Reinventing K-12 Education Using AI with Alpha School Principal Joe Liemandt

Speaker 2 Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors.
Today we're here with Joe Lamont, the founder of the legendary technology company, Trilogy, and now the principal of Alpha School.

Speaker 2 He wants to educate a billion kids differently and also recruit a generation of builders to work in education. Joe, thanks so much for doing this with us.

Speaker 3 Yeah, good to see you.

Speaker 1 Great. Thank you.
I appreciate this.

Speaker 2 So you have an amazing story as a technology entrepreneur. Trilogy is a legend of a company.
Can you just talk a little bit about how you went from that to being principal of a school?

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Rolling back on background, in high school, I actually wrote a paper on AI

Speaker 1 and it literally had a paragraph on neural nets that said, this is decades away. And back then, it was all expert systems ontologies and all that.
And I went to Stanford and

Speaker 1 actually was in a class with Ed Feigenbaum, the father of expert systems, ended up dropping out to build a AI company. You couldn't call it back then because AI was bad back then.

Speaker 1 And it was the first product in the 90s to sell a billion dollars of AI. So we built a software company and did that for 25 years.

Speaker 2 But then that helped with sales configuration.

Speaker 1 Yeah, sales configuration and

Speaker 1 all of that.

Speaker 1 And so think just classic SaaS enterprise software, both organic build and acquisitions.

Speaker 1 But then 10 years ago and sort of how we got to the school is Mackenzie Price, who's a Stanford grad who I'd hired into trilogy back in the 90s, she started a school, started alpha, very different school.

Speaker 1 And we can talk about how I got, but for two years, I was just saying, I'm not going to go to your weird school.

Speaker 1 And eventually, though, my kids went.

Speaker 1 And then three years ago, when Gen AI came out, I was like, wow. neural nets are finally here.
And now we can scale this. The problem with all education is it's not scalable.

Speaker 1 There's lots of, you know, point good education systems.

Speaker 1 And what my view was, wow, this is finally a technology that can get this to a billion kids and take the magic of alpha, which was great for Austin kids and my kids, and get it out to everybody.

Speaker 1 And so I'm a product guy and I said, I guess I have to be principal to go figure this out. And what happens when fifth graders get in a fight? And what do parents yell at you about?

Speaker 1 And how do you design a product from the ground up?

Speaker 1 If you just did, you know, let's start with parents are going to drop their kids off at a school, at a building, and there's going to be other kids in the building and there's going to be adults in the building.

Speaker 1 What would you do to sort of unleash human potential if you had 12 years to, you know, re-envision it?

Speaker 2 So what was your original thinking about your kids going to Mackenzie's school? Like what was the resistance and what was the reason they eventually went?

Speaker 1 Well, lots. I mean, I

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 every parent basically wants their kid educated the way they were, right? That's what you've experienced. We've all experienced the same model for a couple hundred years.
I went to Catholic school.

Speaker 1 I didn't even like it, but my kids were going to it, right? And so they're in the local school and McKinsey's giving this other, you know, weirdness. And I'm just like, no.
What was weird about it?

Speaker 1 Or what was it?

Speaker 1 Well, she was, they were using apps in the morning, right? And it was, you know, it was a mix. It wasn't what we are today, but it was the.
the uh formation of it.

Speaker 1 And you're like, a kid's going to learn really with an app and no teacher? Are you really seriously? Like everybody knows good school equals good teacher, good teacher equals good school.

Speaker 1 And you're like, no, this app, Dreambox back then, yeah, was the app. And I'm like, that's better in math.
And so you just have that hang up. And that's true today, right?

Speaker 1 That, you know, when we look to open a new location,

Speaker 1 basically, everybody wants to go to an alpha once there's 100 kids in the school. No one wants to go when you're the first 20.

Speaker 1 Like, are you, it takes somebody like a McKinsey who's like, I want to be a founding family because the, you know, the bundle that is education, part of what she loved was, I get to go find the other kids that I want to surround my kids with.

Speaker 1 Right. And so it took her two years, but eventually she got, you know, and my, our daughters are all now best friends and have been for a decade.

Speaker 3 But you're taking an even more radical approach, I think, right?

Speaker 3 You're basically saying kids really just need two hours a day with structured classwork or, you know, some interaction with applications, et cetera.

Speaker 3 And then the rest of the day can go to other things. Could you extrapolate on that a little bit more? Because I think it's a very interesting structure model.

Speaker 1 Well, if I had to step back when we're just talking about how we re-envisioned it,

Speaker 1 right? There's, you know, the pillars of reinvention. And if you say, if you could reinvent a school and had to make it 10 times better, what would it be?

Speaker 1 So the first one and the most important, and this was McKinsey's co-founder, who actually was the one who

Speaker 1 told me this 10 years ago, I said, what do I not know about school that I should know?

Speaker 1 He's like, two things. First, kids must love school.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, you know, it's finished sometimes.

Speaker 1 he's like nope you're gonna learn kids must love school and i said what's second he's like when kids love school your expectations of your kids are too low and i'm like whoa whoa whoa i really i expect if i did there's no chance he's like call me back in 100 days and both of those turned out to be true so when we three years ago when i was like okay now with gen ai what we do our first view is kids must love school more than vacation.

Speaker 1 So we literally survey our kids. You know, if we say, kids, do you love school? 96% 96% say yes.

Speaker 1 We get between, you know, 40 and 60% of kids, depending on the vacation they have or how their workshops or afternoon workshops went, saying every eight weeks, okay, I love school more than vacation.

Speaker 1 And that is a magic that every parent should expect that if we're going to put kids in a place for 12 years, we should just have that expectation,

Speaker 1 which is not standard. You're like, okay, how do I make them love school?

Speaker 1 And so for me, you know, once I took that commitment that McKinsey had and I was principal, I went to the kids and this is where your two hours is coming in.

Speaker 1 I went to the kids and I was like, okay, the new fifth graders had come in and it's my first week. Yeah.
I'm like, all right, kids, do you love school? And they're all like, no.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, okay,

Speaker 1 what would make you love school? And they're like, less school.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, how much less? And they're like, none. Yeah.
And I'm like, that seems a little light.

Speaker 3 We were talking about this earlier where school is kind of a bundle, right? It's academics, it's physical activity, it's socialization, and in some sense, it's childcare for the parent.

Speaker 3 So there's a variety of things that school is. Exactly.
And so what specifically are they referring to?

Speaker 1 And so on this one, they're just like the academic part. I don't, if you want me to love school and you're just going to put me in class for six hours a day, I'm not going to love school.

Speaker 1 And so we negotiated basically. I was like, two hours, right?

Speaker 1 If would you, because, you know, there's EdTech that's been deployed forever, but, you know, EdTech's deployed and test scores keep going down. So it's not working.

Speaker 1 And the issue is just engagement that, you know, you could, if you use Dreambox, you know, even 10 years ago, it would work.

Speaker 1 But, you know, there's a lot of studies that like between five and 10% of people are the people who actually engage with Khan, right?

Speaker 1 And there's five to 10% of people who are self-motivated, but the other 90, right, don't. And so what we developed, I went back to my team.
I'm like, okay.

Speaker 1 And I was like to the kids, two hours a day in the apps, like real engagement, but then you get four hours of awesomeness, right? Is that a fair trade? And they're like, yes.

Speaker 1 And so I went to my team. I'm like, okay, we got two hours.

Speaker 1 we got to jam everything in these kids heads in two hours and it has to be there forever right change the whole schema of their brain the good news was there have been learning science papers written for 40 years back you know even before i went to high school that talked about how kids could learn two five or 10 times faster they just don't work in a teacher in front of a classroom model And so we just literally just would pull papers off.

Speaker 1 You know, Dean Schwartz at Stanford has a book on it. And we're like, okay, let's do chapter K in this book, you know, and put it in.

Speaker 1 And so we built a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. It's all based on the principles of learning science.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so then now we can commit to kids. You just need to do two hours a day and you're going to crush your academics.
So top 1% performance in only two hours a day.

Speaker 1 Now, they engage in the app and then once they finish, it goes green and they get the four hour afternoon to go do life skills and all the, you know, the set of things that both they love as well as when you talk about a bundle, what parents really care about, right?

Speaker 1 That when you start saying, what do I want my kid to learn, especially with AI coming and you're, it's very confusing.

Speaker 1 Like, what, what are we supposed to teach kids for the first 12 years when AI is going to know everything?

Speaker 1 But you start thinking about leadership and teamwork and grit and hard work and entrepreneurship and financial literacy and storytelling and public speaking, relationship building, socialization, that bundle.

Speaker 1 Parents are like, oh, okay, I like that. And what's really great about those is you can build awesome workshops that kids love that drive them through that.

Speaker 2 Can you make that like easy to picture for parents or builders listening here? Like, I am a new fifth grader at an alpha school. Like, what does my day look like?

Speaker 1 Your day looks like this. You come in, you do limitless launch.
Think Tony Robbins for kids. Right.
And it's all about growth mindset. You're going to be able to do this, right?

Speaker 1 Our view, kids are limitless. They're awesome.
And we need to create an environment that helps unleash them. So you jump into that.

Speaker 1 Then you literally sit down at your app. And so you're going to have an AI tutor that's going to be there for two hours that's going to give you personalized lessons, right?

Speaker 1 Based on your, right, your level. Age grade and knowledge grade are two totally different things.
Right.

Speaker 1 The number of people in the average sixth grade class in this country who actually need sixth grade content is very small.

Speaker 1 And so this is why all the test scores keep going down is a sixth grade teacher's job is to to deliver sixth grade content. Her audience, right, her students actually aren't ready for it.

Speaker 1 That just to give you like, we just had hundreds of kids join the last, you know, couple of weeks as we started across the country.

Speaker 1 And, you know, my message to the parents, you know, my first academic talk to them was, I hate to tell you this, it sounds extreme, but.

Speaker 1 Your $50,000 private school that you were at for however many years has been lying to you.

Speaker 1 Your student academically

Speaker 1 on standardized tests that we use are somewhere between one grade level ahead. If they had a straight A transcript, transferring in DOS,

Speaker 1 one grade level ahead to three grade levels behind.

Speaker 1 And if they're a B,

Speaker 1 and if they're a B, three grade levels behind to seven years behind. I have freshmen who are transferring in,

Speaker 1 you know, who have, can't write a third grade grammatically correct sentence. Right.
And it's just, and these are coming from high-end private schools. Right.
And so that's the first part.

Speaker 1 The second part, though, and this is where the 10 times faster learning matters, I'm like, don't worry. We can catch you up.
Right.

Speaker 1 And this is why we get such great academic performance is learning science engine, you know, the content when you talk about 10 times faster, the average grade level subject combo, so fourth grade math

Speaker 1 takes between 20 and 30 hours. to master.
That's it. So you think there's 180 school days, hour a day, plus you have homework.
So you're thinking the average when I'm behind, it's hundreds of hours.

Speaker 1 We're like, you're 20 or 30 hours. And so these kids who come in instead of our two hours a day, they can do a third hour and they can do it at school or at homework if they want.

Speaker 1 And so you're literally like, well, you're really only 60 hours behind, which is 60 days. We'll catch you up to grade level quickly.

Speaker 2 These are like 60 pretty hard hours, right?

Speaker 2 Because I don't know what your memory was, but in elementary school, I spent a lot of time like drooling, doodling on my desk because there wasn't anything going on.

Speaker 2 And so this is, this is like hard-focused work. How do you get a second or fifth grader to do that?

Speaker 1 Yeah. So when you talk about hard-focused work, part of what you're trying to do with the, you know, your engine is there's a zone of proximal development.

Speaker 1 And what you actually want to keep kids at is between 80 and 85% right.

Speaker 1 So you can't have 99% because, you know, I mean, they already know it and you're just, you're giving them content they know.

Speaker 1 But if you drop down, when you say hard work and it drops down to 66% or below, you get disengagement.

Speaker 1 Right. And every video game designer knows that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I'm in the like fun struggle.

Speaker 1 And so you have to be in the 80 to 85 percent.

Speaker 1 And what an AI tutor can do that an alpha that a teacher in front of a classroom can't is generate an unending stream of content for each kid at 80 to 85 percent.

Speaker 1 So I can keep you engaged because I'm not going to make it too hard, right? If you're struggling on this concept, right? I need this concept, right? If the leap is too big, right?

Speaker 1 I can just create scaffolding, right? And so then you just do the scaffolding lesson. You're like, oh, I get this.

Speaker 1 And so we're able to figure out, is the kid and create content for them that keeps them in that zone of proximal development. So they actually, and it's not to say it's never hard, right?

Speaker 1 But there is relative to what, when you're put in over your head, there's a view of throw kids in way over their head. And the learning science does not support that, right?

Speaker 1 The learning science does not say there's a concept of desirable difficulties versus productive struggle. And it's a whole debate on, but if you gave me an MCAT,

Speaker 1 I would fail it. And you can tell me to struggle through it all day long, right? And have grit.
You need to roll me back to freshman bio, right? And then build me up.

Speaker 1 And AI tutors can do that for every subject. Like the third grade lesson when these high school kids can't write,

Speaker 1 they're going to go through third, fourth, six hours, right? They're going to just learn it, right? And be able to progress through it.

Speaker 1 And in a matter of weeks, all of a sudden they're going to be writing at AP Lang,

Speaker 1 you know, get a five on AP Lang at an FRQ, right? And so you can roll these kids back. You do not want to push them too hard.

Speaker 1 And you just want to deliver them perfect content, which accelerates their learning.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's the magic of all of this is the way we learned or thought to learn of just putting them in over their head is actually not the best way to learn.

Speaker 2 This has happened. What's going on the rest of the day?

Speaker 1 So then in the afternoons, it's all project-based workshops.

Speaker 1 So you're going to go in and, you know, depending on, you know, the grade level in the workshop, it's going to have something that you're going to love

Speaker 1 as well as something that teaches a life skill.

Speaker 1 And before I get into the workshop, one of the things, this is where our love of school really comes in, but you have to believe one statement that lots of people do not believe.

Speaker 1 You know, the three things that if I could wave a magic wand and every parent believed we could fix education, one, your kid must love school as much as vacation, which a lot of parents don't think.

Speaker 1 Number two, they can crush their academics in two hours a day.

Speaker 1 And then this one is that the key to your child's happiness is high standards.

Speaker 1 Kids want to do awesome things, right? And they want to do hard things, right? And they want to accomplish things. And if you take that away, right, by setting low standards,

Speaker 1 then there is no way that they get the love of school.

Speaker 3 And that's actually a bunch of human history, right?

Speaker 3 If you look at just apprenticeship of people in different crafts over the centuries, it was very common for children to effectively start working in the context of their parents' environment and apprentice in something and accomplish something, you know, make something, those ones.

Speaker 1 And if even you take even a modern day one, most parents actually, when you apply it to academics, they don't. They don't agree.

Speaker 1 They don't think my kid's going to get happier if I hold higher standards. But it's actually true, at least at our schools.
But they all believe it was sports.

Speaker 1 Everybody wants their kid on the championship team with the coach who's going to be like, guys, this is going to be the hardest thing we ever did. But we were in last place last year.

Speaker 1 We're going to be in first next year, but we're going to get there and grind it and work. And it's going to be awesome.
And we're going to have teamwork and leader. Right.

Speaker 1 And every parent's like, oh, I want my kid to go through that, which is why they all put him in after school sports is to get those life skills. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 1 But kids want to do it just even outside of sports. I mean, they want to do it in sports, but they want to do it on everything.

Speaker 1 So like we, you you know, our workshops, right, we have kindergartners who climb 40-foot rock walls. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the parents, when they first see it, because parents want to protect their kid, right? Their job is to keep safety. Parents don't want their kid to struggle, fail,

Speaker 1 and as I add as principals, sometimes cry on their road to success, supported by a caring adult.

Speaker 1 Every child development expert in the world will say, You want to run that cycle on kids as much as you can. That's the key to self-confidence, resilience, growth.

Speaker 1 And for us, it's also the key to love school. And so our workshops do that.
But as a parent, you're naturally like, this seems too hard. I don't want to see my kids struggle and fail.
Right.

Speaker 1 And that's what our school set up is we have guides because we don't have adults teaching seventh grade science. So we hire the best motivational and emotional support experts, right?

Speaker 1 And it changes by age. You know,

Speaker 1 kindergarten is going to be Mallory and Charity, wrap your kid in love, right?

Speaker 1 Versus, you know, at high school, I have ex-NFL athletes, ex-NBA coaches, right?

Speaker 1 Who can take those set of video game playing, you know, middle school boys and be like, guys, we're going to go do something.

Speaker 3 Does this radically change how you compensate people? I think in the context of schooling, people always say teachers are undercompensated and the salaries aresued.

Speaker 3 Like, is this a different salary ban?

Speaker 1 So we pay a minimum of $100,000 at our schools for the guides. And, you know, that allows us, one, we get the best teachers.

Speaker 1 Cause, you know, back in, there's a whole different thing of like, what's the future of teachers? Teachers became teachers to transform kids' lives.

Speaker 1 And your best teacher, she was great because she found you and convinced you you could do awesome stuff. Right.
And she wasn't the reason it's.

Speaker 1 They didn't become teachers to grade that seventh grade science quiz. And they weren't, you didn't think they were great because they marked your paper up really well, right?

Speaker 1 It was because it's because of the motivational emotional support. So we go hire them and say, this is what you get to do all day.

Speaker 1 You know, during the two hour blocks, we do 25 minute pomodoros of, you know, math, science, language reading. And they take a kid out during the 25 minutes.

Speaker 1 And they're like, okay, you're not doing math today. You know, come talk to me.
And hey, how's your weekend? And you win the softball tournament and what's going on.

Speaker 1 And you're having trouble on engagement. Right.
And they get to know the kids at a level that no teacher can. You know, I was just up.

Speaker 1 at the San Francisco campus last night and one of the parents, it's been open 23 days.

Speaker 1 And the parents like, in 23 days, this guy knows more than the teachers did in years, years, you know, in the prior world. And I'm like, because that's what they do all day.

Speaker 1 They don't stand in front lecturing, right? They spend the time getting to know the kids. So yes, so comp is different.

Speaker 1 And if you want to go even edgier, you know, if you talk to our middle and high schoolers, and we'll go really edgy on the high school side, our high schoolers interview the guides.

Speaker 1 before they get hired,

Speaker 1 and which everybody thinks is terrible and that whole rate might teacher, they're going to have low standards.

Speaker 1 The difference is when you have kids who want to go be great and in this environment, they want adults who are going to help them.

Speaker 1 And so they hold really high standards for this, you know, the guides that we hire.

Speaker 2 The sports analogy is really interesting because I'm like, I would totally believe that, you know, there's a bunch of motivated high schoolers who are going to go pick the coach that will make them most successful.

Speaker 2 But the instinct is that they won't if it's academics.

Speaker 1 Correct. Yeah.
And there really is this whole, we have two different ethos in America about sports versus academics. And

Speaker 1 Steph, who runs K through 8 for us, right, she came out of the sports world and she's like, my job is to bring the athletic ethos to academics.

Speaker 1 And when you talk about the guides we hire and things like that, that model that parents actually believe in that does develop life skills, right? Is and kids love it.

Speaker 1 And so yes, if we could change that, that would be huge.

Speaker 2 How universal do you think this is? Because like, let's just say, like, I have a couple of kids, they have different temperaments, right? Some of them are sports oriented.

Speaker 2 They have more natural resilience. Some are less so.
You know, some people are more motivated about learning less so.

Speaker 2 Like, how do you, how do you handle that as alpha school for a particular type of of kid?

Speaker 1 Our job is to get this to a billion kids. So we're working to make it available to everybody, both price point as well as personality type.

Speaker 1 And a lot of it is when we talk about love of school, it helps you design your product, which is, you know, I get all the guides. We've opened, besides alpha, we opened up different schools.

Speaker 1 branded schools for different afternoons. So I have a sports academy where you play sports all afternoon.

Speaker 1 I have a gifted, talented school where in the afternoon you do academic enrichment, robotics, math Olympia, write a book.

Speaker 1 And a lot of it is when we, when we asked the guides, we're like, okay, we only had 40% of the kids love school instead of vacation. How do we juice that to 75?

Speaker 1 You know, the GT guides are like, more academics. They want a third power hour.
Yeah. You know, and what are we going to do? And that's what fires them up.
My oldest daughter is like that.

Speaker 1 Like, she read calculus books in high school. And, you know, she's a double major at Stanford now.
And she literally is like, these STEM boys can't write.

Speaker 1 And so she wrote an English writing class that's equation-based writing to help teach them. Right.
And so if she can do academics all day, she loves it.

Speaker 1 My younger daughter, who's still in high school, wakes up every day. And while academically does great and, you know,

Speaker 1 just took the SAT, hopefully has as good scores as her sister.

Speaker 1 is like, is this the last academics I have to do?

Speaker 1 Right. Am I done? Is Cal PC like the last math I have to do? Or I'm done.
She has millions of followers on TikTok, you know, and, you know, she's built an online

Speaker 1 AI dating app for high school boys and, you know, and wakes up and is like, I just want to be social all day and build relationships.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, it's, it's, it's that continuum or, and it's finding what is the passion for your kid and then saying, okay, we're going to put you in an environment where you get more of that.

Speaker 1 Right. And that then drives your academic performance in the morning, which is, you know, if you're going to give the kid the time back, right? Our product name is time back.

Speaker 1 Give the kid the time back. That's the single biggest motivator.
We can talk motivation about later. But the biggest motivator for kids is don't waste my life.

Speaker 1 Don't waste my 12 years because that's what you're doing. And we all know you sit in class, 95% of the time is wasted, you know, all that.

Speaker 1 And so we're like, great, two hours, and then we're going to make sure your afternoons cross.

Speaker 1 Talk about that a bit more actually, like your focus on incentives.

Speaker 3 And I think you've been very forward-thinking in terms of like, just give them any incentive as long as it motivates them to do the things you want them to do.

Speaker 3 Could you extrapolate on that a little bit?

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 1 You know, this is, once again, we do obviously controversial things,

Speaker 1 but motivation is one of the biggest ones where we wake up every day and say,

Speaker 1 how do we motivate these students and do it in a way where they're going to love school and have great results and high standards?

Speaker 1 And so, and our guides literally create all these different motivational programs. There's an Astral Codex article that one of our GT parents wrote.
And, you know, his summary was alpha bucks, right?

Speaker 1 Where we give them, you know, bucks is the number one motivator, which that's not actually true, which is it we'll talk about when money matters. But time back by far is the biggest motivator of kids.

Speaker 1 Where if you took our Westlake High School or, you know, in Austin, where they do six hours a day in class, four hours a day homework, if you're on APIV track, right?

Speaker 1 You can't pay those kids enough money to be

Speaker 1 right. They are just grinding it.
And if they love academics, great, but for everybody else, it's a grind and they hate it. But if you tell those same kids, look, it's two to three hours a day.

Speaker 1 You can still get 1550 plus on your SAT and fives on your APs, but then you get afternoons, four years of afternoon in high school to do awesome stuff you love. And that's true across all of them.

Speaker 1 Now, when do we use other motivations? You know, every guide wakes up every day and says, I have to make this kid love school and set high standards, right? High support, high standards.

Speaker 1 What's going to to motivate the student to do it? And sometimes it's a sticker, right? Every kid has different motivations. Some are competition.

Speaker 1 So we have leaderboards and we have people who have comp who are like, I'm going to win just because I want to.

Speaker 3 What is the incentive system for the guide? Is there differential compensation based on how well their students do?

Speaker 1 Is it some other

Speaker 1 incentive system? So the guides have to deliver all three commitments to all their guide group, right? And that, and it is, they are accountable for it.

Speaker 1 So if you are not delivering all three commitments, love school, 2x learning, and life skills, to all your kids, you won't be at Alpha Long.

Speaker 2 So it's not a 10-year system.

Speaker 1 There's no 10-year system. It is, you are here, right, to deliver that.
Second, you know, we survey the students and say,

Speaker 1 every adult had one or two teachers who transformed their life. Is your guide that for you? And that's the standard that they have to live up to.
At kindergarten, it's like, do you love your guy?

Speaker 1 But as you get older.

Speaker 1 And then there's a second one, if you're going to be our middle high school guide, which is at middle and high high school one of the things we tell parents is you know the key is high standards high support high standards is hard with an adolescent right and so our question we ask parents is do you trust your alpha guide to hold the high standards so you as the parent can provide the unconditional love and support which totally transforms your relationship with your teen if you trust them like my oldest daughter you know she's like no dad i'm not going to let you read my Stanford application.

Speaker 1 And I'm like,

Speaker 1 you know, and I'm like, she's like, no, because she doesn't want feet, right? Yeah. Teens don't want that.
But for me, Chloe, who's her guide, right? Harvard grad who wants to, you know,

Speaker 1 Chloe's like, don't worry. I got it.
Right. And it's going to be fine.
And that's what you want. The same way you outsource to a coach on sports, right?

Speaker 1 Every parent's like, yeah, he's going to make this super hard for my kid. We're going to win state.
They're going to be great at it. Yeah.
Right. And we don't expect teachers.

Speaker 1 That's That's how we call teachers being 10x better, is that kind of relationship. And so, yes, you can make more.
And there's, you know, different bands. And are you a lead guide and all of that?

Speaker 2 So, one of the things that was like most controversial to me when we were first speaking is, I feel like, you know, schooling is mixed up with a lot of parenting philosophy that makes it complicated.

Speaker 2 And I think there's a popular view of like, if you give kids a bunch of extrinsic motivators, right? It could be stickers. It could be time back.
You're hurting their building of intrinsic motivation.

Speaker 2 They should just want to do it. How do you react to that?

Speaker 1 No. The answer is just very clearly.
That's just not true. Okay, but explain into belief.
And I know everybody believes it.

Speaker 1 And I was trying to, I paused because they're like, should I go through like the research that goes into it?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm like, I can't pay my kid when they're 30 to be a self-actualized person.

Speaker 1 But here's, here's what you're paying them.

Speaker 1 So let's talk about paying. So paying is the most controversial side.
And so let's just, we hit it. We start in kindergarten.
You can earn an alpha buck.

Speaker 1 And we have an economy based on this where kids learn how to earn, right? Okay, I did work. I earned it.
I learn how to save. I learn how to spend.

Speaker 1 I have an emporium and I have to decide where am I going to, you know, spend my money. I learn how to donate.
Right. And so we learn how to save and invest and donate as that ecosystem.

Speaker 1 And it's important that the kids are earning it, being given it. And as you go up, when you talk about our middle school,

Speaker 1 right? Parents are like, we have a system where if you're not top 1% coming into our middle school, we will pay you $1,000

Speaker 1 when you hit top 1% in your subject.

Speaker 2 It's a lot of money for a middle schooler.

Speaker 1 And that $1,000, now there's two, and parents are like, okay, I hate that. I'm like, wait.
But then that money then goes and feeds their Robin Hood for Kids account, right? Which then.

Speaker 1 Now they have real money to invest, right? Which really matters.

Speaker 1 Well, it's some of the seven, you know, they're going to YOLO it and lose it. And, you know, and I have parents who are like, how'd how'd you let them lose all that money?

Speaker 1 And you're like, this is the best time for them to learn not to do that and actually learn good investing behavior and not gambling. And if it's not real money, right?

Speaker 1 And if it's just like a, oh, a shadow account, right, or a fake account, it actually teaches dysfunctional behavior because it actually teaches you to lolo, YOLO, because there's no downside.

Speaker 1 This actually is their money and it teaches them good habits.

Speaker 3 You mentioned you could also apply that, I think, to projects or other things as well. So do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Speaker 1 And then the second part is they use it for their passion project. So we had a girl who was building the first all-teen produced Broadway musical.
And, you know, she had to do her math.

Speaker 1 She got up to 790 Math SAT. It funded and it allowed her to.
get the money to fly to New York to meet the producers to figure all of that out.

Speaker 1 And parents on either end of those are like, okay, those seem like good examples. Right.
And you get the motivation on the academics and it unlocks what they can do.

Speaker 1 And then second, funds things that parents are like, like, okay, this is all good.

Speaker 2 That is kind of how achievement as an adult works as well.

Speaker 1 100%. It's 100%.

Speaker 1 But getting back to the core about you're worried about intrinsic, extrinsic, kids have part of when you're trying to make kids, help kids realize they're limitless and there's no blocks, kids all have inherent blocks on what they can do.

Speaker 1 I'm not smart enough. I'm not a top 1% kid.
I'm not here. I don't have the daily habits.
And so, if you can use money to create the daily habits, every parent should, right?

Speaker 1 Because the daily habits are what's going to help them more than the downside.

Speaker 1 The second part is, if you can break a block that's in their head,

Speaker 1 you should pay it. So, here's my example: is my

Speaker 1 oldest daughter was self-motivated on academics, so it didn't matter, but my youngest daughter is just like, when she got to middle school, she's like, Yeah, I'm top 10%, dad, but that's good enough.

Speaker 1 Um, I'm just, I'm not like my older sister, who's the smart one, and I'm not, and I'm not top 1%. And I was like, you know, well,

Speaker 1 the one thing I know about you, you love to shop.

Speaker 1 And I was like, I bet you $1,000 you can't get to top 1%. This is how $1,000 gets.

Speaker 1 And she was like, and she literally filled an Amazon gift card with all these things. And every day she'd look at it and then she would go into the apps.
And this causes controversy. Like

Speaker 1 my wife, we had a lot of family discussions about this, right? Because the two things

Speaker 1 are you're paying kids, and second, are you setting high standards too high, right?

Speaker 1 And so after she hit the thousand dollar, hit the one percent, got the thousand dollars, bought everything she wanted, she sat down with my wife, right?

Speaker 1 And she's like, Mom, look, I know you didn't like this, but here's what you have to understand, which is,

Speaker 1 ah,

Speaker 1 I never thought I could do this.

Speaker 1 I never thought I was top 1%. And I now realize I'm actually as smart as my older sister.
And I can do anything she can do if I just put in the work.

Speaker 1 That changing of how she saw herself, right? Every parent would pay $1,000, right? We spent $20,000 a year just in America.

Speaker 1 We spent $1,000 to get every kid to believe I can do anything. And there's not these inherent blocks.
I'll give you one other one.

Speaker 1 If I was, we had the Secretary of Education down at Alpha last week and I was like, here's the number one thing.

Speaker 1 If I was in charge of education to fix is, and it uses money, which is the reason kids can't learn and why, you know, our education in America starts to slow down in middle school.

Speaker 1 And by the time you get to high school, kids basically aren't learning. The median high school student in America goes up one point on a 300-point scale in four years, right?

Speaker 1 Now, your top 99% go up about six points a year. So they're still crushing it.
But your median person literally doesn't learn anything in high school. And it slows down in middle school.

Speaker 1 And the reason is, is because we have a time-based system, not a mastery-based system. And every learning science paper says that, is you just get Swiss cheese holes.

Speaker 1 If you haven't mastered fractions, algebra is going to be really hard. And if you haven't mastered algebra, chemistry is going to be, right? It's just, it's all hierarchical.
And so

Speaker 1 what we do when we get these middle schoolers who are behind is we come in and we developed, you know, back to motivation really mattering.

Speaker 1 I sat down with the seventh graders, you know, this is three years ago. And I'm like, look, guys,

Speaker 1 you need to go back and fill a fourth grade hole. And I learned immediately that seventh graders do not want to do that.
There's no world where they want to go backward.

Speaker 1 And the only people who want that less is their parents. And I was yelled at.
I mean, my kid needs to be a grade level. I'm like, that is not what the learning side says.

Speaker 1 He needs to go back and fix this. And anyway, I eventually had to give up on the parents and I could never convince them.
And so I just went to the kids.

Speaker 1 I'm like, guys, you could get 100 on the Texas star, the standardized test. They're like, no, I can't, Mr.
Lehman. I'm like, no, no, no, I'll give you $100 bill for $100, $100 for $100.

Speaker 1 They're like, it's still impossible, Mr. Lehman.
I'm like, no, no, no, there's a catch.

Speaker 1 Any grade level.

Speaker 1 And they're like, I can take a kindergarten test. You're giving me $100.

Speaker 1 I'm like, well, Texas Star starts in third grade. And they're like, done.
They took the third grade test, get 100. Take the fourth grade.
They're like, can I do fourth grade? Yeah. 100.

Speaker 1 They go to fifth grade and don't get 100. They get an 85 or 75.
The AI back to personalized, why the personalized tutor matters, it generates all.

Speaker 1 I'm like, do you want it to generate all the lessons to get you to 100 that you missed that you need? They're like, let me see how many. Yeah.
They're like, I could do that in a week.

Speaker 1 Right. They do it.
Right. And you move them up.
And that, we need to do that for everybody in America, right? Because it does two things back to it. One, it whole fills all their issues, right?

Speaker 1 Which will stop them from slowing down on learning. It'll keep it linear.

Speaker 1 And then second, their perception.

Speaker 1 Like there's a view that the only people who get 100 on a state test, on a standardized test, are the smart GT kids.

Speaker 1 Everybody can, right? Everybody can get 100. That you separate that, it's IQ versus effort.

Speaker 1 And I feel if you said why the athletic ethos doesn't come to academics, is because every parent, because of the time-based system we have and the system we do have, you know, in most schools, it is based on IQ, right?

Speaker 1 If you're good in normal school, you are both IQ-coded and big five conscientious-coded, right? Just all the data says that.

Speaker 1 And this, our system literally separates that, where it's just like, we're going to give you personalized lessons at 80, 85%.

Speaker 1 And if you just put the time in, you can master every subject, right? Through the eighth grade.

Speaker 3 How do you think about there's sort of this broader societal context right now where, you know, there's the sort of hate book around cuddling of the American mind and sort of things being too easy, lack of resilience, et cetera.

Speaker 3 There's a separate thing, which is sort of this mental health wave that's gone through schools, where if you look at things like autism spectrum disorder, it went from one in a few thousand to 3% of the population in terms of diagnoses.

Speaker 3 You have massive ADHD diagnoses in a lot of kids on Ritalin, which is effectively certain types of drugs.

Speaker 1 You have

Speaker 3 very strong perception of mental health crisis for teenage girls, and a lot of them end up on SSRIs.

Speaker 3 And so you have a mix of medication, diagnosis, all the other things that is really the milieu for the context for schooling. How do you all think about that in the context of alpha?

Speaker 1 Yeah, all those things are true. And I believe part of it is because we have this terrible 12-year system that we subject the kids to.

Speaker 1 And if you literally sat down and, you know, said from first principles, what do we expect if we set low expectation, waste 95% of kids' life and put endless pressure on them?

Speaker 1 What happens after 12 years? You're like, not good things.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, and a lot of the diagnoses, right, IEPs and whether, you know, and also gives kids more time in the school to take tests.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and so there's this whole thing where fundamentally what an IEP is, is trying to give your kid a personalized education, right?

Speaker 1 Everybody knows an individual tutor is better than one teacher in front of 30 kids.

Speaker 1 And so all these IEPs and diagnoses.

Speaker 3 What do they stand for? So they're public.

Speaker 1 It's a plan in a public school that gives you basically it's an individualized plan. Yeah.
Right. For each kid.

Speaker 1 And you want a diagnosis because then you get one. Exactly.
Right. And dyslexia, dysgraphia, whatever, ADHD, whatever it is.

Speaker 1 And you know, when parents come to our school, first, you just talk to our parents who had all these diagnoses and now they're at alpha, which is, you know, the, once you go to alpha, you're like, well, your kid's not going to sit in class for six hours and be bored.

Speaker 1 You have the, oh, he's disruptive in the class. Yeah.
You know, and he's, he's a problem child. Yeah.
Right. And all these things.
And I need to met him up, you know, to solve it. No, you don't.

Speaker 1 You just need him to engage for two hours of the app and then have the rest of the afternoon not that. Right.

Speaker 1 And it completely transforms the kid.

Speaker 1 And, you know, back to just the over-diagnosing, I believe it's, I don't know if it's over-diagnosing, given the system system it is, but in the alpha system, it's completely different.

Speaker 1 And I would say the second part about mental health issues, I believe a lot of it comes back to this low standards where, you know, we get into the middle, like back to, we'll focus on middle school, right?

Speaker 1 In middle school, you get in a whole set of girls, you know, who are like, I'm not a math science girl on the academic side. And second, I scroll TikTok all day.

Speaker 1 Right. And you're like, where is this going? Yeah.
Right. And it's not going to be good.
Right. And at our school, first of all, we have to make the kid love school.
Right.

Speaker 1 And we have all day, we have half the day to do awesome stuff.

Speaker 1 And so our workshop, one of the workshops we do

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 you do a values chart. Who do you want to be? Right.
Vision board. And these kids have awesome things they want to do.
Yeah. Right.
And then you say, we do Japanese Ikagai, right?

Speaker 1 You know, for all those who know, and what are you good at? And what's your passion? And what does the world need? And then we do a 168-hour project. What do you spend every hour of your week?

Speaker 1 And, you know, and this this girl came and she's like, well, Mr. Liman, I guess I'm going to be the best TikTok scroller.

Speaker 1 And it's the exact opposite of what her vision chart was, but it was the realization of, right, that discrepancy. And then our job is to use her afternoons to have her become a creator, as we say.

Speaker 1 Like our middle school basically will take consumers and turn them into creators. And what parents need to understand is Every kid actually wants to be awesome and wants to be a creator.

Speaker 1 And they don't wake up saying, I just want to be a video game player, TikTok scroller. They don't want to be, but our schools don't give them an out, right?

Speaker 1 And that's where this environment can totally unleash them because you're like, well, they don't have to do that.

Speaker 2 This sounds like a very. awesome experience for the kids and very ambitious.
It also sounds very expensive.

Speaker 2 So how do you, you said like the goal is a billion kids.

Speaker 2 How do you pay for a billion kids to have this type of experience?

Speaker 1 Sure. And so we're talking about alpha.
And so just back to the things we're building. So at Alpha, it's a high-end-branded school.

Speaker 1 So, there's going to be in 100 cities, there's going to be an Alpha model. It's going to be expensive.

Speaker 1 Literally, when it was designed, we said pretend price is no object, you know, and just and set that there.

Speaker 1 But now we're building out other schools, right, at half the price and lower, uh, to where we actually have schools now down to 15,000, which is lower than your average public school spends today.

Speaker 1 Um, and so we're now it changes what your product is. Yep.
So, for example, a sports academy is actually

Speaker 1 for kids who love sports, you don't need all these expensive workshops. You just need a field and a coach and you can have 25 to one, right? So things of how where you lower cost ratios.

Speaker 1 Schools are driven by how much you pay the teachers and what's the student teacher ratio.

Speaker 1 Now, the crazy part about the student teacher ratio is, you know, in normal school, because you're trying to just replicate an individualized learning, smaller class size is better, you know, in a lot of cases.

Speaker 1 But in our schools, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 Right. And if you actually ask our high school guides, and I was like, okay,

Speaker 1 I can double the pay for a guide, but you're going to have twice as big a class size. What do you guys want? They all vote for twice as big a class size.

Speaker 1 They want a more awesome person to help coach them.

Speaker 1 Right. And so you can fix your.
economics and drive that. So GT school also is very cheap.

Speaker 1 The GT kids are like, oh, I want to do Math Olympiad and robotics and relatively inexpensive workshops. And so those are, you know, at a, right now they're $20,000 to $25,000.

Speaker 1 We're opening a Montessori one at that price point,

Speaker 1 sort of next-gen Montessori. And, but we expect we will have hundreds of schools in Texas, this Texas Sports Academy, next year.
A billion dollars of vouchers are coming.

Speaker 1 You get 10-ish to $11,000, you know, at $15,000. So four or $500 a month parent pay.
and we can make this available to everybody.

Speaker 3 And you're running this as a for-profit, is that correct?

Speaker 1 Yes, yeah. So, we run it as for-profit.
We also have a big scholarship fund, right? And what sort of people are you trying to attract?

Speaker 3 Because I know one conversation that we were all having earlier was how people often wonder: can you make money in education?

Speaker 3 And you're really focused on let's build something incredibly impactful, incredibly useful that also makes money. Are there specific types of people that you want to have join you on this effort?

Speaker 3 Or sort of, yeah, no, that's true.

Speaker 1 So, my best goal out of this would be

Speaker 1 education is seen as it has to be nonprofit. It has to be funded by donations.

Speaker 1 And you have to be, you can't make any money. And anything that makes money, or if you bring capitalism to education, you are bringing evil into the world.
And there's examples.

Speaker 1 So there's reasons why that, you know, historically, but that's not necessarily true. And that's what we're trying to show is that you can build great businesses that are for-profit, right? But that

Speaker 1 both have mission and money as a purpose. And so I'm trying to attract builders who, you know, if we're going to reinvent education, right? If every kid, I guess, wait, here's Top Back.

Speaker 1 If every kid's going to learn everything they need to know in two hours a day, and there's going to be a tablet less than $1,000 for everybody in the world, right? That's coming.

Speaker 1 $1,000 for everybody in the world in two hours a day of what we spent all day in class for.

Speaker 1 Every family and society has to say, well, now how are we going to educate our kids? And what are our values? And what do we want to allow?

Speaker 1 And I think part of what I'm trying to do is let's go get a bunch of builders to go build awesome products. Yeah.
Right. Let's go build the world.

Speaker 3 Are you most looking for engineers? Are you looking for operations people to run these schools at scale?

Speaker 1 Are you looking for? All of them. So we're releasing Time Back, which is going to be a platform that you can build schools on.
So literally, you don't have to know, you know, all the learning science.

Speaker 1 It's going to be all packaged. Right.
And then you basically do the afternoon. Right.
And so that's what this Texas Sports Academy is.

Speaker 1 It's literally, it's coaches, you know, in a thousand school districts around Texas. So there's that, that aspect.

Speaker 1 There are set of coders and builders, which is once you start, most of ed tech does not use learning science, right? Which is one of the biggest issues.

Speaker 1 And once you say, I'm going to build an app from the ground up based on learning science, right? You all of a sudden can say kids can learn in 20 hours.

Speaker 1 Like Math Academy is like the best math app that's out there, right? And that's a great, awesome team who, you know, if you want to learn about it, just go research all their stuff.

Speaker 1 But we need that for every subject, right? And so we need builders and parents will pay.

Speaker 1 Like one of, I'll give you one aspect on top of time back that's being done is there's a AAA video game team, right? Who is building a video game on top of it.

Speaker 1 And this video game is going to be both free to learn for everybody on the planet, but they also believe it'll be the most profitable video game ever built, right?

Speaker 1 That there's just easily, you know, just in America alone, there's 10 million moms who will pay 100 bucks a month to have their kid be in the top 1% or 5%.

Speaker 1 And so, as you think about, you know, getting it down to scale, there is a software element, right, that is going to be available for the software builders, but it is even builder.

Speaker 1 We need sort of the full stack.

Speaker 1 You know, you're going to have buildings and real estate and guides and teachers. But I think, you know, I think there's going to be just an explosion of different opportunities.

Speaker 2 I think for our audience, there's a lot of tech and business people. They'd be like, oh, well, you know, Joe's a software software guy.
He seems like a pretty competent executive.

Speaker 2 And he's about to run into the wall of like the slowness of the education system and regulation and the fact that like most kids go to public school and there's a bunch of restrictions around what you can do and you can't get that time back.

Speaker 2 And so how do you think about like this is parallel system and how quickly you can make that transition or how like everyone should think about it.

Speaker 1 No, this is a great, because in my first year, part of when I got into this, I'm like, how do I make a business out of this?

Speaker 1 And, you know, I put in the first billion yeah and just said okay this is my seed fund big seed fund to be able to go figure this out and but a lot of it is i got to get this to product market fit that then could go funding to rebuild education is going to take hundreds of billions of dollars there's 10 000 buildings that need to be built right it's it's a huge endeavor um you know every country is going to want its own llm right because when you talk about sovereign ai the number one use case of sovereign ai it's either military education yeah Obviously, education is the one everyone wants to talk about.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 the investment here is going to be enormous. And so how do you build profitable models?

Speaker 1 So one of the things about education, you know, as you're, you know, as you're doing your whatever mental model of WhatsApp Beachhead, the private school market is huge.

Speaker 1 So the private school market in U.S. is already over $50 billion.

Speaker 1 And so if you want to go build a multi-billion dollar company, it's easy because these guys haven't innovated in 100 years. Right.
And so all you don't have to fix public education on day one.

Speaker 1 You can go just fix private. You know, back to scale, there's a million kids in America who could afford $50,000 tuition.
So if you want to go high in, there's also

Speaker 1 as you go move down, the amount of private school vouchers and funding that's opened up is enormous. So when you think about the scale, Texas spends $100 billion a year on education annually.

Speaker 1 They just released $1 billion in vouchers that are going to be available

Speaker 1 next year. You can go build a great billion-dollar business, right? And those are only going to increase over time.

Speaker 1 If you look at the big government, the federal bill that just passed, if you actually do all the math, I think Bloomberg just did it.

Speaker 1 They're like, there's like $200 billion of vouchers that are going to be available to parents to use on private school education.

Speaker 1 And so there's enormous amounts that are either already out there that parents pay for, or second, that are coming. Right.

Speaker 1 And if you can build low-cost school models or these, you know, good, protected, awesome products for whatever your vision and niche is, where's, you know, arts, theater, music, school.

Speaker 3 Given how much is available from a market perspective or revenue perspective, why has there been so little innovation?

Speaker 1 So a lot is everybody only knows their education. So here's the big breakthrough you have to have to believe this.

Speaker 1 Back to the one is if you think the only way to educate a kid is a teacher in front of a classroom, you can't do this.

Speaker 1 The model does not work, right? You have to be willing to break that. And 99.9% of parents are not willing to think of that.
Because even if I go build it, how do I convince parents

Speaker 1 to come to my school? It took McKinsey two years.

Speaker 1 That's a really long sales cycle, you know, for one family.

Speaker 1 And so you're, that's part of what we're trying to do and, you know, get out there and be the exemplar for everybody is you have to be willing to break the teacher in front of a classroom model.

Speaker 1 And then once you do, you're like, okay, now everything can change and I can rebuild.

Speaker 2 If you could

Speaker 2 convince every

Speaker 2 relevant policy or lawmaker that has to do with education of something,

Speaker 2 what would you say? Because I'd say like, well, one thing is to make the default something that is time back powered or follows this model more.

Speaker 1 School is a hard bundle. And this is the problem.
We got to get it to public school eventually. I believe it is going to be a long lift, right?

Speaker 1 I think it is going to be a decade to get it to public school. And part of what we are doing is we have to show, we got to get the data.

Speaker 1 Right. There's all these fads in education, ed tech, one more.
Oh, my God. It's not going to work.
All that. I'm like, what data in particular?

Speaker 2 Like academic performance data you have.

Speaker 1 Well, not my end's not big enough.

Speaker 1 Let's go get a million kids.

Speaker 1 Right. And let's do, why don't we do pharmaceutical grade randomized control trials for education? We don't do that at all.
Right.

Speaker 1 We, any latest fad is like, oh, this is what we're doing in schools these days. Right.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, no, let's actually sit here and have the government sit and do, you know, studies where we're going to be able to say this works. Right.
The learning science is there, right?

Speaker 1 Where you could build products, run them through a test, right? And then be able to say, we should adopt this wholesale.

Speaker 1 There's been a lot of things that have been adopted in the last 25 years that are terrible. Yeah.
Right. That you're just like, oh my God, I can't.
And

Speaker 1 there's a new wave coming back, which is the science of reading. But how we taught most of the kids to read, you know, 20 years ago is why they can't read.
Right. Well, I'll take modern ones.

Speaker 1 Let's just take modern ones. Okay, we're not going to have kids memorize their multiplication tables.
That's bad. And I'm like, that is the worst thing you could do to a kid.

Speaker 1 That, you know, all the cognitive load theory, right? You know, you have working memory slots and then how many reps it takes to store into long-term schema.

Speaker 1 And your working memory slots, you can't do advanced math problems. If you're in the middle, if you have limited work.
I'm spending it trying to.

Speaker 2 Correct.

Speaker 1 If you're in an advanced math problem and you're doing seven times eight. And seven times eight to you is still a calculation.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 You're doomed. Right.
There's just, there's no way around it. You'll start making careless errors.
You know, I have plenty of stories around this.

Speaker 1 All the kids who transfer into our school from, you know, public and private, do not know their memorization, their multiplication division tape.

Speaker 2 It's considered bad now.

Speaker 1 It's considered terrible.

Speaker 1 And so you're like, let's go back to this. There's a bigger wave coming.
There's a bigger wave coming, which is the current school system does not know it's about to hit it.

Speaker 1 Chat GPT, first of all, we didn't even get into the technology.

Speaker 1 Chat is literally the worst thing in the world. If you give kids chat GPT in school and academics, 90% will use it for cheating.

Speaker 1 It is a cheatbot. It is not a chatbot.
It is terrible.

Speaker 1 And so, like in our academic two hours, there is no chat functionality. We've tried and the kids all jailbreak it and get around it.

Speaker 1 And so it's terrible. And so kids are knowing less and less.
And the current system is not set up to stop that. Writing is prompting.

Speaker 1 Kids write one prompt and they think, I'm a writer, but writing is thinking, right? And the best way to rewrite, to learn something long-term, deep, and rewrite, restructure your schema is writing.

Speaker 1 And no kids are doing that anymore. There's also a whole set who are like, well, we don't need to know anything, right?

Speaker 1 We don't need facts in our brains because Chat GBT, there was a wave with Google.

Speaker 1 It's like that now, too. Yeah.
And they're just like, we don't need to know that. Yeah.
But here's the problem.

Speaker 1 This next sentence out of the same parent's mouth is, but I want my kid to critically think. Yeah.
Right. And that concept, there is no learning science that will support that concept.
None.

Speaker 1 You know, if you have

Speaker 1 LLMs who try to reason with no facts, we call it hallucination.

Speaker 1 And that is basically what kids are doing. If you don't give them a fact base,

Speaker 1 and their opinions, you're just making stuff up.

Speaker 1 You have to reason over a fact base. So you have to put facts in.
Now, AI and these learning things, we can put in those facts super fast. It's like Neo upload in the matrix, right?

Speaker 1 We can, AI take away because it could cause cheating, but it also giveth where you're like, okay, we can get kids into a kid's brain 10 times faster. They don't have to spend six hours.

Speaker 1 But that concept, right, of all these things. So when you talk about policy and stuff, don't deploy ChatGPT.
Sorry, guys, you know, in its current form.

Speaker 1 Go rebuild everything around learning science concepts, right? You need basically the LLM to have the concepts of learning science, which inform it.

Speaker 1 And then if I was running a school, the problem with schools is it is a bundle.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I, I talk to principals and superintendents in public schools, and I mean, their job's 100 times harder than mine. Like theirs is

Speaker 1 because you don't, as a product guy, they don't have a customer base. They have to serve everybody.

Speaker 1 And so you have customer and the opposite. Right.
So like there's three schools in Austin that they're failing, you know, F's for years. Kids aren't learning.

Speaker 1 And they, the superintendent's like, okay, I'm going to shut it down and we're going to move the kids to the good school academically. The parents are, you know, protesting around the school.

Speaker 1 And they're like, I don't care that the seventh grade math teacher is not teaching math because my older daughter had that teacher and she transformed her life.

Speaker 1 And so I'm willing to give up seventh grade math academics in order to get that other benefit. And so as a superintendent or principal, you're like,

Speaker 1 what are you doing?

Speaker 1 And so it's a hard problem for these to transform because your parents and your community base, right, want very different things in that bundle that they think is best for their kid.

Speaker 2 And so some version in it is going to be allow, you know, and funding for different versions of the bundle.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I guess if I had to do the, it's, I believe if you want to sit and say, what is the bundle? School choice is one way to do it.

Speaker 1 And that brings private market in, you know, but how do you support and buttress the public school system?

Speaker 1 I believe there are a set of academic things we can do where we are working with, we do have some pilots and, you know, a.

Speaker 1 few thousand public school students where MTSS level three, if you know what that is, that's your bottom 10% kids, where schools have the most flexibility.

Speaker 1 So, for example, we were doing one over in Fremont, and you know, the hardest part of it isn't, okay, does the app work? It's like motivation's 90% of the answer.

Speaker 1 How are you going to motivate the kid who has to sit in class still for six hours a day to actually engage with the app? And the kids are like, I'm not going to do it, right?

Speaker 1 You can't take our, if the ed tech doesn't matter. Yeah, ed tech doesn't matter.
You put our ed tech and put it in his classroom. It's not going to work.
It's the motivation model.

Speaker 1 And so we got the school because they're, you know, at MTSS level three, they're like, we can use gift cards.

Speaker 1 And you're like, okay, kid, do the lessons, just get a gift card. Right.

Speaker 1 And, you know, or, oh, wait, let's build a video game that they'll play or, you know, whatever it is, where if you don't solve motivation, all this ed tech doesn't matter, whether in AI to none of it matters.

Speaker 1 And the reason kids use AI to cheat. is because they're just trying to get through the system, not trying to learn.

Speaker 1 And everybody's like, oh, I just hope they're self-driven self-driven learners who just have a love of learning. And you're like, there is five to 10% of the market.

Speaker 1 You should give them Chat GPT and Socratic tutoring and they'll love it. The other 90% are like, how do I get through this?

Speaker 1 And that's the, you know, if you, if you talk to most kids and say what the highlight of your day is, 90% of kids are like lunch, talking to my friends, recess.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, we waste 12 years of kids' lives. Right.
And we're just like, how about we stop that?

Speaker 2 Before we're out of time, can we talk a little bit about like where EdTech does matter?

Speaker 2 If you even considered EdTech, like where you are on the product today, and what ambition do you have for it to be better for engineers and researchers, whoever else would go well for you?

Speaker 1 I mean, the problem with EdTech today and why it's failed, and nobody wants to invest in it, is you're trying to sell to a school system who actually doesn't care about academic outcomes back to the bundle.

Speaker 1 And you can't change the metrics that matter. And so

Speaker 1 you can't get any money for it. So there's no, right, there's no ARPU.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 endlessly long sales cycles. And then second, your product's actually not that good.
Sorry, EdTech guys. It's just not that good.
And

Speaker 1 go rebuild a product based on the concepts of learning science and build an awesome product, right? Have a much higher standard of what your product has to do. And that, I believe, can change things.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, the fact Math Academy. right? How many math apps are there? A zillion of them.
I mean, the results that you get with Math Academy are just step function different than everybody else.

Speaker 1 You know, it only takes 28 hours for fourth grade Math Academy, 26 hours for fifth grade, 22, right, for sixth and seventh grade.

Speaker 1 I mean, to master the material, but there's all the other math apps don't do that.

Speaker 1 Right. But he has a 500-page book on the learning science behind Math Academy.

Speaker 1 And so that concept, right? If you're not, you have to go back and rebuild your product based on these fundamentals that just EdTech never adopted.

Speaker 1 And I believe then the second one I would do is in the meantime, because the school, school straight to schools is a failed model.

Speaker 1 Parent willingness and propensity to pay for education that their kids love is enormous. So this is back to the other side of the market.
It doesn't matter what your income is.

Speaker 1 Parents will pay 10% of AGI, right, of their income on their kids' education. Societies pay 5%.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's a $7 trillion industry. We spend a ton of money in this country.

Speaker 1 And if you have a solution, right, that kids love to engage in, right, that does deliver awesome academic outcomes, parents will pay for that.

Speaker 1 And we need builders who wake up and say, that's what my job is, not

Speaker 1 running the bureaucracy at, you know, the school boards and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 So there's more flexibility with kids kids that are struggling in the public school system. If you're going to be more aggressive than that, what else would you do?

Speaker 1 The number one thing that I would do is the 100 for 100 program that we do, which allows kids to go back and master, right, all their basics, right?

Speaker 1 No matter what their age grade and knowledge grade are different, that program that we run, we need to run that for everybody in America.

Speaker 1 And for $400, maybe $500 of incentive, remember average education, right? We spend lots of, we spend up to 20 grand a kid.

Speaker 1 500 bucks, we can totally fix and change the trajectory and all these bad test scores and all of that by making sure we're motivating the kid to go back and do this.

Speaker 2 Why is this your mission? Like you have kids who have successfully gotten through, you know, old system, new system, right? Or are almost through in the case of your younger daughter.

Speaker 2 You know, you're financially independent. You've built a company before.
Like why go all the way Wade back into this mess of a very hard space? Yeah,

Speaker 1 because it's awesome. So I obviously had a good career beforehand.
And three years ago, my last three years, I'm principal. So this would be my last message to the builders out there.

Speaker 1 I did fine before. It was

Speaker 1 good. There was nothing to complain about.
The last three years have been so awesome, right? There is nothing more important for society than raising its next generation, right?

Speaker 1 It is the definition of whether it continues. And kids are are awesome, right?

Speaker 1 And when you sit and say, we can transform what their decade's going to be like or their first 12 years or even beyond it, right?

Speaker 1 The rewards you get out of this are just 10x,

Speaker 1 right? It's just, and we didn't even get into the student stories coming out or the parent stories, you know,

Speaker 1 you transform lives. And so if you say, what, you know, my kids now are gone.
Right. And so I spent the 20 years with them.

Speaker 1 I was, you know, and then now it's like, what am I going to do my next 20 years? This is going to be the best 20 years of my life. It's going to be awesome.
And,

Speaker 1 and so I believe what we do need, it's societally important. And we need to go get builders like this to say we're going to bring new insights, new ways, even business and capitalism to education.
And

Speaker 1 I couldn't look forward to, you know,

Speaker 1 more than I do.

Speaker 3 So this is incredibly inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

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