I’m proud to introduce a new program as part of Cohort 2 of The AI Second Brain – the Alumni Mentor Corps.
We are seeking a small group of qualified “Alumni Mentors,” successful graduates of the first cohort who want to return to guide and support new (and returning) students.
We at Forte Labs are a small team and serve a large and rapidly growing market for AI education that has far more diverse needs and niches than we can ever address on our own. Rather than expecting one instructor to scale to thousands of people, much less speak in their language and to their context, we are creating a “faculty” of Mentors who can lead smaller, more focused implementation sessions as part of our AISB program.
The word “faculty” also refers to our human cognitive faculty, and that is intentional: we will train our Mentors in how to facilitate small groups so that they’re equipped to support our training at a high level of excellence. Joining the Corps will be an educational program in itself, designed to cultivate the next generation of leaders in AI – whether that means working with us or in their own careers as teachers, coaches, consultants, creators, or builders.
The world is in dire need of leadership in AI, especially through a holistic and human-centric lens. We need leaders who are grounded, thoughtful, wise, and have a commitment to bringing others along with them as they navigate the revolution that AI represents. We are looking for people who are dedicated to democratizing practical knowledge about AI – how to understand it, leverage it, and benefit from it, rather than seeing it as a threat. That is our commitment, and we are seeking those who share it to work alongside us.
What we’re building on
Forte Labs has been in business for 13 years, and we’ve built a platform in that time that is well-positioned to deliver AI education:
- An audience of over 700,000 people across various online platforms
- Over 500,000 books sold on related topics like digital notetaking, organization, and PKM
- A vibrant, global community of practitioners who’ve been impacted by our work
- A prominent, credible brand in the AI field as it explodes
Our core strengths are developing new ideas and frameworks, creating content around those ideas in multiple mediums, spreading that content far and wide online, and delivering live training programs to help people apply them.
What Alumni Mentors will contribute
The Alumni Mentor Corps will contribute a new set of capabilities on top of that foundation:
- The ability to customize and adapt our curriculum in a teaching context, drawing on their own background, knowledge, experience, expertise, and credentials
- Specialized experience with certain AI tools, business applications, niches, professional roles, fields and industries, in different countries and languages, with different age and demographic groups, so they can serve as a bridge to those groups
- A way to test, validate, and evolve our concepts and tools by proving they work in diverse contexts in the real world
- A willingness to test and experiment with new AI tools and features and report back their results, fueling our collective learning
The purpose of the Alumni Mentors is to create more impact, sustainability, and scale as representatives of our work.
What we’re asking for
As an Alumni Mentor for Cohort 2, you’ll be asked to:
- Participate in every live session of Cohort 2, which runs from Sep. 17 to Oct. 8, 2026
- Facilitate 3x Implementation Labs (60 min. each) tailored to your area of expertise or experience
- Attend 3x weekly Alumni Mentor check-ins during the cohort and 2x training sessions with Tiago prior to cohort start (5 total)
- Be active in the Circle community by responding to questions and concerns and providing feedback on homework
This is a commitment of 6-7 hours per week during the 3 weeks of the cohort.
For the purpose of quality control and to guide your learning and development, we’ll have a set of objective standards we expect all AMs to meet, and a way to measure your performance and progress toward them. You’ll know which aspects of facilitation are essential pillars, and what you’re free to adapt or change.
This is the best chance we’ve ever offered to work directly with Tiago and the Forte Labs team, to develop yourself as a mentor guiding learners toward AI mastery, and to position yourself as a leader in the emerging field of AI. It’s a chance to make a difference in how people learn this technology and integrate it into their lives in an empowering and life-affirming way.
Selection criteria
Here are the criteria we’ll use in deciding who to invite to become a Mentor:
- A proven track record of engagement, diligence, good judgment, and follow-through in our community
- Evidence that you’ve applied what you’ve learned in a real-world setting or to produce a tangible outcome
- An existing area of expertise, affiliation, or experience, so we’re learning as much from you as you’re learning from us
- An open-minded, open-hearted, collaborative attitude as well as a desire to receive feedback and grow as a professional and leader
- Availability across the full schedule for Cohort 2, including all core live sessions and all commitments listed above
What we’re offering
The Alumni Mentor role will be a temporary, part-time contractor position for the duration of the cohort, plus a period of preparation beforehand and debriefing afterward. Here’s what you’ll receive for fulfilling the role:
- $500 USD payment
- Access to the Premium Edition of AISB (including more direct access to me, plus a seat in Cohort 3 – a $3,000 upgrade)
- A dedicated training program – you’ll be trained and coached directly by Tiago and the Forte Labs team on how to effectively facilitate transformative live training
- A weekly Mentors-only call to debrief and discuss what you’ve learned – a closed room with me and the team to help shape the cohort
The Alumni Mentor role is the first rung of leadership we’re offering. As we build out further teaching and facilitation roles, we’ll look first to the people who showed up here.
Your area of specialization
I envision the Alumni Mentor program as a “real-time R&D lab” for AI experimentation. AI is an experiential technology. You can’t facilitate what you don’t understand, and you can’t understand AI without using it extensively in real-world settings.
At the same time, the frontier of applied AI is far too vast for any one person to cover, so we will divide and conquer the most promising areas for research and experimentation. In the same way that the teaching faculty of a university also conduct research, with each one informing and enriching the other, we’ll do the same. Your job isn’t to deliver a fixed corpus of fully formed knowledge; it’s to proactively create and extend that knowledge as well.
Having other people deliver the AISB material is the ultimate way to reveal the gaps and shortcomings in it, to show us what’s missing, and then help us address it.
To facilitate that approach, we’ll ask each Alumni Mentor to choose one or more “specializations” to focus on, which will serve as unifying themes across all the sessions they facilitate or teach. Here are some of the specializations we’re interested in:
By tool
- ChatGPT/Codex
- Gemini/Antigravity
- Claude Cowork/Code
- Microsoft CoPilot
- Perplexity
- NotebookLM
- Higgsfield
- Notion
- Obsidian
By use case:
- Filmmaking
- Design
- Marketing & sales
- Software dev’t
- Finance/investing
- Writing
- Personal development
- Health/nutrition
- Parenting/household management
By type of student:
- Retirees and older generations
- K12 education
- Higher education
- ADHD/neurodivergence
- Specific industries, fields, roles, or professions you have experience in or an association with
- A certain AI proficiency level (Beginner/foundational, Intermediate, Advanced)
By timezone or language:
- European timezones
- APAC timezones
- Our top countries for enrollments (Germany, India, UK, Mexico, Spain, Canada, Australia)
Note that this is your area of focus, not necessarily your area of expertise. The nature of expertise is rapidly changing under AI’s influence, so I’m less interested in what you have credentials in, and more interested in what you have curiosity or obsession toward.
The best way to find your area of specialization is to ask yourself, “What aspect of AI most fuels my curiosity?” Or “What is it that people are always asking me how I do?” By choosing a specialization, you are choosing an arena in which you’ll focus your time and attention in order to discover edge cases and nuances that aren’t obvious on the surface.
What Alumni Mentors will do for students
Alumni Mentors will provide a range of different forms of support to students to increase their chances of getting the results they’re looking for, including:
- Guiding them through overwhelm and paralysis, by putting a scope around their goals and helping them identify their next step (this was their #1 challenge in the last cohort)
- Helping them choose their tools and navigate other decisions, and holding them accountable to following through on those choices (this was the #2 challenge we saw)
- Clearing up confusion by translating AISB lessons into language and examples they understand based on their context
- Being an empathetic, non-judgmental listening ear to absolve them of shame and self-criticism
- Contributing to the sense of community, accountability, and belonging that makes live, community-based education work
- Surfacing illuminating anecdotes and points of feedback from the students to the Forte Labs team
You will be the front line of student interaction across the AISB program, giving every meeting a human face and a human touch that not only makes the training more effective and impactful, but reminds us of our humanity and connection to each other in a time of destabilizing change.
The long-term vision
We’re designing the Alumni Mentor Corps to be a win from four perspectives: for our students, for the Mentors, for us, and for the world.
From the perspective of our students, they’ll get a high-touch, human-centered experience that takes advantage of all the social learning capabilities built into our DNA. They’ll find themselves to be part of a true community, not just a course.
From the perspective of the Alumni Mentors, this will be the most accelerated learning opportunity imaginable. I’ve always said that if you really want to learn deeply, you should teach. It’s only when you’re in front of a student, having to explain something simply and clearly, that you realize which parts you don’t fully understand. You’ll gain the immense satisfaction of paying forward some of the value you’ve received to ease others’ path.
From my perspective, by forming this group of fellow facilitators, I’m building the long-term learning community that I want to be part of myself. I don’t want to carry the burden of mastering every aspect of AI myself, even if that was possible. Half the fun is in the shared adventure, in the giving and receiving, in the vulnerability of human experience that AI so often obscures. We accelerate our own learning as a team by learning from others who can fill in the gaps in our knowledge and uncover new solutions in their niche.
From a business perspective, AI is the greatest opportunity any of us has ever seen, or is likely to ever see. By approaching the market with a long-term, scalable model that doesn’t depend on any single person, I hope to secure the company’s survival and growth for many years to come.
And from the world’s perspective, I believe that a collective teaching model is crucial to making AI a contributor to human flourishing.
A recent paper from Google demonstrated that past “intelligence explosions” didn’t come from humans getting smarter as individuals. They happened because of the rise of new social structures – families, tribes, courts, markets, universities, governments – that allowed our collective intelligence to expand.
I believe the same is true of the current intelligence explosion being driven by AI. We are in desperate need of new social structures that allow us to harness its power, without damaging or destroying human values in the process.
I see the AISB program, and the broader ecosystem and community it’s a part of, as exactly such a social structure. It’s not just a course with one instructor imparting fixed knowledge to passive students. It’s a peer-to-peer community of practice made up of passionate and capable people from all over the world who can argue, question, verify, and reconcile the knowledge we’re creating in real time.
It is a venue where social intelligence can flourish – through conversation, debates, specialization and division of labor, brainstorming, devil’s advocacy, crowdsourced experimentation, and constructive conflict between multiple perspectives.
AI has the potential to trigger an explosion of human potential, but it will require both humans and AIs working together to realize that potential. This is a view the Google paper also endorses:
“We should be looking for the next intelligence explosion in the same place from which the previous ones emerged: in cooperative, competitive and creative interaction between multitudes of socially intelligent minds.”
Just imagine all the people out there who could benefit so profoundly from AI’s power. The people struggling with chronic illness, or mired in poverty or ignorance, or struggling in their schoolwork or job or business, or simply unaware of all the existing knowledge and tools they could use to advance their lives.
There are many audiences we’re passionate about reaching, but for most of them, I’m not the right messenger. I can’t relate to their situation, their psychology, their constraints, or mental models. My vision is to empower ambassadors to take our work into all these different arenas, adapting it as they go.
It is through others – through you – that I believe we can make the biggest difference. It’s how we reach more people, in more diverse situations, in more personalized ways than we ever could by ourselves. I invite you to apply and join us.
How to apply
Applications for the Alumni Mentor Corps are open to participants of the founding cohort of the AI Second Brain.
If that’s you, head over to Circle to find the link to the application form and complete it by July 23, 2026.
And if you’d like to join Cohort 2 of the AI Second Brain from Sep. 17 – Oct. 8 as a student, join the waitlist.
Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.