Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/001da49922017ffa

This AI world is coming.
And we're all terrified of what it means.
Why does education seem fundamentally broken today when it didn't thirty years ago?
The the biggest picture.
I think if you talk to parents of like why there's
Agitation for change is
This AI world is coming.
And we're all terrified of what it means, but what we do know.
And we don't know exactly what it means, but what we do know is the education system that we all went through.
Isn't gonna prepare the kids for that world.
Right, and I feel that as a catalyst for people to say the old system wasn't working.
Or the old system needs to change, that's just a huge driver. Like if you know, I talked to lots of kindergarten parents, you know, and they're just looking and saying, in a dozen years,
You know, if I put my kid in standard school that I went through.
Is that gonna prepare them for this AI world? And they're like, No, that's not.
So there's a drive that we need something different.
Um but even ten years ago it was different. Like your daughter, right? Before AI even hit the scene, uh I felt it. You felt it like something is not working with the school system. Yeah. Well, and and schools are failing.
You know, that if you look at
You know, just
Pure academic results. Just take academic results independent of AI. You're you're right.
Uh.
Test scores keep going down every year.
How is that possible? We keep spending more and more money. It's you know
Uh
You know, there's there's a lot of reasons around it. Um uh it's a comp a school's a complicated bundle.
And academic performance
is only one element and it's one fundamentally that schools of basically say
It doesn't matter that much anymore. And so
Everybody's willing.
To let everybody involved in the ecosystem has been willing to let the standards drop. And I believe part of it is because
The way our system is built today.
You know, there's basically a couple truisms about you know the standard school system. The first is the way it's structured is a time based system where you move up every year and you have a teacher in front of a classroom.
There's basically you have two attributes for people who do well in that system. One
It's IQ coded, which is higher IQ better is better. And second, it's big five conscientiousness coded.
If are you a natural grinder?
You know, sort of. And if you have those two attributes, you do really well in our existing school system. But if you don't
You don't do well.
Right. And so and the system doesn't adapt for anybody who doesn't do well in those two those two elements.
Um, and so you you have that as sort of one dimension of why the system's not working,'cause it's if you're not one of those two.
Um
And then the second dimension over here is fundamentally about resources and
uh factually, independent of any, you know, political or anything, is just factually.
You know, one of the strongest determinations of whether.
you learn your educational outcome and how much you know.
is based on your family's income.
And the whole system is just geared that way, sort of is just look at the results. And so you sort of have these just two systems like this, and that's why there's like, okay, we'll spend more money and all these things, but fundamentally it's it's just broken because those those elements, right, aren't being changed.
Right. If you have a time based system that's based on IQ and conscientious, you can pour all the money you want into it and it doesn't change those.
Right. It doesn't make kids more
I'd give'em higher IQ, give them more conscientiousness. And so it doesn't fix the problem.
And uh and so that's that's a lot of the the issues that you have. Do we admit as a society that there is a problem, or is it just sort of like Yeah, I this is this is I think where it gets complicated.
Uh, at least in in your US versus globe is a little different, which is as a society, everybody in America's like wow, our schools suck.
Yeah, it's just there's every article, right? Just constant.
stream of and there's an unending stream of look at how bad all these
school scores and grades go down and everything and then Covid was even worse, but you know, just everything's bad.
Um at eighty percent of the great inflation, everybody knows like you know, eighty percent of people at Harvard get A's now. It's like oh just give A's out to everybody. And so we all know that the standards have been dropped.
But
The thing in the US that's different, especially in if you look globally, is in the US
There's a big disconnect between educational outcomes
And your
Earning potential.
Which is they're not as tightly correlated.
as they are in the rest of the world. Right. They're very tightly correlated in the rest of the world and not in the US. And so there's a big thing among par
Parents who are just like.
The academics don't matter that much. There's all these other things, the life skills and all these other skills that matter more than the academics. And so
I don't really care as much. And I guess a good story about this was
When you know, I became principal three years ago.
And
You know, our first product, the way I positioned it.
You know, was that.
Two X learning.
Your kid will learn twice as much.
And
Fundamentally, I got incredible pushback from parents about that. Like surprising amounts of pushback. And I was so surprised. I mean, I I was doing hundreds of parent teacher meetings, right? With, you know, and explaining it. And I'd be in a meeting, you know, and I'd be like,
You know, mom, dad, and Johnny.
And I just be like, look, Johnny's not learning to X because you know, when he misses the question.
The video that comes up that explains why he missed it and how he can do the next one right, he skipped it. He just skips it.
You know?
But he could learn
Two X twice as much if you just watch the video. And then they're they're probably like, Why are you pressuring him? Why are you Why are you pressuring to learn two X?
And I'm like
Well I okay.
Got it. And it took me hundreds of meetings to realize the parents don't value it. Now, 10% of the market does. Ten percent of the market totally cares about.
great academics, right? And so those guys, they demand it. Like they don't like two hour learning because it's not enough learning. But we switched. So that was my our big product market fit. If you had to say the biggest pivot
You know, from a marketing point of view that unlocked
you know, sort of all the all the stuff around Alpha was
And I was slow, but hundreds of meetings in, I'm like
I'm gonna change this message. And I'd have mom, dad, same Johnny, same momma, dad. Look.
I'm trying to get Johnny out of here in two hours.

So we can go do all the cool stuff the rest of the day, trying to get him out of here. And you know, he skipped the videos. And if you just watch him, he'd be done in two hours.
And then mom's like, Johnny, what's wrong with you? Don't you want to get out of here? Right. People want to get out of the learning, right? They want to get out of the academics. And when it's
Only two hours, then everybody's aboard.
Um, and now we still teach two X and two hours, right? We just emphasize the two hour part. Just take the two question there. No, we literally took we it was two X and two hours, and I'm like
Let's just drop it and call it two hour learning, where you learn to X in parentheses. Well, let's talk about Alpha School. What is Alpha School? So Alpha School is a uh
high end private school, um expanding nationwide. We'll have uh twenty five campuses around the country.
uh this year.
And the way to think about Alpha School is if you could revisit
And just say
We need to build an educational system that's gonna be ready for when AI comes. You know, when when the this whatever world's gonna be here in a decade, right? What would you do? Just ground up rewrite, ignore everything you and I went through, right? Yeah, six hours a day in class and homework and all that, and just rewrite it.
of what are the skills the kids need, how should they spend the day? How do you do that? What would it be?
And so that's what we're doing at Alpha School. The other part we do is we also say
We definitely took off budget constraints. It's a high end private school. We're like if if money's no object, which is gives us a sort of our high end design. Now we're gonna get the cost down and and drive it down, but for the first version, this alpha school, it's it's it's the high end.
And so we
We
We have built a school.
That is totally different than every other school out there.
Um
And the principles that we
underlie it.
Um
You know, first
You know, we said if look, if you're gonna redo school.
And we're gonna put our kids in this for a decade.
The number one rule is
Kids must love school.
Mm-hmm. They must love school.
Right. And you know, that is our core principle and it's what makes everything happen.
And when I talk about
You know, to
Principals and superintendents and other heads of school.
I'm just like, if you don't believe that.
All this other stuff you hear about, you know, to our learning and all this, it's not gonna work.
You have to believe that core value that kids must love school. And we got our ranking like I think was like ninety-sixth the last. We survey our kids every eight weeks. And it was, you know.
Ninety six percent of our kids said yes. But we actually raised
Okay.
So we added a second question, which was
Do you love school more than vacation?
Right. And we get about forty to sixty percent of our kids. Forty to sixty percent of our kids who say they'd rather go to school than vacation, which is that's the metric now that we wake up every day is we're like, we have to build a school where the kids want to go and send a vacation. The highlight of my time as principal.
Three years ago.
was when I started.
Uh in May of this year.
Two thirds of our high school kids sent me a note and they're like, Mr. Lemont.
Can we keep the school open this summer because we don't want a summer break?
And
I
I hated high school.
Like I the school part. I would never have asked ever the
A million years.
And I was just like, Okay, we are
You know, and i there's a lot that to unpack why they wanted it and all that stuff. But that's that's the core. If we're gonna put our kids in for right, a decade, twelve years of this stuff, we as parents, right, should just say they should love it.
Like
You know, and and there's this view that no, it's spinach, you know? And that I I had that view, you know, um
The
Yeah, I wasn't the founder of Alphabet. I was talking to McKinsey and and Brian started it. And I was talking to Brian when I first put my kids in it. And I was like, What are the things I don't know?
About education that I should know. He's like kids must love school.
Like love school.
I'm like, mm, it's spinach.
He's like you don't get it.
your kids are going to come here and you're going to figure it out.
And now I'm like total religion, right? That they absolutely have to, and it makes all the magic happen.
And what's interesting
Is when I talk to b other business executives.
You know, about this no, it should be spinach. I'm like
Is that what you think for your employees? Do you like wake up and say
Man, you know what, this job just sucks. And it should suck. And no, I'm not gonna try to make them like this job. Just suck it up.
But literally they turn around to their kids and say the same thing. Like dude
Suck it up.
Yeah. Right. No, it's ridiculous that you should like school. That's just insane. Cause we didn't like it and we went through the system. But if we're rebuilding it, we just need to totally undo that thought process we have that
You know.
Kids should hate school. They should love it.
I think that was the moment where I started to question the school system, which was just about pre-Covid.
And you know
I was made to feel like my kids were the problem.
And I was like I don't
Like they're not a problem at home. Why are they all of a sudden a problem at school? Like what's going on in the classroom?
And then when it shut down and we all got to peer inside what's going on in the classroom, I'm like, Oh my God, like
100% agree with my kids, you know, this is crazy. Is this what you're doing all day? Like is this what they're learning and how they're learning? And
Um, but before we get to all of what you're doing different, like what are the results?
Yeah. So let's talk about the So the Alpha School, um
You know
One or
Our kids love school. It's just they're phenomenal results. Uh when you talk about academically, we're the best academic performing school in the country. Just
Barnot.
So you can measure us on we we are big believers in standardized tasks because no one when you hear about the whole how alpha works
nobody believes it'll work. And so even, you know, a lot of parents don't believe in standardized test when they come in.
And I'm like, Okay, your kids only doing two hours a day. And they're like, Well, how do I know they're learning? I'm like, trust me. They're like, No, I don't trust you. Right. And so when they score, you know, top of seven ninety and eight hundred math as A T, they're like, Oh, okay, it's working or on stand any
Map test is the one we use, NWEA. You know, when they're top one percent. Every single class, every single subject is top one percent. Every single year. Every single class, yes, every grade.
Every subject, top one percent.
Um
And we publish them.
Right, back to we publish all these results.
We also are kids.
Fundamentally in the two hours are learning twice as fast.
As if they sat in school for six and did homework.
And so like, for example, you on the map test.
You know, there's it's a three hundred point scale.
And so if you have like a two twenty and you're a fifth grader at you know
Seventy fifth percentile, you know, coming up to alpha.
You know it's gonna say you're gonna go up five points.
You know, if you're a normal kid, you're gonna go five points this year. Okay.
At Alpha, you're gonna go up ten points.
Okay.
Right. And so it's just quantifiable. So the parents can log in and be like wow.
Right. My kid
learn twice as much, and they only had to spend two hours a day doing it. And so you know, and so the the part that is just amazing about alpha
Is you know, there are a lot of private schools that just select for good students, right? Which is
one one way to do it. The other way is to make'em, develop'em.
And so
Ours is all about growth. We'll take kids, right? And get them.
From bottom half to top half to top one percent.

Um that the growth rate of alpha
is what the just unbelievable parts are. Like if you you can go download our off our website, like our results, and you can put it into chat GPT, and you're like, analyze the growth rate of alpha versus any other school in the country.
And it's like it's like four standard deviations off the track because nobody does this because we take people who are behind and catch them up. Yeah, but we take the top one percent.
And we move'em years ahead.
Mm-hmm.'Cause it's the same thing. There's you know, even a G T program at normal school when you get one year ahead.
You know, I have third and fourth graders.
Who outscore fifty percent of the high school graduates of this country.
That's amazing. You know, and the and our product's gotten better over time. My oldest daughter was in the school.
Um and she's now at Stanford.
And she was back and she was beating some of the third and fourth graders and she was looking at some of their scores and she's like
They are getting the scores I got in seventh and eighth grade. Oh wow. Right. And she's like, So the we're we're we're even improving the product. Like we're not done. Like when we get into the learning science, if you want to talk about that and stuff. Like it's
It's
Human potential's unlimited.
And we are tapped in and have that.
improvement cycle going. So the amount kids can learn.
In
A great environment that they love.
is just it's gonna explode like
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Yeah.
I imagine the pushback I I mentioned to somebody I w I was talking to you today and this is probably common pushback, but they were like, Oh yeah, they're self selecting. It's a bunch of rich kids in Austin
Um, and you know, so their parents care, they have tutors, they have all these resources and and I don't have that.
So.
Have you like what's the pushback on that argument? No, I so here's l selection effects are a great discussion.
Which is um
I'll I'll answer that second part of okay, what if you're not rich?
Um
Uh after it, but before
Uh
You know, in in most education, there's a view, and this maybe because my background, because I'm not, and I'm a product guy.
You know, when I came into education, there's a view that
You must serve everybody.
All at once.
Or you will serve nobody.
Right. That's that's just sort of the the view around everything. That you have to serve everybody all at once.
And that selection effects are bad.
I am like as a product guy.
I'm like, you must use selection effects to build your product, which is you have to select for the right person who you're designing your product for. Right. And so
Um so yes, I
There's no school that doesn't have selection effects. And yes, at alpha we select for those. And we absolutely have
You know.
an easier cohort than there's other cohorts that we'll talk about that are harder than with the ones we get.
But compare us to every other high end private school in the country. Right, right. I agree. Don't
Don't compare us to
Really hard situations.
Have us go compare us to the best. Go take other 99% kids.
And see why ours are learning three times faster than those kids.
Right. You can get the score that says
We benchmark our ninety-nine percentile kids not against the average kid. We benchmark them against the top one percent kid. And our top one percent kids kill everybody else's top one percent kids. So so I
And design you know, so selection effects matter. So for example, we have another school that's not alpha. So we have to get this down to everybody. You know, Mike I'm gonna spend twenty years on this, I gotta get it to a billion kids. So I gotta solve all the different
Right. Um demographics and and uh
Issues.
So we have a a school rolling out. We have a dozen that we've opened so far.
Um Texas Sports Academy.
Right. And so on this one back to selection effects.
Our tuition's gonna be fifteen thousand dollars.
for the school. It is fifteen thousand dollars for the school. And with the vouchers, it's in Texas, and Texas has a new voucher program.
that they announce billion dollars of vouchers. So it'll be twelve thousand dollar vouchers. So any family who's
income eligible for it.
Rich people can't get it. But if you're income eligible for it.
You get a twelve thousand dollar check. So it'll be a three hundred dollar a month parent pay. Yep.
to go to this school.
We're gonna have generally people who come in the bottom half academically. Yeah. Right.
Um
Uh but
They're all people who love sports.
Right, and it's it's a middle school for D one aspirational actions.
Right, people who wake up and they're like, I love sports. Because back to us, I have to build a school they love more than vacation.
Yeah. So I need to know what like lights'em up drives them and what drives them. And so I'm like, great, so we can do that.
So we already have, you know, and we'll have a
you know, we'll publish all the results, but uh
These kids coming in.
They go in to the same app set that you get it out. Yeah.
Right. They do the same two hours.
Right. So now we have a wider funnel of kids coming in from a academic background. Different academic backgrounds.
And you're gonna be able to see and we'll be able to publish those results.
That those kids can learn too.
Right. Back to the thing is
You know, we talked about why the kids are learning machines. It's almost like we get in the way of it as adults. And and the problem with the kids learning isn't the kid.
It's the system. Like we talked about that at the beginning, where the system's coded in high acute conscientiousness, and how do you unlock those? We've built a system that breaks those two things, which is if you have a mastery based
AI tutor.
Right, that only allows you to advance.
After you've mastered the material.
Right. Right. Master the basics.
Right, which everybody in sports understands, right?
If it
That's what our our system does.
That's
makes it independent of IQ.
That makes it effort based, not IQ based. And we have a ton of results, which is we run a program.
And we have a school you know, back to
The schools every kid
can get a hundred percent on their state standardized test.
And we run this program called A hundred for a hundred to teach these kids.
So we'll have middle schoolers coming into our sports academy. Yeah.
And
They'll go into the system.
And we'll be like well.
We'll pay a hundred dollars if you get a hundred percent of the test.
And they're a seventh or eighth grader. They're like I
I can't get a hundred.
on the test. And we're like, No.
Pick your grade level.
Like you're gonna let me do a third grade test to get a hundred or
Absolutely.
And so they go take the third grade test and they do get altered.
On the third grade test.
And they're like, Can I do fourth grade?
And then you do fourth grade.
Then on fifth grade, they only get a seventy five.
'Cause they have holes. They didn't learn all that material.
In fifth grade.
And then the AI tutor, they're like
Do you want the AI tutor to generate the lessons you're missing?
And
They're like, Let me see how many.
And they're like, I can do that like in a week or so. Mm-hmm. And you're like
Another hundred bucks. Yeah. And so we get more hundreds.
on state standardized tests in a building of two hundred people.
than a school district of a hundred thousand.
And back to this.
concept that you have to change with parents. If you interview alpha parents or any parents and say, can your kid get a hundred on the state standardized test, fewer than 10% of parents say yes. Because in our generation, like only the GT kids did that, right? None of us got that. Right.
In if you ask Alpha Kit.
They're all like.
Of course.
I got one.
Right, because it's effort based, not IQ based.
Right. There's nothing like and if you back to that whole correlation, it's just, you know, there's no concept in US Common Core through the eighth grade.
That everybody can't understand.
Right? It's built that way.
So
It's just a matter of do if and if you're having trouble, it's usually because you don't have the prereqs.
Right. And that's all and that's the difference between a time based teacher in front of a classroom model.
and a mastery based AI tutor.
Well it's
It's interesting'cause as you're saying that it
Strikes me that
Part of the problem is for a
A teacher in a normal classroom.
uh who's standing at the front of the room and teaching, let's say, grade sevens. You have grade sevens who are, you know, effectively in the one percent.
of each you have the ninety ninth percentile and you have the one percentile and you have
Teach.
Not only do you have to teach to that classroom and try to keep everybody's attention, which sounds impossible. I have a ton of empathy for teachers. On the flip side, you're supposed to be teaching grade seven.
But the student
that we you just f like said this, well they pass grade three, but in grade four or five, you know
they only got seventy so they have gaps in their knowledge.
That you're not.
And and everything is so cumul especially with math and reading and
All knowledge. It's cumulative. Like so if you can't do that, you're gonna fail in high school. You're gonna hate math by the time you get to high school, but it's cause you didn't learn something in fifth grade.
That's a hundred percent of the problem.
Which is
you have holes in your knowledge and knowledge is cumulative. And so when you start slowing down
It's because of your precs.
And the system is set up. The teacher it's not there for teachers are awesome.
Teacher in front of the classroom is terrible, right? You have to separate those two concepts. And that's one of the things parents, we all sort of put them together, but those they're two separate things. And that's why everybody's trying to get small class sizes, because you basically want a teacher to give your kid individualized lessons. I mean, for the
Rich families who hire tutors after school.
All the tuner does is give them the fourth and fifth grade lessons. That's all they're doing. Is they're just going back and saying, Oh, you don't know fourth and fifth grade like two, but you're a sixth grade teacher, you have to hand out sixth grade material.
Like we're we were working.
with um a a school with
Bottom ten percent kids.
Right. And you know, back to me being new, I go my first day to see the sixth grade teacher teach.
I was a sixth grade teacher.
And bottom ten percent in America means you can't read. You don't know seven times eight, right. And
You know, I I go into the classroom and
She's handing out sixth grade material.
Well, I'm like.
You know read. You know they can't read being effective. Yeah, it's just they can't read. And that kid needs a first grade phonics lesson.
Yeah. Right. And that guy needs a second grade math question, right? And you can't but the teacher, they can't sit here and every kid give him a right. It's just that's not they're a sixth grade teacher. There's actually laws in states, various states that you must teach at grade level.
Like it's illegal.
for a teacher not to teach at grade level.
Right.
Totally insane. Right. And so you have all these problems that are systemically designed in the system.
And it's one now that parents because they're you know, and if you talk to people, we we've known this back to learning science. For forty years, there have been papers written about how kids could learn two, five, ten times faster.
But they don't work in a teacher in front of a classroom.
Bloom's two Sigma, which is a famous one and everybody fights about it, but it's a gr it's a good paper, which is
You know, in this is when I was in high school, it's like if you do
AI to not an AI tutor, a human tutor.
With mastery based.
You get two sigma better performance. Okay. Right. Just crazy better.

But
You know, the problem with that paper is you can't give everybody a human tutor.
Right. Right. And then second, you also have to enforce mastery, which is hard in a lot of ways. When it's mastery means Mastery means
Do you do you know the material
Cold.
Like think of whenever I talk about mastery, think about sports.
Just move to sports, which is
If you're a point guard.
And you're going down the court.
What percent of the time is the coach gonna let you lose the ball?
Right.
Right.
And whatever that number is, is mastery, right? Because it's not very often, right? Versus in academics.
Kid gets an eighty percent.
You're like, oh, he seems to know, got a B, you know, in in this thing. Sometimes an A now, you know? And if a if if Point Guard was losing the ball twenty percent of the time going down the court, the coach would be like, master the basics. We're not working on dunks. Right. We're not working on new stuff. Yeah. Right. We're gonna master the basics and you're gonna get up to ninety nine point.
Whatever. And so do you know it cold?
And there's a view, though, in a time based system, that you're like, look, it's time to move on.
And we all grew up in a non mastery based system, which is then as you don't have mastery.
Um
You know, the holes compound.

And then all of a sudden the reason like if you look at the learning curves in the US, they start to slow down in middle school and basically flatline in high school. The average kid in the US.
Like on this map score, this NWA map.
There's a three hundred point scale.
If you take a
I I can't remember the exact number, um, but if you take an eighth grader.
They will go up one point.
Bye.
senior year.
How is it?
One point.
Like they learn nothing at first. That's four years. Yeah, four years of learning nothing. Now your top one percent back to this inequality kind of thing, the top one percent probably go up six points a year.
Right. So your top one percent kids are still learning like this, but your median person
in the US is not learning in high school. It's just bas there's no academic learning going on.
And that's why I there's a pa paper um
I'm trying to think. You I think you see San Diego run to the top.
schools, universities in our country, right?
uh just published a paper that like fifty percent of their freshmen
Can't answer fifth grade questions.
Like back to holes and all this kind of stuff. Like how bad it is. It's like, you know, the the the the learning and the holes that are in the system. Cause once you know, in the part of what happened with COVID.
You know, everybody's waiting for the bounce back on Covet. There's gonna be no bounce back on COVID because what happened to your point was
The span. It used to be years ago.
Okay, I'm a teacher.
And I'm a sixth grade teacher. I got this GT kid who needs some seventh grade material, and I got someone who's a little behind, needs some fifth grade material.
Post Covid, you're like, now it's a seven year span. Yeah. Right. You have people in middle school who can't read. It's crazy. I mean, you can't if you can't read, you can't
It's just a
Going to school's a waste of time.
Yeah. Unless
You know, if you're not if you're in middle school, you can't read. All that matters is that somebody's teaching you to read.
And and everybody got uh socially passed.
two, right? So it's like oh you're another year older, therefore instead of addressing the actual issue, we're gonna kick the can to somebody else and we're gonna start fresh with these different groups. And the the pressure I I totally feel if I was a
I could not do the public school job. I could not be a principal at a public school because it is really hard. Cause the product you have is this bundle.
Right. And political and there's political and all just it's totally impossible. And you know, and you do, you have so there used to be rules that you couldn't pass third grade if if you couldn't read.
Right. And the problem is social promotion, where the
Your people are just like, Okay, you are gonna psychologically damage my kid if you hold him back.
Right. And so then you just
promote'em to fourth grade for all these other reasons. Which is with the concept of with this concept of Oh, okay, someone's gonna teach them, right?
Yeah. But the problem is the cis the fourth grade teacher's not set up to teach third grade reading. They stopped teaching reading in grade three. Right.
K K K through three is lear to read. Yeah. And then fourth through twelfth is read to learn.
Right. That's the flip point where you're like, Okay, I'm learning I'm bootstrapping to learn how to read.
And then in fourth grade, you're like, okay, we all know you read now. So now you're gonna learn so science and social studies, and you know, you're gonna get word problems on your math task, because you can read. And if you can't, if you miss that.
Bar.
Then all of a sudden you're all of a sudden all this material and it's just
You know, it could be it could be like me handing out Greek to you. And then it's like a negative flywheel, right? Like every year it gets worse and worse. And then you probably feel like I wanna give up. There's nothing I can do. So like why bother? Why try? And then I'm disruptive to the class. I start skipping class.
You know, my life takes a very different path. Exactly. Exactly. And it with a mastery based AI tutor, you can go to those kids.
Right. And just say.
I'll make sure you get the third grade phonic. So explain the mastery based AI tutor. It's basically like okay, we're gonna start everybody's gonna start in sixth grade. We're gonna figure out what you're strong at, what you're weak at, and then we're gonna go teach you the things you don't know.
Uh, and we're we're gonna maybe not get you ahead in the things that you do until we've caught up.
In the things that you don't know. Yeah.
So you should think but you don't know we're teaching you at third grade level, so there's like no social stigma to it either.
Yeah. Correct. So you just think about
You know, the back to learning science. There's ten thousand papers written about learning science about how kids can learn better. The zone approximal development. Like give them questions where they're getting them eighty to eighty five percent.
correct. Where if it's like 99, they're not learning because they already know it. If you get down to 50, like they disengage because it's too hard. So you want this crate zone, every video game developer knows this. Keep the kid engaged. And so you what you really want
In a perfect world.
You know, and sort of what is imagine.
And a AI tutor and app, whatever you want to call it, giving your kid an unending stream of questions.
At eighty to eighty five percent accuracy. Right. Where if it gets harder, they're gonna
Tune up, down. And it's gonna be and think of the knowledge graph of everything they need to know. Here's the third grade curriculum.
You can ask AI tutors are good at figuring out what you know and don't know. Yeah. Right. Assessments or tests. Right. And so you can just have the kid take a test and be like, Oh, you don't know this stuff over here. Let's give you these lessons until you know it.
Right. And then you can
Then once you know it, we'll move you on to the next grade.
Same thing at the next grade. And just keep progressing you up. At whatever rate
You go.
Right, and this is the but the here's the part that's just crazy town.
Kids can learn ten times faster.
So if you take like just here's um a metric for you.
Our subjects.
Like take seventh grade science.
In a normal standard school.
You have a hundred and eighty school days.
Yeah. So an hour a day.
Maybe some homework.
Couple hundred hours.
Right.
The average kid
In our system with
Time back, which is our
Yeah.
Yeah.
Learned it in twenty two hours.

To mastery.
to mastery.
Math, science, right?
Between twenty and thirty hours for if you're thinking K through eight, you should think between twenty and thirty hours per grade level per subject.
I mean you can basically be done school in September, like based on the current model. If you were gonna now part of the problem is if you put kids in it six hours a day.
They're gonna disengage and we'll talk about why we designed the two hours.
And how we came up with that.
Um but
The material's just not that much.
And that's why our kids can do 2X, right? Because everybody's like, it's just too much to know. And you're like, it's really not that much. And when you get it, right.
Um, you know, for parents, you know, anybody who's looking, you should go, there's a there's a great math app out there called Math Academy.
The g they wrote a five hundred page book that you can download, Justin who wrote it.
that goes through all the learning science. They also publish how many hours it takes. Their their app, I think starts in fourth grade.
Um, you know, but from f how long fourth grade math, fifth grade math, sixth grade math, right? And
It's I mean it literally is. It's like twenty eight hours and twenty two hours and just not many hours.
To master material at these subject levels. And so that when you talk about the unlock, it's just, you know, when you say, why do kids, and we we
You know, think of your kid.
You know, where
He's bored out of his mind in school.
Yeah.
We waste ninety percent of their time.
Like we know the teacher in front of the classroom is the least effective way to teach.
You know, you can argue whether it's five percent retention.
But literally we're wasting ninety percent of the kids time.
'Cause we're teaching them in a very ineffective manner. Now, back to thing.
We didn't have a better way for the last forty years. You're like you know, if you're had a you're like
You know, school
You gotta have a teacher in front of a classroom'cause I can't give everybody a tutor.
Right. And so there was nothing better. So let's not just tell everybody like you could learn ten times faster, but
Sorry. Now
Now there's no excuse for it.
We can get everybody learning that fast.
And I guess the the hit is like, well, we've always done it this way. So there's an aversion. And then starting something from scratch, you're like, well, I have no sunk costs in the way that teaching should be. So I can experiment with something different and head these results are off the charts and we're crushing everybody else. Look here, we should all be doing this.
So why aren't more public schools reaching into this and going like we should be experimenting with this even in one subject if we don't do it for everything. Maybe math class looks like synthesis or math academy or something like that, where you're using an AI based learning system instead of a teacher. Why don't they do that?
Um
It's really hard to change the system.
Right, which is
The first off.
First off.
Nobody believes.
Right. You so the first thing you do when you look at alpha
Right, and see our results is your like selection effects. It's only rich kids and
That's it.
Um
And so
You you sort of reject it and don't seriously consider it.
Um
But
Even in places that do, there's a lot of high end private schools.
who their largest donors.
Or like
I want my kid to have this two hour learning. Go take a meeting. Right. So I I spend my time like there I definitely do. I've met a lot of boards and heads of school of the
Top schools in this country.
private schools who charge, you know, fifty, seventy five thousand dollars.
And they really struggle.
To sort of believe.
Yeah.
This works because
Fundamentally.
Learning science this concept learning science is
They're not trained in it.
They haven't read the ten thousand papers. They haven't built and seen it. They don't know the world's they don't have a team like we do of seven of the ten best learning scientists in the country working on it.
Right, who have all these unlocks and they definitely don't have the data loop that we have.
Like we know,'cause we measure every single thing how long the kid took to do it and what the scores are and what are the results and you know, that whole closed loop.
And so there's just massive skepticism.
You know, around it.
And they're, you know, it's a classic disruptive problem of I wonder if I'm less skeptical by default because my kids grew up playing Prodigy and I watched how much of an impact that had on their math skills. And actually more importantly, their love of math. Yeah.
Like they
They loved playing that game and you had to answer questions to like cast spells and stuff and
There's a there's a group of people and those are our early adopters, right? Who comes to an alpha
It's gonna be, you know, families like yours, we call them founding families.
You know, because they're like, I th I think I've seen enough. Homeschool families, like if you ask the average homeschool family, they know two hours is all you need. Right. There's actually that's all they've ever done. That's all they've ever done. There's two groups, actually, um, when you talk about who believes the two hours versus not, traditional school just doesn't believe it. They just they just don't believe it.
The people who do home school people absolutely whatever. Their th their view is why why is off so expensive because I do home school.
Absolutely. The other group actually is athletes.
Which is IMG.
Which is our head of high school actually came he used to run academics at IMG because at
For big time athletes like at IMG, you do the academics in the morning, you play sports all afternoon. Yep.
Right, and that's why our sports academy is all is being designed. It's just they know it too.
Yeah.'Cause that's how they catch up, right?'Cause they got all this time already used. And so so there is a s a small set of group of people. There's others, you know, if you
You know, talk there's a couple, you know, real experts of learning science.
You know, Dean Schwartz, who runs Stanford School of Education, he's published a book on learning science. What do we know like about learning that
So so AI customized.
Um, I wanna get into like how you know kids are doing effective behaviors versus ineffective behaviors, but like what do we know about teaching them through AI? Like what makes
Like I'm not just giving you a same math lesson that I would give somebody else, yeah.
Yeah, so it's well
It's
It's important that more important than the AI is the learning science. Like if I had to pick the two, but it's the combination that's really online. But let's let me be clear, let's let's dive into what what I don't mean by AI.
chat bots is I am not talking. Our school does not teach people by giving them chat GPT.
Chat bots are cheap bots.
Ninety percent of kids who are using chat bots.
For academics.
Or cheating.
And not learning.
And you know, in our schools, you know, we do the academics in the morning and then we do all these great life skills in the afternoon.
And
You know, for that world we say if you're using
a chat bot in the morning, you're probably cheating. And if you're not using it in the afternoon for your life skills and all that stuff, you're probably failing. So AI needs to be chat bots have a use.
Just not on the academic side. Now, how we use AI.
In the morning.

What AI the it's the generative AI part.
Not the chat part, it's we generate.
Personalized lessons for every kid.
Right. That's the part. And so imagine if you had an LM and you fed it the following.
You fed it the curriculum you're trying to teach.
Right, you fed it the kids knowledge graph. What do they know and what do they not know?
You also feed at the kids' interest graph.
What do they like? Oh, they like baseball. Cause then right, one of the fastest ways to learn is analogies, right? Back to engagement. If I'm teaching you in something you love and that you're good at, you learn both faster and more engaged. It's sort of a combo effect.
Uh and then there's a fourth one, which is we're adding it. It's it's not in our current one, but it will be in twenty six.
which is cognitive load theory, which is a whole set of learning science of how your brain works. And you should think your brain's like a a chip, a register where you have these working memory slots, you have a certain and everybody has a s different number.
And so you know you have four working memory slots, and then you every person needs a different number of reps.
to take something from short term memory and put it into long term memory. Think of how many times do you have to look at a flash card. Right. An easy way. But each person's different. But you could imagine an LLM that sits on top of all that data.
and generates the perfect next next lesson for you.

Right.
And so that's that's where we use the generative AI, not to have kids do a Socratic, you know, tutoring thing, because they're just
You're instead saying, I'm gonna generate a perfect lesson. And those lessons are all based on learning science. So I'm gonna make sure that they're engaging and not passive, right? It's gonna be a worked example in math because that's actually the best way to teach kids.
you know, I'm gonna be measuring if it's too hard.
If it's you know, and you get it wrong, I'm gonna go back. You know, and I can tell from the other questions.
You know, if even if it's multi choice.
The AI is gonna make them so that if I'm unsure if you really know it, I'm gonna put some questions in there that'll tell me whether you know that prior knowledge or you don't.
Right. All of those things are all baked into what we're generating and creating as a lesson. You know, we can do it
As a video, right, with text and audio overlay, right? Make sure it's short so it's not
you know, passive and discagement. So we can do all that.
As generating those lessons. And that's that's the key to the unlock. And you might be getting that second grade lesson.
Yeah. And I'm getting the first grade lesson. You know,'cause we're in the same class because the AI is just giving us whatever we need. Or maybe you probably need the twelfth grade lesson. I need the I need the first grade lesson. Um but you know, it's it's it's it's generating that. Now the second so that's one element.
And then there's a second element, and this is actually the most expensive part of Array.
And one of our limitations right now is we burn a lot of
AI.
Um
Ten thousand bucks a kid.
Right now.
And we'll get it down to
Less than a thousand and then a hundred we're we're driving it down, but
think of basically streaming
The screen.
to a soda model to a
One of the best ones.
And having
And then we have
Set of things up.
To prompt
The kid.
how to learn. It coaches. It's a coach. So it's like
Look, it
You're skipping those videos.
You keep skipping the videos.
Right.
You're not learning.
As effec as effectively as you could. Yeah. And so literally in the bottom of the corner there's a little waste meter.
Where it tells the kid.
You're wasting time.
And so this is back to the whole product design you have to do. Right. Where
You know, when we our product name is Time Back.
The most the most important part to mo educate a kid is motivating.
Yeah. So just educate a kid, every educator will tell you. You need a motivated student
And you need to put'em in lessons of the correct difficulty.
Now, AI does that second part well. It knows what you know and don't know, and I'll give you second grade or fourth grade. It'll put them in your the right difficulty. But how do you solve motivation?
Yeah.
Right. How do you solve motivation? So on my first week
As principal.
You know, I have to make the kids love school.
And so I went up to the fifth graders.
And they were brand new to school too. I was like
Do you love school?

They're like, no.
And I was like, What would make you love school?
And they're like less school.
I'm like, how much less? They're like none.
I'm like, okay, that's
Right. And we basically negotiated two hours. I was like, look.
If I would you engage in the app, because I need you to engage in the app. If you don't engage and you're spinning your chair, you're not gonna learn.
Would you engage for two hours if I gave you the four hours back to go do awesome stuff?
And they're like, Okay, that seems pretty fair.
And I went to my team, I went, Great, we got two hours. Right. Let's get every learning science paper. Let's read the crap out of
Let's figure out exactly what we need to do so they can learn all the material in two hours.
Right.
And so that's sort of the design of how we got the engine and the waste meter.
So for if you're a student
And when you first come in.
You're sort of screwing around and you're not really engaged.
And so all of a sudden your two hour learning's three hour.
And you're like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, I thought this was two hour learning. And you're like, your waste meter is at fifty percent.
You're wasting fifty percent of your time, dude.
Right.
And then all of a sudden it's like well
Go change these behaviors and you'll get out of here in two hours. So the unlock is
Like at the sports academy, right? It's a little meter.
And they have to
Be in the lessons until it goes green.
Yeah.
And then they get to go play basketball or soccer or whatever. Right. You know what the sport is. And they go do the other. Yeah, and their coach.
The coach was like, Guys, stop screwing around, like, get it done so we can all go play.
Yeah. And their friends are playing it.
And so all of a sudden you have motivation where they want to go do what they want to do. They just have to and it's not hard because we keep'em at eighty to eighty five percent. They just can't screw around.
Stop we just use effective techniques. Every kid, like they scroll.
You know, if they have a lesson they're trying to read.
Yeah. They scroll the bottom, look for some questions, search, you know, they try to skip reading the article.
You're like
look, you gotta actually have to read the article if you want to learn how to read. Yeah you know and and
You know, we also now can generate the articles so they're interested back to engagement interest levels. You can take that second, third grade boy who's like, I hate books.
And then you're like, no, no, no. What's your favorite movie? The Avengers, who are your buddies? And all of a sudden you're doing a choose your own adventure where you and your buddies are saving the world. And that kid will click page by page for an hour. Yeah. And you keep the Lexile level, right, within 10% of his difficulty level. So he's he doesn't get it's not too hard.
You can funnel new vocabulary words to'em, right? All these kind of things where you can
These these AI tutors when you solve the motivation problem.
can fill these kids' head with awesome knowledge, right? And you know, one of our design principles is we we're given twelve years, right? Parents give us twelve years.
To fill their kids head with awesome knowledge, because we we think.
We should make
Kids' heads.
An interesting place to hang out in.
Because they have to hang out there for the rest of their life. Right. Right. And that's we're we've we've reserved as societies, right, this amount of time.
And
It is great to fill it up. And the kids actually are engaged and if it is interesting and applicable.
Right.
They do like it.
And then there's also just a learning science concept.
That the more you know, the faster you learn.
So acceleration curves, like where the average American in a time based system, right? Or it's not even American, global.
Slows down.
Yeah.
Ours accelerate.
Like if you actually took our high school kids, yeah.
Right, and set measure them on how fast they're learning versus two X.
One, because the denominator is going way down because the other kids aren't learning, but also how much our kids learn.
Right. We'd be like we have we'd be at five to ten X, like at high school. Because it's sort of you have this.
effect going, right? And that's why you can see some tweets I did where I have all these kids like seven ninety, seven ninety, seven ninety math, eight hundred math S A T. You know, and it's it's it's all very doable.
And it's just you and I in our world are like, This all sounds like magic and hocus pocus and all that stuff. And that's what
sort of my job now is and why we're getting it out and opening the alphas and getting this everywhere, is we have to educate everybody that this is possible.

Like you know, if if
You know, if I to your
If I was if you have a parent in your audience and there's three things that I could put in their brain
Right, that they don't believe today.
Like with their if they have a kid in school.
I need them to think
A, not B, right? A is
your kid can love school, must love school, like more than vacation, that should be the standard you hold, right?
Сек, я круж.
crush their academics in just two hours a day.
This six hours a day in homework. It's not necessary.
Right.
We have the highest test scores in the freaking country.
Two hours ago.
Right.
If you're gonna go more than that, it's'cause you have to really catch up'cause you're behind.
Right. And whoa, okay, you gotta do three to catch up.
You know, two hours a day.
Crush it.
And then third is
The key to your child's happiness is high standards.
Right. And that is one that, you know, it's a hard one because I I struggle with it as a parent too. I have two daughters, right? And you know
You want to hold high standards, but when they're struggling, it's hard.
Right.
But that high standards is why our kids love school so much. Talk to me more about the high standards part of it. Yeah. So
Generally.
You know.
If you're trying to build a school
Around
That they love.
There's this view of Oh, just let'em play all day.
Right.
But that's actually not gonna make them wanna come during the summer.
Right, they have to be working on things that are ambitious, right, and significant.
to be able to do that. If they're just scrolling TikTok or playing Fortnite, they're not gonna come.
They can do that at home. Right. Kids wanna do awesome stuff. They do.
Right? Kids are awesome and they want to do awesome stuff. And we need to give them an environment. And we start in kindergarten. Like our kindergartners, like here the you know, the thing that freaks everybody out.
Right. And we do this like on a shadow day'cause we have we're like, come test it, right? No one's gonna just
Drop their kid in this weird thing.
Come test it. And so we do a shadow day and one of the things we do is like we have a forty foot rock wall.
for kindergartners and
Parents are like Oh my kid is not.
Right, that seems scary. I'm kindergarten. It's all safe. It's I mean they're all right in harnessed in harnessed in and stuff. But and you know, we teach the kids growth mindset, right? And they can and then you mic'em up, you know, they're climbing up.
And they're like halfway out and they start to struggle. And you can see the parents, but our guides
Right, our guides and coaches who this is what they do all day, right? Our guides and coaches.
Their whole job when you say what's the different role of the teacher, because we don't sit in front of the classroom.
Think of a mentor who's going to guide and coach you.
And their job is to hold high standards, but give you high support.
Right, to help coach you through it just like a great coach. And then they'll see the kid get to the top. And when they that kid gets down, they're beaming.
They're beaming because they accomplished something hard.
Yeah. Right. And every child development expert in the world will say
The struggle the the the cycle of
You need to struggle and fail.
I add in as a principal, sometimes cry on your road to success, supported by a caring adult. That loop is what child development is.
Right. And it builds self confidence. It builds resilience. Right. It's what why people fifty percent of America puts their kids in after school sports because everybody expects that cycle to be run in sports.
But in schools it's just not run.
Right.
Every kid needs this, right? It's shouldn't just be in sports. We should just they wanna go to do hard things. And so like we start in kindergarten, but we'll talk middle school is like when we talk about middle school.
You know, we have a middle school epidemic of
Scrollers.
Cons we call consumers.
Right.
been caught in the dopamine TikTok or the Fortnite playing right loops.
And they're just not engaged.
Right. And so when you come when you move into an alpha middle school, we run a program, right, which is
Well what what what what are you interested in, right? How are we gonna engage or how we can get you out of that?
And
You know, as a society we create a world where all those kids sort of get stuck in it.
So we do a values chart.
A Japanese Ica guy.
Right. Think of a vision board, you know, fifth or sixth grade where you're just like, who do you want to be? And if you ask all these kids, they want to do awesome stuff. Yeah. They want to do awesome stuff and they diagram it out, right? And it's just like, I wanna be this. And it's awesome.
Right, and then you say, Okay, we make him do a hundred and sixty eight hour project.
Track every hour your week.
And then they're

And then because you are what you do. Yeah. You are what you do. And so literally they then come in and like, Oh, I guess I'm going to be the world's best TikTok scroller.
And they're just so disappointed'cause they realize this is who they want to be, but this is what they're doing. This is how I'm spending my time. And I'm just like
That's our job as a school, right? Our guys and coaches. This is what because you're not spending all your day in academics, we have afternoon workshops where they're able to go figure out their passion project where they can get out of it.
You know and
I I why the world has to change and why everybody wants to change education is because we have too many people. There was a kid who came in
And he was talking to our high school because he went through our program, but he was talking to the the next set.
And he's just like, you know.
If you had
told me like when I first started.
You know, the the whole program.
And said, I'll pay you a hundred dollars an hour for the rest of your life to play video games and just till you're dead.
And like literally just like plug into the matrix. He's like, I would have sold my soul for that.
And he's like and then I went through the program.
And he's like, now I don't even have time to play video games.
Right. And he's like'cause he's engaged on stuff of who he wants to go be, right? And that's what's happening to a lot of our kids, right? In society. And then you totally can break them out.
Right, but that's what we have to do as a school and back to high standards. The kids want to do it'cause it's hard. That guy kids never worked harder.
Right, on that project that he's doing that's transformed him to pull him out of the video game, you know, loop.
And the kids wanna do it. We have you know our second graders.
You know, our our afternoons are all these great project based workshops that teach life skills, right? And our life skills are leadership and teamwork.
Storytelling and public speaking.
Grit and hard work.
Entrepreneurship and financial literacy and socialization and relationship building. So there's five categories of those.
And
You know, are
Our second
Uh
uh second grade teacher.
Right, Faith, this was a year ago. She's like
All my second graders can run a five K.
And I was like
Oh I don't that
She's like kids are limitless.
I'm like all'cause parents, right, back to the standards, you don't want to see your kid fail.
Parents naturally, it's right protective. You don't want to see them struggle and fail. I'm like, Oh, the parents are gonna really not like this. She's like, Don't worry.
And I'm like, how you gonna get me around five K, first of all. She's like, we're gonna teach atomic habits.
And you know, most of us as adults read it what, twenty five or whatever, you know, after college.
But she's like second graders understand one percent better.
Yeah. Every day they do.
And so she gets all the kids, you know, we teach growth mindset, right? And so she's like, How many of you think it's impossible? And all the kids are like, Oh, it's impossible. You know, can't do it. And she's like, Well, I signed you up for the jingle 5K at Christmas. This is in August.
Signed you guys all up. We gotta go run it.
And she brings them out to the track and they're all this is impossible. And she walks the track the first day with them all. And every single one finishes. And she's like, Okay, so we've all established we're all gonna finish the race, right?
And then she comes out the next time and they run a quarter of the lap.
Walk the rest.
And half a lap, walk the rest every time. And by December, they're all running thirty five minute
Five K's. And when they crossed the finish line, you know, at the Jingle Five K to their parents, they're just like, Oh look. They're like, Dad, I can do anything.
Yeah.
'Cause I can just one percent better every day. I can do fifty push ups. I'll do one today, two tomorrow, right? And they just learn these life skills that we don't learn till late because school doesn't teach'em, but when you have all day.
When you're not sitting in class, you can teach these things, and you teach it via hard things that the kids love.
Right, that they're engaged in doing things that they think are impossible and learning how to do these.
Spook.
It sounds like
Guides and teachers are very different. What makes for a good guide? Yeah. So teach you know, when I think of a spec.
You know, we have there's a huge teacher problem.
Right? Teachers are burned out. They can't hire enough. You know, it's just it's
It's tough.
Right.
Um
You know, and it just once again me coming from the outside, right? General HR.
You know, HR one oh one if I'm a business person.
You know, okay, you can't hire a spec, you know, what's the problem?
Either the spec's too hard, you're not paying enough, whatever, you're targeting the wrong one.
So there's five things really if you're gonna be a teacher in a standard school, right? Standard teacher in front of a classroom model to do well.
First, you have to be a domain expert in seventh grade science.
Second, you actually have to be good at teaching.
Like what are the effective teaching? We all know researchers who know a lot, but they're really bad teachers. Right. Third, you have to connect and motivate with kids.
Fourth, you have to deal with parents. And then fifth, in a lot of our schools, you have a lot of administration and you know.
Uh.
school systems.
And those are five hard things to be good at.
Right. And so when you have a hard spec.
Then we go and say, okay, let's underpay them.
And you're like, and it's a surprise that no one applies for the jobs, right? And that's why there's huge to fall and all the stuff.
And so in our world, I'm like, okay, well, how would I fix that, right? We're re envisioning school. So which how do we re envision the role of a teacher?
Well
We take
You know, we've what do teachers really want to do?
Right. And if you
Go talk to teachers.
Teachers did not become teachers to grade seventh grade science quizzes. They became teachers to tr connect and transform kids' lives. And we all had one or two teachers who did that for us. And they and it wasn't because she marked your paper up well. It was because she connected with you and got you to go see a bigger picture.
Right, and just inspired you to great.
And pushed you.
Right.
And that is what great teachers do, and that's what they wanna do.
So we just narrowed the scope where we're like, nope, you don't
You don't need to know seventh grade science because
AI does that. You don't have to know the ten thousand pa papers that are written on learning science of how to teach kids well and all that.
AI tutor, ba learning science based, it'll do that.
Connect and motivate kids. Okay, you need to be the world's best. Are you the best at connecting and motivating kids? Can you hold high standards and high support?
Right. And if you're great on that.
We want to hire you.
And then the
Parent side, we actually have a dean of parents. So we designed the school where they don't have to do that.
Because I when I first got in, the guy who was going through the the teachers is like this
This teacher's great with kids but not good with the parents, so don't promote.
This person's not as good with the kids, but they're great with parents, so they should be promoted.
And I was like, Okay, no.
I'm gonna we're gonna build a school.
where the kid they're great with kids and we'll find a way to deal with the parents, right? Because they're different skills. Yeah. Um and then and the more important skill is the kids. No, all you care about is I mean I'm parents obviously wish they were good about it, but you really care that these kids connect.
Right, that these guides connect with your kids. And we call'em guides and coaches because they're not doing academic teaching.
Right.
So what's their background? Is it like coaching and sports or it's a set of a one, they're the best we get the top one percent of teachers.
Who wanna move over and
You know, come on over. So we get those and we're just like, You're not gonna be teaching.
And you know, that's always the biggest surprise of like this is what I want to do all day. During those two hours.
You know, since you're not in front of class, they're pulling the kids out one on one, you know, conversations look like so those conversations are gonna be like, you know, uh back to connecting, hey, how was your weekend? How was the softball tournament, did you win, did you not win?
You know, we've been working on this goal setting about your, you know, vision.
You don't seem to be engaging in it. Is do you really not like it? Is it too hard? You know, they connect with the kids.
And then
sit there and help them understand, you know.
Uh, what are you trying to do? How am I helping you hit your goals?
Just what you would call coaching.
It's absolute coaching. So how much of the kid's success then would you describe to I don't want to disappoint this person who's now paying attention to me. Versus like if you go into a a classroom of thirty kids, it's like I can get away with almost anything. Yeah. You know, I can like sort of like check in a little bit
But now this person knows my name, they know what I'm doing on the weekend, they I'm gonna get questions on this. Yeah. No, there's I mean our guides.
have great relationships with the kids. I mean, if you really want to get into it, like at high school, when we we ask quite we measure everything, because if we're gonna scale, I need the metrics to make sure the quality stays high.
You know, so in in middle and high school.
We actually asked the parents.
Do you trust your alpha guy?
So much.
To hold high standards.
So you as the parent can provide.
can only have to provide the unconditional love and support.
Right,'cause you wanna hold high standards, but you also want to provide support. And as kids get to adolescence, it gets hard for a parent to be both.
when you're holding high standards, they rebel against you. Right. Yeah. And I'll just take myself as a personal example. So my oldest daughter, you know, she's
Putting her
Stanford application in.
And I'm like, can I read it?
And she's like, No.
Right. She does not want to be judged by parents. Par kids adolescents do not want parents judging on them.
And
I was like, okay, and I just gave her a hug. I'm like, good luck.
Because I knew
Chloe.
Her guide.
was gonna hold high standards and you know, Chloe back to we get really the best in the world, right? She's a Harvard grad and I I know she knows the standard, you know, to get in and
Kate, my daughter.
Has a great
Such a relationship with Chloe, she trusts her.
Yeah. And she trusts her to get her in. Right. And you know, even now she's in college and when she comes back to to Austin, she goes to lunch with Chloe still. Right. So she has you build these great relationships with with them. And it's you know, the
Everybody when they think of AI Tutor, they think of robot terminators and all that. And the answer is
You know, in twenty years.
you know, predict the future, what's gonna be the same in twenty years. Parents are gonna drop their kids off at a building.
In the building are gonna be other kids.
And adults.
Right. There's we're not the you're not
Getting rid of school. School is gonna be there. Now it's gonna be do our job as we what happens in those six or seven hours is totally different. And the roles are different and it's ten times more awesome. But you're gonna drop your kid off at school because you want him around other kids. And you need kids don't grow up on their own.
They need caring adults who are going to mentor and coach them.
Right, and help
You know.
uh build hold high standards. And so that whole loop is is going to continue. And when we talk about building schools, that's gonna be the future. It's just right now the whole day is six hours in class.
Right, in the st where we waste ninety percent of the kids' time and we're like, Okay, let's just stop that.
Let's just stop that.
Right.
And so that's what back to our thing of how we designed school. The first part was
You know, they must love it. The second part was they need to learn ten times faster. They can't sit in class all day.
Right. And so that's this engine we built that teaches kids ten times faster. That's the time back. That's time back, our time back engine. That's ten and today it's an alpha, you know, in twenty twenty six, everybody in the world's gonna be able to access it. And so everybody who wants to build a school based on time back is gonna be able to next year. Um
You're that development team.
The whole thing is the world's way. My kids are waiting. Everybody's waiting for that. So that's the second part, the time back, right? The engine where they learn ten times faster. The third is
There's a set of life skills that we think really matter to kids that aren't just pure academics.
And we went through them, but you do care about leadership and teamwork and entrepreneurship and financial socialization and relationship building. Those skills, socialization and relationship building, right? They matter so much. And we don't teach kids. Now you experience socialization in school.
Some good, some bad, right?
If you're at Westlake High School and you're the quarterback and the homecoming queen, it's really great.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. You mean girl high school, right? Cafeteria. There's tons of movies made about it. Right. But you can teach kids skills, right? You can teach them all these relationships. You can teach the life skills. Are you doing anything different there than we would think? You would you would think these great project based workshops in the afternoon to teach these skills. So
We're like, okay, how do we teach one percent better? How do we teach atomic cabbage? Like, okay, let's have them run a you know 5K. Uh you know, we teach financial literacy. It really is like our fifth and sixth graders launching food trucks, running Airbnbs.
Right. And so you can teach them when you have all afternoon, you have all this time to teach them. Now the biggest thing we do versus probably most others.
Is we try to quantify everything.
A lot of life skills are very soft.
Right. And that I I can't run a scalable system if everything's
Hey.
you know, maybe it works. So like we talk grit.
Everybody wants their kid to r you know have grit, right?
You can't read like Angela Duckwork's book and
Okay, great.
Right? That doesn't mean anything.
So every third grader in our school can do a Rubik's Cube.
Every kindergartener can do a hundred piece puzzle.
And so we write every eighth grader?
has passed a teamwork
grit test, which is they all run a tough mutter.
Oh wow. Yeah, yeah.
Tough mutter and pass cross the finish line at the same time.
Oh and and you know, and back to bonding and hard things. You know, and parents back to
They're like, you know, and especially at a high end private school, some of these moms are like, My daughter's not rolling in the mud. That's never happening, right? And then at the end of the race, they're all covered in mud and you know, there's they have all the pictures of they all, you know, bonded as a team.
To go through this really hard challenge.
Um, and so you're teaching so we have metrics where and we try to make them quantifiable. All our fifth graders, fourth and fifth graders.
can pass Wharton's um
uh leadership and teamwork simulation challenge that war and MBAs take.
Amazing. Right. And so we have all these, you know, quantifiable metrics across those skills, right? Entrepreneurship, can you make a thousand dollars? Can you go raise ten thousand dollars, you know, all those kind of things. Um, you know, character building.
Which is character building's always the hardest one because it's really hard to measure. But it's w the only thing parents care about. It's my kid a good kid, right? But like
Our example we just we have examples, which is our we have middle and high schoolers who are building an app
uh where they're trying to convince a hundred million teenagers the key to their happiness is contributing to their community.
Mm.
Right. And just that whole concept of how contributing to community is a great character building exercise. They all have been experiencing. They're like, Oh, we can build this into an app and get this out to everybody. Yeah. So you have people learning how to vibe code with cursor, right? In their afternoons, or those are those are the kind of app
Right. And they're working with some of the biggest influencers on the planet to to do this. Right. Where they're like, Okay, I'm I wanna come in this weekend or I right, I don't want to go on summer break because I'm working on something hard and significant.
The the heart thing is really interesting.
When my kids went back to school after covet
I switched schools and I put them in a different language.
They didn't speak it. They went to a French school.
And they had so for grade seven they started and they didn't speak very much French at all.
And if I had to sum up the difference of that school from the one they were in previously.
It would be high standards. Yeah.
And it was they were consistently on the kids and they would be like, No, you should be getting a hundred. I'm gonna teach you how to get a hundred.
Uh and it was, you know, small classes, but it was
a very strict old school French school
Uh and I did that'cause I wanted my kids to wake up.
Like they were sort of like sleepwalking through school a bit and
I was like, oh, well, you're gonna go learn a different language. And for three months, my oldest kid came home and he was crying like almost every night.
This is so hard.
Like, I got the word right. I'm like, but you missed the accent. And he's like, Yeah, well, they give me a zero. They should at least give me like three quarters of a point.
And I'm like, Well, you have a choice, right? Like you they're telling you what the standard is. You can choose to live up to that.
And push yourself or you can choose to fight it for the next two years.
And which of those
Do you think is gonna result in a better
Okay. Anyway, but the end of December
So they have exams. So they test the kids like crazy. Right. So these kids have never taken a test before. And by the time they're done these two years, they've done over two hundred.
Uh so they just like there's no stigma around testing or anything. By the end of December, he's going into exams, he's like
Oh, I love this school. Like this school's amazing. I know exactly what's expected of me.
And I know exactly how to accomplish what's expected of me. Exactly.
So I love that story. That is now
If every parent thought like you.
We would have a different school system today.
We would not have the s academic results.
At our schools. One of the things I've learned as principals is your mindset that you just described is very rare.
That parents in general
want low standards at their school. And part of why schools, even private schools, right, react. Why does Harvard have grade inflation?
Harvard.
Right.
And it's because there is pressure.
From parents and students.
to lower standards.
Yeah. And that it is hard to keep high stakeholders. That's the participation award that, you know, everybody seems into these days. And the problem with that is it doesn't, you know, when I
Where it really starts to manifest is in middle and high school, where you're like, these kids are disengaged. They are addicted to TikTok and
Fortnite and they have mental health problems and all these issues that are are occurring. And the they're the outcome of low standards, not high standards. People think it's no, it's too hard. If kids don't engage, if humans don't engage in challenging things, right that they love that they can go do and accomplish, right?
They do lose meaning.
There is no meaning in a tick tock loop, and eventually it catches up with you.
You just you can't eat sugar all day.
Right. It just eventually it's gonna catch up with you. And instead, right, we need schools where we show kids.
It can be so fun. Like, you know, if you took out our core our first one.
Kids must love school more than vacation.
Parents would not send their kids to the school because they'd be terrified of the high standards.
And it's only because their kids come home every day and they're like, the greatest thing ever. I I don't like you know, they do. They're like
Parents are just like my kid.
Used to never
Like, you know, these middle school sports kids. They're like they used to skip school all the time, never on time, all these things. All absenteeism is a huge thing. They're like they wake me up and they're like, We better not be late.
Yeah.
Alpha kids are like
Is it Monday yet? Yeah. Why is why do we have to go school on week? Why don't we go to school on Saturdays?
That's incredible. And that's and that is one. There was there was one where th those stories are just
They they do love doing hard things. Totally. And you know hard things. And they can do hard things. They love it. They have to be supported by an adult. So you have to have a guide who's awesome. You can't, if you just throw them in the deep end, that's not gonna work, right? But get a guide who's gonna bond with them, right? And we spend enough money, right? We pay teachers, right?
Just let's shrink, let's refocus their role around what they want to do anyway. Transform kids' lives, right? Let's get them all focused on transforming kids' lives, where they're supporting them, high standards.
Right. Exactly the one or two that we knew.
Right, that transformed to ours and just get that going in all the schools. But to do that, you know, back to it's it's a tough one. Now that's why we have to go build we're gonna go build 10,000 schools, right? Or yeah, I'm in the talk about scaling in a second.
Uh I should
I do want to come back to my son for a second. So when he was coming home crying, I was also very supportive. I'm like, you can do hard things. I don't want to be reported to child services or anything like that. From people listening, you know, this is me and my life, no judgment about how you raise your kids. Um
Uh the video monitoring thing sounds super interesting. I want to come back to this for a second. As a parent, I'm like, this is amazing. You're teaching my kids effective behaviors, ineffective behaviors.
As an employee, I'm like, Oh, wait, what? Yeah.
Talk to me about that. So let's talk about the monitoring. Which is it's actually really interesting, which is um
Uh I just went through this with uh some of our middle schoolers, which is
Kids.
Like the modern.
And the coaching.
'Cause I want to get better.
Sort of parents.
Parents don't like AI mod.
They're terrified of it.
Oh this boogeyman of
AI monitoring. Kids, they're like, I want a human to do that, not an AI.
The kids are like, I don't want a human to look at me ever.
Because I'm judged by adults. Kids kids don't want to be judged by adults. They're like
Let me talk to the AI.
Yeah. Like if you tell like we have an an app
That grade your public speaking?
And you're like, do you want to practice with the human to give you the feedback?
Or do you want to practice with Ori, this app?
you know, till you get to ninety percent. And it it does you know, filler words and you know, pacing and
All that.
And they're like, give me the or I.
Yeah, my kids would 100% change. They because they all want the AI because it's not judgmental to them. They don't feel all that pressure. Parents are the opposite.
And so it's this very dynamic where I'm like, guys, I the kids want this. And I know you don't like it, but you got to get over it because your kid wants it. And it's
Let's do what they want. And so the kids love the AI tutoring, right? They love the feedback. They love the monitoring. Okay, I'm wasting time, how to do better.
Right. And now the second part is if you don't have a motivation
on the coaching.
Like on why they should do it.
Like I'cause I tell like sch other sch school districts are like great, I'm gonna go put this in my class.
Let me give me this time back stuff thing.
And get magic.
I'm like if you put this in a standard school day of six hours, it's not gonna work.
Like ed tech generally has failed.
And it's generally failed because the kids aren't motivated to engage with it.
If you don't give them their time back.
They're not going to engage. And that's why it might be part of the problem with like normal schools adopting it. You know, you're the principal of a school, head of school, and you're like, what am I supposed to do? Like two hours a day, and they're not really teaching. And what do they do the rest of the day? It's a whole re it's a it's a rebuild. Sounds like a lot of work. It's a lot of work.
It's, you know, and there's not enough proof yet. And you have a bunch of parents who are like, I don't want screen time anyway. And so you have all these good excuses to to slow it down. Now
T
If you look at Alpha's like we're the most talked about school in the world, right? It's just give us one more year.
Right. Give us one more year and everybody's just gonna be like, okay, we we need to do this stuff, right? And so we're we're that's part of our job, and that's part of why I I I'm out there is just educating parents, right? Our schools educate kids, our marketing department, we have to educate parents that this is all
all doable. Um
But
Uh but that's that's when you look at the sort of this whole loop is
You know, it's it it's hard to put it in a normal school.
right now,'cause you do have to do a rebuild. They need more proof and data.
But why don't they babysit we were talking about this a little bit before we started recording. Like why don't they just say, Oh, we're gonna do math tutoring.
Uh we're just gonna do that. So math class now is gonna be an AI tutor.
Whether uh you know, whatever product that is.
And then we're gonna see how that goes. We don't have to switch the whole curriculum. We're just gonna take the thirty minutes or forty minutes we've assigned a math class. Yeah. So there's there's a few few different reasons on that. Just pr
Tactical, practical reasons.
First is they've been lying to their parents. So I and I I don't know public schools much, but let's talk about high end private schools, right? I know the high end private school market.
The high end private schools are all lying to their parents by giving kids A's when they don't deserve it.
So like we pulled in.
You know, so we had hundreds of kids joined, you know, whatever a couple months ago.
across the country.
Right. And these are people coming from forty, fifty thousand, seventy five thousand dollar private schools.
And we give them our assessment test.
Right.
And if you had an A, if your transcript was an A coming into alpha.
You are from there's some students who are one grade level ahead.
Super awesome.
All the way and more many more of them were three years behind.
Oh what three years behind. So this is seventh graders who when we give them the fourth grade test are missing a significant number of problems.
If you got bz
You are from three years behind to seven years behind.
So these are high schoolers.
who are like, okay, I need to have you in third grade.
There's third grade material you're missing.
And that that's a beak.
And so the problem is parents in our world A's and Bs, like A's are good.
Bs okay, do better next time.
But
They don't give out Cs, D's and Fs anymore. So A's and B's have to cover the whole range.
And so parents basically are being lied to because they're using their old
Point of reference, eighty percent of kids at out at Harvard get A's. Just they've had such great inflation.
that the school is like, Oh my God, I can't do the AI tutor because I'm gonna show the kid needs fourth grade material.
And the parent doesn't know that.
And as soon as they
put it in, it's gonna be obvious. The assessment's gonna show them.
Right. That's actually what causes lots of people to move to Alpha.
Yeah. Just give them the assessment. Like what's going on?
Like if you go to our website, we have testimonials of people, you know, we open San Francisco.
Right. And this guy's like, I've had my kid in a fifty thousand dollar school for eight years. And he couldn't answer some fourth and fifth grade questions.
It's not the kids' fault.
Right. And the parent didn't know because the school's giving A is this good brand?
Good brand. Thought I knew it. Everything's working. Everything's fine. Yeah. And so you have that. That's number one.
Let's get over that one. Now let's get to the second one.
They're
In this I fought.
Like this was that hundred for a hundred we were talking about.
I went my first year to the seventh graders and I'm like, guys.
You have holes.
I gotta get you to do earlier work. You got in some fourth and fifth grade holes. You gotta go fix it.
And let me tell you about motivating a kid and making him love school. When you tell seventh grader they have fourth and fifth grade material.
Non starter. Non starter. There's only one person who hates it worse.
Their parents.
Oh my god.
I was yelled at so many times by parents. My kid must be at grade level. Why are you putting him in earlier stuff?
Every parent's been trained, my kid must work at grade level.
Which is just the learning that is not
Right. They just don't know learning science. That is not what the learning science says, right? You gotta go back and fill
Right. Mastery the basics. Master the basics. But the parents hate it. That's why eventually I still to this day don't know how to fix the parents. Like so I sort of went around them. And that's when we came up with a hundred for a hundred. I'm like, guys, I got to get you to do it.
Honey that's and then how we came up that's how it came out. I'm like third grade, they did it, fourth grade, and then and then they moved up.
Right. And that does it also has this other real thing about academic performance. The the self confidence it does.
All these kids are like okay, I can get any I can get a hundred on any standardized test back like your son. The same thing where once you show'em how to do it, you give them the ability, they're like, Oh, I can get a hundred. Like so we always we have a thing now where
We'll advance you at ninety percent to the next grade level.
So when you score ninety percent on a standardized test.
You know, your state standardized tests that shows you you have mastery.
We'll let you go to
The great above it.
But you get a hundred for a hundred.
If you get a hundred. And so all the kids are like, Okay, that's a couple extra. And you're like, Oh my God, a couple an hour or two, and I'll get the extra questions. Cause even if you miss them, you can go back and learn them and then and and retake.
And so, but it just sets that mindset of every kid's like, Of course I could get a hundred. The reason we get so many seven ninety's and eight hundreds on the SAT is all our kids are like I of course I could get a perfect score on the SAT. I just it's just how many hours is it? It's an hour question, not a capability, which is that unlock we did about IQ.
I most people think it's IQ and I'm like, it's effort.
It's effort, not IQ.
Well, this is the the fundamental thing, right? Because a lot of people just look at that and they're like, Some kids are smarter than others and I think we you
I think
My hypothesis is that we could get ninety percent of kids, if not more.
to effectively perfect SAT scores. Totally. There's a little SAT has a little bit of IQ coding at any time test.
has a little bit of IQ coding, but yes, fundamentally you should think 1350, which is top 10%.
No problem.
Fifteen fifty.
Which is your top one percent.
It gets
It it gets a little dicey on h you know what to ninety percent then. For ninety percent for sure.
Like just off the charts. And we're right, we measure all this. We're like, Well, how many can we get to fifteen fifty plus, right? If you're on our honor, our high school program, not honors is thirteen fifty minimum. Okay. Honors is fifteen fifty.
And the difference is it's three hours a day to do honors, which is fifteen fifty plus fives on your APs, thirteen fifty and a four or five on your AP.
That only takes two hours. So it's just if it and to kids, it's an effort issue. You want two hours, you want three hours.
Just
Okay.
It's extra time, that's it.
Um
And so uh but anyway, but that whole thing, you you change their mindset. But back to this
this why a n standard school can't do it.
The k how do you have the parents screaming at you if you try to put your kid
To do
you know, the the hole filling, as we call it, right, to go backward and do fourth grade. They're like, I want the teacher to teach my kid seventh grade.
'Cause that's you know, and it's just so you have that problem the schools are just like I want the outcome. I want my kid to be educated, right? Right. And well and the problem is a lot of parents are like, My kids get just give me the A. You get the E g it's an A, right? And then what happens is then when they take their P S A T or S A T.
It's not as high as they want it. Yeah. But then it's like the school's like, Well, too late.
Oh.
And then some parents hire to you know massively expensive after school tutoring.
Right. I mean the after school tutoring work's like fift billion dollars. It's insane.
Insanely huge because schools, parents, even at high end private schools.
Like the percent of kids at a high end private school who also have a tutor
Right. When I look I was like, this is insane. Aren't you sending your kid to the school to like learn? Yeah, why do they have why do they have tutors? Why is there a huge after school tutor market? I'm like, we commit that your kid'll learn during the day. They don't need that time. You don't have to hire a tutor. That's insane.
I was asking my kids last night what questions I should ask you, and they came up with two. So one one asked how do you teach physics to high schoolers? Mm-hmm.
And what program you use.
And let's tackle that one then we'll talk about it. Great. So there's a great so Math Academy is the best math app out there for twelve.
There's a um a a new one called Physics Graph, who they
They're online and uh they are the physics version of math academy.
Okay. Um and so I would go get it. I don't know, um I think, you know, f back to A P
I'm trying to remember exactly their product. There's like physics
Uh I was A B C one Two Three, whatever it is on the A P test. The first one is based on algebra.
And then the third one is based on calculus. Okay.
And so I don't know if they've released the calculus one yet, but on the algebra of the other
You just use physics graph.
Awesome. Physics graph is is is the way to
to go. I know a couple other products that are about to be released next year.
Um, but if you're in it right now, if you're if that's the one great, then I would do that.
And then the other question was, what happens after? You've had a couple of years now of students graduate. They go to university or grow out in the real world or whatever it is they're doing, college.
Um what happens? Because now they they go from the structured environment.
High coaching, high standards.
A lot of hands on to
Good luck. Yeah.
So um
Well, one of the things, even though we have high support.

All our kids are self driven learners, right? They have to during the two hours learn how to be able to learn on their own.
Right. And so that's one of our tests of are you a self-driven learner? Our eighth graders all know how to get a five on an AP on their self. Like every eighth grader actually knows everything I want to learn is on YouTube.
Right. Everything. Yeah.
And so you're just like, Okay, pick some random AP that you're interested in.
You know, not one of the core hard ones, but just pick one, right? And
Uh
Go learn it.
And
Go figure out.
And there's all the resources available and then you know, so that's our that's how we
show okay you're a self driven learner you can learn anything for the rest of your life.
you know, without somebody spoon feeding you you know, the material. But at the college level, so we had um
Let's see, here's one where uh
Where do people go? So our first class was we had twelve graduates, um, eleven of them went to college.
Uh, the twelfth is one of the world's best water skiers. Uh, and so he's building his media empire wildly water skis. It was like, I'm not going to college. The other ones all got into their first choice colleges. We get into you know, Stanford or Vanderbilt or NYU Shanghai or'cause our academic scores are just through the roof. Then
We also have these Cri Killer Alpha X projects in the afternoon where kids have four years to work on a passion project. We didn't even get into this. And so they look just
They look like a completely different character.
Right. Than the average college grad. So they stand out. There's contrast. Huge contrast.
And and super impressive.
Right.
I mean
This one I
She'll probably kill me'cause I'm not.

You know, we may have
No high school
um student has ever been the lead researcher on something published in Nature.
And we have an alpha kid who's submitted it hasn't been accepted yet.
Um and so that's why she doesn't want to mention it, yeah, in case it does it. But
Literally.
Right, that's usually
I mm if if she was a Ph D
That would consider be considered like one of the most impressive things of her career. And she's literally seventeen years old in high school. And it's because they're allowed they have four years to work on awesome things and do just amazing things. Um and so uh
Anyway, so in college I now it's not two hour learning. No, it's college. No, here's what they do. No, so they do. So we went, so um I I met with them at Christmas after they all the eleven who went.
And uh it was six or seven of'em. And I was like, Okay, guys, how we doing?
Everybody had a four oh.
Um, they were crushing it. They loved college, the whole social environment and stuff, and you know, summer in sororities, and you know, they're doing all the different things and they loved it.
And I was like, well, what's the worst part? They're like, okay, those lectures are a total waste of time. They are a complete waste of time. Literally, I sit in there and they're just terrible. Four of them had written editorials to their school papers about can we stop the charade that are these lectures? Literally, there's 200 people in a class.
None of them are paying attention. They're all on their computer like scrolling TikTok or just doing other stuff. Right. The teacher's terrible.
is not a good teacher.
Right. And this is just a waste of time. And I'm they all learn, you know. So like back to
My my daughter is a a math English major.
You know, and she's like
I just use math academy.
She's like she's you know, she I used to
skip classes when I was I didn't like school. I was not like my older daughter.
And she always had disdain for me, where she's like, You should go to class, Dad.
And
Now that once she finally went.
She's like, Okay, I get it.
I get why you skive class,'cause it's totally a waste time.
And so I believe in college, you know, Harvard published a paper that their best teaching class is their physics one on one.
class, one of their best you know.
Teachers.
And they did an A B test with AI tutors versus them.
And they publish that Harvard you know, there's great paper. Harvard says AI tutors better than Harvard teachers.
And you know, they learn twice as much using the AI tutor as going to class.
And so it just it's it's just facts, right? And so hundred series classes in university are gonna go away.
Like as soon as everybody figures out the saying teacher stuff, they're just gonna go away. Now, small group seminars, they love it, right? You know, small group writing seminar that's super awesome, like when in her writing classes and stuff. So it's it's not like universities are gonna go away because some kids still need time to grow up.
Right, and they need socialization and all those other things, but the big lecture classes
Those are gone.
Those are a waste of time.
What were you like as a student?
The world's worst student.
Tell me more about that.
I was um
You know, uh academically, uh
You know, people would definitely say, I can't believe Joe's doing education if you knew me in and uh
Stanford.
I dropped out.
Um
You know it
This is you know, back to the
Every kid has a passion for learning.
It's just not always academics.
Mm-hmm. And that was me.
Right.
I didn't care.
I hate school. And I'm just like
I don't care about these classes.
Right. And
You know
When I
Drop down.
You know, when I started my company.
I went from I used to do the minimum out.
I mean I literally like
In my high school.
the way our grading system worked is you you got four points for an A.
But there's no A minus, no A plus, no nothing. Just
Right.
And an eighty nine point five rounds to a ninety, which was an A.
And I literally would do the minimum work to get an eighty nine point five, like not an eighty nine point six.
I remember one time I didn't turn in I I didn't answer all the questions on a test.
'Cause I knew I didn't need to finish the test to get the eighty nine point five in the grade. And my teachers look just like what right? I was just a nightmare.
Because I just whatever the minimum was.
And you know, my parents weren't really excited about now, it was a minimum bar of okay, I'm still gonna get in Stanford'cause I want to go there.
But I want to go there'cause I want to start a company.
Right. I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
And so I go and then I'm in class at Stanford. I'm like in some Spanish class.
And so anyway, I drop out.
So I there's nobody who thinks I was a good student, including I wasn't a good student, but there wasn't like oh I was like nobody. Everybody's just misunderstood. Right. No, I was definitely not a good student. And then I drop out.
And then I started working a hundred plus hours, sleeping under the desk. Right super passionate.
Because you're motivated.
I got I loved it.
I'd found right my spark. I found what I loved.
And I'd never worked harder in my life. Like it was insane. And my dad, who you know, there's this a
Was not happy that I dropped out.
Right.
But eighteen months later
When we were
Talking.
God, I'm so glad you tried.
He's like, you know, and
He's like, you know, I was so worried that you were a lazy little shit.
Your whole academic career you were just a shirker.
You just you never engage in anything. And you know, as a parent, like you don't want your kid to be just a you know a slacker. You want and he's like and you found it.
You found what you love and you're working your ass off on it. And it's just great.
Right. And our my view of that is that
concept. What I found after dropping out of college, we want to get that into kids in middle and high school. Like what do they love? Like as they hit an adolescence, who do they want to be? What do they love? And let's get them started on that.
Mm.
Right. Now there's some minimum academics you have to do, right? You want to start a business plan, you gotta know some math. You wanna write good proposals, right? You have to be able to write. So it's not like you can it skip all the academic side, but
You do it.
motivated by stuff that you love.
Right.
Um, and back to if we want to get kids, we're competing with TikTok and Fortnite.
But kids' vision of who they wanna be is awesome.
So let's go get
Right, associate with what they wanna be there.
Right. And that's what's gonna drive and motivate'em to
You know, learn all the skills they need.
Um
If you you know, if you look at our kids doing these huge alpha X projects that are so impressive.
Right. It's because they're working on stuff. I mean, it's harder stuff than
we ever worked on in high school. For sure. They don't think it's work because they love it. You know, no, we have a we have a girl, she's And you didn't think it was work when you were sleeping on the floor. Exactly. Work's not it's like my now now job.
Which by the way, just as a sidebar.
Everybody
should go into education. If you're like
Wondering like what you should do the next ten years, come into education's also.
But'cause it it is fun.
Uh but they can we have a we have a uh high school. She's
Doing a Broadway musical.
Right. Launch all team produced Broadway musical. She sourced all the singers off TikTok. Million streams the first week when they went. They can fill they filled like
four times they fill the venue. It's not big enough to be on Broadway. It's still like not quite big enough, but they're they're doing it. And you know, you listen to her, she's like having to learn about music rights. Right. Legal conduct. Right. And all this stuff I mean it's hard. It's harder than any high school class. But that's how we should teach. And this girl will spend
endless hours on it. She loves it,'cause she's putting on her musical. It's hers, right? And the team and all and just think of those projects for all kids, right? Everybody can do that.
Right. And so and that's where when we talk about what this if we're gonna get'em ready for this AI world that's coming, that's what we need to get'em ready for, not
Borem for six hours a day in class where we waste ninety percent of their time.
you know, learning a bunch of material that is becoming commoditized.
Right. L's are reducing
Right. The value of that knowledge. Now
AI also with taking it away on that side.
But it's also letting you learn 10 times faster. So you know, it's sort of this balance of just you gotta you figure out what parts you wanna learn. I remember Elon in interviews had something that made a ton of sense to me. He's like traditional schools teach you like here's a branch, here's when you use it. When they should be like
Here's an engine, let's fix it. Oh, you need a wrench to like take that off. So like we got to figure out what it's used for. And like it's sort of like that's the approach that you're taking. Exactly. You take so like and let me I'll give you example, like our sports academy. Like we wanna teach public speaking, right? Storytelling and public speaking is such a great skill, right? For kids or for adults, everybody.
And but you go to a ten year old boy and you're like
We're gonna teach you public speaking. You like Okay, they've turned off.

She's the head of Schwarz Academy.
Postgame press conference. Are you ready for it? And these kids are like, okay. Like, right? And you're gonna learn all those skills, those same public speaking skills where a ride is gonna grade you and do it. Of course they wanna do that, right? Or
you're gonna learn financial literacy.
Roll the eyes.
We gotta work on your Nike five million dollar contract.
All of a sudden they're ready to, right? They're gonna learn, they're gonna dive in and become the world's experts in all those skills. And so the thing that
When you talk about stuff, associating it with stuff kids love.
that's in their interest, right? Back to I understand their interest graph.
Kids.
Kids will love it and work because it's
And everybody knows this, right? If it's related to what
Your interests are.
You'll spend endless time on it.
There's kids, like just think of how long they spend on YouTube on some obscure thing where you're just like, oh my God. Like, no, we have we have a kid.
P
can like he he knows everything about World War II battles.
And you know like those geo locators who know anything in the whole world and a little picture and it's there. This kid knows it for every World War Two battle.
Like you can show him any picture from a battle. Oh, that was in Poland in nineteen forty three. I mean, it's just insane. Right. But the cause he's interested in it, right? Kids will learn endless stuff if they're interested. And what we have to do as schools is say, okay, this is what we want them to learn.
'Cause these are fun there are fundamental things you want to learn, but we need to do it where they're doing projects that are hard and have meaning to them.
You mentioned your father. Is it true that he didn't invest in your company?
Yeah, no, that's totally true. He um yeah, my my dad very much was worried about me being a spoiled kid.
Um, uh you know, he grew up with nothing and then
Got to success later in his life.
And so was terrified of that.
And so
You know, he's like, look, if you have a good idea
Other people are gonna invest in it.
And if I'm investing in it.
Right. It just means no it was it was such a crappy idea, no one else would give you money.


Convince people that it's a good idea.
Um you know back to the standard, which is a true statement, right? If if if your pa you know, you know if
If your parents leading
Right, or giving you money then.
Uh if they're leading you around. Maybe it's You don't have a good idea. You don't have a good idea. Go convince somebody else. And so he used to work for Jack Walsh, yes. He did.
And so he was Jack's strategic planner. Um
Uh Mark, his son, you know, we
play hockey, go skiing together. Um
And so I had a business background upbringing, which is maybe why I knew I wanted to be able to do it. Tell me more about that'cause I remember reading one anecdote. Actually you had two conversations with Jack Walsh, one when you were twelve about gross margins. Do you remember that one? I I
I had a lot. I spent a lot of time with Jack. So Jack, you know, my dad passed when I was twenty five.
Yeah.
So there these will probably be the later ones you're talking about. And Jack.
called me and is like look
I'll be your mentor going forward. And so every year I would actually fly up and spend
A couple days at GE and at Jack's house.
with him uh coaching and and helping. What was the most memorable conversation you had with him?
Oh, there was a lot. So
You know, uh between he and my dad, they
They uh there's a there's a ton of if you want them, which is, you know
One was
Uh, Mark and I were playing hockey and we were small for our age and both
Our dads played hockey.
Um
Uh.
Jack and my dad. And
Uh so
We weren't good at it.
And so we're like, we wanna switch to skiing.
Don't tell a hockey dad that you want to be a skier. Okay. My dad was from I was born in Minnesota, so you know, hockey is
I'm from Canada. That's like religion for us. It's the religion. And he's like And so Jack's like Okay, I'll only do this.
There's a there's a
uh race at the end of the year.
Jimney Peak was the name of it. He's like
You two need to come in first and second.
And if you guys are willing to do that.
I'll let you switch over to Ski.
And he gets he's on the phone with my my dad. He's like, Greg
our kids are gonna be first and second in the race, so they're gonna have to work really hard, so
Buy your kids some skis.
You know.
Literally.
We would literally
Uh you know, during the summer, like you run up the mountain.
Literally after school, they drop us off weekends, drop us off ski. End of the year, Mark came in first, I came in second.
And Jack's like
Wasn't it worth it?
You know, and just back to high standards. Like I
Crazy high standards. Um gross margin, you brought up that one, you know, where they had sold their um they'd swapped their business with uh I think it was Thomson Medical at the time.
Where they had TVs. G had TVs and Tom. They swapped it for their cat scanners. Because they had G Medical and one of these deals.
And I was like, dude like T V is the only cool thing you guys make, you know.
When you're young.
Right. Cat scanner.
really boring and Jeff's like, let's talk about gross margin.
Right,'cause T Vs have none.
Cat scanners make a lot of money.
And so I was learning about gross margin.
And I'm gonna bring that back. I'll I'll go back to the story, but I'm gonna bring it to a related one.
So we have kids who launched a food truck.
Our fifth graders.
Like launched a food truck in Alpha.
And
So I was talking with him and I was like, Why did you guys
You know pick.
Breast breakfast foods.
You know.
On for your food truck. They're like
Have you seen the gross margins on a breakfast food? And I was like, okay, which is the most awesome thing ever, which is because they're building a real business and you gotta know gross margins, right? And these are fifth and sixth graders, right? And and so kids loved it, just like I learned and loved it young. Everybody can learn this stuff if you're if they're interested. We have other kids who don't like, you know.
launching food trucks, but for those who do, it was awesome.
Uh and then once I once
Um
You know, back to my twenties when I was building my business.
You know, Jack.
Jack was both.
super, you know, harsh.
You know, when you talk about high standards, high support.
It's both where he would just be like
I I remember this particular story was
I was the youngest.
a self made member of the fours four hundred.
Right. And with the cover.
And so
I'm flying up to
Uh you know.
Where my annual mentoring thing that I was gonna do with them and I'm all
Right.
Check this out, right?
I'm all that.
And I do want a sign copy. Yeah, exactly, Jack. I'm sure you want a sign copy of this, right? And I mean I full of myself, obviously. And um
I get there and you know, he's we're talking about stuff and he's trying to understand'cause he's
astounded by, you know.
How much
Yeah.
And um
Uh so at the end of it he's like, Okay, so I guess if I had to classify you, you you're like uh
I'm trying to remember the G levels. You're like a level eight project manager product manager.

You know, like that's why like he's like that's sort of like your skill set.
Right. And
At the time.
Realistically it was, right. I I I had other I had this set of skills, but fundamentally that's that's what I was and
He's just like
You know, Joe, you have to decide whether you're gonna sit here and
You know.
Be full of yourself and decide that you're awesome. Or if you're gonna decide
You are now at the case where you can go spend the rest of your life and frickin crush it.
Right. Is this your first step or your last step?
Right. Are you done?
Have you just declared victory and hey, everybody, look at me, I won the race. Or are you like, oh my God, I'm only on the first step of the race?
And then he is the most inspirational person.
'Cause you sort of had to
He shocks you a little bit with the
Who are, you know.
And then
inspires you to greatness.
Right, where I remember I was flying back.
From that trip.
And I that whole plane right back, I had a
I was writing a hundred things down that I had to go do.
Right, that I was on the I was sure I made sure I was gonna be on the first step, not on my last step.
Right. And so just that kind of great inspirational um he was amazing at. And other level setting, like this was a big one for me was
In ninety seven, we won e commerce product of the year.
And ninety seven went spec to bot com it's a big e commerce year.
I'm like I I won the e commerce. That's why we were very successful.
And you know, GE had used it, G Medical had used it, uh in Meltzgroup. And
Literally.
I met with Jack and he's like, Yeah, I hear
Med doesn't like your product.
Like

Freaking one e commerce product of the year.
And I he literally was like
Ciao.
I don't care if it comes from heaven above.
If GE doesn't get an ROI.
Your product.
You
And your company, so.
That's
Where's our R Y?
And
It was like
An eye openered me where I was literally just a product guy where I was like, I delivered a good product. And he's like, if your customers don't get value.
Um
Nothing matters.
Right. And I was just like, huh.
Right, and it totally reset my whole view of like what a company would have to do and you know, I c if I had to apply it to education now. Education thinks their job
sort of just to put kids through school.
Ours is.
To actually have learning.
Right.
Kids have to love school and they have to learn.
Right.
And when we designed our educational system, I think we're the only school in the world.
Who if a kid's not learning
It's our fault.
It's the system's fault. It's not the kids.
Right. If if our kids aren't learning two X, you know, in two hours and they're failing.
It's my fault. What did I do wrong?
How do is my motivational model not right?
Do I need a different guide?
Was the lesson I gave them not the right level? Was it not a good lesson? Was I not coaching them the right way? But what did I do wrong?
versus a lot of school systems like uh kids
Right. And that can uh you can draw it sort of back to his resetting me of
Are they getting value out of what you're doing? I'm like, Oh, it's my responsibility to make sure all the kids learn.
uh these days. So anyway, so yeah, I had all those kind of things. It was it was awesome. What a crazy experience. Um at one point you were gonna IPO trilogy and you IPO'd PC order.com, right? Yes, we did.
And then you ended up buying it back. I wanna hear the story about that. And then when you changed your mind about being public with Georgie.
Uh the P C order.
Story helped me realize I didn't want to be public. So Peace Order was um actually one of the
Trilogy co founders, Christie.
Yeah, had this idea of okay, I'm gonna build PC order.
Um, which was online selling computing back in dot com days.
And you know, built it up, super successful, had all the biggest resellers aboard.
Um, and then she went public.
And then basically Dell.
put her customer base out of business.
And so then sh
She her business went.
Terrible.
And so the stock went from fifty to five or something. I can't exactly remember, but you know, down ninety ninety plus percent. So it went public.
Uh, you know, ran up in all the hype.
And then imploded.
Uh and then we bought it back.
And just, you know, said okay.
Um
And you know for me, uh so I've kept trilogy private.
Yeah, to this day it's still private.
And a lot of it is just um
I prefer just to be a hundred percent in control.

And frankly, just my my daughters give me T you know Marcus Lamonis on uh The Prophet, if you know that TV show, he has I'm one hundred point zero percent in charge.
That's pretty much my attitude. Um Is it like that with everything or the things you're completely hand off like are you hands off or completely hands on, but nothing in between? Correct.
Yeah. I'm I am
I'm in charge or
Hey.
I'm the your biggest supporter. Good luck.
Um around it.
But yeah, I don't do well on the fifty fifty consensus kind of stuff. Um I'm my just I
I push the edge on radical stuff and
I I I'm like I don't want to vote.
You don't get to vote on this, right? We're gonna do this. It's not a democracy. Yeah, it's not a democracy. We're gonna do this. And if you wanna come board, we're gonna do this. Like if you want to come and start a school.
Right, on time back.
You're gonna do two X in two hours.
And there's a whole set of people who are like, Well how about we do one X in one hour?'Cause one X is as good as every other school.
And I'm like, Well, go do that with somebody else's software, you're not.
If you're gonna use mind, you're so all these coaches who are setting up these sports academies, they're like, Well, some of the parents don't care. I'm like
Sorry.
We're gonna do it this way. We are delivering awesome academic outcomes.
Right.
Yeah. That's just it's who I am and
That's just I I don't want to vote around that. Reminds me of something Alan Malale said, which is like when he was turning around forward, he was like, Here's how we're going to do it. And if you don't want to choose to be a part of that, that's on you. Uh but if you're here, this is how we're gonna
Yeah. No alignment. Like we like, you know, we do the three commitments to the kids.
Your kid will love school, they'll learn two X in two hours and then life skills. Those those those three commitments.
Every kit.
Every kid. We have to do that for every kid. And if you're in my organization
Yeah. You wake up every day and say, I'm gonna deliver that.
And you can never blame the student, you can never make an excuse around that. And if you don't like that.
Just don't come.
Because that's what we're gonna be about, right? We lose about fifty percent of our educators.
when we tell'em they're accountable for the kid learning.
Oh. Because they're not used to it.
Right. And they're like, No, it's a kid's fault.
What if he doesn't do this, or what about that? I'm like
Yeah. Our guides are measured on do they deliver the three commitments to every kid.
Every kid.
Right. And that's, you know.
It's just really important. Um and
You have to have that.
you know, focus. No, I had one of my public school one of my there's a tea when I first came in.
You can imagine there were scepticism, you know.
'Cause I would say crazy stuff.
There'll be no adult academic teaching in this building.
You know, just if now with hindsight you're like, Well duh it works, but
Before that
That's crazy talk, whether you're a parent or a teacher.
Right. It's just it's it's
And you know, but
the set of teachers and parents who stay, you know
Who were like, Okay, I'm in.
I was there was one who was, you know, basically from public school and I was like
W you know, and I'm an evil billionaire, you know, and so educa every evil billionaire does education, all those all those
You know.
Uh.
Appropriate memes.
And I was like
Eventually what was it that
won you over to stay and be part of it.
And she was like
It was because uh your
Just constant focus.
That it had to be every kid.
That we'd come in and we'd be like, Okay, we got ninety percent of the kids.
And you're like.
Let's focus on the ones we want and what do we have to do and what do we have to fix to get that.
For every single one.
And that's back to building a system that if we're gonna get this out to a billion kids, that's the mental, that's the model we have to have.
And that's, you know, um back to being a hundred point zero percent charge that makes it so great is
Yeah.
If you're gonna be on time back and using this system, it's gonna be every kid.
What's the biggest problem with scaling?
There's a lot.
So scaling's hard. This is, you know, this is sort of back to your Elon example. This is, you know, building your first prototype's really easy. And how do you build the factory that church churns it out? And so a lot of what I've been doing the last three years is how do I build the system?
That's gonna allow this to scale. And so time back's, you know, a key element on the academic side. But that sounds like it would scale pretty easy. Once you figure out the compute.
Uh and bring the cost to compute down. Like totally it's that's part's gonna be easy that's easy. You could add a billion people to it effectively if you had the compute power for it. Yes. Uh and that wouldn't be Exactly. So that part's I we've commoditizing how the six hours a day down to cover.
Got that.
Now.
Let's talk about all the other hard parts.
Let's talk about
There's physical and then virtual.
So on physical schools.
How do you measure guides?
And how do you have the metrics so as you open new buildings, right? New
schools that you're sure.
What happens.
in all the other schools, right? So you know we we we call them painfully insightful metrics.
So we
We wake, you know, our our org, you know, every summer when we're redesigning, you know, for the next year, we sit down and we say, What are the painfully insightful metrics that we need to know?
Such that we know that new school we opened that we've never visited.
is as good as our Austin flagship.
Right. And all our guides, you know, and
Everybody in the org is like
We can't every year they get better.
Like, how do I know I don't have a bullying culture?
You know, somewhere.
Right. What's the question? What's the survey question? What's the metric I can collect?
to know that so obviously on the academic side, right? We have the best closed loose system in our
You know.
that collects all the data. So I know on a daily basis if you're learning.
Yeah. Right. And so I have all that. But how do I know if my culture's good?
How do I know if I've hired the right guide? What if I have a wrong guide?
Right. How do I measure all that? So we have the same level of metrics that we do around.
our school and our system that we do around our academics. Okay. So I know
Within eight weeks.
Weather.
My guide's good or not.
And a lot of this so a lot of it comes from
Results are they delivering three commitments to all the kids.
But it's everything also surveys. We ask the kids.
Every adult had one or two teachers who transformed their life. Is your guide that for you?
Right, to the parents.
Do you trust your guide?
To hold high standards so you can provide unconditional love, right? You know, kindergarten like do you love your guide? But we ask, you know, so you just are asking these questions, right?
Um
to to get the data that you need. We have quantified.
All the metrics on the life skills.
So I know it's not just, oh yeah, our kids have grid or oh, they're good public speakers. I'm like, no, everybody in our class scored 95% on our eye and every fifth grader
B.
a warrant MBA and teamwork and leadership. And so we we quantify everything.
Right.
So that we and measure it.
And then can react to it if we have a problem.'Cause you do, right. You
Every guide's not perfect.
But then can we swap one out?
Uh quickly. So part of scaling it sounds like is uh quickly identifying
uh servicing problems so they can be addressed while they're small.
Uh not letting them pass. Exactly. And it's it's asking the hard question. It's easy to ask easy questions.
Right. It's why we move the question from do you love school to do you love school more than vacation? Because do you love school
My comparison, when you say that to a kid, it's like, Well, it's better than my old school. My old school sucked. Yeah.
Right. But you're better than vacation, though. That's a harder standard. Your old school, if you're comparing to your old school, it's too easy.
Better than vacation. That's a hard state. As a parent, I would also feel like I'm not giving my kids a very good vacation if they want to go but that's that back to our thing, right? Your kids are with their friends all day doing awesome stuff. Doing the stuff they love. And they're doing the stuff they love that's hard and challenging with a guy who's supporting them, right?
Yeah. It is hard to be. That is why on Saturdays they're like, God, I wish I could go to school.
Just building all that kind of stuff. So, so, but you're always trying to figure out what is that extra question, right? Like, how do we know if the parents really love the school?
Right. What is it? Like will the parent create testimonial videos?
You know, of their school,'cause it's totally crazy, right? Of because people are always like, You go to that weird school where they don't have teachers and you know, all that kind of stuff. And so like
We went through back to
Our standard, which is we opened all these schools, all these new locations. I'm like, how do I know if they're good? Well
We have six and a half hours of testimonial videos from peop families who joined the last ten weeks about them saying, You know, it's only been ten weeks and my kids tr life's transformed. And so you just you're out there trying to figure out what's the hard question to ask.
You show it publicly. We show all our grades publicly. We give all the you know.
uh all these testimonies we see everybody a around it. And that's our control group.
Right, for that. And then the other parts just core culture.
Right.
Your core culture of
Mm.
Do you believe in delivering the three commitments to every kid?
And if you don't believe in that.
don't come and everything's based around it. And if you're a
guide you have to deliver to your students.
But if you're on my academic team creating lessons, you do too.
Yeah. So like if a kid is struggling and can't get through your lesson.
The guy who did the lesson is gonna get on a call with them.
Yeah. Right.
Back when I lose fifty percent of'em when you have some of these learning science researchers and they realize they have to deal with kids and are accounted. So much easier on paper. Exactly. And you you lose some because they don't want to do it. But you build that culture of
You know, and back to even growth. So like our growth team.
Right,'cause we're expanding.
You know, they wake up every day and the first thing they work the
You know, we have three concentric circles. The first is
Is there something you need to do to deliver three commitments to every existing child in the school?
And if there is, go do it. Like if there's a problem in an existing campus and you can fix it, don't worry about some new campus. Go fix it. Yeah. Then the second is, have we filled every school?
that we already have.
Because the number of classmates
is an important part of school.
Right. And when you start a school it's smaller and then you want to grow it.
And so the second thing we're doing is we want to make sure for our existing students that we're giving them awesome classmates.
Right. And then and only then after you do those first two circles, do you say, Should we open to a new location?
Right. And the
Building that culture hard, especially we have we're the most talked about school in the world. We have demand.
you know, through the roof, we're called from every country. Secretary of Education's down here. I got 10 governors who, you know, are coming down. Everybody wants this model.
And I'm like
High quality at all times, right? Never relent on quality.
Because we have to deliver every kid and we'll get it to everybody.
So those are our physical school.
Rules.
Right. Now I'm not gonna be able to get to a billi next year.
If I have to build the schools.
And so then I get to the second when we talk about virtual. How can I
you know, scale it without that.
So one way
Is
You know.
The the the time back software. So we're gonna let people build on it.
Right. And so anybody wants to build a school.
Now's the time.
Right. If you have an idea of what the afternoon should be.
Yeah. Come do it. We're hiring a thousand coaches, right, through Texas in Texas for Texas Sports Academy for these middle schools. Right. We have, you know.
five hundred GT schools for gifted talented kids. I have somebody who's loves Montessori, so we're gonna have a Montessori school. We have a wilderness school.
Right. Where if you think the wilderness in the afternoon. So there's all these great opportunities for entrepreneurs, right, who want to go then build schools. So we're there's gonna just gonna be a think of Shopify for micro school or for schools, right? That's what time back's gonna be and it's gonna explode it.
And then there's the the pure virtual, which is, well, home schoolers, yeah, right, and everybody else.
That's what my kids want. They want the two hours on the weekend. Great. Well so here's what they're gonna get. So here's what they're gonna get.
And or here's our problem and what we've been working on is
You know, if ten percent of it is the ed tech, you know the time back.
How are you if I let it out of my environment.
I I no longer can give the kids a time back. If I own all six hours and I give you four, I got the motivation. I got the motivation. But at home school.
I don't have that.
Or after school, no one w you know, I can't tell you how many
My daughters are like, No one wants to go to school after school. My kids will make'em. Right. But no I need to make'em love it more than vacation. Right. Not just there's a set of parents who will make'em for sure. Well, I know it'll happen. They'll start doing it and then they'll be like, Why do I have to go to school? Exactly.
And that's what I want.
Which is so
How do we ninety percent's motivation, so how do we solve it? So we've spent all our time
And when we release time back next year.
The set of motivations for these kids are gonna be awesome.
Like give me an example.
Well,
Let's just take
What let's take middle school boys.
Their number one motivation is video games. Mm-hmm.
So imagine if you got
Some of the world's best video game designers.
Like the best. Not your prodigy guys.
Right.
the best ever who made the world's best video games.
And you got a hundred and fifty of them in a building and said, Go build the world's best video game on top of this.
Where the kids are gonna play two hours a day and become top one percent.
Right.
I bet your kids, if they're video gamers, are gonna love to play that.
Mm-hmm. Right. And the
Super interested in that.
Or
Let's talk about like an after school.
for kids who need after school tutoring?
We just ran this, uh
That's a test.
Imagine they like Cooman, if you have some of these tunes, everybody hates it, right? Yeah. Oh my gosh, dude. It's all terrible. They're in dingy building. What if you just went to Dave and Buster's? Yeah.
And then in the
Davon Buster's like in the little
You know, birthday rooms or whatever.
They did their hour with the tutor.
And you earned like your little card and then you went out in the afternoon.
Or what if online after you did that?
you were able to go into a ten thousand person's Twitch stream.
with some of the best video gamers in the world, right? Who's your favorite who's the streamers you like?
Right, who are the influencers you like? So imagine there's influencers, right, where you're getting social cred.
Right, based on being able to do this. Now, and if you want as parents, what if I allowed you to do a hundred for a hundred?
So
Just take our system and you as the parent could put in the
The money.
Right.
And all of a sudden
The kid gets it.
Right. And what if especially when I took that money.
And I didn't let'em spend it.
It went into the Robin Hood for Kids account to teach them financial acumen and investing and
Financial literacy.
Yeah. What if it was that?
Right. Or what if I had an associated
Life Skill Project where it funded your trip to New York so that you could go meet the producer for your musical.

You know, or funded your robot war.
that you are gonna do all ideas.
Or just more mundanely.
What if it was
was what manage your screen time.
So every parent struggles with how much screen time.
Well what if there's just the time back?
That's like guys.
Let me be in charge of your kids' screen time. Cause I'll make sure they get to top one percent.
Yeah. And if they're top one percent.
You gonna give them some more screen time? Yeah. Totally. Yeah. And so it's gonna manage all that for the parents, right? And the parents are gonna be like, Oh my God, my kids top one percent. And they're super happy because they hit this and then oh my God, I got some gaming time or I got some TikTok time or whatever it is. I was able to control.
You know, uh those kind of elements. So
wrapping in all the motivational stuff. There's just
There's a hundred ways to motivate kids, right? There's gonna be social peer gaming. Like we have a multi-user version where the kids are ca just competing.
Right, think of video games, but just you know, you're competing on academics and you know, the ten percent of kids who really love academics.
They love that. I mean
Oh my God, those kids, you know.
They're they're they just run out of curriculum. There's just not enough t teach them.
Like they've just you know, they just they blump.
Uh blow through the top of the charts. What does the science say? I I can imagine this would be controversial about paying kids to learn.
Yeah, external extr external and extrinsic motivation versus intrinsic. There's a huge debate about it. And I believe we'll have the biggest real data set in the world.
Um uh
And so here's there's there's both there's there's there's both sets of papers, which is
Um
There's a paper that literally that you should you could look up that says there's no such thing as
Intrinsic motivation.
Because even if you're intrinsically motivated, it's because of something.
Yeah. You know, even a good student.
They want the accolades of being a good student.
Yeah. Is there a true love of learning or is there a true love of accomplishment? Yeah. And what's the accomplishment getting you? And so you can go read that paper and have a very strong view of
There's no difference between paying kids and and boosting'em. It's why in sports parents often hold their kid back a year.
Yeah. So they're bigger, so then they win a little bit. And then once they win, they get jump started and then they're good and now they like it because they keep getting accolades that they're good at it. Academics is the same way. You just need to jump start'em on paying.
And then like
Those kids so in our middle school will pay any kid a thousand dollars to become top one percent.
You know, so when they transfer in, oh my God, top one percent's too hard.
You pay them a thousand dollars, they get to top one percent. It changes their internal view of themselves.
that I'm like, oh I am a good student, then you don't have to pay him anymore.
Well And all of a sudden they're gonna do it themselves'cause they change their internal view.
And so part of all of this stuff is
When you talk about extrinsic and intrinsic is
If you can change the kids internal view of their capabilities, it's worth using whatever motivation you can.
Right, back to our guides. They use whatever
lever they need to pull with the kid to break through. Kids have part of education is kids have blocks about what they can do. I'm not a math science girl.
Yeah.
Right.
And you're like
That just doesn't exist. There's no like brain chemistry that like I'm I I'm a middle school girl, I can't learn bad science, right? You yes, you can.
So I have to so m our guides have to break through that.
And they'll do whatever it takes. And if paying them a thousand dollars is it, or bringing them out to an event, or letting them go to an off-campus lunch. What's do an off camp, oh, you guys want to do an off-campus lunch? You know, whatever the currency is, social peer pressure, oh my God, all the other girls are there, or whatever it is our guides will use to get them there. Then once they're top one percent.
Right.
Boom.
Right. They're there forever. Our kids at college aren't getting paid. They're all four students.
Right. It's just you change kids' capability to become self driven learners to to do that. But but there is a fear of it. And there is I'm I'm sure there's a bad way to do it.
But you know, starting in kindergarten, our kids earn alphas.
Because our if you want to teach financial literacy, which every parent wants.
You know.
You earn alphas.
You learn how to save, earn, save.
Spend, invest, and donate.
And they start that cycle in kindergarten.
And then move it all the way up and it gets bigger dollars as you get older, but
You want your kid.
In seventh grade, like if you give them some phantom stock thing to teach them to invest in seventh grade.
I can tell you that's terrible.
Because one, it's not real money. They didn't earn it. And they're going to YOLO it.
Oh, it's like a casino. It's not investing. It's just gambling.
Right. Versus wait, I just earned this thousand dollars. Yeah that's mine. Real money and it was hard. And it's mine.
And I'm gonna invest it.
Right. Now we do let them YOLO it and do something stupid and lose all their money. Yeah.
And then they've lost real money. And it's the best lesson. And it's better to learn that in seventh grade than 27 years old. Right. And so all those things around it where trying to take out, you know, one of the things is
There's a bunch of Montessori, right? Maria Montessori in Montessori schools. She very much believed that kids should be involved in real world things. She actually has things where she's like, kids, adolescents should earn money.
Oh right. And you know, that this having them do work and the value of work and that their work has value.
Is a good thing.

child development. And we find
You know, I I think if you the the best thing you can do is ask alpha parents. They're like, no, this is all really good. This isn't we're not poisoning the kids and getting them to be this
coin addicted person who if they don't get paid, they won't do any learning.
Right.
Instead It's just not how it works. I mean and you could get kids on this and it's not like there aren't times where the kids like, Okay, I'm gonna do some extra things'cause I want something.
Yeah.
Right. And so
You know, but that's life. Correct. No, the the the um
uh musical.
Maddie, who's doing the musical.
She wasn't
Wanting to do the seven ninety.
She has seven ninety other math as A T. She was below it.

And sorry, Maddie, I just outed you. Um
Uh
You know, choose below it.
But
She wanted she needed money to go fly to New York.
to meet the producer so she'd get money to do her thing.
I was like, Well,
What's
What what does time back tell you how many hours?
Right. It's gonna take you to get to seven ninety. We were actually trying for eight hundred.
Right.
And
She it was like X, and I'm like, Okay, go do it and you'll earn the money and we'll buy your plane ticket up there, right? To to do it.
Right. And so she did. And then she got her plane ticket.
Right.
And it was just and it's just this concept of oh it was work and you know, she was happy it
Seven fifty or seven sixty or whatever it is. And then you just move it up. It's work, but she also knows and learns that she's capable of doing more if she pushes herself, puts in extra effort.
It's just it's effort based. Do you wanna do it? And w and back to just how life is. She's like, Yeah, I want this thing. And now I have the world's best Broadway musical. I'm gonna change my wor right? Change what you know, she's gonna go back in college and she's like, I'm gonna go.
f you know be arts theater forever. But that and that's why the math. She was like, it was enough on her because she's an arts theater girl. It also sounds like a small enough effort, you know? Like whereas before, even with a a teacher or guide, it's like
This ambiguous thing. It's huge, it's big, it's far away. Yeah. I'm not even gonna try because it's sound like Well it's two hundred hours. Yeah. Right? I mean, we're twenty hours, not two hundred.
Right. We're ten times faster. And so there's the two parts. There are two both things you said were totally correct.
It was ambiguous.
So I could just put a bunch of time in. And if you don't have an AI tutor, you can study for a long time and your SAT scores don't go up. Right. And so the first is.
We're not ambiguous. We're like, here it is. You're seventeen hours away.
You're four hours away. Like in our dashboard.
It literally says
You know, you're six hours from finishing. You know, six or
six weeks from finishing it. If you go do an hour of homework, you're like a week away.
Yeah. Right. So it literally can just tell you based on your work how long, you know, to get there and when you put the goal setting in, it'll tell you.
You know, all of that. And so not being ambiguous, right, and being
Definitive to the students, critical.
And then the second, the numbers are small.
It's definitive and small.
Yeah. Right. Manageable. It's super manageable. Math Academy, every parent, go look at Math Academy. It's gonna be like oh twenty eight hours away.
I wanna say they've just released like their SAT program. They've they've been updating it.
And I wanna say it's
A hundred and eighty hours?
We're gonna we're gonna try that this weekend at the my kids wanna great explore it. Well you should you totally look at it, but I wanna say it's like a hundred and eighty hours. Yeah.
Matt like
That's it.
Yeah.
But you know.
And then you're you're
It's crazy.
Uh, Joe, this has been a fascinating conversation. We always end with the same question.
And I I think I have an idea of what you're gonna say here, but what is success for you?
Um
That we transform education for one billion kids.
So that's nothing like what we had.
And
The
The
Tagline, if I didn't give my tagline is.
Our job is to make this the best time in history to be a five year old.
That's incredible.
That might be the best answer ever. Thank you for taking the time today. This was fascinating conversation, one that rings true to me. So I really appreciate it. I loved it. Thanks for the time.