"I was the nicest person you'd ever want to know," Alex recalls, "but the world wasn't that way. The problem was that if you were just a nice person, you'd get crushed. I refused to live a life where people could do that stuff to me. I was like, OK, what's the policy prescription here? And there really was only one. I needed to have every person in my pocket. If I wanted to be a nice person, I needed to run the school." But how to get from A to B? "I studied social dynamics, I guarantee more than anyone you've ever met," Alex told me. He observed the way people talked, the way they walked--especially male dominance poses. He adjusted his own persona, which allowed him to go on being a fundamentally shy, sweet kid, but without being taken advantage of. "Any hard thing where you can get crushed, I was like, 'I need to learn how to do this.' So by now I'm built for war. Because then people don't screw you." Alex"