Joe Liemandt  - Building Alpha School, and The Future of Education - [Invest Like the Best, EP.439]

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1:12 Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolosis.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Some.

1:48 This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My guest today is Joe Lamont. Joe is the principal at Alpa School and the founder of Trilogy Software and ESW Capital.

2:13 He became the youngest member of the force four hundred in the nineteen nineties before vanishing from public view for two decades. Only to emerge with a one billion dollar bet that he can make kids learn ten times faster using AI. Joe has built an AI tutoring system so effective that students at his alpha school literally beg not to take summer breaks. Achieving two times learning outcomes in just two hours with standardized test results that compete with the very best schools in the world. We dive deep into why this could be the most valuable product he's ever built.

2:42 His contrarian thesis that traditional SAS is facing AI driven obsolescence. And how his experience buying a hundred plus software companies prepared him for this moonshot. In a trillion dollar market that hasn't been innovated on in two hundred years. For investors, this is a masterclass in deploying patient capital to rebuild broken systems from first principles. With insights on everything from regulatory motes to intersection of AI and human psychology.

3:05 I try to be the excited skeptic here. I push hard on the technology readiness, parental adoption hurls. And whether this audacious vision can actually scale to a billion kids. In a Colossus profile released last week, our editor in chief Jeremy Stern reported for the first time Joe as the product guy behind Alpha School in a can't miss piece of writing. It's one of my favorite things that I've read in a very long time, and you can find a link to it in the show notes.

3:30 I'll leave you with one of my favorite ideas of Joe. He's convinced that across major disciplines a new instrument often unlocks tremendous Progress. Whether that be the microscope, the telescope, or the analytical balance. He's convinced that generative AI is that instrument for learning science, and that as a result, we will be able to deploy this incredible knowledge.

3:51 To make our kids and ourselves learn faster and better. than ever before. Please enjoy this great conversation with Joe Lamont. Alright, Joe, so This is gonna be so much fun. I have learned so much from you about what you're building, and I'm extremely excited to share it with everybody else.

4:10 And I view my role today as the excited skeptic. Which I feel like is the role of a lot of the parents. Considering alpha school for their kids. And so I want to go into deep detail about every aspect of what you and McKenzie have built. But since most people actually don't yet know what Alpha School is.

4:25 I think you have to start the conversation by just explaining what it is and why the two of you are building it together. Alpha. school. It's a high end private school. It's expanding. Across the country. At its core is redefining what

4:38 school can be for kids. And what makes A great school. I'm a product guy. looking at it from product aspect.

4:46 How can you rebuild school and make it awesome? And so the core of it, we look at five things of like how do you build a great school? And the first is kids must love school. That's just a crazy thought. That most people do not believe you.

5:00 And our standard is We want to build it so the kids want to go to school instead of going on vacation. A highlight. Is I've been principal now for three years. McKinsey started it ten years ago.

5:11 I came on three years ago. But But Two months ago our high school kids sent us an out and they said, Hey.

5:17 Can we now take some of a break'cause we're loving what we're doing so much. We want to continue through it. And so it's sort of a peak. Sounds possible, but I'll get it. Right. I was one of those kids who definitely did not like school. I dropped out of college and then High school I got in trouble'cause I skip school all the time. And so this is a different world for me. Second part of it is just on learning.

5:36 Kids need to learn ten times faster. And so we built an engine, learning engine. All the talk about AI and learning science. Where kids can learn ten times faster. in our school

5:45 Kids go in, spend two hours a day with the AI tutor. With screen time and all the things around that. We obviously consider it very good screen time. And they learn ten times faster. So our academic performance is the top of

5:59 Any school in the country. And we do it in dramatically less time. And then the key to that is once you Can crush your academics in two hours a day. The natural follow on question is

6:11 Well, what do you do the rest of the day? 'Cause I can tell you as principal, the one thing parents don't want you to do is send'em home. After two hours. What do you do for the four hours? And so that's where we talk about life skills. And this is You know, and reimagining what are all the things that as a parent

6:27 We want beyond pure academics. Leadership teamwork. Entrepreneurship, financial literacy. relationship building, socialization, hard work grit. Storytelling, public speaking, all of those kind of things.

6:39 We do all of that in the the rest of the day, and those are big project based workshops that are super fun for the kids and team based. Not screen time. The first thing you ever said to me was something like Educating kids is the single most important thing we do as a society.

6:56 And it hasn't changed in Two hundred years. And let me just dig into that a little bit more as to how it began and why it hasn't changed because it's been the same way for so long. that radical approaches like this one, we're open to radical approaches in everything in the world, like the pace of technology. Everyone's excited about the pace of technology change. But education's one place that I think parents, myself included.

7:16 Are scared because it feels like the ultimate risk to put your kid in something that's different. So I want to talk about this like two hundred year legacy. Like why is it like it is and why it hasn't changed. And to that point you make, every parent wants to educate the kid the way they were. I didn't start the school. McKinsey started the school ten years ago. I went to Catholic. My kids are in Catholic school. She starts alpha. It took her two years of saying, come to my school.

7:39 And I'm like Dude, no offense, McKinsey, I'm not sending my kid to your weird janky school. Like it's weird. It's different. I didn't want to do it. And that's the normal parent reaction to all of this. And the reason is'cause it's all we know. So back to the two hundred years is

7:53 There were if you go Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great. The elite had tutors, but fundamentally Two hundred years ago when we decided everybody needed education globally. We created the industrialized model.

8:07 And the way to do it is put a teacher in front of a classroom and whatever the class size is, twenty, thirty. That is actually globally. It doesn't matter where you are in the world. You can be in the poor school district. You know, in India and there's a teacher in front of a classroom building's not that nice.

8:22 Or you could Be down the street here. Seventy five thousand dollar private school and it's a teacher in front of a classroom in a very nice Very nice building. And that is how teaching's been done.

8:33 Now What happened is forty years ago. The schools of education. Stanford was one of the leading ones, lots of others. took a lead and said, How do kids learn and develop? And there's actually a thing called learning science.

8:46 The science of how children develop. And they started writing papers forty years ago that were basically The teacher in front of the classroom is the worst way to teach kids. And there's all these ways where kids can learn two, five, ten times faster. And so it's not scalable, so you can't do anything about it. One of the first papers, there's Bloom's Two Sigma is a seminal paper.

9:04 And they talk in the paper. Well, if everybody had an individualized tutor It'd be great. Obviously not feasible. There's a lot of other things too mastery based learning, space repetition, all these other concepts. We can go into those, but Fundamentally, it just hasn't been possible.

9:19 To do it, and that's sort of I guess where How I came into the Alpha story, which was Short version of my background was I was in old school AI, not the new neural net setup. In the eighties actually wrote a paper in high school on AI. And one of my paragraphs was like neural nets, but they're decades away.

9:36 Back then it was all expert systems and ontologies. Then I went to Stanford. And I was actually in a class with Ed Feigenbaum, Professor Feigenbaum, who was the Father of expert systems and He's talking about how these things are worth millions of dollars if you ever get'em to work and

9:50 My classmates and I, couple of us, we dropped out. And start a trilogy. And our claim to fame in the ninety's was We were the first AI product to sell a billion dollars. But old school.

10:02 Old school so. I was doing trilogy. Private software company. But then three years ago when Gen AI came out. It was like oh neural nets are here. Five later it's decades here and my kids

10:14 We're at Alpha'cause ten years ago. I didn't talk about it. I eventually did Send him to Alpha. Which is a great story, how they got there. But it wasn't scalable, just like all other educational things. I was like, McKinsey, you have a great school here, and it's great for my kids and your kids and all kids go to Alpha. But this can't scale.

10:29 Three years ago with Gen AI, I was like ah. This is finally the technology that is going to allow education to scale. And we can take all this awesomeness where kids can learn two, five, ten times better. Faster and get it out to a billion kids. So that's when I became principal because I was like, Okay, McKinsey, we can totally make this a super scalable thing, but I'm a product guy. I gotta be in it. I gotta see what happens when Fifth graders get in a fight and when parents yell at you and all of those things.

10:56 So if we think about the school as there's lots of components, but I want to spend a chunk of time on just the two hours of learning, whether that should be one hour or three hours. And then the the afternoon session, the sort of life skills, the motivation, everything else. Maybe starting with the chapters that the two hour learning has gone through. originally it's always been computer based try to make it personalized.

11:19 Using external tools like IXL and others that people may know about. But then layering in critically like a feedback mechanism, which I know for you is, you know, incredibly important in anything that you build, the tight feedback and iteration matters a lot. So maybe talk us through the various iterations of this software itself. Literally what it is and what it does, what it feels like to use and how that's changed. Con Academy is

11:41 Getting that out. You can deliver lessons. Online. There's various apps.

11:49 Or you can just learn on YouTube. And actually home schoolers know this a lot is Most home schoolers only spend a couple hours a day. With apps. Trying to teach.

11:57 The evolution very much was using various apps. figure out okay, here's ten years ago. Dream Box was one of the the leading apps back then. There's using apps in order to have kids learn. Now the evolution has been

12:12 How do you make the apps better? How do you get better? educational outcomes and less time. So There's little revisionist history since I've I've only been here the three years. But fundamentally the design goal that our team uses is

12:26 When we put in new software or new anything, does it increase their academic knowledge? Or reduce the time. That it takes to learn it. How do I get knowledge into a kid's head? And not crammed where they're gonna forget it, where

12:40 It truly is. Back to learning science can change the scheme of their brain. It's gonna change it and it's gonna be there forever. And how do I do that and create thinking? and create knowledge acquisition.

12:52 And how do I do that in the most efficient way possible? And there's lots of the learning science that says, here's how you do that. And so what we've been doing is saying, Great. since I took over, we came principal and started building out this product was Вот the principles of learning science that are the foundations of this.

13:12 That now can have a kid learn and learn well. But when you come in, so how does it work? So let's take a new kit. You're gonna come in. The first thing that

13:21 apps are really good at is figuring out what you know and what you don't know. It's gonna be able to ask you some questions, so just think of any kind of assessment test. A map style to be a good example. It's figuring out what do you know and what do you don't know. And then once we figure that out, we give you lessons.

13:36 to build up your knowledge from wherever you are. The first thing you have to do in this that's very different is Age grade and knowledge grade are very different things. Just because you're in sixth grade. Age wise doesn't mean you actually should be in sixth grade content.

13:52 And this is one of the big things that's different. for a teacher in front of a classroom model where a teacher has to deliver sixth grade material. I'm a sixth grade teacher. I'm doing sixth grade lessons. The magic. And this is what AI Tunor can do is say

14:06 Look, I don't know what happened, it was covet. Whatever happened. You were on holiday You miss those lessons. You don't know this fourth grade material. I'm just gonna give you this fourth grade lesson, even though age wise you're in sixth grade. And the reason you've been having struggling in sixth grade material.

14:21 It's because you didn't know this fourth grade concept. If you're doing fractions. And you haven't mastered division. You're gonna sit there and say, Gow, this fraction problem's really hard. But the real issue is, well, just go back and learn your division. And then the fraction's gonna be easier.

14:35 Most of knowledge is hierarchical, where it's based on foundation. Algebra is basically advanced fraction manipulation. Fractions is multiplication and division, and you can just keep going down. The tree where you have to actually learn bottom up. And have mastery. One of the big Concepts of learning sciences.

14:54 You need to master material, not just No parts. What does mastery mean? Mastery means think of sports analogy. Have you mastered the basics?

15:03 How good are you? We always talk about in standard school There's a whole set of things that seventy percent. You're passing You don't know thirty percent of the material.

15:12 And then they move you on to more advanced things. It's sort of like in basketball if you're the point guard. And you lose the ball thirty percent of the time going down the court, the coach is not gonna be like, Hey, let's work on the alley of They're gonna be like, Okay, let's get back to the basics and master the basics so you can get down the court. Close to a hundred. Close to a hundred. So our standard is over ninety. One of the things that we do. versus other apps and

15:32 What we had to surround the apps. was if you use existing apps and use them at the а mastery standard they have You'll struggle to get the results we get at Alpha. Because the master standard that's embedded in all the apps and used Is just too low.

15:48 Can we spend a minute on the learning science and the cognitive behavioral stuff and cognitive load theory and all this kind of stuff that underpins less time, better content scores? Yeah, just dump on us the important aspects of those two fields that you've assimilated. Let's go through just in order. If you take Personalized lesson plans. The first thing is if you need a fourth grade lesson.

16:08 It's really important that you're given a fourth grade lesson even if you're in sixth grade. This is like one on one tutor. It's like Bloom's one on one tutor. The second part is. You do need mastery. And so back to fourth grade, go learn it. And when kids are struggling as they get older, the real issue isn't that they're struggling in the older material, it's the prior material. And so just put'em into the prior material. Then as you get into cognitive load theory, which is

16:29 Here's the way to think about that is simplification and You have working memory slots. Every person has a certain number of chunks that you can work on. registers on a CPU if you're a a technical person. When you're doing that, that's when you're computing, i.e. thinking.

16:45 What is seven times eight? And I'm calculating what that is. Then the second part of it is How many reps does it take? to take what's in working memory and put it into long term memory so you remember it forever. And there's certain number, and actually people are different.

17:00 GT kids need fewer reps than other kids. But Fundamentally, it's how many reps you need to put it in, and there's a whole concept of space repetition. Which is if you space them out over time. You retain it.

17:13 For longer. This is the I cram. versus do you r remember. We have a workshop with the kids where If you actually take kids and say Okay, you're gonna do vocabulary words ten minutes a day. Every day.

17:26 On Friday, here's your test score. We have another group that then volunteers and they're like no I'm gonna cram the night before. They cram the night before. And then they take the test and they basically get about the same test. And say that like C cramming works.

17:40 We then Retest'em a week later. And the craom kids don't remember anything and the people who've done it ten minutes a day all remember it. And the kids learn, Oh, okay. I should actually not cram if I really want to learn this. Which goes back to retention and learning faster.

17:56 You can Teach kids to be these self-driven learners. where they learn these concepts and actually are excited to learn two, five, ten times faster. Kids wanna learn as quickly as they can. Assuming you give them their time back.

18:09 Just to put a fine point on it right now. School's been around for a while, you've been there three years. Maybe just share your favorite some of your favorite outcome statistics, like So far we've been talking about a a really radical, cool new way of educating kids. But you measure everything.

18:23 In our conversations, I've come to appreciate you are a measurement fanatic. And so you care very deeply about the measurable outcomes here. What are some favorite examples of what this method has allowed for in the kids? Well Our academic results are just crazy based on standardized task. So There's two parts. The first is our kids literally spend two hours a day and that's it.

18:41 Instead of sitting in class for six and homework. The amount Of time they need to spend is so much less than what we spend or what parents expect. The data you need is the average kid at alpha. If you're a year behind in a subject.

18:56 For whatever reason. To a parent, you're like, Oh my God, that's terrible. Well Your kids only twenty to thirty hours behind.

19:03 You can teach an entire grade level. of material for one subject. In about twenty to thirty hours. And you're just like Wait, there's a hundred and eighty school days.

19:14 Each class is an hour and it's a hundred and eighty hours plus homework. And you're telling me it's twenty to thirty hours. And you're like, Yeah, five to ten times faster. over and over our AP kids. Like they'll do AP world history where our kids all got fives. 'Cause the test came back a couple of weeks ago. They all get fives.

19:31 And They spend seventy five hours max. to do AP. So this whole oh these A big AP loads, you know, in high school. Where it's hundreds of hours. You're like, Oh wow, it just doesn't take that long.

19:42 And so this whole concept of we need to have kids spend Six hours a day plus home work for twelve years. It's not even close to true. In this new world. And then the second part is okay, they're only doing it two hours.

19:56 Your scores aren't high enough. And the reason we use a lot of standardized tests, first off, when I talk to the parents, I'm like, even our parents don't like standardized testing. They actually love it with alpha because they wouldn't believe our results. If I sat here and just said, Hey. Trust me. Trust me, that two hours is totally working. They're like

20:15 What's the test? We do a a mid year test. So You come in in August or September and take your maps tests that we use. We use third party And then in January you get your mid year update. For parents who come in, first they're like, Okay, this sounds really exciting and then their kid

20:28 comes in and is doing the two hour day. Their kids loving school. Somewhere around December,'cause they're home at Christmas and the family members are like, This seems like a fr is your kid really learning and all this stuff? They start getting a little freaked out. And then the January maps test come back and shows they're learning twice as much. in two hours a day. So our standard is In two hours a day, you'll learn twice as much as sitting in class for six.

20:50 For that, if you look on growth rate. our growth relative to any other school in the country is off the charts. There's a sub stack actually that just came out that literally just takes our maps results and feeds it to AI and says compare this to the best schools in the country and they're like There is no school in the country who can deliver these kind of results because

21:07 You can take in kids who are behind. And if they're learning twice as fast, they're gonna catch up. So you can take a kid at fiftieth percentile and get it into top ten percent. Or you can take a kid at ninety ninth percentile. Which is usually capped out. And all of a sudden

21:19 Put them years ahead. And so it works on either side because you're just focusing on the growth, which is How do you teach the kids more in less time? And you also can just sit there. You talk to the experts in learning science.

21:33 They're like, Well, theoretically this has all been predicted for forty years, but no one's been able to implement it. Oh okay. I guess. We're implementing it. And it's working. I like the idea that you told me one time that kind of like the microscoped unlocked biology, that AI unlocks learning science. It seems like that's just true. My favorite analogy is

21:51 The sciences biology, chemistry. Physics, let's take those. They had their days of wandering in the wilderness. Where Doctors were still bloodletting and Chemists were blowing themselves up.

22:04 And there was an invention of an instrument. The microscope for biology and The telescope for physics and the analytical balance for chemistry. That allowed more precise measurement. And that precise measurement is what allowed those sciences to really take off.

22:19 And so learning science has sort of been that way. It's in this wilderness period for forty years where we still have Teachers in front of the classroom in just a bad model. Teachers are great. teacher in front of the classroom is the problem. The model is the issue, but teachers are awesome. I want to be really clear. We should talk about how important the adults in a building are. But back to the learning science.

22:40 AI allows you to do precise instruction to the student. And then second, measure the results. And if you take the AI out. Your effect is dominated by the classroom. And you don't know is the student motivated? Are they even trying? What's the prior knowledge of the student?

22:58 Did the teacher actually instruct it correctly? The environmental variables dominate. In the last forty years with learning science. With hours with an AI giving very precise instruction. And being able to close loop measure it. That closed loop.

23:14 is the magic to your point, which is We have a closed loop that no one else has. Our team comes up with an idea and says, Okay Theoretically, let's take Dean Schwartz chapter K and put it in.

23:26 And We generate lessons. The students use them. How well does this improve teaching? They take a standardized test, we measure how long, how much time they spend. They take a standardized task, we have the results, did it work?

23:38 And keep that loop going. We're basically the only place that has that closed loop. Which is why we're able to get these crazy awesome outcomes and other people aren't. You also told me the best way to learn is by analogy. And there's there's another analogy which is I think quite cool is is to think about this program like an iPhone.

23:56 Every year for a long time. They're releasing a new one and it's constantly getting better. And I wanted to understand some of the dimensions of that with the two hour piece specifically. before we get to the afternoon and motivators and everything else. I know you started, like I said before, with tools like IXL. You're starting with a standard set of curriculum that maps to the map tests and everything else.

24:15 What has improved the most since you first started applying this this idea of like wait Not only is this core idea of the learning loop better But each component part of it can probably get improved like the iPhone does year to year. Here's the magical part, and this gets into the time back of what were

24:32 going to be launching to bring this outside of Alpha. Generating personalized lesson plans for kids for them. is the magical unlock. 'Cause it affects everything. Which is back to motivation. And point of analogies and learning.

24:50 Let me go far extreme. I have a first grade boy who's like I hate books. I don't want to read. And you're like

24:57 Here's a book. Good luck. Good luck. Okay. Just a second.

25:02 What's your favorite movie? Oh, The Avengers. Who are the buddies on your soccer team? Okay. I am gonna generate Right, a personalized Choose your own adventure story.

25:13 Where you and your buddies are saving the world. It's going to be geared exactly to your lexile level, right? Your reading ability, which is back to learning science. You want to stay within 10%. of where they are so it's not too easy, not too hard. Zone of proximal development. And so you're sitting there And now I have a lesson that you are gonna engage in.

25:31 And you're gonna be reading it and you're choosing your adventure of where you're going and you're engaging. And kids will spend who quote hate books. We'll spend an hour choosing it, and as they learn more, you can move up the Lexile level and set And you can build a personalized lesson just for them that's dynamic. You want to learn fractions.

25:50 You can sit there and say, Oh. You don't want to do math, but oh, you wanna be a fashion Eastan and a fashion designer. Okay, well How are you gonna do that? We're gonna make this all in rulers and dress patterns and all those kind of things.

26:03 And all of a sudden you're gonna wanna learn fractions or If you love baseball, I'm gonna teach you statistics in the term of baseball. AI, and this is the generative part of AI that really matters, is Uh Content.

26:16 All educational content. is obsolete. Every textbook. Every lesson plan. Every test.

26:23 All of it. Is obsolete. Because Gen AI is going to be able to deliver generate a personalized lesson just for you. And it's gonna take into account What is your knowledge graph? What do you know and what do you not know?

26:37 It's gonna take in the curriculum, okay, what am I trying to teach you? It's also gonna take into account your interest graph. What do you care about? And so all of a sudden you can sit and say What is my knowledge graph of what I know and what my interest graph is.

26:50 Here's an example of an AI I generated one where people were doing AP world. And they were coming back from a Taylor Swift concert. And they're like, I'm having trouble with the start of World War One. And you're like, Okay, we'll generate a lesson plan. in terms of Taylor Swift.

27:05 And all of a sudden, you know, when I can't remember exactly, but when she was on the Uh, getting the award and they came up and took it, and then there was all the controversy, and there was a mediator. And literally it just created a table of all the people. who were involved, the Taylor Swift people and then the World War One with Archduke Frontford and all that. And literally the kids like, Okay, I'm gonna remember this forever. Or for AP world history, our kids, our high school kids generated this. Where they go into Sumo, which is an AI music generator.

27:31 And they literally just like Hamilton. Back to interest level. and generating content. Every kid coming into high school these days. 'Cause we don't teach history that much anymore in standard school.

27:42 And so if you transfer into Alpha Your knowledge of history is basically whatever is in a Hamilton song. If it's there, they know it, and if they don't, they don't. Well, taking that theme even further.

27:53 For every unit. In A P history. The students generated a song. To teach themselves the concepts.

28:00 And they were all just singing the songs, going down, having a great time. And they made the material relevant to their interests. Which massively aids engagement and retention. And so when you think about The biggest change is imagine getting personalized lessons.

28:17 Geared for your interests. And those lessons though are all based in the concepts of learning science. Think of Giving a kid an unending stream. Of questions.

28:31 And knowledge. At eighty to eighty five percent accuracy, which is sort of the zone of proximal development, which is You don't want to make it too hard. where half the time I'm failing'cause you're gonna get disengagement. Talk to game developers. They've learned about this. Yeah, you're just game developers. You use the same theory as game developers is how do I keep them engaged?

28:49 And if it's getting too hard, let's make it a little easier. Oh, it's a scaffolding issue where there it's a prior knowledge issue. I can do that, I can use analogies that they know it's Taylor Swift or baseball or whatever their concepts are. And I just give you an unending stream of questions that you're engaged with that you really like. The amount that you are gonna learn is ten times more.

29:09 then you would passively sitting in class. Disengaged. And so that's really what the magic is of. being able to auto generate content. for each student.

29:20 based on their interest graph. Now, there is cognitive load stuff also of when you feel confused and overloaded, that's usually when you're overloading your working memory. That's also when careless mistakes come in. And you can sit there and say, make sure, because every student's different. You tailor the question based on

29:39 How many slots they have. How many chunks do they have? So it's not too hard for them where you're not overloading it. A classic one on this one is Fluency. Which is fluency.

29:49 You can solve harder math problems if you know unification tables and division tables. And so for students who are struggling. In advanced math. Part of the problem is Just go memorize your multiplication tables.

30:01 Which they all can do, and then all of a sudden their higher level math scores get better. We have one student who was This is sort of a unique An extreme example and I hesitate to say, but We had a student who was seven forty on the math S A T.

30:15 And in looking at the same thing. They were making careless errors. Some of the problems that were overloading work and memory. And for whatever reason the student didn't have fluency of multiplication and division tables.

30:25 So we literally sent her back. to third grade math. We're the only school in the world who will take a seven forty math SAT student. And she got a seven ninety. A seven ninety. And it's that kind of thing where when you talk about the science of learning and just I say it this way, the parent and the student in this case were not excited that their seven forty math student is being given third grade problems.

30:49 That can't be the issue. But it is. It is because you're overloading the working memory and she's just making careless mistakes. A quick selfish aside. When will this be available for me? I keep referencing we're gonna come back to motivation. I'm motivated to learn lots of stuff, investors in general.

31:05 Motivated to learn lots of stuff. I'm often facing novel situations where I don't know the physics or the technicals or the this or the that. And I wish I could just input like, yeah, here's everything about me. Here's all my favorite stuff. Ask me anything you want to know, I'll tell you anything. Now teach me whatever. Teach me avionics, teach me whatever.

31:22 I'll take tests, like I'll do whatever it takes. How long do you think we are from a normal adult? That doesn't need motivating. Just being able to input the thing they want to learn about and having a system like Time Back teach it to us much faster. We're focused on K through twelve and so

31:37 There needs to be somebody else who does that for the adults. But the next five or ten years, everybody can have this. This is going to be a standard thing for everybody. One of back to a visionary I was talking to some ministers of education of other countries. I was like, look. Sometime in the next five years. I don't know exactly when.

31:55 There's gonna be a tablet that's less than a thousand dollars. That is gonna teach every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day. It's gonna come. R A I burn is like ten thousand bucks a kid right now, but it's gonna be down. It's gonna be for everybody. It's gonna be on a

32:10 Tablet that everybody's gonna have. That is coming. I believe that it's a reality that everybody should If you're a parent You should wake up and be super excited.

32:20 AI's gonna affect people. In various ways. There's gonna be winners and losers. I'm in Austin. And we have the Robo Taxis and the Wayboats and all the stuff that I'm like I would not want to be an Uber driver. This is just not good.

32:31 It is not good for them. For kids It is an unequivocal good. McKinsey's favorite line that I completely agree with, which is This is the best time in history.

32:41 to be a five year old. Because we are gonna transform their first twelve years, because they are not gonna sit in class. People do not like school. School experience for most people is not good, and they don't learn. And we're gonna completely be able to transform their

32:56 Dozen years. And make it awesome. As opposed to the chore that it is too. How fast does the benefit diminish with age? Like the best time to be a five year old, what about to be a ten year old or a fifteen year old? Will that cohort still enjoy these benefits? Back to catching up and how far we'll take anybody into an alpha school academically.

33:14 If they're willing to put in the time. And when you talk about the time You're like wow, you're really far behind, so you can't do the two hour learning. You gotta do the three hour. Okay. You need to take one hour of homework. Or an extra hour in the daytime. No, because it's on our dashboard. We literally have one for when people come in. Where parents can look and say

33:35 How many weeks it will take their kid to catch up. if they do one hour of homework. You can take a kid years behind. And you're like well. you're twenty to thirty hours times you're two years behind, great.

33:47 You're forty to sixty hours behind. The number of hours just isn't that much. And you can just catch up very quickly. So anybody can take advantage of it. And I believe that It's getting the curriculum in, getting that closed loop and measuring it and

34:01 Let's talk about motivation now. We know that motivation is some huge percent of the problem. I think there's been interesting studies. the anonymous parent that wrote about whose kids in alpha school talked about this idea that They tried to adopt some of the programs on that were underneath

34:17 early versions of Alpha and they really didn't have a lot of success. Like their kids didn't really want to do it. They kinda complained about doing it on the weekend. There wasn't the feedback mechanism critically to show the kids gamified where they are. But motivation, solving for motivation. both in giving feedback on their progress, but also in What happens in the afternoon.

34:35 has been a critical part, I think, of Alpha's success. So just talk me through the journey of learning about this and what you do. Motivation is ninety percent of the solution. The ed tech is ten percent. Just hitting the ed tech and the software and all that stuff, even though I come from the software brand. Ed has failed.

34:49 We keep putting ed tech into schools and test scores keep going down. So It's fail. And The issue is ed tech is necessary but not sufficient. It's ten percent of the solution.

35:01 Educators will say you need two things. To teach a kid. First and most important, a motivated student. And then second, you need to put'em in lessons of the correct difficulty. And not too easy, not too hard. So in a proximal development.

35:14 So ed tech does the second one really well. AI tutors, right? We can ask you what you know and what you don't know, take an assessment test, and then we're gonna give you those questions. But Are you going to engage? Do you have any interest in engaging? Or if I don't engage with the app.

35:27 Then I'm not gonna learn anything. And so Motivation is ninety percent and alpha's a hundred percent built on solving the motivation problem. There's two stories here on this was

35:38 Back to when I moved my kid over years ago, Brian who was the co founder with McKenzie of Alpha. I asked him, I was like, What's something that I don't believe about education that I need to know? He's like kids must love school. The first commitment of Alpha is kids will love school.

35:55 And I'm like Oh school's sort like spinach sometimes. It sort of sucks and all stuff he's like you are wrong. Kids must love school. That Couldn't be more true, which is

36:05 If we're gonna fix education, we have to wake up every day. And realize Why don't we make these dozen years for kids? We spend plenty of money. We spent plenty of money. We spent a trillion dollars for K through twelve in this country. to make kids love school.

36:18 Put them in class for six hours, give them homework, make it a very terrible environment. We're not doing that. But we need to change it so they love school. And that's tied into how you have to solve the motivation. If you want them to learn. You have to do that. And just back to the ed tech, one last thing on the ed tech is. Ed tech has five or ten percent of kids. who do well with it.

36:36 Right. And there's a whole paper out called the five percent solution. Where? The successes around ed tech are Basically, there's a set of kids. Who love academics for academic sake.

36:47 And learning more. The self motivated, high conscientiousness. Often high IQ kids. Who do really well. in the current existing system and you give'em apps and they do it.

36:58 That's not ninety percent of the market. Ninety percent of the market is okay, how do we motivate kids? Motivation is the core of the design. So let's start with The first part of this, which is

37:09 So my first week as principal three years ago. I'm now accountable. to the kids must love school. And love school so much that I want to go on vacation. I'm talking to some fifth graders, I'm like, guys.

37:19 They're new to the school. Do you love school? Would you rather go to school on vacation than like No. And I'm like, Okay, well what would make you love school? And they're like

37:30 Less score. And I'm like, okay, well how much less? And they're like No school. And I'm like, okay, well that seems a little light as a principle to like Have no school. And so basically we negotiated. I was like, look, how about this? If two hours a day.

37:47 If you engaged in the apps, like and you'd have to engage, can't screw around, can't be doing stuff. If you really engage with the apps for two hours. And then you had four hours of the most awesome stuff you love to do and workshops and team based stuff. That you really loved. Would you do that?

38:04 And they're basically like Okay. I'm back with my team. My software team, I'm like, All right, guys, we have two hours. We have two hours and we have to teach these kids as much as we can. And look, all this learning science says it's done, and let's go figure this out.

38:19 And let's create a system where these kids are gonna crush it academically in two hours. Because first you have to solve it in two hours and give them their time back. the code name of our product. It's actually gonna be the product. When you say when does everybody get this? Next year our goal is to get this out. My job is to get this to a billion kids.

38:37 And so I need a software platform to do it. You can't do it with just the physical schools. Or just the alpha. But time back was the name of the product. Give kids their time back. And that is by far the number one motivator for kids.

38:51 Actually in that article you're talking about from that parent. Motivation's complicated. There's lots of ways to motivate kids. Our guides, our adults in the building, our guides and coaches. They spend all their day figuring out how do we motivate kids. And sometimes it's the kindergartner wants a sticker.

39:06 Or Sometimes it's oh, some of the students are competitive and they wanna be top of a stock rank, we'll say like that. Other ones. Parents give'em screen time. Or video game time, you know, whatever.

39:17 Whatever the motivation is, some is money. Give them money. But by far the number one If you take The biggest kids, your biggest one, your

39:25 Highest effect sizes. Give kids their time back. And that drives the huge performance, which is If you took all my other motivations that we use And you said they have to sit in class for six hours and do homework.

39:39 I don't know any of those other motivations would work. versus you have to solve the first one, which is you need an engine that teaches kids ten times faster. So you can give'em their time back. And then once you do that, these other motivations work as well. But time back is by far the most important motivation.

39:58 And then with it, it totally works. Kids get it. You're like, Well Do I want to spend two hours engaging the app? to then do four hours of great stuff. Right. Almost every kid's like okay, that seems a lot better. So what is the great stuff? What happens in the

40:12 second two thirds of the day'cause the the parents don't want the kids back. What's going on? So the afternoons are all the life skill workshops, and so Think of there's tons of stories around it, but these are project based workshops. Where kids are doing Stuff they love, but also teaching them life skills.

40:30 And so think of a life skill that you want. Oh, I want my kid to be I want entrepreneurial life skills. So our fifth graders last year or two years ago ran an Airbnb. And they loved it. And they had to learn P L's and gross margin and all these things, they had to learn business. And they were loving it. How do we set prices and

40:47 decorating it and this year those same group were like, Well, we want to launch a food truck. Austin has a big food truck scene. We wanna launch a food truck. And I was talking to one of them and I was like Why'd you pick they pick breakfast food dippers, they call themselves, right? Why'd you pick breakfast food? They're like Do you understand the gross margin on breakfast foods? It's just enormous. And you're like, Okay, this is awesome. And they have the food truck and they're at on weekends, like they're going to car dealerships and have it open and they're making a thousand dollars and

41:14 And just think it's great. When you think of Life skills. We're trying to change. We have a whole life skill curriculum. 'Cause common core curriculum is the standard academics.

41:24 But parents have a standard of Okay, well How do we teach teamwork and leadership? Today teamwork and leadership is talk via sports in America. Most life skills in America are taught.

41:36 in after school sports. And if you actually survey parents, they're like Where did you learn your life skill? Grit, leadership team or all those kind of ones. They're all like, Oh, in sports. And that's why sports is such a big part of it.

41:48 Now you can teach those in school. You don't need to do it and actually school's a great place to teach leadership and teamwork and All these other life skills. And so It's leadership and teamwork. Second, storytelling and public speaking.

42:01 And then talk about this one, which is If you actually go to the average ten Ten year old and you're like, Hey. Do I do public speaking. The kids like sound that fun. That's not exciting. How do you make it fun and exciting so they love it? You're like, Well

42:13 We have post game press conference. Where You're the athlete. Everybody wants to be able to do their postgame press conference. So these kids all practice their public speaking.

42:24 And then they go up to Austin F C the stadium. Once they pass, they get to see the game and they get to go then sit and see the post game press conference. with their favorite star. And then we have a deal where then after the stars leave. A couple of the press stay. And then the kids go up. Think it.

42:41 Interrogated by the M. And every kid's like, okay, I want to be able to do that. This is a life skill I want to teach public speaking. How do I frame it in a way where kids are going to love this and really engage with it? How do you have the teachers, the guides? The coaches.

42:56 do this more systematically, like The software really tracks it me, like it's very clear to me intuitively how it might scale. Because you can program it into the system. It seems less obvious how you could scale something like those examples. I have a friend, a dear friend, who I'm sure will enjoy this conversation, whose son is super interested as a young entrepreneur, as a young teenager, and he's building this little online business.

43:17 And I'm sure if you told his son, you're gonna get four extra hours a day to work on your business. He would bust his butt on the two hours to do anything to run his online sweatshirt shop. But the most amazing version of this I can imagine is that some amazing person that knows a lot about entrepreneurship and online selling and all this kind of stuff is helping that kid. That that matching exercise, it just seems less scalable and less obvious how a system can get built that allows that afternoon to be as buttoned up as the morning. The answer to that is it depends on the age of the kid.

43:48 So key three, you can build an afternoon, and we have built an afternoon set of workshop and curriculum. That's structured and standard and can be rolled out. It's not custom where they're doing individualized projects. But once you get to high school we have what we call Alph X project, which is your

44:05 four year super passion project where you have all afternoon for four years to work with w on you love. And that is very custom. Every kid's different. We have a one student who's putting She's trying to get a Broadway musical.

44:18 It's the first all teen produced developed Broadway musical. And so she spent years building it out. She sourced all the people from TikTok. All the singers. She can fill a thousand people into a a venue now.

44:32 To your point, there's no guide or coach at Alpha who can help her. Our high school curriculum very much is how are you a self-driven learner who can use resources, including where AI really gives you superpowers. to be able to do these projects on your own. And that's the difference. K through eight, we have a life skills curriculum.

44:54 That the kids do that are Designed and managed by the guides and coaches. And then high school is where they transition. To where they take ownership themselves. And then they basically get feedback on how they're doing.

45:09 From the market. From the public. Are you selling stuff online? And they learn how to reach out. And

45:15 They DM people on Twitter and are like One thing we found is Super successful adults over invest in ambitious teens. And so all these kids are out getting help. From adults in order to do it.

45:29 Because you can't hire a teacher staff who can do all that. What about the stuff that goes in that K to the K through eight bucket specifically? I can imagine if the carrot in the four hours was an amazing field day or something. That's different than like you need to learn, you know, to memorize some poem and give a public speech or something. Like the amount of actual motivation can range a lot and it's student dependent. What have you learned in the three years about the sorts of things that kids actually love doing that is the reward for doing their two hours in the morning?

45:56 Okay, I'm gonna say the most controversial thing I think of the talk right now. Which is there's three things that if I could wave a magic wand And get every parent in America to believe.'Cause they don't believe it today. If out of this podcast. This was the outcome.

46:11 This would do more to change education than anything. The first thing is Your kid must love school. We've talked about it. And They should want to go to school instead of going on vacation. If every parent believed that.

46:23 That would be critical. to change again. The second is your kid can crush their academics. In two hours a day. You cannot think and subject your kid to six hours a day plus homework.

46:34 We need to stop that. Two hours a day. And then the third, this is the controversial one. about this and that we've learned Is the key

46:42 To your child's happiness. is high standards. And that is the controversial part. Which is kids Wanna do awesome stuff.

46:53 Kids think they're awesome. Kids are awesome. And Parents are very worried naturally. They care about safety. They worry about their kids trying and failing.

47:05 So The work shops that drive excitement. That drive kids loving it. What really engages it's not. Make the workshop easy.

47:16 The kids want to go do hard things. They don't want to struggle and fail, but they want to struggle and fail on their road to success. Now they need to be supported. By a caring adult. You need high support and high standards.

47:29 When we talk about our guides, we should go into that. But fundamentally, kids love it. One of the things you'll see in the videos. McKinsey's Instagram is basically all the videos of all these workshops. And all she does is just goes to school and films'em. It just films kids and you know, there's like half a million or a million people who

47:44 Who love it because you're like wow, this is what school should be like. We have kindergarteners. Who climb a forty foot rock wall. And when you hear that. If you're not in the alpha environment, you're like, Oh, that is so bad. That's so whacked.

47:57 That's too hard. But when you actually see the kids go through it. They love it. But it's hard. We mic up the kids as they're going up it. And

48:05 You'll see somebody who's just like okay. This is scary, but I have a growth mindset. I can do this. And then they achieve it. And it's all safe. And then they do it and they come down and they're beaming and they're like, oh, this was great.

48:19 Our guides. to create these workshops. We have a whole library of the ones we've developed and we're always constantly What are the ones that really work and what are the new ones we're trying, but Last august our second grade guide.

48:31 Fake. She comes and she's like okay. All the second carders can um run a five K. In less than thirty five minutes.

48:39 And I was like, Oh Mm. Well this one, that seems too hard. That seems too hard and God, the parents are really not gonna like that if that doesn't work. She's like

48:49 I know it. She was an athlete at U T, she's like, they totally can't. Let's do it. Let's do it. She's like, now.

48:55 Here's the key. We teach kindergarten first grade teach a lot of growth mindset. You should think you can do anything. And she's like, We gotta start teaching in second grade how to do anything, not just think it, but how to do it. And so She's like, we're gonna teach them atomic habits.

49:09 The book of Comic Habits, which is one percent better, basically. Most adults don't learn that till after college when they read the book. But the concepts in that book you can teach a second grader. Everybody gets it. She gets all the kids together and she's like, We're gonna run up five K. Who thinks that's impossible?

49:24 Every kid's like, Okay, that's totally possible. I can't do that. It's fake. And Then She goes out to the track.

49:30 And she's like, I've signed you guys all this in August. I signed you up for the jingle five K, you have the Domain Christmas. We're gonna run it. Here we go. She's like, but day one? We're just gonna walk the track. And all the kids walk the five K.

49:43 And she's like, Okay, so we've established everybody's gonna finish the race. And then the next time they go out, they run a quarter lap, walk. Half lap. And they incrementally do it so that by December. These kids are able to run the five K in thirty five minutes. You look at the finish line.

50:00 And the parents, the kids are crying. So awesome. And back to the life skill that you taught. It's not just the heart. They love that it was difficult. But they sit there and they're just like Mom, dad. I know how to do anything, man.

50:13 And I have those skills that I'm developing. And as a parent, you're like, that's the life skill that you want your kid to know how to do. And the way to do it though, first off right back to how the whole system has to work. You have to have a system where the kids love school. Where it only takes two hours, so you have these afternoons. And then

50:32 You have to have those three belief, those three things. Including High standards is the key to your kids' happiness. It's an amazing lesson. Can we talk about these guides?

50:43 We've referred to them a lot and I think everyone listening will imagine an amazing teacher that they've had or their kids had. Maybe they'll also imagine a terrible teacher that they've had or their kids had. It matters a lot. I can cite my favorite teacher looking back to third grade or whatever. What have you learned about who these people are, who they should be, what skills they should have, what role they should play, like

51:03 Blank sheet of paper first principles approach here, I'm sure. Walk us through that part of it. AI tutors and all this stuff. That's just the complete wrong misconception. Is В адолц і не будин.

51:18 Or crap. People have this image of robot terminators. Don't send your school to the school with robot terminators. Terminology we actually have a lot of discussion around the terminology. Should we call them teachers? But they don't do academic teaching.

51:30 So if you are an adult in our buildings, you do not do academic teaching. And so that's why when we start we're like okay, we we shouldn't call them teachers then because it gives the wrong impression. So Guides and coaches. But then. You're like well

51:44 people think they're teachers and it's a new role for teachers. Anyway, we'll see figure it out. We'll figure it out. But fundamentally it's what matters. Think about this is every adult has one or two teachers who transform them their life. Every adult has that. Our guides.

51:59 Or that for our our students. Literally, we have a survey question that we ask every eight weeks, which is that exact question to kids. Which is every adult had one or two Teachers who transformed your life.

52:10 Is your guide that for you? And that is the standard we hold our guides up. These adults These guides, coaches. And teachers.

52:18 Their job is and what they're accountable for is to deliver the three commitments to the kids that they love school, they learn two X and learn life skills. They're accountable for that. And they are seen by the kids as you are transforming my life. And so you think about who's good at that. The first part of it is, and this gets back to academics and the teacher in front of a classroom.

52:38 Whoever is in your head. The reason They transform your life. Is not because they graded your seventh grade science quiz really well. It's because they met you and motivated you and understood you.

52:52 And they probably held you to a high standard and convinced you that's right that you could do a lot more. Back to the key to your happiness and success is high standards. High support, high standards. Great teachers. are high support

53:06 High standards. Doctor Yeager. has a book called Ten to Twenty Five, How to Motivate That's right. It's a great book. And we work with him a lot on all this stuff, and that is Every guide.

53:16 Ed Alpha lives that philosophy. That is what you're looking for. You are looking for individuals who can hold high standards. But also high support. And it's different at age.

53:28 So if you go into our kindergarten, you're gonna get Charity or Mallory. And they're gonna wrap your kid in love at kindergarten, that's what you want. But as you get up to middle school and high school They're gonna be able to sit there and bond with you over okay, let's talk about the high standards.

53:44 Look at all these great things that you can do. It's various things, but we hire because you don't have to teach. Seventh grade science. in our school we actually hire Ex coaches.

53:54 As an example. Ex coaches, athletes. We'll talk about like we have a sports academy. And we literally have ex NBA coaches, X NFL players, ex MLB players. And they're awesome at holding high standards and providing great motivation.

54:08 For the kids. When you don't have to do the academic side. You bring in all those other things and you focus a hundred percent on I'm gonna hold high standards for the kids. I'm gonna be able to motivate them.

54:20 We probably are the only school where We have a system where you can go in for every kid. And see every motivation that's ever been tried by any guided alpha. To motivate them to see what do they really love, how do you engage this kid. What are their interests?

54:35 And so our guides spend time getting to know the kids. As an example. During the two hour session, the kids do twenty five minute pomodoros. During the mass commodore. What the guide will do is pull the kid out one on one. Like, you're not gonna do the math stuff today.

54:50 Come sit down and talk to me. And the guide's gonna be like How was your weekend? What happened? Oh, to win the softball game. Whatever happened and get to know. Not as engaged anymore, what's going on. They talk through all of that.

55:03 with them. They get to know the kids. And we talk about There's Mount Alpha that you're climbing up, and your guide is there to help. The students get up the mountain.

55:15 People who love to do that. The ones you want to hire. I guess a little segue also on that on just overall is We pay our guides a lot more at Alpha than standard teachers.

55:26 How much more? Like what percentage more? Our minimum pay for a teacher is a hundred thousand dollars. In the Austin market. That's basically double the pay. you're gonna go get great talent and you're gonna get great talent not just in t shirts. So we can go get people who are the best teachers in any Teaching one.

55:40 But you can also get people who aren't traditionally teachers. That's very much what we believe. The core of it really is. Students want these great teachers.

55:50 And you don't have a class size problem. The economics of a school are based on Fundamentally, how much do you pay the teachers and what your class size is? We have some other economics like our AI and our workshop costs. But fundamentally that's driving the economics of schooling.

56:05 And so The lower grains we have low tooling. Which is, you know, you're gonna have five students per guide, but as you get older. What you actually find is students don't want that.

56:16 By the time you get to middle school, they're like, Mr. Lemote, yeah. I'm gonna outless. I don't need all these guides around. They want more freedom, but the ones they want they want really high caliber, awesome people. who are going to know them and and motivate them and hold them to high standards. I want to talk about

56:33 Feck loops. This is something that We've referenced. Many a time. It's a huge part of your success outside of Alpha and leading up to Alpha that's allowed you to fund it and

56:45 Be such a force behind it. In your life, you seem to have learned a tremendous amount about the power of well enforced feedback loops. So maybe just give us the foundation of this belief. And then I want to talk about all the many ways in which you've been able to deploy these learnings into the Alpha School setting. To give kids feedback.

57:05 Not just motivation, but show them their progress. Show parents, show coaches and guides. Where did this deep belief in the power of iterative feedback come from in the first place? There's two parts to it, I guess. sort of the individual level and then the systemic level, which is part of the feedback loops that are really important and

57:23 The biggest Yet to be proven part is We need to scale this. We need to scale this. We need to get this out to a billion kids. And so, how are you going to measure?

57:34 Success. And so I always look at myself as I'm a product person, but then okay, how do you put in the systems that allow it to scale? And the key to the system's scaling is the feedback loop that you know what's going on. So when we open a campus. How do I know? That the kids love school.

57:50 How do I know that the parents are super excited? How do I know they're learning two X in two hours? Are the guides awesome? Is my guide in New York City gonna be as good as my guide in Alpha? And so how are we gonna be able to measure it? Oh. The key on all these feedback loops is if you want to scale it.

58:08 You have to measure it. And you have to provide that loop. If we're gonna be able to say we're gonna keep this quality at standard at scale. Um and so there's sort of all that. That we can talk about. And that's a big part of what AI enables, and enables scaling at quality.

58:27 Yeah. I believe ten years ago you couldn't have done. And then the second one around feedback loops is back to educating kids, it's just people. Is Reciving feedback

58:39 Is like one of our most important life skills. To teach is If you are somebody who actively siks feedback to get better.

58:49 That is one of the most important life skills you can teach somebody. We see feedback in our life skill stack. at kindergarten are test to pass. All our life skills we have a test that You have to pass'cause you have to be able to measure it. Can you receive feedback without crying?

59:05 In kindergarten. By eighth grade. Do you know that the key to you getting better is actively seeking critical feedback? And do you actively go seek it out in order to improve? The day that alpha parents get really happy is when their kid comes home and is like Mom, Dad

59:23 I know I haven't been a good member of the family. How can I how can I be better? And so That whole concept of seeking out in order to improve. That concept is critical to just human development getting better. It's we call it watching game film. Great athletes are like, Yeah, I'm gonna go watch the game, how'd I do and how am I gonna get it better?

59:42 We actually do the same thing on the academics. We have game film where you're like, Why did I screw up these questions on the test? And they literally will sit there and say, I missed this question because I didn't know the material. Or oh this was a careless mistake. So they can start to sit there and say, What is is my problem? I don't know it.

59:58 Or actually. Test taking skills. And you help them do that. Like you show them the game tape of themselves learning. Exactly. Well that's part of like when we talk about our AI too. We believe the biggest user of AI in education. And How we use it is completely different than what everybody else thinks. There's this whole view that we are gonna deploy

1:00:17 Chat GPT. To everybody in America. And things are gonna get better'cause everybody needs to use AI. If you take away from alpha, you're like, Oh, we should play chat GP D everybody. Okay.

1:00:29 Wrong takeaway. That is the literally the worst thing you could do. Just to be very clear, you are not A principal at a school. If you think Jack C V T is good. Ninety percent of the use of chat GPT. Mr. G.

1:00:41 Now there are Ten percent use case of people who are like I need a Socratic tutor where I'm super excited about it and I need that. Dive in deeper. And that five to ten percent.

1:00:50 Those kids are going to crush it with it and you should give it to those five or ten percent. Ninety percent of the kids are like, How do I use this to cheat? Okay. They want their time back. Cause they want their time back. Cause they're just trying to get through it. We literally don't have chat functionality activated in our AI. It is not a Japba. It's terrible.

1:01:08 And that's not what people need. Back to where we use the AI is generating personalized lesson plans. And personalize lessons themselves. That is a great use of AI. A second great use of AI.

1:01:20 is actually to watch the screen and coach the kids. To give them the game film. And we can go from the remedial of the A kid. You're like literally scrolling through the article and looking at the questions and trying to search.

1:01:34 Because you don't want to read the whole article. That's not really gonna work well. Or You know, when you miss a question. Here's the video that can help explain it, the little explainer of what you got wrong and you skip it. If you really want to get out of here in two hours.

1:01:48 You need to do it. Our biggest thing is our vision model. Which is actually part of the big expensive part'cause you're streaming full time thing. It's it'll come down in cost, but right now it's a lot. We have a waste meter. Because once again, if you are gonna give the kids a time back.

1:02:02 They want the time back. And they wanna get better. They wanna become a more self driven learner where they can move through this faster. So we literally like you're wasting fifty percent of your time. The kid's like, Whoa. Coach me up.

1:02:13 I don't want to waste fifteen percent of my time. So I'm spending three hours when I could spend two. And so giving them the coaching of how to learn better. How to learn faster and more effectively. That's a great use of AI.

1:02:26 But that's not something that all the other platforms or work. So so just so I understand, like I almost want to like imagine we have the engineers of the system here with us and we're now in a technical explainer. The thing is built. I'm interacting with it. There's different things I can do and not do. The entire process, мі looking at it.

1:02:43 The touches, the scrolls, everything is being monitored. And that is being fed through what kind of system? Like that sounds complicated. Like how does that system know? It's the little thing at the end that ex the explainer that I'm skipping like Help me understand the engineering of the thing. As a frame of reference

1:03:00 Use Con Academy since everybody understands it. And imagine a dynamically generated con lesson. The video is dynamically generated. The video can basically be about half as long as a con video, because using the concepts of learning science and more active passive is bad. So more active engagement you can Teach kids in less time.

1:03:18 And it's based on their interests. And so you're doing that. And then the video stream itself. is actually being fed. to an AI model sitting there s looking for anti patterns.

1:03:30 What are the things that kids do?'Cause basically what are things that their kids do that slow them down that are Learning anti patterns. And so it's looking for those. And then when it has it's gonna be like ooh look, that's waste. And then it's gonna update the ma waste meter or

1:03:47 flag the kid and say stop doing it. Depending on the motive. And when you think about the technology behind it, just think of back to that what's valuable data. The same way. having the data stream of all the Tesla cars running around that you're then saying, Okay What are we doing? The data stream of okay, here's what kids do when they're learning.

1:04:07 And what they shouldn't do and what to avoid. And then you move it to so the first phase is go find all the anti patterns. And then the second one is coach'em up on it. Maybe it's a data stream, just a raw data stream that That you have privileged generation of because the students are using the thing.

1:04:22 Maybe talk about the team behind this. So, like how many engineers are working on this? What kinds of people are they? Like where did they come from? Are these like the best engineers from your trilogy ESW days? Like who are these people? And then what is their process? Of turning the raw data stream into actionable Lessons in the software.

1:04:39 The software team There's a couple different parts to it. So incept. is the core generation engine. And the name actually matters. This is important, especially with AI and education, which is

1:04:52 Incept sort of has two definitions. One is the movie. You're putting a mind virus in a kid's head. That's what you're doing when you're educating a kid. You're putting these thoughts into kids' heads. There's a second definition though, like from a thousand years ago, the original from Cambridge and Oxford.

1:05:06 Which was qualified to t And there was a subtle underpinning of You Trust the person. Teachers are trusted.

1:05:14 Because you're putting things into kids' heads. It's important to understand it's two parts. You're putting stuff into kids' head and you need to be trusted. on what's going in. And there's gonna be a lot of controversy, I believe. There is just in AI in general, but especially in education. Of how we make sure these are trusted.

1:05:30 generators that are putting things in. You have TikTok as a untrusted generator that currently dominates. We should talk later about our standard of TikTok as our competition, which is we have to out tick tock TikTok if we're going to take over getting the right thoughts into kids' heads. But anyway, so there's the INSEP team, and the INSEP team, you should think, is we use all the different LLMs. We have our stuff on top of it.

1:05:54 Where We are generating content. It's gonna be taking in streams of Okay, what's the curriculum we're doing? What is the kids knowledge graft? What is their interest graft? What is their cognitive load model? And then be able to generate the dynamic lesson. And so you should think

1:06:09 This is gonna be your standard AI. Tight team. Embedded with massive A set of learning scientists. So the difference between us and the standard

1:06:20 just using a normal LLM to generate content is We have probably the biggest team, best team of learning scientists. Who are building this. And that's a critical aspect of it. That's why if you just have and why I believe all the

1:06:35 L are out and All the educational ones, they're not embedded with learning science. They don't follow these principles. They don't embed mastery and all these other concepts. And that's why generally

1:06:46 when you give them to kids, they just use them sheep. So you have that side. Then the second side is you're like okay, I have this data stream. And now I'm basically it's a video model. It's just a vision model.

1:06:57 And you're just sitting there saying, How do I? Optimize this vision model to find what I need. But how it started is literally just Humans. When you talk about human annotation.

1:07:10 Just watching video. So three years ago, we would just sit there. Have teams of people all night. You know, the kids would finish. And then all night you would just sit and watch the videos. And annotate'em of okay.

1:07:25 That's what's going wrong here. This is what the kids doing. All of this reinforcement learning. And it is. And it's just building out a video model, a reinforcement learning video model with human feedback. And the human feedback's not from the kids. It's from People watching it to say I need to train this up. on how kids learn and what is effective learning, what are the anti patterns. And what do we want to coach for? And so then you you take that.

1:07:47 And literally the first month back three years ago, August. We literally would just take the output of watching the videos. And then the guys would just tell the kids the next day. They're like hey. Look what you're doing.

1:07:58 To now the AI. handles almost all of it, at least off some humans where we're still Fine tuning things, but Fundamentally that's what you're doing is you need a vision model where you are sitting there training it on how to have kids learn better. How to be more effective, where the things

1:08:15 And back to the streams. You need this where you're generating content. You need this to see are they engaging with it. And then you need to be saying, Am I really moving the standardized test scores? I mean, are the kids really learning this material? You need that whole close loop to be able to say, okay. Yes. We came up with this concept, we generated this materia.

1:08:35 Okay, look. Yes, the kids are learning. And you can measure that. Can we talk about the third one as the kid sees it? This is really help. I'm glad we're going to the little bit more technical side of things. So we've got incept. We've got the vision model and then we've got the feedback mechanism or whatever at the end of standardized testing.

1:08:50 How does the kid feel that like in the anonymous parents post about the school they talked about. Hitting your minimums and Your weekly scores, your daily scores, things like this. Like the kids seem to have this gamified sense of their own progress. So what have you learned about presenting that well and using that last closing part of the

1:09:07 The kids' motivation. How do you drive kids' motivation? You know, at the end of it, you're giving them a measure of How much do you have to do a day and how much do you want to do a day and So you have a goal setting part where Okay, kids, you can set your goals.

1:09:20 And This is what I want to achieve. Then from that you're like okay the system can tell you you need to do this much. Actually last year one of the changes we're making for the year coming up is We do okay, you finished a lesson.

1:09:33 And one of the problems is lessons are different lengths. You have a twenty-five minute pomodoro and okay, I have two fifteen minute lessons. What's a pomodoro? Pomodoro is a twenty-five minute segment that the kids do. For each subject. So they're gonna do math. Science language reading. Actually you could do whatever order. It's twenty five minutes.

1:09:52 You basically go into the app. in the morning during the two hour session. And you're like, Okay, I'm gonna spend twenty five minutes in that. And then the system is gonna give you the lessons. And you're gonna be like, Okay. Here's the lessons I'm gonna do.

1:10:04 And I'm gonna do'em to mastery. And then I have rings that close that say. Yeah. It's just it literally, it's just like the watch. And it's just like the Apple Watch, where it's gonna be like You did it at the high accuracy. If you're doing it with low accuracy and not learning.

1:10:20 Just gas, right? So you have to have eighty percent accuracy. You did it to mastery. You didn't sort of the mass practice up front. He locked it in.

1:10:29 And I spent the time. I did spend the twenty five minutes. And then your ring closes, boom, you get it. And the kids back to gamification, they have to do their two hour sessions to unlock their afternoon. And so all these privileges come around because you unlock things.

1:10:44 And when you come into Alpha. Your first day. And I'm transferring from standard school. You actually go into what we call standard school. Where you literally sit at a desk.

1:10:53 It's like you're in standard school. And it's like okay, your job is to become a two hour learner. Where you learn the skills so that you can Learn in two hours instead of six hours. The kids are like, I'm all into this. Let me do it.

1:11:06 And so they're gonna learn how to engage in the apps. How to use them correctly. If I sit and spin in my chair all day. I'm not gonna be a two hour alerter. And we'd be stuck.

1:11:16 Then as you achieve back to motivation models, as you show you can be a two hour learner. Oh, I hit all my rings this week. I basically finished my lessons. you graduate to be a two hour learner, which then unlocks all these different privileges. Our guides have different ones at different levels, but

1:11:31 think when you see the alpha pictures where The kids are in a beanbag with their computer not sitting at a desk. they've unlocked those privileges where they're like, Yeah, you know how to be a self-driven learner. You can do it however you want. The booths that we have. They're literally like the phone booths that you see in the Silicon Valley. We have those in our schools.

1:11:49 And they're famous in our middle and high school. Because kids voluntarily go in those. Where students learn Where do I learn best? My daughter's an example where I'm not going to be able to

1:11:59 We have a communal table where you can all just sit. Together. If you're two hours, you can just sit at the table. Now. My daughter, she's a Talker

1:12:08 And she's like I can't sit at the community table. 'Cause I won't get anything done'cause I'm just gonna sit and talk to my friends. So she'll like say, I'm gonna go into one of the booths. So I can get it done. Kids, right? They learn this.

1:12:19 All kids learn I totally know how to become a learner. And if they have the motivation, i.e., you're giving them their time back. They all do. Those skills where you talk about do kids have agency, right? And do they own their learning and are they self driven? That's all part of the system.

1:12:35 where you create these two hour learners, which are basically you're creating self-driven learners, which When you think long term, that's a critical life skill that you really want to have. And then how do you game it? What is the gamification? There is all different ones where

1:12:51 Guides will have ones where you have individualized goals, you have team goals. Our Brownsville campus. The biggest motivated for the youngest kids. Is the Petting Zoo. So if the whole level

1:13:03 Exceeds all their academics for a week. And a session. They get a petting zoo. When you talk about motivation Okay.

1:13:11 You get the bunny and the petting zoo. Those kids they go to Ten hours of homework. Can you talk for the kids that do want money about Alpha Bucks? We have a whole economy based on

1:13:20 Alphas. Alphas are used where fundamentally You do these academics, then you can earn alphas. And then how can you spend those alphas? It's all age dependent, so it's it's very different.

1:13:33 Which is very interesting, just talking about motivation and money. In general There's a lot of motivations that parents love. Oh, the putting zoo. That sounds really cool. Or I get more privileges. Yeah, you can privilege yourself.

1:13:44 Those two money is obviously the controversial one. That causes everybody to just go, Oh my God. And That's a terrible one. I'm gonna give a couple of examples of it. Your kid can earn money.

1:13:54 For doing academics. Parents gonna be like, Okay, I don't like that. Now Your kid can earn money by doing academics. so they can fund their passion project so that their afternoon workshop that they're trying to do.

1:14:07 So when she's trying to do the Broadway musical and has to fly up. She's gonna earn money that's gonna allow her to do that. Parents like Okay, that seems okay. Or since this audience. It's gonna fund

1:14:18 your financial literacy investment account. And we're gonna take all the middle school kids and if they crush their academics We're gonna fund an investment. Uh Robin Hood for kids or whatever, you know, whatever. Investment fund to teach'em investing because

1:14:32 The key if you're gonna teach a kid to invest is make sure it's real money and theirs. And it's something they earned, not given. Because your loss aversion, right, and all that. Oh, parents are like, oh, that's a great idea. We're gonna have a fifty percent

1:14:45 penalty for early withdrawal. Parents like that too, actually. They're like, we're gonna teach them to save. Енсо, алліз бер. around money that are good. And so those are all examples that our system does with you can earn the alpha bucks and have those. Other ones. Okay, they do good life skill workshops. And they have a bigger picture.

1:15:03 We'll do another one. This is what every parent should do. 'Cause this is super controversial, everybody hates it. And if you care about academics, this is the single best thing you can do to fix academics. So the number one issue in academics for kids, and let's start at middle school. Is

1:15:18 The reason they're struggling and if you look at the curves in learning in America They all start to flatten out. In middle school. The median person in high school in America. Actually doesn't learn anything. Scary.

1:15:30 In a maps test, which is a three hundred point scale, the median American Goes up. one point in four years. One point. On a three in point scale.

1:15:39 Not burning. It starts slowing down in middle school. And motivation engagement's an issue. The other is just It's the

1:15:47 ramification of having a time based education system instead of a mastery based education system. And Saul Conn in Convideo, you go he has great videos around this where he's just like When you're pushing people up and they've only learned seventy or eighty percent of the curriculum. You should think it's like Swiss cheese. It's like you're building a foundation with all these holes.

1:16:04 And then eventually as you get high enough, it just gets too much and it collapses and you can't learn anymore. And that's what happens when kids hit algebra. The problem's not the algebra, it's the prior knowledge. And so the number one thing we do is Okay.

1:16:19 We need to go fill your holes. So let's talk about marketing and motivation, which is actually probably half my job. You know, its principle is If you go to a seventh grader. And say look.

1:16:29 It's not your fault. However you got here. You don't know this fifth grade material. And you should go back. They are not into it at all. And the only person who's less into it than the student.

1:16:41 Parents. They are like parents have been taught. My kid needs to be at grade level no matter what. And that's just The opposite of what the learning science says.

1:16:51 The opposite of what a tutor does. When you hire a tutor for your school, all they're doing is saying, just give them a fifth grade lesson. And they don't call it a fifth grade lesson or whatever, but That's what you're fundamental. Correct. And everybody understand when you apply this concept to sport.

1:17:04 Every parent gets it. They all get it. They're like, Yeah. Master the basics. When it comes to academics, it's like no no no do all the advanced alley oops. How parents think about the world is just not right. And so you're like, how do you fix it?

1:17:16 I gotta deliver it. So I went to the seventh graders I'm like guys. All of you can get a hundred percent on the Texas star. The Texas Standardized Test. No way, Mr. We want. No way. I'm like back to money motor, I'm like I'll give you a hundred dollar bill for a hundred on the Texas Star. A hundred for a hundred.

1:17:30 They're like That's still impossible. I can't get one. I'm like no no no There's a catch. Any grade level.

1:17:37 They're like I can take a kindergarten Texas Star and you're giving me a hundred dollars. And I'm like, Well, the Texas Star starts in third grade. And they're like, Okay, I'll take a third grade task. And I'm like, Great. And so they go take a third grade test to star, they get a hundred, you give them a hundred dollars bill.

1:17:50 They're like, Can I do fourth grade? I'm like, absolutely. They do fourth grade, get a hundred dollar bill. They're like Okay, you're really gonna let me do fifth grade? I'm like, absolutely. And so they take it and they get an eighty five. Right. Seventy five or eighty five.

1:18:04 And I'm like Do you want the AI tutor? To generate the lessons so you can get a hundred? And they're like, Let me see how many. And then they see it like I can do that in a week.

1:18:15 And they're like, I'm in. And then they get a hundred. And then you do sixth grade. And for literally four hundred dollars. We can do two really important things.

1:18:25 We can whole fill. As we call it, which is we can go back and for whatever reason, wherever your kid is, you can go back and fill all those holes. And put them on a foundation where they can keep learning. But second

1:18:37 You actually change how they think, which is I can get a hundred on a Texas star. Every parent like if you actually survey alpha parents Fewer than ten percent of them think Kids can get a hundred on a Texas star.

1:18:50 And that's because in the time based model, the GTK, right, only the super smart kids got a hundred. In a mastery based model. Everybody can. It's just a matter of effort. It's not about IQ, it's just about effort. And as soon as you break that link for a kid

1:19:05 It changes everything about education. Where they sit there and they're like I can totally do this. Oh my God. And so If you take the alpha stats.

1:19:13 First of all, ninety plus percent of our kids who've been there at school a year are like I can totally get a hundred on a Texas store. And the reason is'cause they have during the year. our building our K through six building. Down in Austin. Gets more hundreds on the Texas Star.

1:19:27 Then a school district of a hundred thousand kids. 'Cause it's just a different mentality and a mastery based thing. You don't advance until you know it. And you sit there and back to motivation and how do you get it right. If you make everything a hundred, everybody thinks it's too hard. So you say you can pass it ninety, but a hundred for a hundred.

1:19:42 And everybody's like, Okay, I'll do the extra work. It's only a couple of questions. If they get less than a hundred. The AI tuners like here's the ones you miss. Was it careless or did you not know it? And if you didn't know it. Want me to give you the lesson.

1:19:54 And so the kids can get to mastery. You put in this motivation, this very lightweight motivation. We spent twenty grand a kid in this country. Across. Alphas. Forty thousand plus, but

1:20:04 We spend plenty of money where for a hundred dollars or four hundred dollars We could literally change how everybody sees both their capability. And how they see themselves. That's a part that just back to motivation that really matters is

1:20:19 When money matters, here I'll give you one more. Example on money. Which is That's a perfect example of using money. in order to get people to change how they think about themselves.

1:20:30 And A lot of Kids have a view that they have these limits. That's high standards, high support. That's what guides are doing is they're breaking through it. And in academics.

1:20:40 Kids have these hang ups. Of Look, I can't learn that much. I'm that kid. My daughter will probably kill me, but I'll use her on this one.

1:20:48 As an example. So when she Got to middle school. She got to top ten percent. And she's just like You know, Dad her older sister is the academic one. Of the two.

1:20:58 She's like I'm not like uh my older sister. I'm top ten percent, that's good enough. I'm not. Top one percent. I'm good. And I was like

1:21:06 The one thing I know about you That you care about more than anything is you love to shop. And so how about A thousand bucks. I bet you a thousand bucks that you can't get to top one percent. She's like.

1:21:19 Right, she's in middle school. She like fills her Amazon cart with a thousand dollars of stuff. And she would just look at it in the morning. And then go grind. And just do our apps.

1:21:28 And We had a lot of family discussions about this'cause My wife is like Okay, so first of all you're paying. For academics.

1:21:37 And You're setting this really high standard and all stuff, and is this gonna be good for her? And all these things. That's common. Back to parents. You don't want to set too high a standard, and is this motivation bad?

1:21:48 Anyway. She got to top one percent. And she buys all her stuff. And she sits down actually with my wife. And it's like Mom, I know you didn't like

1:21:56 Uh doing this. But She's like You need to understand. What it did to my view.

1:22:03 Which is I never thought I was smart. Is my older sister. I now realize I can do anything. And

1:22:10 Her internal change, right? Her internal view. of I'm not capable and then oh my God, I can learn anything. And breaking that internal theme. When we talk about it now as a family it's emotional. As a parent.

1:22:24 You're like That's what you wanted. He would do anything for that. He would do anything for that. And a thousand dollars. Whatever. You would do anything to have your kid think, I am limitless, I can do anything and I can see anything different. That breakthrough of a lot of raising kids and stuff is There's internal limits on what their belief is. And you want to put'em in an environment where you're like

1:22:44 You're limitless. And I'm gonna give you the high support and high standards. That's gonna let you see that. And a lot of the development stuff when you talk about Life skills and all of that.

1:22:56 And our guides and why the humans are so important and all the stuff. That part of it is part of the culture of a school that you have to build. And it unlocks human potential. When we talk about Education can unlock human potential. You're taking these limits that kids have, or as they see themselves.

1:23:14 And you're removing them. You're just blowing the doors off. And it's in all these different areas. And fundamentally you're like, Whatever motivation I need. That's gonna unlock my kid a parent's willing to do. And so now we will tell kids.

1:23:27 when they get to middle school if you want to be top one percent when you transfer in. And you're not there, we'll pay any kid at Alpha a thousand bucks to get to top one percent. So they then realize I can do anything. There is no academic Height.

1:23:39 Our kids at our school all believe I can go crush this academics if I just put the time in. And it's not an inherent okay, I'm not smart enough or any of that. And that unlock That's the part that this new two hour learning all the stuff is gonna I'm sure.

1:23:56 Listening to the story of your daughter. Thank you for telling it. Every single parent, myself included, is just gonna picture their kids' faces in their mind. And agree instantly that they would do anything for this moment of unlock. Or several of them. Which demands the I think really important and exciting question, which is how the hell are we gonna scale this system?

1:24:15 Across the country. Like so many things, like a great product. It tends to get built in a small space where it's artisanal and you're trying stuff and you're figuring out the system and then hopefully like software you can spread it and scale it across the country. What are the biggest barriers to that being possible? Let's talk on the technology side.

1:24:33 'Cause it's not ready yet. We have a whole team of people who wake up every day. Trying to make it ready to scale. Broadly. And the engine, the time back engine. We still have hallucinations, right? I

1:24:45 And you know, in the alpha environment, an alpha environment super safe. The kids love school, they're all stuff. The high school kids literally it comes up with some whack job thing. And the kids take a screenshot and send it in. They're like AI's acted up today. And it's fine.

1:24:59 You release that into the wild and AI robot tutor is terrible. And so We got a burn down chart of how we think and we do believe that next year Right. We hope to have beta's

1:25:10 between August and December of this year. This platform will be out. And The first party's I gotta get the technology a little better. Once that's done.

1:25:19 Now you get into what are your channels of distribution. So obviously home schools Biggest thing is Parents were like okay, let me do this at home. And so

1:25:28 The biggest thing we have a test With fifty plus home schoolers. The problem on all of this on the technology technology's ten percent of the solution. It's only ten. So

1:25:37 My ten percent still doesn't work yet. It's got a But then how are you solving the ninety percent of motivation? So when you're in an alpha building. or one of our schools, then all of a sudden you're like Yeah, we control it. We have the motivation. We do it all.

1:25:50 You're at a home school. Is there any motivational model? So Our tests we're not getting two X in two hours with the home school kids. Now Literally every time we test it, we're putting building in motivational models, putting in other things.

1:26:02 So that we can get there. So I believe next year we will have a home school version. That somebody will be able to buy. The kids gonna be able to sit down and deliver two X in two hours. For sure.

1:26:12 The second part is schools. Right. We're gonna have a platform that if a school wants to adopt this. Then you can absolutely do it. Now What are the hurdles? You gotta rebuild your whole school from the ground up.

1:26:23 You can't just sort of tack it on. This is a full rebuild. And so our school is really gonna do that. Public schools. Wow. They have a ten times harder job than me. If I was a principal or teacher or superintendent of public school.

1:26:36 As a product guy, I'm like you have the most impossible job in the world. My job's ten times easier. Because I control everything. You have a really hard problem, I believe, though. We need to start getting lots of data. Proving out lots of things, showing the F sky.

1:26:50 That this works. With the hopes that in public school, you know, a decade from now. My vision on this is I'm gonna spend the next twenty years of my life on this. And I'm gonna need all twenty to get everything in public school spread. For sure.

1:27:03 The next phase, and this is one of my goals uh in being on the podcast is Entrepreneurs need to build new schools. And This two hour platform.

1:27:14 Will cover the two hours for you, you crushed the afternoon. And let's go start. Let's have a platform technology, yeah. Build on top of it. And build on top of it. And so I'll give you an example of one of the ones that It's not funded yet, but the business plan is super awesome, which is

1:27:29 Texas just passed school choice billion dollars. And so this group is basically they're building Texas Sports Academy. Their goal. Is to go to every school district in Texas. And

1:27:40 Build a micro school. Which is gonna be a micro middle school for D one athletes. They're gonna be based on the Time Back platform. And then in the afternoon, it's gonna be one of the local coaches. That everybody in town reveres.

1:27:55 Who is gonna have a school middle school. For people who want to be D one athletes. And they're gonna spend the afternoon doing whatever awesome athletics. Whether I'm seven on seven in football or we're doing basketball or soccer. All these things where you can create these innovative educational models.

1:28:11 So that for a kid Who's like oh my God, I will go crush my and their commitment. Don't get to do the fun thing unless they've done the time back, yeah. Unless they do the time back. And because of that, and because of the learning science and the app. They're gonna make a commitment that when you look at their thousand school, there's thousand school districts in Texas, twelve hundred or something. They're like our thousand schools, our thousand micro schools.

1:28:34 They're like when you compare us. If you view us as an entire school district. We will be seen as the best school district in Texas academically. We will have By far the best academics.

1:28:46 Tens of thousands of kids will be in these micro schools. And their hope is to launch a year from now when the Texas ESA vouchers come due. And you can sit and see for parents who are like wow. That is an economic model I could get behind.

1:29:00 Or a education model I can get behind where Oh my God, my kids gonna love school. He's going to crush the academics and he's going to flicking do his sports that he loves afternoon, and that's the middle school. There's a whole set of parents who can then go build that out. And entrepreneurs. Who can do that?

1:29:15 As we prove this out in scale, there's actually a lot of famous professional athletes. who are like, I would love to start a school like that. And so I believe that's just a whole huge opportunity. There's another school that we've started, but it's one unit and we need entrepreneurs to scale it.

1:29:30 Із ж ткути і талант шку. And gift intelligence school we define as You love academics for academic sake. Like when you're motivated five or ten percent. Yeah, so five or ten percent. And my oldest daughter is actually like that. She loves it. She in high school's books for fun. There is a set of people who just love that. And that's where you're just uncapping. Those kids aren't learning two X and two hours. They're learning three X, four X, five X. I mean they're just

1:29:53 Crushing it. They love it. When we get all the guides together. And we're like, okay, how do we juice love of school? You know, how do we make kids raise it? The GT guides are like. More academics.

1:30:05 We need a third power hour and all stuff and all the other guys are like, No, we don't want more academics. More life skills. Anyway, but G T you can just imagine A different purpose. No, there should be five hundred G T schools around the country. built on the time back platform where

1:30:20 Kids who love that can just unleash it. It's new, but it's super fun. I mean, those kids are like we're gonna be the last human smarter than AI. Right. And you literally just have this great group of kids who are just like, We love this stuff. And we just love academics for academics' sake. Um and math Olympia and robotics and Writing novels and all that. So Every kid, right, back to when you really focus on kids have to love school.

1:30:42 You're like okay, there needs to be different school types for different kids. This platform, this time back platform enables that because you can sit and say Look, the academics Hard. The coach doesn't need to teach the seventh grade.

1:30:55 Science. Right. The platform does it. The app does it. What the coach does needs to motivate the kids and then do the afternoon. Workshops.

1:31:05 In this case they'll be athletic. If I think about scaling, there's lots of paths and they all need to be tried. There's the micro schools, there's entrepreneurs starting schools, there's refitting that probably happens later in the adoption curve from the maybe the public schools to the very last, you know, the classic like adoption curve. But the answer is we just need to go hard at all of these solutions. where time back and the motivation the creativity around sources of motivation are thoughtfully paired together.

1:31:29 This is one of the tasks that is on my list to do. First part is okay, I gotta build this product. That makes kids learn ten times faster. Then the second is okay, we have to have these schools that are sort of the exemplars. Prove the case'cause no one would believe it. And so Alpha obviously is the flagship.

1:31:46 High end private school model. There's a third part. That we have to show. In order to really unleash stuff, and that's A businessman.

1:31:55 The business of education because capitalism enters the chat. Capitalism enters the chat. We need to bring capitalism in here. Then that's obviously a very controversial. View and My view is with time back, we have to show Here's a platform.

1:32:12 But you can build great businesses on this. And you have to be able to build great businesses. In order to attract great talent. It's a trillion dollar market with no good products. The economics historically of education having work. This completely changes it.

1:32:27 I believe we're gonna show I mean We're in the cash burn phase and we're burning hundreds of millions of dollars. Building all this stuff out. It's just like anything, which is It's a huge market.

1:32:37 And if you have an awesome product. The one element is If I was talking to an entrepreneur where everybody's like, Don't go into education, can't make any money, it's terrible, it's failed. All those things. Great products.

1:32:49 Parents will absolutely pay. For great product society's pay. For great education. We spend a trillion dollars for a relatively bad product right now. As an entrepreneur, if you look at this

1:33:01 You build a great product, you actually can build Great customer base. And It doesn't have to be a money losing nonprofit that's supported a hundred percent on donations. Which is the world today.

1:33:14 You can't sustainably grow. Part of the problem on schooling today is everything has to be nonprofit. The organization nonprofit. And so then you just caught at scaling. There are good school system charter schools out there where

1:33:27 Their gating factor as well. I'm waiting for someone to give me forty million dollars so I can build a campus. I have a three thousand person wait list. Back to my economics. I need someone to donate forty million versus okay, well let's build a really good business model. Yeah.

1:33:41 You can build a business model out of it, so you can open up five hundred of them'cause Capitalism will provide capital to this space. Let's adopt the ultra skeptic mindset for a second. And as the principal, I know you get to deal with this because you're dealing not only with parents that are at the school, but parents that are considering joining it. If you had to name a thing or two that you struggle with the most personally, not skeptics that you can answer easily, but skeptics that are hard to answer.

1:34:05 What are the hardest to answer? skeptical points of argument that you come across most often. Well, I mean your best example right now is just we haven't done this at scale. And so here's all these things, but it's in a limited group. Selection effect size, all those kind of things. Absolutely. Like

1:34:25 There's nothing in Alpha today. Yeah. Would say there's a billion kids. Ten years from now, that's gonna work. Now I shouldn't say nothing.

1:34:33 Holistically. The viewpoint is well, there's seedlings of data here. Of trying to figure out Wow, look at some of these data points of what we can do and have been able to do. And then figure out how would you scale it.

1:34:47 But fundamentally the best example is okay, you're this really high end private school. And you have all these adults, you have all this money around that. The bigger one is The biggest issue And this is my product side.

1:34:59 Is Education is hard because you have to define the product. And your customer bases have very Different needs. This is why when I talk about public school being impossible.

1:35:12 Parents do not agree on what the purpose of an education is. What a parent wants in education. Big bundle. It's a huge bundle and they're diametrically opposed. They're diametrically opposed. We're having that in Austin on the public school side where we have three schools that have failed.

1:35:27 Standardized tasks and So they're trying to be shut down. And the kids move to schools where Superintendent's like okay. Propose, we're gonna shut'em down and move the kids to schools where the kids do better.

1:35:37 Academically. Parents are like I don't care about I don't care that the school academics is failing it because My oldest daughter went to that school and the teacher, the seventh grade teacher there is so great and I know her kids don't really learn math, but she transformed their life.

1:35:51 And they're gonna pick it and say, I don't want academics. Actually stepping back. If you had to say Back to this problem. One of the things that I did not realize going in.

1:36:01 is How few parents actually care about academics. Back to product market fit and pivoting and all that stuff as a product side. Three years ago, I would sit down in the parent meetings and I'd be like, What. If your kids can engage in the app, they're gonna learn twice as much.

1:36:17 Two X learning. And I'd just be like two X Learning and you'd sit there with the parent, you're like, Look Johnny's not watching the video and If he just watched the video after he misses a question. He learned twice as much.

1:36:27 And parents are like Why are you pressuring him? To learn to X. They don't want it. And it took me hundreds of parent meetings.

1:36:34 I was slow on the listen to the customer side. Then we switched it to two hour work. And then you're like same meeting, same parents, same Johnny. You're like, look. I'm trying to get Johnny out of here in two hours. But he won't watch the video. He can't do the workshops until he does. And

1:36:49 The parents are like, Johnny, like why don't you watch the video? Don't you want to do the cool things? And so back to product market fit. Figuring out Positioning matters. Positioning matters, and every parent wants stuff differently. When McKinse puts her GT families and the sports academy families, you know, and she has a lunch with them, the parents and talking about it. Parents want different things for their kid. You know, the sports academy mom is just like My kids come home from Search Academy and you know, they're sweating so much, I literally just throw them in the shower fully clothed. GT parents are like school was having a chest

1:37:20 tournament at the end of the day. And when they came home, we just continued the tournament. Parents want different things. And so That's why I absolutely believe We need to bring entrepreneurship there's not one there's not one size fits all. And we need entrepreneurs who are domain experts in the field. Do you want to do entrepreneurship?

1:37:37 You want to build an investing high school All of that stuff. But I believe, you know, if you look Our New York Campus.

1:37:43 I bet we'll have more financially oriented workshops in the afternoon. than our San Francisco one, which is gonna have more tech oriented So anyway, so the whole thing, I believe we need to bring entrepreneurs in. We need to bring capitalism in here. And we need to create. All the different parts of school choice.

1:38:02 So that parents can pick what they love. And there is this enabling technology when you talk about Do you have something that's ten times better that can transform an industry? Kids learning ten times faster. And so that they can do it, you know, in two hours a day, is that breakthrough product that can do it.

1:38:19 And then back to your point, which the skepticism. It's like, okay, well, you have to prove this the product's not done. So we gotta get it done, we gotta scale. And whether it's us or anybody else. The tech behind this is totally doable. Then the second is for parents is okay, now that I can think about it, what do I want my kids to do in the

1:38:38 I think the broader question on all this stuff is I believe it's societal level. It's when I was talking to the education ministers. I was like, once there's this tablet. And it's two hours a day. What is your education system gonna be?'Cause it's coming.

1:38:51 How do we want Our kids to spend their day. What does society want to say this is where kids should spend their day because there's no point in having them in a classroom for six hours a day. That's gone. back to my three things that I want every paratively. I'm like

1:39:05 We need to make it where kids love school. Because they only need two hours, they can love school and then they can be in an environment of high standards and high support. And do awesome things and learn life skills. That's the vision that I want. And it is hard to execute and all of those things. But that's That's the next twenty years. No, that's my next twenty years is to do it. And

1:39:26 I guess one last to the anybody in the audience who's like Maybe I want to do this. I can tell you in the last three years, like just career wise, obviously I I had a great career. We'll talk about it in a minute. You know, made plenty of money and all that stuff, but

1:39:38 There's nothing. That's more fun and exciting and rewarding than working on education. The last three years in the whole scheme of things is ten times better. I mean it's awesome. And so you know, in recruiting entrepreneurs to the vision and mission and Excitement.

1:39:55 totally come aboard. We need to go build great businesses. But there's nothing that's more fun and rewarding. And back to the bigger picture, there's nothing more important for society. Can you tell us a little bit about Prodigy and the idea of using games to deliver this?

1:40:11 Let's talk about motivational models. Prodigy, there's a game out there. People have talked about gamified learning forever. We very strongly believe in this. I'm investing a lot of money in this space. Because when you talk about scale We have our physical buildings.

1:40:26 And I got guides and I got expensive footprint. Expensive cost to serve to drive motivation. Now. This engine. If I get kids to go through it.

1:40:35 is going to provide the learning. And so how do I get engagement? And the people who know how to engage kids. More than anything. His video game developers.

1:40:46 They know how to engage kids. TikTok and video games. Back to the things. That is absolutely a scalable way when I talk about this tablet. I absolutely believe. There will be video games.

1:40:58 On that tablet. That are totally engaging to kids. that they will go through and it will teach them everything they need to know. So you'll see when Time Back launches. There'll be a section.

1:41:10 Where we have a team of people who's like using AI. Where They're using AI. to build video games on top of the Time Back engine. That kids will sit and play.

1:41:22 The easiest way to think about this is Well let's take fluence. Schools have stopped teaching multiplication and division tables, vocabulary lists. Memorization has sort of gone out of style. Which is really, really bad. It's really important that kids learn this.

1:41:36 But people don't like the grind. The engagement's the hard part. So I just saw this last week where Basically think of a game like Candy Crush. But it's teaching math fluency. Math fine. And it's super fun and engaging and it's Super high quality game.

1:41:51 Kids are basically just gonna play this game and learn. All their fast math facts. And that fluency will do more to move up. Math capability. than anything you can imagine. It's obviously highly scalable and you can get that out there.

1:42:04 Broad distribution. Now. If you take that example though, and then just go Large. You can imagine

1:42:11 Uh great triple A team. of the best video game designers. We've invested. over a hundred million dollars in getting some of the best video game designers in the world. They're down in Austin. And they are building a video game on top.

1:42:26 of the two hour learning engine that they believe will rival any video game on the planet. And the difference was Parents. will be happy to let their kids play it. Or pay to play it. And they will pay to play it.

1:42:38 And They won't have to pay their kids'cause the kids will love it. And Get their kids to top ten percent. And I absolutely believe that is back to motivational models. Absolutely. When we talk about the software side, we talk right now it's all the physical building side.

1:42:52 Back to the scale, the tie back team is like, Okay, I gotta get the engine working. But then twenty twenty six is How do I take parts of the motivational model that's only been done physically? in person and get it into the software. All of a sudden you're like, Okay, if these kids just voluntarily play a video game and they're going through it

1:43:09 You can imagine. Let me give you an example. Is I watch a test case where You're asking a kid and you're like And I'm not a video game person, so maybe I'm get the wording wrong. If I had a training center that would give you extra health.

1:43:21 So to increase your chances. How long would you be willing to go to the training center. And the training center is just gonna be math problems or some academic thing. And these kids are like It's gonna give me extra health. So like I can increase the wind and the more I do in the training center, the more health I get. And they're like, Yeah, and the kids like

1:43:38 I do ten hours in that training session. I'm like How long's these video games? And they're like, Oh you know, ten or twenty minutes. This kid literally just is like I would do ten hours of academics. Now remember. It's only twenty to thirty hours to do an entire grade level.

1:43:52 For one subject. There's all these kind of motivational stuff. And so there's a whole video game one that back to I absolutely believe The next set of big video games are gonna be built on a academic engine that's gonna teach kids.

1:44:07 The old ones aren't based on learning science and mastery standard and They're not engaging enough. So the kid won't grind through it. And you have to have that standard. You have to have both. You have to have a learning engine plus the world's best video game. So there's that whole thing, and I think uh there's gonna be a ton of video game development. Back to getting entrepreneurs it's too competitive. Yeah, the old video games are it's too competitive. Come do educational ones. 'Cause let me tell you financially.

1:44:29 Parents are willing to pay. Way more money. The ARPU on a video game that's getting a kid to top Ten percent academics. There's ten million Moms in America who would pay a hundred bucks a month.

1:44:41 for their kid to love academics and drive it up. The second part is back to engaging is there's another team who's basically trying to out tick tock tick tock, which is How do we create engaging videos, AI generated videos? That teach these concepts that kids will scroll through by making it relevant.

1:45:00 Back to the knowledge base of the kid. Every kid knows all the TikTok memes. And so how do I teach all these concepts to them in form of TikTok memes? And get kids to engage that way. And so their goal, what they're trying to build, and these are farther out and I I hesitate to talk about them. But if you sit in a Stanford lecture You

1:45:19 retain about one to five facts or ideas or concepts per hour. Our learning engines right now. Can do about twenty. Orso to forty. This team, this TikTok team.

1:45:31 We're gonna do a hundred ideas, concepts, and facts. It's gonna be a scrolling interface, just like TikTok and they're like, Yes, we're gonna be able to get all these ideas into kids' heads. Back to that incept. Concept.

1:45:44 that is doable. So as soon as the engine works, then you need the entrepreneurs building out the motivational side. On top of it. And there's gonna be software. Innovation. There's gonna be the physical school innovation. There's even after school. So there's one where

1:45:59 Back to product market fit. And deciding so one of the schools that was opened was a video game school. Back to this where Learning. It's a middle school only. To catch kids up.

1:46:09 So they're ready for high school. And then you do. Video games in the afternoon. And back to product marketing. You talk to it and they're like, Wow, it really works, but there's Parents are like, I'm not sending my kid school.

1:46:22 That's a hard push. But if you just pivot it a little bit and say, Well what if your kid came to you and said Mom, dad, I want after school tutoring. Parents are like. Oh, I'd love after school too, right?

1:46:33 Then there's one that's gonna be created. Which is tutoring in tournaments. So after school You're gonna have tournament games. video game tournaments. So you do your one hour in the app.

1:46:45 And then you get an hour of tournament gaming time. And we're actually working with Some of the big streamers and video game. Players. We're gonna host these big events.

1:46:54 And you sort of compare The problem today where parents have to go push their kid for coupon and Do all that and the kids hate it and it's all this point of confrontation. versus kids coming and you could totally build an environment where they love it. And they're like Yes, I'm gonna go crank the app, especially because it's gonna give me extra health in the video game that I'm gonna go play and I'm gonna play.

1:47:13 In this huge stream with all these other kids. You can build those solutions. It's so exciting for me. We've talked before about this, but this conversation really made it click for me how much time back is sort of like an enabling platform technology. That if you get that three part engine right. in the software which you're working on and as a tractable problem.

1:47:31 A thousand flowers can bloom on top of it. That makes me wonder like We spent all this time talking about elpha school. I would love to just hear a little bit about you and your background. There's not a lot about you in the world. Most of the press that exists about you is from the nineties. one point you were the youngest self made Four One hundred member or whatever, and then you sort of went into the wilderness. I don't know, you disappeared.

1:47:50 Tell us like your life story. I would just love to hear your personal background and then we'll dip into a couple of topic areas. Mine was I grew up in a business oriented environment. My dad worked for GE. I was learning what gross margin was and twelve years old and things like that.

1:48:06 Back to my schooling. I didn't like school. I'd get in trouble almost kicked out of uh I suspended and kicked out of high school. Didn't graduate college'cause I'm like, I can't sit there. I just I I can't sit to these classes. Now One of the things that's really important is academics is one piece of a very complex bundle.

1:48:23 Stanford is an awesome school, even if you don't like the lectures. Yeah. When I was at Sanford, it's like oh Steve Jobs is talking. One of my Best friends, Julius Zelensky.

1:48:34 She's like, Oh, I'm gonna go work it next with Steve Jobs and learn all this stuff and Bill Gates comes down or Scott McDeally. And you sit and you learn. From all whether it's your classmates or just the environment in general. All this awesomeness.

1:48:47 It's important in education understanding it's a complex bundle, not just who does the best academically. Even at a school like Stanford. My daughter's there and now as a freshman. And she's like I am gonna start skipping class. She hasn't had a teacher in ten years. Right. She hasn't had a teacher in ten years. And she is like the one who loves academics and she always would look down on me. You would skip classes, then'cause she's very much that.

1:49:08 Follower. And then now that she's there, she's like Oh wow, like Math Academy is a way better math app than my math lecture. And I'll just use that. But she loves Stanford.

1:49:17 School's a bundle. And I dropped out and I started trilogy. In the nineties it was. We were starting in eighty nine. We started officially in eighty nine. I would have been class of ninety. If I'd stay and graduated.

1:49:29 We were the rocket ship in the nineties. What was trilogy at its inception? So trilogy was the core product we built, and this is gonna get very boring for everybody, but it's an AI product. An expert system, one of the core Products of an expert system back then was

1:49:43 A configurator. Well if you go to a Dell website or a car website and you do configuration. Now imagine it. For a phone switch or a Boeing airplane. Or medical equipment.

1:49:54 Mainframes. Things that are super complicated where you have millions and millions of common Combinatorics. And if you Sell it wrong.

1:50:03 You only find it out on the manufacturing floor. And then it costs you millions of dollars to fix. And so basically what our system would do is called sales builder. It would basically take All the dollars.

1:50:14 that was in engineering and manufacturing and put it Laptops were new back then in nineteen ninety. And would put on a laptop so you could sell things that would work. And be eligible and save companies millions of dollars a day. And so they give us millions and millions of dollars.

1:50:28 For all that stuff. And so that was our first product. We then built our round we had sales stuff, so we built other things round that suite. And then After two thousand We started buying companies, not just builds. So ninety's were all organic builds.

1:50:44 And then two thousand was let's acquire. Software chapter. E SW and that's continued. through it and it's a private company down in Austin. generates lots of cash flow. It's why you can take a billion dollars and say, I'm gonna go spend it on education.

1:50:59 That is that history. So we've been doing it and I guess I don't know if I told this part already. Which was three years ago, I went to my team who'd been with me for twenty five years. And I was like You've been telling me for twenty five years that you could run this company better than me.

1:51:14 Let's see. Good luck. I'm gonna go be a principal. And by the way, I'm taking a billion dollars so I can figure out and get that going. So now I turned from Boss shareholder.

1:51:27 Literally I'm like the worst shareholder now in the world. I feel like if I was I feel so sorry for it,'cause I'm like Guys. I need all this capital. This expansion that McKinsey wants to do. It's gonna take three hundred million dollars. So she has to raise money or we're gonna have to give it to her.

1:51:39 Generate more cash flow, guys. All these software companies you got, you gotta figure out how to be more capital light. Which to their credit, I will give them a call out. Bill Gurley, by the way, lives right next to our high school. Uh in the building right next to it.

1:51:51 He said on his last one, I'd really love to see a private equity firm. That is taking advantage of the thousand dead unicorn. And that very much is what That's what you do. That's is what Trilogy and E SW, the team, is doing There's all these SaaS companies. Who loaded on a ton of debt.

1:52:08 in a growth play and they're gone. And so basically their equity is a zero. And they're being handed back to the private credit guys. And the private credit guys are right. What me to do with this? When I put the pressure on them of I'm gonna suck a ton of capital out of you guys. And cash flow out of you guys. They're like how do we become capital like?

1:52:25 So they're actually and they've signed a few of these deals already and we'll see if it really takes off. But they're going to all the private credit guys. We'll take this whole company. Give us this company for a dollar. And we'll split the cash flows.

1:52:38 ESW and trilogy is known as being like the best operators in the space. They can generate more cash than anybody else. Some of the big names are like they've sold them a few companies. Basically for a dollar. And they're gonna split the cash flows and see how they go, but The point is.

1:52:53 There's twenty billion Dollars of those companies. out there on the books. Good luck, guys. Crush that for me. If you think about the lessons from especially from ESW, let's talk about trilogy too. I'm always interested in software, how incredibly hard it is to build software that anyone cares about, pays for, and uses.

1:53:10 And then how surprisingly efficiently they can be run once you've achieved product market fit. So if you take like the Elon example that Every time I talk to a software CEO in private, they'd be like, Can you believe this guy cut? Seventy or eighty percent of the jobs and things seem totally fine. There's just a massive efficiency gain.

1:53:26 in software systems that are at maturity or past product market fit, and that ESW fundamentally was about How do I take something that's working but wildly inefficiently run and make it massively more efficient and therefore more cash flow generative? Is that like a fair summary? Growth is expensive. A way to do it is if you're trying to be a hyper growth. Company.

1:53:46 Your cost structure and your culture, it's just very expensive. When you say okay. I don't need That kind of growth. That's why everything becomes that much cheaper.

1:53:57 I guess there's two dimensions'cause the Elon example brings up. First just though, just Back to these deals. You're the private credit guy. The management team of that failed unicorn have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to be worth billions and billions. And that's their culture and attitude. And if you go in and be like, dude, you're wasting some money here.

1:54:17 What are you talking about? We have built a culture around all of this, and if I change it, I'll lose all the employees. when you go in you have to be able to say we don't care if they go go like to Elon Musk. Elon's firing them, but You fundamentally have to be like My team can run this company.

1:54:35 Back to trilogy and ESW is just their capability is they're like, Yeah, we can run this. That old team that wants growth, they should go on. Companies have life cycles and you're like You guys are the growth team. You should go get your next growth. There's an AI startup that you could go raise a ton of money for. And go do your growth playbook.

1:54:52 But this particular company wherever it is. It's not a growth plan anymore, and so you should run it not like a growth play. And so yes, trilogy and ESW is very good at that and you can generate tons of cash flow. If you had to name like the three things that are most responsible for okay, you get a new business at ESW, either for a dollar or for more than a dollar. Dollar sounds like a good deal. And then a year later, or however long it takes, it's now way more profitable than it was before.

1:55:17 What are typically like the One, two, or three things that you're doing to make that possible. The number one is growth versus install base. In a growth company You care about the new customers, and that's all you care about.

1:55:28 And in an installed based company you care about your existing customers. And so literally like Our team, when they buy a company, the first thing they do is they call all the customers. Every single one. You'll be shocked. At these multi million dollar customers like wow. It's the first time I've got a phone call from this company.

1:55:46 Because management on the prospects now. It's not. It's all on the prospects. And you're like Hey. Customer success. The mantra trilogy in E SW is

1:55:55 Customer success. Hey, what do we have to do to make you Successful. Why don't we set up quarterly calls where you tell us if we're making you successful and what are the joint metrics. And they're like, Wow, this is the first time anybody said that.

1:56:08 And when you do that. All of a sudden you get retention. retention of the installed base. And that's actually how you grow the install base is They're gonna sit there and tell you what they want and how to do it. And sometimes you can do it.

1:56:19 Sometimes there's upsell opportunities and all of that as well. Where you're like, Great, I'm solving the customer's problem, and that is actually leading to more. But you have to sit there and you have to look at your install base and be like this is it. You don't get more. I don't get more. I really need to treat these guys really well.

1:56:35 And I really need to understand what they want and I need to figure out, hey If I do add AI to this product. Is there upsell there? Is there something that's really valuable or Oh my God, the prior guys have ignored you and it's total nightmare and you're trying to cancel it.

1:56:49 hard to get off enterprise software and so you're two years into your three year transition plan, can I reverse that? Can I provide something where, oh, all of a sudden I care about you, you're gonna stop the migration off and Get back on. And so that's a hundred percent of what the playbook is. And is the idea is the objective function

1:57:07 actual cash flows that can be pulled out of the business versus enterprise value. Is that the same as the switch from growth to install base is like look. This thing is a melting ice cube would always be the term of art in this space. So just like keep it cold for longer, basically, and take the cash flows and if the terminal value is zero, fine. I don't care. Yeah, you're correct. You're looking at your DCF, you're pulling the cash out. And if it goes to zero.

1:57:31 There's built to last. There's a cycle in a company where it's built adopt. And you're just like, This product is done. And what you're just doing is that and you're pulling the cash out to do it. And there is investment you make because that extends it. Software still is one where if you focus on the customer I mean just basics.

1:57:49 That you can extend your area under the curve. Absolutely. And then you get some nice things like oh an AI uplift and things like that that allow you to do it. What was the transition like for you going from this extremely young, extremely successful person that's on the cover magazines and stuff like this in the nineties? To choosing a much more private Quier existence. Basically'cause I got married. So like in the nineties Crazy trilogy, super awesome. We're on all the covers. We're growth. Hundred percent growth. It's totally awesome.

1:58:19 My last Podcast was twenty years ago. Coincidentally, twenty years ago you're married. And so I just decided I wanted a different path. for the family and the kids and what it was. That was a

1:58:31 The different stage. So Why I'm here. Is growth. She's a senior. She's like, okay, trying to give your kids as normal a world as you can. I just felt that being

1:58:44 Under the radar. And more private was better. Now, as I look forward to my future, I'm like, I got twenty years. And I need to be out there because

1:58:54 We have to educate parents. Schools we educate kids. And time back, we educate kids. Our marketing department slogan is we educate parents.

1:59:08 His parents view of education, it's two hundred years of all this old stuff. They just think things are true. It's not true anymore. Educating parents about What is possible. my new role is I have to go out and do that.

1:59:22 What? Lessons did you learn from Trilogy University. I think it's so interesting that that used to exist back in the trilogy days. And now here we are again. Tell us what that was and what you learned from. Sure. Let's go back to the nineties. Trilogy built itself. So we started in Silicon Valley.

1:59:35 Dropped out of Stanford, literally living in the garage. We couldn't raise venture capital. It was different back then. We couldn't raise venture capital and we thought our ideas were terrible. And one of our co founders was like if I'm gonna be poor And have no money and live in a garage. I'm gonna do it in Austin, Texas.

1:59:50 'Cause it's way cheaper than Palo Alto. And so he moved to Austin. So we all followed him. He was our best engineer developer. Guy. Visionary behind the engine itself.

1:59:59 And The problem with Austin, Texas In nineteen ninety two, would we move there? Is There were very few software engineers.

2:00:07 What we had to do was build basically the software group down there. And so what we did is we basically went to the All the best schools in the country. And we hired two thousand Ivy League grads, you know, Stanford, MIT. Princeton, wherever.

2:00:23 And brought them to Austin. So that was our big thing and back to the culture was We brought him in. It's an interesting thing about high standards. So these are the best kids in the country coming from the best schools.

2:00:36 And we're like if you come down to Austin. We're gonna put you in trilogy university. And this would be the hardest hundred days you've ever done. You are gonna work a hundred hour weeks. It's gonna be eight AM to midnight and we are gonna build the most awesome products.

2:00:50 And it's gonna be the hardest thing you did, but it's gonna be great. And that was why we were able to recruit everybody. Was because of the high standards. Right. And it was actually interesting, you know, Microsoft. At the time, our claim to fame was We got all the best students.

2:01:06 At the time I think Microsoft sort of the peak of their power of ninety seven, ninety eight. ninety percent of the students would go to Microsoft versus any competing company. Against trilogy, it was like Microsoft only got thirty percent and we won seventy. And The reason was

2:01:20 We made it harder. Kids wanna do awesome stuff. Graduates want to do awesome stuff. And you don't want to give them a cushion job or all this stuff, you want to put them on the hardest problems. Where they can work like crazy and do it.

2:01:32 So that was Chills University. Which Yeah. Ethos we continue it today. That's in Austin, that's running right now.

2:01:41 Called Gauntlet AI. 'Cause they're trying to figure out about AI and training. Where they're bringing down a hundred people into Austin, so they basically scour the world. Basically looking for the top one or two percent kids. And these are twenty somethings.

2:01:55 And they're bringing him down. To Austin. They're doing a hundred days. of hundred hour weeks to learn AI. to build apps with AI. And retool your whole career to be like

2:02:08 What am I gonna be in the future? And they have it set up where it's actually free for people to go through this. And then if you make it through and there's like a fifty plus percent washout rate. But they then get a two hundred thousand dollar job because there are all these companies just lining up for being like Oh my God, these people just worked a hundred hours a week.

2:02:27 They're leading a JI. Oh, I can't wait to hire them. It's a unique thing where when it started people are like, No one's gonna go sign up to do that. But if you actually talk to the gauntlet crabs, they're like This transformed my life. This is the best. 10 weeks

2:02:40 hundred hour weeks I've ever done. If I was to watch you like a day in the life from Your podcast twenty years ago, now through today, with the focus on trilogy and ESW. What was your life like? Were you just like a normal CEO running a software holding company, basically? Basically. You strike me as a person that's just relentlessly like pushing.

2:02:57 To make things better. Where would I find you most pushing in those days? What would be the parts that matter back then is It's always back to capital is You're trying to figure out is the trade off between how much do I have to pay for this company.

2:03:10 And the more I pay the better caliber asset I get. Versus Okay, what's the cash flow I can generate out of it? And then what

2:03:19 are the things that generate the cash flow. And so first you're like, Okay, what are the innovations we can make? about customer interaction and delivering customer success and How do we Innovate there.

2:03:30 The second part is okay, how do we take this code base and old code base and how do we make the product better? And how do we make sure that we're being able to take these and revitalize them. And how do we do that? Third, how do you source the talent for this?

2:03:44 You can't just take the Silicon Valley growth people. You're like How do I go get People who care about this. And how do I find them? It's just looking at what are the parts of the company.

2:03:52 That drive your returns. And fundamentally back to systems. You're like you have to have these scalable systems. We've bought over a hundred companies, so anything we're doing. You have to be able to say, Okay, can I apply this to a hundred companies. in companies that you bought.

2:04:08 We talked about the measuring and watching through the vision model wastage and learning. When you looked at people that worked in software companies. Where were they wasting their time? I know you're just driving crazy amounts of efficiency in this. Where are you driving? Well, first just the whole growth thing. Where if you're sitting there saying after growth, you're just there and what's left, you're just Culturally.

2:04:28 It's sort of our same standard that we use with guides, teachers, which is Everybody says it's student teacher ratio. I would always take Pay more to a teacher. Pay more.

2:04:39 Get the best teacher. With a fixed thing. And have a bigger class ratio. Because that's what matters. Software is the same thing. I mean your returns from Having the best talent.

2:04:50 Is always there. So interesting that you were like the software Holtco guy long before that that was popular. Yeah. No, very much. There's obviously great ones. Constellation's obviously, you know, a phenomenal one in what they do. On their world.

2:05:04 Vistas move down to Austin, you know, in the middle. And so I spent a lot of time with those guys. Talking about their model and how it's different. Software's a great business. It's a less great business, I think, going forward. Why?

2:05:16 It's gonna be dominated by AI. The dynamic that's gonna change. is The ability to swap out

2:05:24 Your long tail legacy. Is just way easier now. Software companies Especially systems of record and transaction stuff. you're counting on a decade long tail.

2:05:34 You can't pull it out. And that's been true forever. And I believe This is the bear case on SAS is Can AI enable companies to swap out?

2:05:46 The systems that never have been able to be swapped out before. in your world of melting ice cubes to see ice cube melt faster. It's not freezing, it's heating it. Is AI just A sand. burning this ice cube down.

2:05:59 The question is just it's a matter of extreme. It is a true statement. AI allows you to replace legacy systems. Much easier than you could create. No one disagrees with that. It's just your rate of melt.

2:06:11 If you had a fresh billion dollars with a new young version of yourself in a new L L C wrapper or something or C Corp wrapper. And you wanted to invest it in software. How much worse do you think the returns that you would earn in the next twenty years would be from that, applying a similar playbook to what you've applied? versus the last twenty years. How much worse is the two it's two parts and when we talk about SaaS versus AI driven.

2:06:34 This asset's gonna be way worse. Pure transactional SaaS, I believe, is just gonna be Dramatically worse than the big winners. The AI Native ones.

2:06:44 And it depends on whether you call AI part of SaaS. AI native companies. Calm software companies or whatever. AI native companies are gonna be worth more than any SaaS company ever has. They can just do so much more for the customer. Yeah, it's just your breath. Of what you get to do you could change fundamentally how the business works. Take education. You literally are like

2:07:04 Okay, kids can learn ten times faster. It's a multi-trillion dollar industry globally. And there are no other software that's out there, no ed tech, nothing that's ever been built. can have kids learn ten times faster. And you're like, Okay, I have to build a really good product and now kids can learn ten times faster. I don't know what the value of that is. It's a lot.

2:07:24 That product. Kind back as a product. There's zero doubt in my mind that time back as a product is the single best product I've ever built. By far. Doesn't ship yet and all these things, my team would kill me, but

2:07:38 the value that it will drive to the economy is just Going to be huge. And I believe I've obviously just been focused on education. But it's gotta be the same thing in every other thing. So you would not be a buyer of the new constellation spin offs or something like this that are buying old system of record software as I love to phrase. It's how you're running them. You need to understand.

2:07:58 The economics are generally worse than what they've been. You really have to worry about How long your tail is. But if you are focused that it's a melting ice cube. To Gurley's point of view, there's a thousand of these. There's

2:08:09 Tons of stranded capital. And stranded organizations and all this stuff where If you keep a growth team on something that's a melting ice cube. All you're doing is just incinerating everything. And maybe it's miserable for everybody. The growth team's unhappy because shrinking the customers are unhappy because they're being ignored.

2:08:26 The investors are unhappy because they're not getting any return. And so that's all just a mess, and that needs to be cleaned up. If you were saying I'm gonna go in I had a billion dollars and I'm gonna go do that and I'm gonna go clean that mess up. It is. And you can get great returns there.

2:08:40 But the ones that are gonna be like change the world. Growth plays. are gonna be AI native by industry. For sure. Can you tell me what you've learned from Jim Abel? So Jim Abel He was my head of HR.

2:08:53 And he came from old school. He was from Bristol Myers, I think I hired him. And this is in the early two thousands. Jim Abel was one of the most influential guys. You know, in my career for me, he was awesome.

2:09:06 Still is awesome. On advice. It's ironic. If I had to say what was the best business advice I got. It came from gym. And the reason was because first of all, software businesses are HR.

2:09:19 They are HR businesses. It's your biggest cost structure. It's your biggest leverage of getting return. It's all that matters. And he was an awesome HR guy. I was a terrible HR person. Still in.

2:09:30 And he would just sit there and be like Let me explain. Why you're like the world's worst. boss or manager or however, whatever. Category you wanted.

2:09:39 He did more to help educate me. And Growby. than anybody. I could give you twenty stories. Okay, here's the first one I remember. So he comes in and

2:09:50 We're doing our annual meeting. And I used to write a strategy doc. It'd be like twenty pages. Here's our children's strategy. Here we go. We get him in, you know, there's fifteen hundred people in a big room and I'm gonna get up and we're gonna talk the strategy. And Jim was like

2:10:04 What are you doing? This is the dumbest thing ever. Here's which got you. You're allowed three lines. Three words each.

2:10:11 And you need to distill your strategy down to that. Because twenty page strategy documents. Those are useless. And I remember sitting there and I was talking to somebody.

2:10:21 And I was just like God. Does Jim understand we hire all these guys from the Ivy League? Like everybody can read a twenty page strategy document and the slogans. I'd be embarrassed to get up and sloganeer my way through. With super high end.

2:10:34 And he's like, Joe, smart person disease. You have smart person disease. You need to craft your message and make it simple and clear. I was like, Whatever and I ignored him. And then he went and he interviewed every single person in the company. And it took him Basic month. And he came back and he pulled me into his office and showed me on the whiteboard. And he's like, This is what actually people think your strategy is.

2:10:55 Because I just asked them all. And I'm like wow, that's like literally the opposite of our strategy. He's like, Yes, because in a twenty trade strategy document, there's always one line. That someone can attach to And say, see, I'm aligned.

2:11:08 Because you said something. And he's like, you need to go create your strategy where there's no escape. Where your message is so simple. Everybody can sit there and they have to read it and if they feel discomfort. Because they're not aligned, that's what you're looking for.

2:11:22 That lesson and feel it in the alpha school kids must love school. Three commitments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kids must love school. And he's always about the edge. He's like, And how are you going to measure that, Joe? And he's like, instead of vacation. Jim Abel would definitely pass that as like there's no escape from that. If you're a guy If you are gonna be hired. To be in charge.

2:11:43 You sit there as a teacher and you're like I need to make the kid love school. He has to crush the academics into the life skills. There's no escape from that. And if you don't think that's possible. You won't take the job.

2:11:56 Last week a friend and I went through five we were looking for new companies to be interested in investing in. And we went through five hundred company websites blind. We didn't look at who their investors were. It's just companies that had gotten some funding. And went through five hundred websites. We didn't find a single one where it was totally clear and obvious what the damn product did for the customer. I think if everyone in the world did the three line three words each.

2:12:18 The world'd be a far better place. It absolutely would. He's doing it from corporate strategy, but then once you do it, you're like, Okay, we'll just communicate everybody. No, it's just true everywhere. And if you Communicate that out. He's an H R guy. His marketing insights he came through like Pepsi and

2:12:32 He is a great consumer marketer as well, where he'd just sit there. And Be like It needs to be a magnet. Good marketing needs to attract.

2:12:42 And repel. You need to go find who is your target audience, and if you're giving platitudes. Then that's not repelling anybody. That's terrible marketing. That's terrible vision for a company. He'd look at most, you know, what are the five things, and he's like if someone won't say the opposite.

2:12:59 It shouldn't be on the list. Because then it's a platitude. So it's like a controversial one when we were back then was Integrity. Everybody has integrity on it.'Cause of course you want that.

2:13:08 He's like It's a waste word. Because no one's gonna put on their core values. I want a company with no integrity. Nobody says that.

2:13:15 Yes, you have to have it. I love that the opposite being. If it's not the opposite. And you have to have it's a magnet, attract and repel. And if there's not somebody else. Will say the opposite. It's wasted. You're not getting the clear message across. Is there anyone in addition to Jim that taught you something as valuable that you remember from your business career?

2:13:32 Jack Welch was a mentor of mine. My dad worked for him, and then my dad passed when I was twenty five. And Jack called me and was just like I'm here. Any kind of coaching or help I can give.

2:13:44 I would fly out during the nineties. I'd fly up and spend the day with him at GE or wherever. He was awesome. His ability To motivate you.

2:13:56 Back to limitless. was phenomenal. How did he do it? Like what did you take from him? Youngest man of the Fords four hundred. I'm on the cover of the magazine. I'm freaking twenty something. Life is awesome. I'm awesome. Right. That whole attitude. And I go up there and we talk.

2:14:10 Literally at the end of the the lunch. He's like, Okay, so Joe, you're like uh Good product manager? Is that how I should like Think about you like level seven or whatever G it was. He would just sit there First of all, brutally honest on the feedback. Let's talk about strengths and weaknesses here, Joe.

2:14:27 You sort of suck at this. Not just sort of suck, you're terrible. But then Taking that to make sure you understand where you are. I remember I flew back from that trip.

2:14:36 And I speak. I had so much to do. I have all these things I need to do. I gotta get better on this dimension and my company has to get better here and I I have to build better product. I need to learn more. He'd inspire you to just incredible greatness.

2:14:51 With the highest standards. Possible. Around it. I'll give you one more. Gene Medical had bought one of our products in nineteen ninety seven. I was up talking to him, he's like, Yeah, Med doesn't like your product.

2:15:02 And I was like I don't know if you know it just one e commerce product of the year. In the year of e commerce in ninety seven. Jack's like Joe. I don't care if it comes from heaven above. If General Electric doesn't get a return on its investment

2:15:14 Your product sucks, you suck, your company sucks. No. You go from Oh my God, I one product in the year to He's making a really good point about return and Literally that helped us create our customer success and how we could

2:15:27 Show return that we won't just be a product company. But we could show value to the customers. And so that was what he definitely did. I love that. I'm curious about your motivation. We talk so much about other people's motivation. What is the through line of all your hard work? One of the things that comes up a lot when you ask people that know you, I think, decently well.

2:15:45 They'll say some version of this. Joe's like Nine tenths just a really nice, high energy normal guy. And then he's one tenth. Business Killer Psycho.

2:15:53 I'm curious about that ten percent of you. Maybe for you to describe it if that resonates with you or not. And if so, where it comes from. Is it true, first of all? Like does that feel like a good I'm just a normal guy with the with this extreme. You shall probably have a a good view on that. There is an element of

2:16:11 Pushing the limit. Is where you get All the alpha. That's where you get all the benefit. Um It's at that extreme.

2:16:19 Where the real truths come out and I absolutely believe I'm always trying to figure out how do you take this and where's the limit? Turn it to eleven. Yeah. Let's work a hundred hours a week. You know how we're gonna get all these kids? We're gonna build craziest food camp, Jones University. Back to to our learning.

2:16:35 My first day I literally sat in front of the parents. It was first Day of school, which was two weeks after I started. And I was like We're not gonna have any adult do academic teaching in this school. You know, there's like hundreds of parents who are just like This dude's a whack job.

2:16:49 I appreciate All those who stayed to us, some did rage quit. Obviously and totally. Understandably. Right.

2:16:55 To me, I'm like, Yeah, this is how we're gonna make it work and it's gonna be fine and of course there's not gonna be teachers doing academic teaching'cause this can do it better. That's where you get the okay, that seems like that ten percent of just pushing to it. And today. Or two hour learning.

2:17:09 Engine. And two X in two hours. You're just gonna go push out. Well, there's no reason why not to, because the kids a hundred facts and ideas an hour in their head with the TikTok interface is just Whatever this is, well, let's just do more. And on the scale, when you say I'm the ten percent. Obviously Elon Musk is always the thing, like you go to dinner with him.

2:17:27 And he's like A hundred X. I'm like, Oh, I really suck. He's like, I don't understand why you don't have a thousand schools already. I don't know what's going on. I'm like, Whoa, it's all these issues. It's all a continuum. On where you said.

2:17:40 But yes. That part of it is Designing the system and designing the ecosystem. Whether it's a product or whatever. You're like, What are those things? What are the levers that if you

2:17:51 Really push'em, that's what keeps going. So learning sort of happens at the limit would be like the capsule. Learning happens at the limit. It's learning and There's always the ideas. And then actually how do you implement it and scale it? It's the Steve Jobs thing of it's really easy to visionary a good product and there's ten thousand decisions you have to make.

2:18:12 To make'em all work together. There's ten thousand decisions we've made in the alpha system and to our learning system in this ecosystem. There's ten thousand decisions that You need to make. And they reinforce each other.

2:18:27 One of the things people often say about Me, is it like I want eighty five percent show. Ha ha. Right. I want what Joe's doing, but I'm gonna do the eighty five percent version of it. The answer is

2:18:39 And they find out. It doesn't work. If eighty five percent work, I do that. It doesn't I'm pushing it to where it needs to be. For it to work.

2:18:47 And if all of a sudden you back off those It's gonna fail for some reason. If you don't believe your school needs to have kids love school, they'll go instead of vacation. It's not gonna work.

2:18:58 And people are like, that standard is so ridiculous. Yes. That's the one that makes it work. Yeah. That is the one that makes it work. Exactly. When was the first time you experienced that? This spinal tap approach turned it to eleven. I'm so curious about its roots in you. Like we liked that as a kid, like what was the first time you remember pushing something to eleven to see

2:19:19 Well you can learn at the lens. High school This is a dysfunctional eleven, I guess, which was I was always about what's the minimum academic score I can get, but still hit. Goals.

2:19:31 So like I would sit there and be like, Well if I get an eighty nine point five, that'll round to ninety, which gives me an A, which is the same as getting ninety nine or a hundred. And I literally would just do the work to get an eighty nine point five. Right at the limit. There's a time where I literally turned in a test where I didn't finish all the questions. I'm like, Oh, it's enough now. I hit my eighty nine point five and turned it in. The teacher just God I hate you, Joe.

2:19:55 Really? You can't just like finish it. So I didn't like school side. I was trying to figure out how to game it. How many days could I skip school and not get expelled? When I really turned it on was when I started drop down started trilogy. So The story here is.

2:20:09 My parents were very unhappy that I dropped out of school. My dad was definitely more of the rule follower type. I was too much of the renegade. And my mom was very upset. There's that Forbes article where they're like you're a moron.

2:20:22 This famous title. This was a little over a year after I'd started trilogy. I was with my dad. My dad was like I know I didn't like you. I'm so excited. That you start a trilogy because I was so worried that you were a lazy little shit. I was so worried about it. And it was just because you were an academic and you didn't care.

2:20:42 And so you were always trying to shirk and do the minimum. He's like We're working a hundred hours a week, we're sleeping under the desk, we're just doing everything right. He saw that I found what I love. That was that unlock that you want to do it. That feeling of limitless that feeling of limitless.

2:20:57 And that I would just run through walls. To do that. For him that was the point. So that would be the first time when I really Demonstrated that, at least to him would have been that. I I agree that

2:21:09 Ай стронг еври кід. has a thirst for learning. It's just not always academic. And you're just trying to tap into that. For me it became starting a business and learning everything about it and

2:21:22 I was one of the world's expert in configuration. I can't tell you why. But it was a means to an end. I wouldn't have just done I'd sit in the Stanford C S library, you know. We back then you had to read papers and all that stuff. This is it's very different, which is it was finding that unlock, and then once I did it. It brings the energy and excitement.

2:21:40 to it. What was the switch over from trilogy to ESW? What was the first time that that new unlock happened? Yeah, that's it. There really wasn't it was a continu like to meet all trilogy. There was a name issue that's a corporate legal entity, but it's all the same trilogy. There really wasn't, which was we bought a couple companies. And we're like, Oh, we really are good operators. Yeah. We're like, Oh, we we actually really want. Yeah, oh wow, look at this. And

2:22:03 We bought a company and we made I don't know, ten times our investment on it. Like Oh wow, this is like this is cool. Yeah, this is really cool. It's so interesting, the limitless thing. Maybe it's a nice place to start to wrap up. is the the same person I mentioned earlier, my friend, his name is Graham Duncan. Who had the teenager selling the sweatshirts that would be so motivated by it.

2:22:22 An amazing kid. He has this notion of trying to get people into positive feedback loops. And it strikes me that that is what you are doing now. with your time and your money and your attention. You know, I haven't quoted numbers, but it's an enormous amount of your own personal money that you're putting behind this.

2:22:37 And it's pretty amazing for me as a dad, and I'm sure for everyone listening with kids. to think about your time and your energy and your money. That basically what you're doing is putting kids Into positive feedback loops where they can feel that feeling of limitlessness. But for anyone that's felt that knows you don't have to talk to them about they know that is the biggest unlock of their lives.

2:22:57 And so I'm very thankful that you're doing what you're doing. I think it's one of the coolest projects happening in America that people are just starting to learn about. Hopefully now a lot more will learn about. I think you know my traditional closing question. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? I've had so many. My wife runs a kindness campaign. Around all this stuff, and the kind world that we live in is just

2:23:19 When you look at The kids. At the school. And you just sit there and say When we look at

2:23:27 And maybe kind or grace that They're part of this. When I wake up every day. The kids who are in the schools We are like forging new ground.

2:23:36 This is a startup school. And there's all these kids who buy in and are like, We are part of it. And to a large extent They're putting their faith in the adults, and that includes obviously me. To be like

2:23:50 This seems really crazy. The scene's Very different. But I'm all in and I buy in.

2:23:57 That's the part that for me I'm just like At the end of the day it all comes back to the kids and their buy in around this stuff. And their willingness to be part of it. Is the thing when I think of Gratitude and kindness.

2:24:11 That's the core that makes this all happen. And that's where my appreciation goes. immense amounts. To all of them. There's a few of them who are.

2:24:20 Watching this. Who are gonna be like. It's time to receive feedback, Mr. Lemont. Here is my critical yet constructive feedback. Alex or Tatum or Ella is gonna do that. And that's the part of this whole thing.

2:24:35 And to your point. There's nothing more important for a society than to raise its kids. We have an opportunity because of Things that have been invented and where we are in the world. To totally make it awesome.

2:24:46 For the kids, and there is nothing not just more valuable, there is nothing more rewarding. And so If I can assemble the dads and the moms who wake up every day. And are like I want this change for the kids.

2:25:00 We have the opportunity we need to. Get all together and make this available to a billion kids. Around the world. And I'm in. I'm in for the next decade.

2:25:10 Two decades, twenty years. I'm putting in the first billion. Transforming this is gonna require more than that. It's a trillion dollars a year. It's gonna require more than that. There's nothing more important than all of a store on it.

2:25:22 Joe, this is unbelievably fun for me. Thank you so much for your breaking your twenty year streak with us here. Can't wait for everyone to hear. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode, visit joincolossis.com where you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with hand-edited transcripts. You can also subscribe to Colossus Review, our quarterly print, digital, and private audio publication featuring in-depth profiles of the founders, investors, and companies that we admire most. Learn more at join colossus dot com slash subscribe.

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