Universities teach students what to know. Almost none teach them how to operate the instrument they run it all through.
Two courses, designed as a complementary pair and built to be taught. One on operating the human instrument. One on building AI that serves it. Either can stand alone.
This keeps happening.
Every few years a university offers a course about how to actually live, and the lecture hall can't hold the demand. It isn't a fluke. It's a signal.
How to Use Yourself
You were never taught how to use yourself.
Twelve years of school. Maybe sixteen, maybe twenty. You learned calculus, the causes of the First World War, how a mitochondrion works. Nobody taught you how to operate the one instrument you ran all of it through: your attention, your nervous system, the machinery that decides what you even notice. This is the course for that. The one that should have come first.
Universities teach you to think about almost everything except yourself. This course closes that gap directly, not as wellness or vague advice, but as a set of trainable skills you actually operate. It's built around the Human Operating System, a working model I've developed across thirty years of behavioral practice: six networks of intelligence, each with its own operating instructions. Students learn it as a framework to use, test against experience, challenge and refine, rather than as doctrine.
The Body as Foundation
We start with the body: structure, nervous-system state, and the intelligence of desire, taught seriously rather than awkwardly. Structure, the nervous system, and the intelligence of desire, taught seriously rather than awkwardly.
The Inner Interface
How your mind constructs your experience of reality, and how to operate it. Reality tunnels, the stories you inherited, the ones you choose on purpose.
Agency in the World
Will, leadership at the individual level, and what it means to live deliberately. You leave with a written operating system for yourself.
The exact route flexes with each cohort. The territory doesn't.
What students leave able to do.
- Identify and describe their own patterns of attention, regulation, motivation and meaning-making.
- Apply and evaluate embodied practices intended to change state and widen behavioral choice under pressure.
- Distinguish inherited narratives from deliberately chosen commitments.
- Articulate and document a working model of their own decision-making and agency.
- Evaluate technology according to its effects on human capability and flourishing.
- Design and test an intervention, practice or product against explicit human-development criteria.
What it takes to run it.
| Engagement, applied-section attendance and journaling | 30% |
| Mid-semester self-operating-system paper | 30% |
| Final integration presentation and document | 40% |
| Engagement and weekly written reflections | 20% |
| Mid-semester thesis paper | 25% |
| Project prototype | 30% |
| Final presentation and thesis document | 25% |
AI in Service of Flourishing
AI is usually evaluated by what the system can do. This course asks a second question: what does using it make the human being more capable of doing? Students examine AI through the lens of agency, judgment, attention, creativity and human development, then build an alternative against criteria they define and defend. This course is for the ones who want to build the second kind, taught by a founder doing exactly that.
Underneath the course is a problem the field has not solved. You cannot build technology that makes people more themselves unless you can tell whether it is doing that. Right now we mostly cannot — we measure engagement, not whether a person is becoming more or less available to themselves. That gap is what the measurement work is pointed at, and it is why a behavioral model and a signal-processing platform belong to the same project.
Built from thirty years of practice. Brought into the classroom.
Devon White has spent thirty years on a single question: how does a human being actually become the version of themselves they keep almost being? He's a behavioral engineer and senior leadership advisor, co-founder and CEO of two AI-driven ventures, Neutheos and FIELD, and a fourteen-year practitioner of a serious somatic discipline. The model students learn, the Human Operating System, is a working framework developed across thirty years of behavioral practice. It is taught as something to use, test against experience, critique and improve, not as doctrine. Neither course is a position paper. Both are documents of work he is actively doing.
Designed for a career-track practitioner appointment — Professor of Practice or comparable — rather than a tenure-track research appointment.
Designed for the university.
The curriculum can scale from a 25-person honors seminar to a larger lecture format, with experiential practice, assessment, and project work adapted accordingly.
Both courses can stand alone or be taught as a sequence. They can live within a single department or cross disciplinary boundaries between human development, design, entrepreneurship, technology, and AI.
The structure is flexible. The intellectual proposition isn't: students should leave more capable of operating themselves and more deliberate about the technologies they're helping build.
Full syllabi, learning objectives, assessment structure, and faculty-fit materials are available on request.