The 50 richest families in America are betting on this trend

0:00 I'm gonna read you the most alpha sentence possible here. Kindergartners Must climb a forty foot rock wall and pass a receive critical feedback without crying test. Right. This is the best time in history to be a five year old. Exploring. I'll put my law in it like a day zone. On the roadless travel never looked at the game. Well, I'm gonna flatter you for a second. So the easiest one is I wish there was an alpha school near me so I could send my kids to it. I actually have a kindergartner, so that would be perfect. But you have this really amazing story. It's kind of the story that me and Sam like to tell on this podcast. 'Cause it sounds like a movie. Here you've got this sort of

0:40 Secret of billionaire, right? This guy who in his twenties drops out of college, figures things out. You're on the cover of Forbes magazine when you're twenty seven years old. And You built Multiple.

0:53 Huge companies, multi billion dollar companies, and then you disappear. For like twenty years. Nobody hears about you. Like us talking on podcasts and saying how great you are. And then you Take a billion dollars of your own money and you use it to try to reinvent education. Now you're back. Yeah.

1:10 So In two thousand five I got married, which was also The first year of podcasting, I did a podcast actually at Stanford. That was my last one. And then I went signed for twenty years.

1:21 And then now my youngest daughter is about to go to college. And so now I'm back on the road, right? I'm back in the limelight and I hopefully Balpha will be doing it for the next twenty years to fix education. Why don't we start at the the start there? So you have this idea for trilogy and you're you drop out of college, actually in high school. I wrote a paper. About AI. And so Lillian Heisco has written a paper on AI, one of the paragraphs said

1:45 Neural net are decades away. I then went to Stanford. And I was in class with the father of expert systems at AI, uh Professor Feiger Pump. So my buddies and I, you know, were like, we can't sit in Spanish class anymore. So we dropped out. Um you know, back then it was rare and so the parents are not excited. My dad famously said you're a moron. And then We built

2:07 Trilogy. And our claim to fame actually in the nineties, it was the first AI product. to sell a billion dollars. Did you have the idea when you dropped out or did you drop out and they say let's come with a whiteboard, let's come up with an I the idea. No. No, then we we had the idea, which was you could build this product call the configurator, which was expert systems had a a range of things that they could solve. Configuration was one of the domains. That they've been trying to solve since late seventies basically. And

2:33 You know, by the late eighties, I was like, Oh, we can totally do this. I tried to figure out what Trilogy did because at one point you guys owned so many different products. I think you owned a bunch of different companies. And I was trying to figure it out and I was like, Is it sort of like if an airline needs to like buy parts to build an airplane, your you built software that would help them decide how many bits and pieces for each like how many Seats they need, therefore, what they should order from the manufacturer. Was that right? The first product we had that started the company was a configurator. Just think of a configurator on like, you know, a car website or Dell computer where you're configuring your computer. Now just imagine it if it's a million times more complicated. Which is a room size phone switch or a Boeing airplane.

3:16 Or you know, back then main computers, you know Big manufacturing systems that the problem back then is Reps would be out in the field selling these complicated products. And then what would happen is they'd get to the manufacturing line and the manufacturing line didn't build that. It was an unbuildable configuration.

3:34 And so Being able to take That knowledge. Uh how what is a correct configuration, put it in your thousands of sales rep's hands. So they would sell accurate configurations would save millions of dollars a day to the Fortune five hundred. So we just found all the Fortune five hundred manufacturing companies and said, We can take what Oh, this huge problem is costing you just eight zillion dollars.

3:57 sales builder which your sales reps would be able to build correct configurations And then you'd pay us millions and millions of dollars for it. And so that was our first product. And that's what launched the company. And that was the first one that, you know, drove the billion dollars revenue. And y you're at the time you're only what, twenty, twenty one years old. You're saying like So simple. We just went to the Fortune one hundred.

4:18 Knocked on the door, they handed us the millions of dollars. Yeah. How how easy could it be? So w what was it actually like when you were doing that? I mean Were you just like really savvy early on? Were you making dumb mistakes but figuring it out? Can you uh take us back? Yeah, well, there's there is, you know, for if you want the long form, there's that two there's a two thousand five podcast. Where I was presenting to Stanford about Why if you're doing what we're doing?

4:41 It's the dumbest thing you could do. But you gotta try it anyway. Which is No, the four two five hundred does not want to buy from a kid dropping out of college. Right. And we lived painfully. It took three and a half years.

4:54 But the flip side to it, if you ever build a product that the Four Five Hundred wants and it saves them, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. They will buy it from you. Because there's no other choice. We went into multiple sales cycles where, you know, they'd go in and at the end of it, they'd be like, Oh, we're gonna go hire back then Anderson consulting or we're gonna call You know, one of these oracle.

5:15 to to solve this problem. And when those companies couldn't solve it. They would come back to us. We were the most expensive software you could buy in the nineties. because we also had super high pricing because we're like, they're not gonna buy from us. Unless they have to. And we know it's worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

5:32 Right. We are the last choice on the list. And the when they're like, Okay, we gotta deal with these guys. Then you're like, Great, I'm gonna charge you lots of money'cause you have no other choice. Well that's not That's not a very young kid mentality. Every time that I've read about you, you've had this. uh confidence.

5:49 That I love. And it seems like even what you're describing is a very confident move for a very young person to make. And b back to there's some back rap that that helps on that is Jack Welch, who is CEO of GDE. My dad was a strategic planner.

6:04 And so I grew up in that GDE culture. And I remember telling my dad, I was like, God, that's just And He's like, Oh, let's talk about the gross margin of a cat scanner versus a T commodity TV.

6:18 And so I was learning all of that from, you know, a young age. And so that helped when I was ready to start my business, that I understood ROI and you know, that I was going to be set up value and all of those things. But then I took that and said, I'm gonna be the best product manager and I'm gonna put the two together. And I actually think today with Alpha, that's a lot of what I'm doing.

6:41 It's just taking The product management part. And the go to market business part and saying if you took those two things How would you change education? Can you put some things in perspective? So uh I used to live in Austin and a bunch of my best friends are Austinites. And at one point, I don't know if you know this, Sean, I think at one point trilogy was

7:02 V largest or top three largest employer. Of folks in Austin. And like your growth was like astronomical. I mean I think that you're doing hundreds of millions in revenue and only like five or six years in. Can you sort of brag for a moment? How big and how fast did you get? Well, so once we had it took us, you know, we dropped out, it took three and a half years to actually build the product.

7:25 and convince anybody to buy it. But then as soon as they started to buy, Silicon Graphics bought it, Hewlett Packard bought it, AT IBM, right? It's just we started to roll through the biggest companies with You know, massively, you know, high pricing. On this show we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. Well, lucky for you, the team at HubSpot, they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple, easy to read. Wealth Guide.

7:53 It's thirty five principals from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Manish Prabry, Morgan Housel, Kathy Wood, and a ton others. So these are all their frameworks, their mental models, their rules, basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin. You can get it in the link below. You know, we were in Austin. Where they didn't have lots of software engineering back then.

8:16 And so we hired two thousand Ivy League graduates, you know, MIT in Sanford and brought them to Austin. So our claim to fame to the nineties was If you ask Microsoft no Bill Gates, who's The only company who out recruited. They were at their peak.

8:32 So Microsoft would win ninety percent of college graduates back then. And we against them won seventy percent. Bill Gates literally flew down to Austin. to figure out why we were getting the best graduates. And

8:46 This is also how intense Yeah, he was is We're at dinner and he's literally going through every single person. that we had made an offer to. You know, if there's Fred here and you're offering them back then, you know.

8:57 Forty eight thousand dollars, you know, and we've sort of reverse engineered how you guys hop. You know, and we think he's like a thirty eight thousand dollar guy. You know, why what was his technical capability that you you really liked? I mean, it was crazy the level of detail he went through. Right,'cause you it was it was a fight for talent. And if you're getting talent, you gotta get the best people. What was your response to Bill Gates during that dinner? Well no, Yeah, w what do you say, Well listen, Bill, here's here's how you do it. Well what did you say? After leaving, he's like, I'm gonna call. Every single candidate who has a trilogy offer and a Microsoft offer, and I'm personally gonna call them.

9:32 And I'm like I need the candidates more than you do, Bill. And I you this is just all just to escalate. I'll just escalate. I'll bring'em on a trip and we'll we'll do a a week ski trip. And I'll ask'em. How was the last time you'll ever talk to Bill Gates?

9:47 You know, how was that called? Um because he's never gonna have time to talk to you again because he's got dozen thousands of employees. And so but they did for the period of the nineties. Right. A would have, you know, whether it was uh Balmer Gates or Mike Maple, the other third in the office of the president, those three would call all our candidates and we would just continue to fight and it was desolate. Right. It's just we needed them more than they did.

10:12 This is one thing I wanted to learn from you'cause you know, when we're talking to you right now, you seem like a friendly Nice guy, you know, th you seem like a normal normal dude, but you you definitely have a gear. Uh that that most people don't have. Can you talk about that that extra gear, which is some version of boldness or intensity? You set out, you have a goal, and you just do whatever it takes. To achieve the goal.

10:33 And there's no amount of work. You wouldn't Ew. to hit the goal. Just like this. I have to win the recruiting war. I have to win. I have to be if I don't beat Microsoft and get the best talent, my company's doomed.

10:46 And so whatever it would take. Right. And I think that's true. You know. for everything that you want to do. You just have to have and back to that gear.

10:56 I had been lucky enough that I do find what I love to work on. So I love build the stuff in the nineties, right? And it was awesome. And so I was loving every minute of it. And you know, if I look at what I'm doing with education right now. I have the best job in the world. So I'm working seven by twenty four. On education.

11:14 And there's nothing that we won't go do. To figure out. How to go fix this and get this to a billion people. And I think just back to entrepreneurs, they have that gear. Right. And Bill Gates has like here. You know, today's the world's best add. It's Elon. Right. You know, when you go to dinner with him, you're just like, Oh, I suck. Like he is so much better.

11:34 Right. His level of intensity and working on the most important problem and being able to focus on it. Um is just a critical skill. And if you want story, I guess. Going back to the early days. So my dad

11:49 Um Uh had terminal cancer. But he said You know, look. You know I I basically have eight months.

11:56 How about I sit on your board? And help you, you know, figure it out your A young punk who doesn't know what he's doing. But it was obvious that I had, you know, caught the tiger by the tail and And you know, and there was a meeting where

12:09 Massive deliverable we had to hit for Hewlett Packard. It was one of our first one in HP's You know, yay or nay was everything. And he's like, Is your entire company focused on this? And you know, we have we have the board for you to go I'm like Absolutely. Of course we do.

12:23 Totally focused on it. And he's like, So your engineering team. Like if if if I asked him. You know, what percent of their time. Do they focus on Hewlett Packard versus all the other companies? And I'm like

12:34 A hundred percent on Villa Packard. They everybody understands we are not gonna miss this. And he's like real Okay. Stops the board meeting. Goes out and says.

12:46 Good. Bill Reed, who ran our development. He's like, Bring him in here. You've got a lot of customers, Bill, you know, working on this stuff. What percent of this team is working on on Cuba Packard? And Bill's like well

12:58 Since you come from traditional work. You know, traditional world. I would generally say Two hundred percent'cause we're working eighty hours a week. Every single person's working eighty hours a week on Philip Packard and that leaves us an extra twenty hours a week.

13:12 to work on you know the other customers. Right. And that's the kind of thing where, you know, when you're talking about intensity and focus. Right, and your team trying to deliver on it. Right. It's just it's You know, and I was like, Oh thank God, great picture, you know. You're like, uh hey dad, have you ever seen me uh kiss a girl man on the lips?'Cause it's gonna happen for the first time ever. Completely. That was right. And that is exactly the when you talk about intensity when you're trying to solve this. I heard a story though. It's not just intensity. I heard a story. I don't know if I if I heard it through a friend of a friend or online, that you would take

13:45 people you were recruiting, like uh like uh at the end of your your university cohort, I I forget what you called it, and you would take'em to the casino. And you would give'em some money to gamble. And if they and you wanted to teach'em, they wouldn't want to gamble a lot of money and you're like, Well, you're not a good fit. We need the people who are gonna Gamble more. Well, actually so this you can go look. There was a cover story in the Wall Street Journal on this. Um It was actually their money.

14:10 And you know, we get all these kids down and they're like, I want to be an entrepreneur, I'm risk taking, that's who I am. I'm like, great. So at the end of our Trilge University a hundred days, you know, if if enough of the teams had hit their goals, we would take everybody to Vegas. And then we could get everybody around a roulette wheel. Right. And we'd say you have to bet one month's salary. on the number. Right. And so everybody would have to put one month salary.

14:34 Down. And You know, there's a lot of people who are like Well I I'm not I don't want to.

14:40 that one month salary of it. And we're like, first of all, that's not a huge risk. You're gonna be asking a venture capitalist something to give you millions of dollars. And you're literally not willing to take any risk. At all. And so we would we that every year in The Wall Street wrote this big story about it. I actually got a lot of flaff from parents after they read the story. They're like, What are you doing to my kid? He just got out of college.

15:01 But yeah, it's back to just, you know, pushing people. You know, if you want here's another intensity. We actually trilogy university, you know, there's Harvard business. you know, case studies on it and and you can read about it. But we literally had a swap. program with the Navy SEALs.

15:17 Literally the Navy feels Or like, okay, you know, we're gonna send a couple of our seals over. to your program and you send a couple of your Trilogy Kids. to California to go part to be part of ours. It was sort of the physical versus the mental.

15:32 And you know, it was that level that we were considered by the seals the only thing on the standard and rigor. That would equal them on the physical side. And kids, you know, back to recruiting kids when they would be like, Oh my God, yeah, I get to go do and it only last a week, you know, or you know, really a few days before they Yeah, well, is it is it easier Is it easier to make a meathead good at programming or a nerd good at like Swimming. Actually, super smart, right? They filter. Right. So they were coming in as super capable.

16:05 Um now they've never been in an environment where you're having to make it was the kind of thing of a different environment of decisions and things like that than than their other one. But it was uh you know, it was those kind of things when you talk about intensity and doing things that are non traditional. Uh we're I'm all about that. Right. It sounds like on the recruiting side you also Did something counterintuitive, right? Instead of making it easy.

16:27 Cause when I moved to Silicon Valley It was all about ease. Google will do your laundry, they'll cut your hair, they'll walk your dog, they'll they'll give you free food. Do you want some more free things? I mean went to a vending machine and it gave me a MacBook. It was unbelievable. But you were like You realize that actually young, ambitious people wanted something hard, not easy. Can you talk about that a little bit? That's a huge insight, which is

16:51 This is the hardest hundred days of their life. And that was what allowed us to recruit it against Microsoft or all these other companies. I was actually at the board of directors of a of Uh Fortune Tech Company. And we had taken some of their Mec ees. Who wanted to go to trilogy instead of their company they're like how are they going to this little sh

17:10 company, you know, instead of us. Yeah. I'm like, well, during the internship. You made it easy. Right. And so they're just oh, I'm not doing anything significant. And when they come down It's a trilogy.

17:23 It's gonna be the hardest thing they ever did. They're gonna work on something significant. And kids want to do awesome things. Right. And mapping it now to our education. When we talk about the kindergartners clutten forty foot rock wall. It's the same thing. Can't want to go do hard things. Now, they need to be supported through it. You can't take a kindergartner, say good luck. Right.

17:46 You need to sit there and you have to have high standards and high support. You need both parts. But it You know, we have these you know with Alpha Test where you do all these workshops. You know, and then you have to test to pass it. You gotta climb the forty foot block wall, you know, or second graders gotta run a five K.

18:01 Our eighth graders have to do a tough mutter, or they also all have to cross the finish line at the same time. You know, we have all these tests. But the ones that drive back to the the most excitement, I mean, they all are hard. Are the ones where the kids can beat their parents. Like there is nothing that motivates a student more and a kid more than them being able to go head to head with their parent and winning. Like fair, not with a parent tank it. Like they love that.

18:27 Kids love that. One of our our claims on the you know Is Kids love school more than vacation. Right.

18:35 I can't build a school that kids love more than vacation if I have low standards. It is the reason they're excited is because they're going with their friends doing hard things. I actually think Sean This insight that you guys just came up with is actually quite brilliant. And you did a really good job of uh tying it into alpha, but like of making things hard and that actually attracts a certain type of person. But what's interesting is like if you're a kid, it's exciting to climb a forty foot wall. It's exciting to uh beat your mom and dad.

19:03 When I think of like a configure software, I that's not like that exciting. Like that, you know, it versus Microsoft, if you're making like well, Microsoft's not terribly exciting either, but if you're like Apple, you're making like the iPod, you're like, you know, we're rev it's like this consumer product that I could hand to you. How cool is that? Or I we just talked to the guy who founded MTV and he was recruiting these people and it was music, it was entertainment. That's cool. Configuring software, that's not that cool, but yet you said we're making this awesome stuff. Can you dive deeper into what makes something awesome because that I actually think that that one trigger of like Making school awesome.

19:36 Making trilogy software awesome. Like w other than making it hard, what is necessary for something to be Awesome. Yeah. Sure. So you're never gonna convince anybody That configuration is sexy. Right, versus all the other options. However, The AI algorithms that underlie configuration.

19:58 at the time were some of the most complicated computer science problems you can solve. And so when you're sitting there and you're looking at, oh, I'm gonna go to an about box for Microsoft Word. as choice A, or you're gonna go work with the smartest people tackling this challenge that no one's been solved before. Right. It is a technically impossible challenge.

20:20 And the best computer scientists like you know in nineteen eighty five. Rice, Stanford, MIT, their number one computer scientists all came down, were graduates. All came to Alpha. Right. And that is because we were working on the hardest problems.

20:37 It's the same thing. You know, people always ask You know, and you know, and on on on companies, why do people do startups? Like why do they go to Down to SpaceX. Why do you do it? And it's like,'Cause I'm with other people who are super smart. who are working hard and we're all trying to do something that's really, really hard.

20:54 Navy SEALs. Why do you join the Navy SEALs? Right. It is the camaraderie. It is the, you know, everybody together. That starts in kindergarten. It starts and kids love this stuff. Right. And it goes up to they're getting out of college and then late career, like the people who are joining us. Yeah. who are you know, my generation of my age, these are people who are like, okay.

21:18 I'm gonna go spend the next decade trying to fix education and it's gonna be a nightmare. It's gonna be super hard. Right. But they wanna get in and do it because The alternative is oh I'm gonna Fire and Like golf all day. And you know

21:33 The challenge and the excitement is what motivates people. You said something earlier about high standards and high support. I'm gonna talk about high standards for a second. All right, let's take a quick break and I got a question for you. When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they found out, they've already lost the deal to another company that did. HubSpot has AEO, which helps you show up in the moments when the right buyers are looking for a company like yours before the first click, before they fill in the form. That is the moment.

22:03 HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. I was at a Tony Robbins event a decade ago and somebody was You know, all these people come to Tony Robbins, some people who are at the edge of their craft that the top one percent performers, they're there to get that edge. And there's some people who are, you know, on the edge, you know, broken and and you know, they're looking for a fix. And he said uh if there's three words that would solve Every problem you have in this room.

22:30 It would be raise your standards. And he basically said, you know, your life will be what you tolerate. And he goes on and gives a bunch of examples. David Perell was telling us he uh he said that You know, Joe once sent me as a holiday gift. Two bottles of wine.

22:45 And it's the note on it said Here's two hundred point bottles of wine to remind you uh something like that, to remind you of what One hundred point looks like A a reminder about standards. Can you talk about

22:57 What that means.'Cause it's easy to say. It's really hard to do. You can't get higher than a hundred points, right, on a on a a wine ranking. And it's the same thing on a test. Like our kids alpha get hundreds on their tests. If you go to your average parent and say You're kicking it a hundred on the Texas star.

23:15 Ninety five plus percent of parents right. No, they can't. They can't do it. And You know, we have a we have a building with a few hundred people in Austin.

23:24 Who get more hundreds on the Texas R than a school district of a hundred thousand. And all you have to do is just show kids they can. Right. Now you also have to support them and show them how to do it. Right. But the back to the motivation of what what should the standards be? Right. And standards that should be are

23:42 should get a hundred you should know everything right you should be great at your craft right whatever it is And Who wants to be number two and all of those motivations, right? That drives Right, human potential, human nature. And when you're building a business or with a school, it's the same thing.

24:00 How do you instill that in your team, though? Is it just about being a sort of Steve Jobs asshole where you're nothing's ever good enough? No. It's it's it's the exact opposite. Most parents are one or the other. They are either high standards, low support. Just throw your kid in and figure it out. Good luck.

24:16 Right. And that's what's gonna cause grit is you're just gonna keep struggling. Okay, that's a that's a covel way to do it. Because they'll try a little for a little bit, but then they'll decide it's too hard and bail. Right.

24:28 And you get tons of disengagement. With that. You can do the other one. I'm high support, low standards. Which is oh, I don't ever want stress.

24:39 Right, but I'm gonna be there supporting the whole time and redo it. And that's terrible because you never learn. How to do hard challenges. You never learn resiliency and grit, right? You never get stuff confidence because you never tried something hard that you struggled through. And so you have to give the scaffolding and show people how they get there.

24:59 What does that look like uh within a company? Yeah. Let me give you the school one and then I'll give you the company one, which is I go to the seventh grade is my first year. I'm like all of you guys could get a hundred on a test star and they're like, Mr. Lemont, that's impossible. No way. Can't get a hundred. I'm like no. I'll give you a hundred dollar bill, hundred for a hundred. Right.

25:16 And it's still impossible to right. I I I I don't know how to do it. And I was like no no no. Here's the catch. Any gray buff. And they're like, you're gonna let me take a kindergarten test? And give me a hundred bucks for a Texas, you know, a hundred on a star. I'm like, Well, they start in the third grade. And so the kids like

25:32 Done. goes and takes a third grade tech, it's a hundred. They're like, Can I do fourth grade? And you're like, absolutely. Maybe fourth grade. And then they do fifth grade.

25:42 And they only get an eighty two. because they didn't know all that they hadn't done their school and not given the mastery. Right. And this is where you have to give scaffold date. Do you want the AI tutor to look the ones you miss and give you those lessons? That will get you to a hundred.

25:56 And the kid looks at it and is like, ah. That's like gonna take me a week of work. Sure, for another hundred bucks, I'll do it. And then they do fifth grade and then sixth grade. And by the time they get to seventh. What you've done is you've changed their mindset. When you're getting a hundred all the grade levels you're like, Well, obviously I could do fifth grade and I obviously can get it to sixth grade. It's just a matter of work, and then it's just a matter of work to do it in seventh grade.

26:19 And so you've taken a kid who thinks it's impossible and you give it him a scaffolding, right, to work through. Plus motivation, because motivation matters, right? And you give them scaffolding and motivation to do it. So if you're building a company, it's gonna be the same thing. Go build a billion dollar product. And that's hard. Right.

26:37 You're like, what is the scaffolding you're giving your team? Where you're making it where they understand, okay, I know how to get And that's the part when you think about high standards. If you as a company Give high standard with no support. They don't how to get there. They'll try for a while and then they'll disengage. Lots of companies are trying to move their companies to be AI first.

27:00 Right. We want to be an AI first company. And they're basically like here, here's Good out. Claude Code. Good luck. Right. And what is the scaffolding you're going to be able to do to get your

27:11 people to that standard. Are you able to sit there and role model This is what excellence is. This is what we mean by excellence. And then once you show them Here's how you if you don't have the skills how you can repeat it.

27:25 And so that's the part when you look about, you know, this is HR is am I getting the people in who have the skills to do it? And then can you I give them the training and the motivation model where they want to? You are very good at understanding how to get people to do what you want them to do. Did you g learn how to do this because you wanted to build an awesome company and you're like, I gotta figure out how to motivate people and how to make them productive, or were you always into human psychology and business was a good example of just making it work. So No, I was not good with human psychology and Uh I I did want to build the company and how I got there is Well one of the most important hires I ever made is this guy Jim Abel, who was my head at H R.

28:05 who would coach me through a lot of this. Where I I started very much as high standards, low support. He was the one who was like look. Here's the part, here's what you have to do if you want to bring your team with you. Here is the organization you have to build if you're gonna bring once I had, you know, two thousand employees, I'm like, Oh my God, you know.

28:24 What do I do? He was the key insight on that side. And then you know on the school side now there's this there's a uh professor, Dr. Jaeger. who's written a great book that every parent should read. Which is called

28:37 Ten to twenty five, the science of motivating. your kid from t age 10 to 25. He's the one who actually developed our our child development side and how our our adults, our guides work. Which is Mentor mindset, high standards, high support. And he's done a ton of studies that actually show literally with wording changes. Where you can take a a student and just say

28:57 Look, I'm about to give you Feedback. That's gonna be hard. But it's only because I know you can go crush this. Right. Because I know you can do it. Back to the growth the Tony Robbins part, right? The growth mindset. And it's I'm giving it to you because I know you can do it.

29:14 And so Here's what you'll need to go do, and you can then give them the coaching. Back to that book. Ten to twenty five is a Every parent should read it.

29:22 And it actually is our model where people say, How does Alpha work? It only has uh three hundred and five reviews on it's not that popular, it looks like. The books once you get to middle school at Alpha you have to read Uh ten to twenty five. There's another book, Self Driven Child. that we do not allow kindergarten moms to read. Because it talks about your kid being independent and a kindergarten is the last thing you want to worry about. But once you get to middle school, right, that's where kids

29:46 You have to, you know, they're moving independents. Uh and so those are the two books that uh drive our Our model. Talk about simplicity,'cause as you're explaining things, um

29:57 I feel like you're taking, you know, uh big ideas and you're compressing them in a in a great way that makes it Easy to sort of uh you know, grok. You're giving us good frameworks. I used to do big You know, twenty page strategy documents. Here's our big strategy documents. And you know, when Jim joined, he'd like read this document. He's like, Joe, this is useless.

30:16 Yeah, but like Mm. It's really not. It's like really good strategy. What are you talking about? Things are super awesome. Like what are you talking about? What's wrong with you? And literally I'm like and then he's like when you think you know, he's like Joe, look.

30:29 You have a couple thousand people now. Your strategy document has to come down to three lines, three words each. And I'm like not gonna make a strategy of this Complex tech company. Sloganed.

30:42 Like we're not gonna use slogan earring. to get there. I was I've literally been talking to one of my co founders. I was like, God, when we hired Jim, he was really smart, but why would he like try to dumb this gap? And I I remember thinking about that, right? And so he kept coaching me on it. I'm like, guys, these are like Stanford and Harvard graduates, they can read a twenty step strategy doc. And he's like no the next We're gonna have a company meeting and you're gonna get up and

31:06 You know. Slogan W what are your key Praise it. I just was like, I'm not gonna do it. So he interviewed everybody in the company literally back to intensity. He was

31:15 Right, met with every single person in the company and Then put on the board after It was it took him over a month. And

31:23 He's like, Joe, this is what your company thinks is. I'm like, wow, that's like the opposite of what we're doing. And he's like, Exactly. He's like the problem with the twenty page gadget document is every single employee takes the one sentence. that they can attach to And say see on aligned.

31:40 Right. Unaligned. And when they're really not and then that's you just lose, right, you diffused all your focus. And so uh he tried to reverse engineer just three lines of three words each. I was like

31:52 Okay, they're definitely not that, but here, I'll go now I I I understood and then You know, we created it. And that now for everything we do, right? So so what is it for Alpha? What are your three lines? So our three lines for Alpha are for every student, right? Every parent understands. We make three commitments. To every kid.

32:10 The first is you will love school. We used to just take a survey, do you love school? But ninety six percent. And so it's too easy. So we added one eighteen months ago where we say, Would you rather go to school or go on vacation? And four weeks ago when we surveyed all our kids.

32:25 Forty six percent of our students said I would rather go to school than go on vacation. Right. Great high standard, high bar are you delivering love of school. The second is You will learn.

32:37 twice as much in two hours a day as if you sat in class for six and did homework. So that's our learning engine does you learn ten times faster. And so we don't make you do a whole day and learn ten times as much. We're like, no, we're gonna shrink it down. You'll learn twice as much. So no matter where you start on a percentile level, we'll get you to top one percent if you're in the system long enough. Right. If you give me time, twice as fast, I get to go beat the top. I can get a hundred on the Texas stars and and catch up. Even if I start in the bottom twenty five. Right, you can move up. Then the third is

33:09 We use the rest of the day to teach all the valuable life skills. Okay. Kids are gonna need to thrive in this new world. But you know, leadership and teamwork, entrepreneurship and financial literacy, storytelling and public speaking.

33:24 relationship building, socialization, grit and hard work. And so that those are the the skills, but those are the three things. So if you're coming to Alpha Why are you coming, right? It's Putting together a very simple clear product. Message.

33:39 That everybody understands. And the wording, the part that Jim was really great about when you do this, when he's like, it's not sloganeering. Which is if you can't say the opposite of it. Right. Then it's not

33:53 On the list. Like so when we were doing the core values of trilogy in the nineties. I was like, Well, we obviously have to have integrity on the list. And he's like, Joe, was there ever a company in the world who's like, I'm gonna be the non-integrity company? He's like, those are wasted words. Those are nonsense words because they mean nothing.

34:12 She's like, I want Edge. Right. They have to have edge. And so like school is a great one. There's lots of people who don't think

34:21 Kids should love school. Like well, where are they gonna learn grit and all these things that love school is Anthesis. I remember when I put my kids into Alpha ten years ago. McKinsey and Brian were actually the ones who started it. And I was like trying.

34:34 What is the thing I don't understand about education? You know that And he's like, Well first. Kids must love school. I'm like, Yeah, it's sort of spit.

34:42 You know, I didn't like school and you just sort of suck it up. And this is part of the game. And he's like, You're totally wrong. And that is completely true. Right. And the number one question I ask ask of every head of school now is

34:59 Are you willing to rebuild your school so kids love it more than vacation? And if the answer is no, I will not let you use the software. Or Because you're it's not gonna work. Can I ask you a question that sounds really stupid, but I think you'll have a really good answer.

35:15 Why does a kid need to learn two times faster? It's not stupid, I get it a lot. Everybody's like, Why? Two X. There's a couple different dimensions, so let's talk about it. The first is You know, kids spend six hours a day plus homework today.

35:27 Right. They spend six hours a day plus homework on school. And so the answer is if I can build a product, a technology. That lets kids learn in half I Shouldn't we do that?

35:40 To the point of the name of our product. is time back. Which is We want to give kids their time back. right now we suck up twelve years of kids lives

35:52 Sitting in class and doing homework. And in the old world for a you know, for a hundred years, there was no other alternative. Right. And Now because of learning science and and generative AI, you can literally build an engine that teaches kids ten times faster. So you're like, well, okay, let's do it.

36:10 Why wouldn't we? And you know, back to obvious simplicity. Product positioning. There's a question of whether it works, but once you believe it works, right, and you get the results that show it works. Who wants to have their kid be in the six hour learning instead of the two hour learning?

36:26 Because then your kid can do other stuff. Right, the rest of the day. How big is this gonna be? Because I'm I'm completely alpha pilled, not from this.

36:35 conversation but my kids are both in elementary. I volunteer in their schools maybe once or twice a month. It's a great place, but it's very much like A bundle of daycare A little bit of education, a lot of learning social stuff, that's great. But in terms of just like the learning and the life skills, I don't think It's anywhere near what's possible.

36:53 And when I heard about Alpha And specifically this uh the five K story, it blew me away. I I was supposed to like the AI part. And instead I love the part where it was like, Cool, after they do the two hours, they had this thing where it's like, I don't know, second graders or something. It's like who here thinks they can run a five K? Nobody raises their hand. So they don't believe themselves they could do it.

37:10 Hey parents, who thinks that if if their kid had to run a five K right now they could like Dude, they're whatever, first grade or second grade, whatever it was. And um nobody raises their hand. And over the course of whatever some amount of time, month or two, whatever it was. They were like, Well, great, can we walk?

37:25 A quarter of it right now? And then they walked a quarter. And then they were like, Yeah, that was could we walk half? Can we jog a quarter? And they basically did what anybody would do, and they sort of trained their way up and the kids all did it and they they were able to do it. I just thought Man, that's a kind of an incredible experience. I want my kids to have that type of like growth and and and opportunity. So I think this is gonna be big, but you think about this all the time and you've already built

37:49 Companies that You know, or multi billion dollar company. So how big is Alpha School gonna be? Eight five percent of alpha parents say I saw my kid do something In the last ten weeks that I thought was impossible for their age. This is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars a year in revenue. Because around this point, that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company.

38:12 And you realize two things. One, you've done something great. But you're still a long way from your final destination. And two, you look around and you realize I am all alone. I've outrun my peers.

38:23 Which means you're now making ten million dollar decisions alone by yourself. And that is when mediocrity can creep in. My company Hampton, we solved this problem by giving a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs. who are gonna hold you accountable Call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way. Because the fact is is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there.

38:46 And they're hard to find. And if you can find them It's hard to have this explicit time, this explicit place where you sit down, where the rules are clear that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors. The biggest risk is not failing. You have a company and it's working. You're gonna be fine. But the biggest risk is waking up ten years from now and saying, Shit.

39:06 I barely grew in business and in life. And for people like you who are ambitious, wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid. We have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members and I know this stuff actually works. Whether you work with Hampton or you get your own group on your own. But having a group like this, a group of people who you meet with in real life once a month It can change your life. It changed mine and I know it will change yours. So check it out.

39:31 joinhampton dot com We as parents, because of the old system and learning 2X or 10 times or learning these lifestyle, running five K's, climbing 40 foot rock walls, launching businesses, you know. Broadway musicals. Do

39:47 is much lower than what their capability is. Right. The greatest untapped resource on on planet Earth is human potential. And we now have the first chance, right, in a hundred years. To re envision it. And what we're showing at Alpha is these kids can do ten times more than we expect. I believe

40:03 How big this is gonna get is you know, my view is I'm twenty years and get this to a billion kids. Right. And it is gonna utterly transform education, you know, for everybody. That when you think about AI is gonna transform the world. Right. There is nothing.

40:19 that is going to have there's no part of the world that AI is gonna have a bigger impact. than education. It is the unmitigated win. Right. This is the best time in history to be a five year old. Because the twelve years ahead of you are gonna be great.

40:33 And so There's lots of work to do. Right, to do that. But I believe that once you realize what's possible and why we get all the what we're showing with Alpha, once you show this is possible, there isn't a parent. Who doesn't say I don't want this for my kid.

40:49 You were silent for the last twenty years. But you've been quietly building that. Why weren't you talking then? And you're talking now, is it just because you need to influence parents to Give this a shot. So there's two parts. One is

41:02 Yeah. Two thousand five's also. the year I got married, which was the last time I talked. And so You know, and building the family and being in the limelight's harder. Right, it's easier if you're just quiet. And second, it didn't help the business. So in the nineties, it really helped the business.

41:16 didn't help the business after two thousand five. And then now for this, it absolutely does, right? The biggest impediment to change in education. Is the parent. Right, because all we know, right, we're fish in the water. All we know is the education system we went through and our parents and our grandparents. And so there's just massive resistance to change.

41:37 Right. There's disbelief, right? Our marketing department. You know, their slogan is We educate the parents. Right, because nobody believes this. Like you you listen to one of my podcasts, the number one feedback is Well, I don't believe kids can learn 10 times faster. I don't believe these kids really love school more than vacation. Right. And so

41:56 back to being out there and and and uh Getting the message out I I consider it critical in Education historically hasn't had that. To do a billion students. You need like

42:08 Ten million alpha schools or something? How how are you gonna do that? I saw you doing the math, Sean. Right when you said that, I saw him type it. I knew exactly what he was doing on his calculator. Yeah. So th I mean, if there's a hundred thousand schools in the US, um, you know, and back to a billion, now there's gonna be different ways to get there. One is just physical schools, right? And so I am learning how to scale physical schools, right? This is gonna be You know, across the nation.

42:32 Just to give you scale if you want on the business side of this. You know, private school market in the US is about a hundred billion dollars. So it's a huge market where even if I don't get to public school, we will. But even if I don't get to public school I have a hundred billion dollar market that gives me a great B check. That's why Alpha Start, it's why we're highing private school is because it's you Right, the anchor, right, in the credibility and the revenue.

42:55 Right. That then funds everything else. It's your Tesla Roadster. Yeah. Yeah. Tesla Roadster is a great one. So there there's that hundred billion dollar market and that's US K twelve. How long does that take to make a profit? And are are you just using your money? Yeah. So I put in a billion dollars for my my software company as the the first payment.

43:12 But back to this, getting to a billion kids is gonna take tens of billions of dollars. So Fixing education's a multi trillion dollar industry, right? It's the second largest industry besides healthcare. Globally. And there's nothing there, right? It's there's no there's no private market players really. And so

43:29 You know, there is definitely the opportunity to build SpaceX for education. And so and the capital requirements are high. You want all these campuses. Now we're busy. innovating on the business model to show that you can build a profitable biz a business. So that

43:46 Capitalism can provide the capital needed to to scale education. Right. Historically everything in education's been nonprofit. And the problem with non profits is nonprofits are non scalable. Which is

43:58 The better your product. The faster your donations go away. Right. There's plenty of really good charter schools. Who have three thousand person wait lists. And if they pass their head of their school, why don't you open another one? And they're like, I'm waiting on a forty million dollar donation, you know, to build a new campus.

44:16 I don't have that problem because I have a thousand families in New York City at the info session. Right, who as soon as I want capital to build a new campus. Right. Every I I'm funding it right now, but everybody's gonna be happy to to give me capital to To build the business.

44:31 Second. You know, and and thinking about Alpha. Alpha's the high end private pool you should think. Stanford of K through twelve there'll be uh Couple hundred locations. Thousand kid, you know, K twelve.

44:42 Um Locations. five but it's five percent of the market. You know. We have other physical schools around Austin that we're incubating to to figure out where we get product market fit.

44:54 We have a gift school. They're trying to find the hundred thousand smartest kids who Yeah. When you say what would make you love school. They're like more academics. Right. One in twenty kids when you ask them that is like more academics. They want a third power hour in the app. They want math Olympiad, right? They want all that.

45:10 We have a sports academy. Right. This is like forty percent of the market, maybe fifty percent of the market. Which is when you say, What would you love to do kids who like sports? So like Texas Sports Academy, you know, our baseball team just won national championship, B I M G, if you know, right? Our basketball team is number one. You know, our academics are ten times better than OGs.

45:31 uh we're rolling out a a set of other sport that you'll see for for um August, where these teams will be the best in the country. But also the best academics. Sort of, you know. Alpha premier academics, but also sports. And so we're working on you know

45:46 Uh, I don't know if you've heard of founders school yet. that we're building for high school. And so we're building all these different school types, but those are you should think physical schools. And and my view of the market is in twenty years, AI is going to change the world in a lot of ways, but in twenty years Parents are gonna drop their kids off at a building. Ninety percent of parents. You have homeschoolers and stuff, but it's a niche. Ninety percent of parents are gonna drop their kids off at a building, and in that building are other kids and adults. Right. That's one of the miss you know, there's rope butt terminator stuff. It's not.

46:16 Right. Kids need adults to develop them, right? And now if we do our job right, what occurs during six hours is totally different. Right. We totally transform it in the last hundred years. But that's the market. And so we have to bring the physical school. Now how do I get to a billion kids, you know, that it's gonna take uh twenty years is not enough to

46:36 So we're working on other products. One, just the time back software itself, where if I can go get people Who wanna build schools or transform their schools and they realize this isn't ed tech. Right, and tech failed. Um, the second is we're doing stuff outside of school.

46:53 So to give you give you one one example. We have Some of the world's best video game developers, right, building And they're spending two years building a video game. On this these concepts.

47:05 Right. And It will be free to learn, you know, think free to play, free to learn. for five hundred million kids and it'll start shipping later this year. Why?

47:15 Like why why do this? Like you you're incredibly wealthy. And then also like you're You're kind of a shark, not in a bad way. You're a tycoon. You're a titan of industry. You're like a Uh T take over the world type of guy. Why school? This is a great question. Which is, you know, before I

47:32 Did this and put my Billy Dollars in. I talked to a dozen billionaires at all fans. Over at all. Uh spent over a billion dollars on education. And to a person, every s single person said don't do it.

47:44 And they're like, it's the lowest ROI you can get any ph philanthropic thing. It doesn't affect it. There's just no You just can't impact it. Right. It's it's just this impossible problem. And Like every

47:55 dumb entrepreneur or good entrepreneur, right? I'm like I'll be different. You know. And For me It was one where

48:03 You know the I just had this experience, which was you know, I'm back to the life story. So I was I was doing the AI, having my software company, right. Big, we're making tons of money. Pis of cash flow, right? Plenty of money.

48:16 But Twelve years ago in Austin. McKinsey and Brian started the school alpha. And McKinsey's like, come on over to Alpha and I'm like, I'm not going to your weird school. That is a weird janky school. And you know, it took her two years to convince me. And the the only way she did

48:31 Was At the uh you were in May. At the end of May, St. Gabriel gets out. And Alpha was still in session, she can ask my two daughters to spend a week. You know, before they went to Summer King. And they went and spent a week and they came home after the week and they're like, Dad, I don't want to go to summer camp.

48:44 We wanna go back to Alpha. And that was my insight. That was ten years ago. And then I sat and just talked to McKinsey. you know, while our kids I'm like, this is great for Austin, great for our families. Too bad it doesn't scale. The stuff just doesn't scale. And then

48:58 Four years ago when Jen AI came out. I was like. Neural nets right from my high school. They're finally here. And I was like this will enable alpha to scale to a billion kids. Because back to fixing education, first off, you need tons of capital.

49:13 You need somebody who can sit and say, I need a billion dollars on the most well funded principle in history. Right. Nov is gonna fund ed tech and all the ed tech stuff's failed. Right. It's never worked. Right. Ever all the billionaires are like done with the philanthropy on it. And so I sort of just woke up and I'm like, I actually do have the skills. Right. I think.

49:32 To go try this. And now I can tell you four years later, I'm four years into it. It was the best decision ever. Like My job in today is so much better than my trilogy job. Like not even close. I went four years ago, I went to my team. I'm like, for twenty five years, you guys have been telling me how much better you are than me, and you know, guys are great. I'm like so

49:53 Good luck. Is the company better now? Now that you have a new CEO at the well two part. Well, yeah, it's actually I went and said, Guys, and I'm to be your worst shareholder you've ever thought about. Which is Yeah, I'm like I'm just gonna pull every dividend that I can out. because I need to fund education.

50:10 So You're an acquisition company and I have to turn you from being capital intense, i.e. buying companies and turning around, to being capital light. But somehow still making all those acquisitions work. 'cause I'm gonna be sucking all the capital for education. And

50:25 On the face of it, everybody's like, Okay, that seems like an impossible problem. The team actually has done a Fabulous job, better than I had ever thought of. of how to do B. Super capital efficient. The downturn in SaaS really helps them.

50:39 Because there's lots of companies now, if you want to just know their business, what's happened. is we're considered one of the best operators of fast, right? We know how to generate cash flow out of businesses better than anybody. And so they're bowing to all The SaaS companies that have died that are now owned by the private credit, right? The Blackstones and the Black Rocks or

51:00 Yeah. where you're hearing about, you know, why the market cap in SaaS is down ninety percent. And they go to'em and they say, look, you have two choices. You either can put another hundred, two hundred million. Into this. Faest company. They've gone bankrupt.

51:16 And reboot it. Or you can just sell it to us for a dollar. And we'll split the cash flow. And You know, four years ago when they did this pitch, everybody's like, Yeah, I'm not doing that'cause I'm gonna give another hundred million dollars to this big private equity firms. They have a lot of companies in their portfolios that they're just turning over to the credit guards.

51:35 And Those guys built four years ago had faith and hope. you know, the last twelve months have completely changed. They're like, Oh my God, AI is here. Guys aren't gonna last at all. The last thing I wanna do is write a big check and hope they can reboot for AI. And it like looks like just getting the cash flow is the best thing we can do. And so now I haven't seen the last pipeline last round, but they saw twenty billion dollars of pipeline of companies that were they were looking at about splitting the cash flows um buying for a dollar. So they did a great job.

52:06 How did you get into buying companies in the first place? So you you start trilogy, you're an entrepreneur, you got a product, you're selling it, you're doing that game. Wha why did you s what what triggered you to start saying, Let's go acquire other companies? Uh in what was the moment? Two parts after the dot com meltdown. Um Fifty percent of our cast.

52:22 Customers went out of business and you know, in two thousand. In the dot com turn down. There were two parts that happened. The The configuration market, original market.

52:32 We had tapped out. Right. We dominated it was full. And Then during the downturn we saw that we're just better operators than the other people. We were able to go through it make profit. All these other

52:45 Software companies were not making that transition. They were dying. Right. And Uh, they were available for a dollar, right? You could buy all these companies for nothing. So we just we we just literally was like, Okay, well let's buy a couple and see if we can turn them around and did and we made tons of money. I'm like, Oh, okay, let's just do this. So we bought hundreds of companies since then.

53:05 But it was nothing the strategy was just like, Oh wow, the companies are really cheap one about some. I I heard that you studied Warren Buffett intensely. My journey on this is I had been investing since you know high school and at Stamford. Like I was in the fund and we ran part of the Stanford endowment. You know, and I came out of it during the nineties and the boob. I'm all like, Oh, I'm so great. I remember in ninety eight, like reading an interview with Warren Buffett. I remember we thinking, man, that guy's an idiot.

53:31 Then after two thousand one Oh. Maybe I'm the idea. Maybe I don't know what I'm doing, right? And my returns weren't good, right? Really good on the way up, but after the bus. Oh my y life today were terrible.

53:45 And so I was like, I should probably listen to it. And so I literally just read everything. So there was not Book. or anything back to my standard of be an expert.

53:55 Being an expert, if you're gonna be an entrepreneur, you have to be the best world in whatever your field is. And so My standard w well. Here's what I need to do. I need to know everything about Warren Buffett so that if I'm watching him being interviewed.

54:10 I can pause it. And answer the question the way he would. Because I know what he thinks. Right. I'm so into the way he thinks. And so I literally that's what I do is We do the same thing with our alpha high students where we're like being expert is one of our our our pillars.

54:25 And then when you say something That I didn't You know, where I'm like, Oh, I'm surprised. Right, I would then have to go back and research and figure out why I didn't understand it. I love talking to people like you who like we have Dharmas Shah, he's the uh founder of HubSpot, and he's like

54:41 I'm just'cause and he has got the story where he's like, I'm the best ping pong player there is. Because like one time someone wanted to play ping pong with him and he got beat and he's like, Oh, I want to be the best because he's competitive. Well, some people it's a board game where they just love winning the board game. What's what's your thing? If I'm gonna do it is just why why not be the best? It's just well, why would you do the other? Right, is your other alternative. Well, what about you though? This is actually interesting. Are you using Alf like what what learning techniques have you learned all along the way that you yourself are using to learn? Sure. So our our framework about how to be an expert is, you know, you you dive in. Right. Our students do the same thing. I do the same thing our students do, which is You spend one hour a day

55:20 Reading And then summarizing. Right, their work. So we've created a a structure called a brain lift. Which is we think a lot about is what is the role of humans and what is the role of AI. you know, going forward. Like if you're a kid mom, you're like, are you preparing my kid for the AI, you know, AI age coming.

55:40 We think a lot about that, right? How what is the role that humans are gonna play as AIs keep getting smarter? And So we have a concept in uh in learning science, there's this concept of depth of knowledge. Right, which is sort of the hierarchy of of of knowledge, which is D O K one.

55:56 Is Uh fact. Right, do you know facts. D OK two is Can you summarize them? Do you have summaries of the facts. DOK three is

56:05 If you look at all those facts and summaries, can you have insights? And then D OK four is really Creating new knowledge. Right. Oh, I have insights that no one else has because of this. And

56:17 LLMs. are very good at helping you do D OK one, two, and three. Right, and and reasoning around that. And then the part that the humans still do really well. Is Do you K four.

56:29 Creating new knowledge. And so what we do every day Is we spend the time reading the current experts. That are helping fill your D O K one and D OK two. Right in this brain left.

56:42 And then you are having D O K three. I'm having insights on it. Kids can learn ten times faster. He's an insult. Right. Based on the learning science facts, right. You can you can just derive that.

56:55 D-OK four. is insights that are so counter So what You know, what it what do you think that no one else believes? So this would be the equivalent of if I ask an LLM, help me design a school.

57:07 It's gonna put a teacher in front of a classroom. And if I say Wait. I want to design school that doesn't have teachers. doing academic teaching.

57:18 The LLMs are gonna reject it and say that's unethical. And so AI is not able to help me. If I load the brain lift basically as context on top of the LLM where it has the D O K one facts, the D O K two summaries, the D O K three instance, all on research papers, all this stuff, if they wait. Read all this.

57:38 Take this into context. Now design help me design a school. It's like oh Yeah, actually based on all this, I totally see how alpha can work. And then it actually can help me.

57:49 Right, that is the skill we think. is critical. We start teaching in high school. But is it summarized in you you spend an hour you or you personally are spending an hour a day, and then you're literally just summarizing what you're saying, and then do you write out like here's my insights and my new ideas based off of what I've just read for this last hour? Yeah, I will load I'll change my brain lift. So for me how I actually Why is it? Is

58:11 I basically have a Twitter of a custom timeline that authors right or experts like on green science. Right. I'm gonna go read it and see if there's anything new in there. Or I'm gonna summarize that article and put it in the brain lift. And then if it causes me to have new insights, I'm gonna you know, I try to have one D O K three insight.

58:30 You know. A day. As my standard. Doesn't happen all the time, but that's what I'm trying for. you know, D O K four are ones are these are the big ones.

58:39 Right. And then you're you you have that knowledge. And if you work that way, right, of having expertise. Right. Any field that you want to be an expert in. Right. And AIs help you do this, you know. If my you know, back in the nineties, I did the same thing, which is I would sit in Stanford's math CS library. You know, in nineteen eighty nine, you know, when I'm dropping out. And I would read every paper written about configurators.

59:04 Right, of how they tried, why they'd fail. You know, back then it took forever you have to send, you know, to the you have to send to Germany, Dimler had really good configuration stuff, right? And they'd have to send you the paper over, you know, and you'd get it a week later. Now literally on an L L M, right? You can Dude, how are we gonna how are we gonna convince people to buy shit they don't need or do stuff that they shouldn't do if everyone's just super baby and really smart.

59:30 Like there's like what's what's the world look like when everyone's skinnier? What's the world look like when everyone has access to AI? What's the world look like when a billion people are smarter than they are now by a significant amount. I know there's this dystopian view that AI is gonna Cause everybody to be dumb. And if we do it the wrong way, just to be clear, if you take chop chap off on unmanaged Chromebook and deploy them to kids. in K through twelve, those are not learning. chat bots are cheap bots. It's terrible. I understand why people want to ban AI and And do all that stuff.

1:00:03 Now, there's also a good way to do it. There's in our way, you know, a very different way. And I believe we should be teaching all the kids good way because they can learn ten times faster. We have a student who's gonna be published in nature. She will be the first. High school student as a lead researcher published in Nature.

1:00:20 And that used to be you had to have a H D from State Food. Right. And we are pulling that capability down to a seventeen year old girl. And there's 10 people at Alpha right behind her who are like, oh, she can do it, I can do it. And That concept of like unlocking human potential.

1:00:37 We haven't even you know, scratch the surface of what they what you can do. You know, if you talk to our sports academy, you know, as an example because of the two hours a day in the morning and the you know, you get skills training in afternoon. You know, our our our

1:00:51 We're gonna be in every field. We're gonna be the number one team in the country. Within a year. of deciding that's gonna be our support.

1:01:02 Wait, but how are you gonna do that with sports? How are you gonna make someone seven feet tall? You know what I mean? Like to be good at basketball. You're you're on on all things, right? There's human limitations, right? I can't Even with my learned ten ten there's knowledge there's also IQ, right? And I can't be a nuclear physicist. I just don't have the cycles, right? Actually in cognitive load theory, I don't have the working memory, right? As you get older, you get slower. Like my brain, my neurons fire at about half the speed of my daughter my eighteen year old daughter.

1:01:33 Now the difference is I have a knowledge graph. Right in my brain that I uploaded, you know, the last, you know, fifty plus years. That allows me to take shortcuts because I know the answer. I don't have to think through. So in a list of ten things. She has to go through each one.

1:01:49 I can read the 10 things and be like, oh, seven's the answer. So I can still get to it, but you have to load knowledge into your brain, even as your brain slows down, as you get older, or even if you don't have the fastest brain to start with. So I can't make people seven feet tall, they're not gonna win, you know, the NBA. But whatever the boundary of your human potential is We can get you there. Got it. Right. We can get you to the boundary. And what the surprising part is.

1:02:13 Your expectation of what your boundary is or what your kid's boundary is. You're wrong. That's where when you talk about the excitement, the energy, and why I get up every day to do this, is I literally am surrounded by kids who are just doing magical stuff. And You we have to get it out to everybody, right? There's nothing more important to society than raising the next generation.

1:02:35 Every parent, right? That's your job. Every society. That's the most important job. There is nothing more important. We haven't had an answer for a hundred years where we did change it. We now do. And it needs not just to be me. Right. I have to go get all the best people in the world to work on this problem because it's more important than all the other ones. I can see why you out recruited Bill Gates.

1:02:59 I'm in. Where do I sign? Well, come on and boy. I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna back to your audience. Right? Of people who want to start businesses. I haven't done it yet. 'Cause I'm still working on exactly the business model and the go to markets to prove it. But I'm gonna show this is the single best market if you're an entrepreneur to enter.

1:03:21 It's A multi trillion dollar market with no competitors. Dude, is the Catholic church gonna be like is it gonna get like the Pope knocking on your door and like, Hey Joe, what are you doing? They know we are working back to this. Back to school. So there are Catholic schools that I'm working with. Or like how do we adopt to our learning?'Cause

1:03:39 It's it's just so obvious that no matter what you want, you know, the Catholic Church has a different afternoon they want. Right. Everybody has their afternoon they want. But everybody gets, okay, well, why do we're wasting the kids' time in class? Let's let's get that two hour learning thing working so that we can then build the afternoon that we think our kids will thrive in. Sean, is your is your cup full or what? Oh my gosh. Yeah, this is amazing.

1:04:05 Uh I loved it. I love the stories, I love the insights, I love what you're doing. Uh, we're big fans. We've been talking about Alpha for a while, so it's fun to have you here. Thanks for coming on. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. You're the man. We appreciate you. That's it. That's the pod.

1:04:20 I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be But I want to I'm putting my all in it like my days off. On the road, let's travel, never look at it. Hey, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about a podcast that you could check out. It is called The Science of Scaling by Mark Roberts. He was the founding CRO of HubSpot, and he's a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School. The guy's smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like Clavio and Vanta and OpenAI. And he's asking about their strategies, their tactics, and how they're growing their companies as you know, head of sales or chief revenue officer. If you're looking to scale a company up, if you're a CRO or a head of sales that's looking to level up in your career, I think a podcast like this could be great for you. Listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast.

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