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

26:26We're going to win state. They're going to be great at it. Yeah. Right. And we don't expect teachers. That's how we call teachers being 10x better is that kind of relationship. And so, yes, you can make more. And there's, you know, different bands and are your lead guide and all of that. So one of the things that was like most controversial to me when we were first speaking is I feel like, you know, schooling is mixed up with a lot of parenting philosophy and that makes it complicated and i think there's a popular view of like if you give kids a bunch of extrinsic motivators yeah right it could be stickers it could be time back you're hurting their building of intrinsic motivation they should just want to do it how do you react to that no the answer is very clearly that's just not true okay but it's a belief and i know everybody believes it yeah and i was trying to i paused because they're like should i go through like the research that goes yeah i'm like i can't pay my kid when they're 30 to be a self-actualized person but here's here's You're paying them.

27:20So let's talk about paying. So paying is the most controversial side. And so let's just we hit it. We start in kindergarten. You can earn an alpha buck. And we we have an economy based on this where kids learn how to earn. Right. OK, I did work. I earned it. I learned how to save. I learned how to spend. I have an emporium and I have to decide where am I going to spend my money. I learn how to donate. Right. And so we learn how to save and invest and donate as that ecosystem. And it's important that the kids are earning it, being given it. And as you go up, when you talk about our middle school, right, parents are like, we have a system where if you're not top 1 % coming into our middle school, we will pay you$1 ,000 when you hit top 1 % in your subject.

28:07It's a lot of money for a middle schooler. And that$1 ,000, now there's two, and parents are like, okay, I hate that. I'm like, wait, but then that money then goes and feeds their Robin Hood for Kids account, right? which then now they have real money to invest, right? Which really matters. How does that go for them? Well, it's some of the seven, you know, they're going to YOLO it and lose it. And, you know, and I have parents who are like, how'd you let them lose all that money? And you're like, this is the best time for them to learn not to do that and actually learn good investing behavior and not gambling.

28:38And if it's not real money, right? And if it's just like a shadow account, right? Or a fake account, it actually teaches dysfunctional behavior because it actually teaches you to YOLO because there's no downside. This actually is their money and it teaches them good habits. You mentioned you could also apply that, I think, to projects or other things as well. So do you want to talk about that a little bit? And then the second part is they use it for their passion project. So we had a girl who was building the first all-team-produced Broadway musical. And, you know, she had to do her math. She got up to 790 Math SAT.

29:12It funded and it allowed her to get the money to fly to New York to meet the producers, to figure all of that out. And parents on either end of those are like, OK, those seem like good examples. Right. And and you get the motivation on the academics and it unlocks what they can do. And then second funds things that parents are like, OK, this is all good. That is kind of how achievement as an adult works as well. A hundred percent. It's a hundred percent. But getting back to the core about you're worried about intrinsic, extrinsic kids have part of when you're trying to make kids help kids realize they're limitless and there's no blocks.

29:46Kids all have inherent blocks on what they can do. I'm not smart enough. I'm not a top one percent kid. I'm not here. I don't have the daily habits. And so if you can use money to create the daily habits, every parent should. Right. Because the daily habits are what's going to help them more than the downside. The second part is if you can break a block that's in their head, you should pay it. So here's my example is my, my oldest daughter was self-motivated on academics. So it didn't matter. But my youngest daughter is just like when she got to middle school, she's like, yeah, I'm top 10 % dad, but that's good enough.

30:27Um, I'm just, I'm not like my older sister who's the smart one and I'm not, and I'm not top 1%. And I was like, you know, well, the one thing I know about you, you love to shop. And I was like, I bet you a thousand dollars you can't get to top one percent this is how a thousand dollars and she was like and she literally filled it it was on gift card yeah with all these things and every day she'd look at it and then she would go into the apps and this causes controversy like uh my wife we had a lot of family discussions about this right because the two things uh are you're paying kids and second are you saying standards too high right and so after she hit the thousand all hit the one percent got the thousand bought everything she wanted she sat down with my wife right and she's like mom look i know you didn't like this but here's what you have to understand which is uh i never thought i could do this i never thought i was top one percent and i now realize i'm actually as smart as my older sister and i can do anything she can do if i just put in the work that changing of how she saw ourself, right?

31:39Every parent would pay a thousand dollars, right? We spent 20 grand a year just in America. We spent a thousand dollars to get every kid to believe I can do anything. And there's not these inherent blocks. I'll give you one other one. If I was with the secretary of education down at alpha last week, and I was like, here's the number one thing. If I was in charge of education to fix is, and it uses money, which is the reason kids can't learn and why, you know, our education in America starts to slow down in middle school. And by the time you get to high school, kids basically aren't learning. The median high school student in America goes up one point on a 300 point scale in four years.

32:17Right now, your top 99 percent go about six points a year. So they're still crushing it. But your median person literally doesn't learn anything in high school and it slows down in middle school. And the reason is, is because we have a time based system, not a mastery based system. And every learning science paper says is you just get Swiss cheese holes. If you haven't mastered fractions, algebra is going to be really hard. And if you haven't mastered algebra, chemistry is going to be right. It's just, it's all hierarchical. And so what you, what we do when we get these middle schoolers who are behind is we come in and we developed, you know, back to motivation really mattering.

32:51I sat down with the seventh graders, you know, this is three years ago. And I'm like, look guys, you need to go back and fill a fourth grade hole. And I learned immediately that seventh graders do not want to do that. There's no world where they want to go backward. And the only people who want that less is their parents. And I was yelled at. I mean, my kid needs to be a grade level. I'm like, that is not what the learning side said. He needs to go back and fix this. And anyway, I eventually had to give up on the parents and I could never convince them. And so I just went to the kids. I'm like, guys, you could get a hundred on the Texas star, the standardized test.

33:26They're like, no, I can't miss. I'm like, no, no, no. I'll give you a hundred dollar bill for a hundred, 100 for 100 yeah they're like it's still impossible mr i'm like no no there's a catch any grade level and they're like i can take a kindergarten test you're giving me 100 bucks i'm like well texas star starts in third grade yeah and they're like done they took third grade test get 100 yeah take the fourth grade there can i be fourth grade yeah 100 they go to fifth grade and don't get 100 they get an 85 or 75 the ai back to personalize why the personalized tutor matters, it generates all. I'm like, do you want it to generate all the lessons to get you to a hundred that you missed that you need?

34:03They're like, let me see how many. Yeah. They're like, I could do that in a week. Right. They do it. Right. And you move them up and that we need to do that for everybody in America. Right. Because it does two things back to it. One, it whole fills all their issues. Right. Which will stop them from slowing down on learning. It'll keep it linear. um and then second their perception like there's a view that the only people who get 100 on a state test on a standardized test are the smart gt kids everybody can right everybody can get 100 that you separate that it's iq versus effort and i feel if you said why the athletic ethos doesn't come to academics is because every parent because of the time-based system we have and the system we do have, you know, in most schools, it is based on IQ, right?

34:52If you're good in normal school, you are both IQ coded and big five conscientious coded, right? Just all the data says that. And this, our system literally separates that where it's just like, we're going to give you personalized lessons at 80, 85%. And if you just put the time in, you can master every subject right through the eighth grade. How do you think about there's sort of this broader societal context right now where there's the sort of hate book around cuddling of the American mind and sort of things being too easy, lack of resilience, et cetera. There's a separate thing, which is sort of this mental health wave that's gone through schools where if you look at things like autism spectrum disorder, it went from one in a few thousand to 3 % of the population in terms of diagnoses.

35:33You have massive ADHD diagnoses in a lot of kids on Ritalin, which is effectively certain types of drugs. You have very strong perception of mental health crisis for teenage girls and a lot of them end up unnecessarily. eyes. And so you have a mix of medication, diagnosis, all the other things that is really the milieu for or the context for schooling. How do you all think about that in the context of Alpha? Yeah, all those things are true. And I believe part of it is because we have this terrible 12 year system that we subject the kids to. And if you literally sat down and said from first principles, what do we expect if we set low expectation, waste 95 percent of kids life and put endless pressure on them?

36:10What happens after 12 years? You're like, not good things. And so, you know, and a lot of the diagnoses, right, IEPs and whether, you know, and why. It also gives kids more time in the school to take tests. Yeah. And so there's this whole thing where fundamentally what an IEP is, is trying to give your kid a personalized education. Right. Everybody knows an individual tutor is better than one teacher in front of 30 kids. And so all these IEPs and diagnosis. What does IEP stand for? So it's a plan in a public school that gives you basically it's an individualized plan. Yeah. Right. For each kid.

36:46Yeah. And you want a diagnosis because then you get one. Exactly. Right. Dyslexia, dysgraphia, whatever, ADHD, whatever it is. And, you know, when parents come to our school first, you just talk to our parents who had all these diagnoses and now they're at Alpha, which is, you know, the once you go to Alpha, you're like, well, your kid's not going to sit in class for six hours and be bored. You have the, oh, he's disruptive in the class. Yeah. You know, and he's a problem child. Yeah. Right. And all these things that I need to met him up, you know, to solve it. No, you don't. You just need him to engage for two hours of the app and then have the rest of the afternoon.

37:18Not that. Right. And it completely transforms the kid. And, you know, back to just the over diagnosing. I believe it's I don't know if it's over diagnosing given the system it is. But in the alpha system, it's completely different. And I would say the second part about mental health issues, I believe a lot of it comes back to this low standards where, you know, we get into the middle. But back to you, we'll focus on middle school. Right. In middle school, you get in a whole set of girls, you know, who are like, I'm not a math science girl on the academic side. And second, I school TikTok all day.

37:51Right. And you're like, where is this going? Yeah. Right. And it's not going to be good. Right. And at our school, first of all, we have to make the kid love school. Right. And we have all day. We have half the day to do awesome stuff. And so our workshop, one of the workshops we do is you do a values chart. Who do you want to be? Vision board. And these kids have awesome things they want to do. Right? And then you say, we do Japanese Ikigai, right? For others to know. And what are you good at? And what's your passion? And what does the world need? And then we do a 168-hour project. What do you spend every hour of your week?

38:28And, you know, and this this girl came and she's like, well, Mr. Limon, I guess I'm going to be the best TikTok scroller. Yeah. And it's the exact opposite of what her vision chart was. But it was the realization of right that discrepancy. And then our job is to use her afternoons to have her become a creator, as we say, like our middle school basically will take consumers and turn them into creators. And what parents need to understand is every kid actually wants to be awesome and wants to be a creator. And they don't wake up saying, I just want to be a video game player, TikTok scroller. They don't want to be.

39:05But our schools don't give them an out. Right. And that's where this environment can totally unleash them because you're like, well, they don't have to do that. This sounds like a very awesome experience for the kids and very ambitious. It also sounds very expensive. So how do you you said like the goal is a billion kids. how do you pay for a billion kids to have this type of experience? Sure. And so we're talking about Alpha. And so just back to the things we're building. So at Alpha, it's a high-end branded school. So there's going to be in 100 cities, there's going to be an Alpha model. It's going to be expensive.

39:36Literally, when it was designed, we said, pretend price is no object, you know, and just set that there. But now we're building out other schools, right, at half the price and lower to where we actually have schools now down to 15 ,000, which is lower than your average public school spends today. And so now it changes what your product is. So for example, a sports academy is actually for kids who love sports. You don't need all these expensive workshops. You just need a field and a coach. And you can have 25 to 1, right? So things of where you lower cost ratios. Schools are driven by how much you pay the teachers and what's the student-teacher ratio.

40:18Now, crazy part about the student teacher ratio is, you know, in normal school, because you're trying to just replicate an individualized learning, smaller class size is better, you know, in a lot of cases. But in our schools, it doesn't matter. Right. And if you actually ask our high school guides and I was like, OK, I can double the pay for a guide, but you're going to have twice as big a class size. What do you guys want? They all vote for twice as big a class size. They want a more awesome person to help coach them. Right. And so you can fix your economics and drive that. So GT school also is very cheap that the GT kids are like, oh, I want to do math Olympiad and robotics and relatively inexpensive workshops.

41:04And so those those are, you know, at a right now they're 20 to 25 thousand dollars. We're opening a Montessori one at that price point, sort of next gen Montessori. And but we expect we will have hundreds of schools in Texas, this Texas Sports Academy next year. A billion dollars of vouchers are coming. You get 10 ish to 11 thousand dollars, you know, at 15 grand. So for four or five hundred dollar a month parent pay. And we can make this available. And you're running this as a for-profit, is that correct? Yes. So we run it as for-profit. We also have a big scholarship fund, right? And what sort of people are you trying to attract?

41:40Because I know one conversation that we were all having earlier was how people often wonder, can you make money in education? And you're really focused on, let's build something incredibly impactful, incredibly useful that also makes money. Are there specific types of people that you want to have join you on this effort? Great. Yeah, no, that's, so my best goal out of this would be, education is seen as it has to be nonprofit. It has to be funded by donations and you have to be, you can't make any money and anything that makes money. Or if you bring capitalism to education, you are bringing evil into the world and there's examples.

42:12So there's reasons why that, you know, historically, but that's not necessarily true. Right. And that's what we're trying to show is that you can build great businesses, right. That are for profit. Right. But that both have mission and money as a purpose. And so I'm trying to attract builders who, you know, if we're going to reinvent education, right? If every kid, I guess we're here to step back. If every kid's going to learn everything they need to know in two hours a day, and there's going to be a tablet, less than a thousand dollars for everybody in the world, right? That's coming thousand dollars for everybody in the world in two hours a day of what we spent all day in class for Yeah.

42:51Every family and society has to say, well, now how are we going to educate our kids and what are our values and what do we want to allow? And I think part of what I'm trying to do is let's go get a bunch of builders to go build awesome products. Yeah. Right. Those go build the world's best. And for builders, are you most looking for engineers? Are you looking for operations people to run these schools at scale? Are you looking for all of them? So we're releasing Timeback, which is going to be a platform that you can build schools on. So literally, you don't have to know, you know, all the learning science.

43:21It's going to be all packaged. Right. And then you basically do the afternoon. Right. And so that's what this Texas Sports Academy is. It's literally it's coaches, you know, in a thousand school districts around Texas. So there's that that aspect. There are set of coders and builders, which is once you start, most of ed tech does not use learning science. Right. Which is one of the biggest issues. And once you say, I'm going to build an app from the ground up based on learning science, right, you all of a sudden can say kids can learn in 20 hours. Like Math Academy is like the best math app that's out there.

43:55Right. And that's a great, awesome team who, you know, if you want to learn about it, just go research all their stuff. But we need that for every subject. Right. And so we need builders and parents will pay like one of I'll give you one aspect on top of time back that's being done is there's a triple A video game team. Right. Who is building a video game on top of it. And this video game is going to be both free to learn for everybody on the planet. But they also believe it will be the most profitable video game ever built. Right. That there's just easily, you know, just in America alone, there's 10 million moms will pay 100 bucks a month to have their kid be in the top one or five percent.

44:32And so as you think about, you know, getting it down to scale, there is a software element, right, that is going to be available for the software builders. But it is even builder. We need sort of the full stack. You know, you're going to have buildings and real estate and guides and teachers. But I think, you know, I think there's going to be just an explosion of different opportunities. I think for our audience, there's a lot of tech and business people. They'd be like, oh, well, you know, Joe's a software guy. He seems like a pretty competent executive. And he's about to run into the wall of like the slowness of the education system and regulation and the fact that like most kids go to public school.

45:10Yeah. And there's a bunch of restrictions around what you can do and you can't get that time back. And so how do you think about like this is parallel system and how quickly you can make that transition or how like everyone should think about it? No, this is a great because in my first year, part of when I got into this, I'm like, how do I make a business out of this? And, you know, I I put in the first billion. and just said, okay, this is my seed fund, big seed fund, to be able to go figure this out. But a lot of it is I got to get this to product market fit that then can go funding. To rebuild education is going to take hundreds of billions of dollars.

45:44There's 10 ,000 buildings that need to be built, right? It's a huge endeavor. You know, every country is going to want its own LLL, right? Because when you talk about sovereign AI, the number one use case of sovereign AI, It's either military education. Obviously, education is the one everyone wants to talk about. And so there's a the investment here is going to be enormous. And so how do you build profitable models? So one of the things about education, you know, is you're you know, as you're doing your whatever mental model of what's your beachhead. The private school market is huge. So the private school market in U.S.

46:19is already over 50 billion dollars. And so if you want to go build a multibillion dollar company, it's easy because these guys haven't innovated in 100 years. Right. And so all you don't have to fix public education on day one. You can go just fix private, you know, back to scale. There's a million kids in America who could afford$50 ,000 tuition. So if you want to go high in. There's also, as you go, as you go, move down, the amount of private school vouchers and funding that's opened up is enormous. So when you think about the scale, Texas spends a hundred billion dollars a year on education annually.

46:57They just released a billion dollars in vouchers, right, that are going to be available right next year. You can go build a great billion dollar business. Right. And those are only going to increase over time. If you look at the big government, the federal bill that just passed, if you actually do all the math, I think Bloomberg just did it. They're like there is like two hundred billion dollars of vouchers that are going to be available to parents to use on private school education. And so there's enormous amounts that are either already out there that parents pay for or second that are coming.

47:33Right. And if you can build low cost school models or these, you know, good, protected, awesome products for whatever your vision and niches, where's, you know, arts, theater, music school. Given how much is available from a market perspective or revenue perspective, why has there been so little innovation? So a lot a lot is everybody only knows their education. So here's the big breakthrough you have to have to believe this. Back to the one is if you think the only way to educate a kid is a teacher in front of a classroom, you can't do this. The model does not work, right? You have to be willing to break that.

48:11And 99.9 % of parents are not willing to think of that. Because even if I go build it, how do I convince parents, right, to come to my school? It took McKinsey two years. Right? That's a really long sales cycle. you know, for one family. Yeah. And so you're that's part of what we're trying to do and, you know, get out there and be the exemplar for everybody is you have to be willing to break the teacher in front of a classroom model. And then once you do, you're like, OK, now everything can change. I can rebuild. If you could convince every relevant policy or lawmaker that has to do with education of something, what would you what would you say?

48:53Because I'd say like, well, one thing is to make the default something that is time back powered or or follows this model more. School is a hard bundle. And this is the problem. We got to get it to public school eventually. I believe it is going to be a long lift. Right. I think it is going to be a decade to get it to public school. And part of what we are doing is we have to show we got to get the data right. There's all these fads in education, ed tech, one more. Oh, my God, it's not going to work, all that. I'm like, what particular like academic performance data you have? Well, not my ends, not big enough.

49:27Right. Let's go get a million kids. Right. And let's do. Why don't we do pharmaceutical grade randomized control trials for education? We don't do that at all. Right. We any latest fad is like, oh, this is what we're doing in schools these days. Right. And I'm like, no, let's actually sit here and have the government sit and do, you know, studies where we're going to be able to say this works right the learning science is there right where you could build products run them through a test right and then be able to say we should adopt this whole thing there's been a lot of things that have been adopted in the last 25 years that are terrible yeah right that you're just like oh my god i can't and what's an example there's a new wave coming back which is the science of reading but how we taught most of kids to read, you know, 20 years ago is why they can't read.

50:16Right. Well, I'll take modern ones. Let's just take modern ones. Okay. We're not going to have kids memorize our multiplication tables. That's bad. And I'm like, that is the worst thing you could do to a kid that, you know, all the cognitive load theory, right. You know, you have working memory slots and then how many reps it takes to store into long-term schema and you're working memory slots. You can't do advanced math problems. If you're in the middle, if you have limited working, correct. If you're an advanced math problem and you're doing seven times eight and seven times eight to you is still a calculation.

50:49Yeah. Right. You're doomed. Right. There's just there's no way around it. You'll start making careless errors. You know, I have plenty of stories around this. All the kids who transfer into our school from, you know, public and private do not know their memorization, their multiplication division. It's considered bad now. It's considered terrible. And so you're like, let's go back to this. There's a bigger wave coming. There's a bigger wave coming, which is the current school system does not know what's about to hit it. Chat GPT. First of all, we didn't get into the technology. Chat is literally the worst thing in the world.

51:21If you give kids chat GPT in school and academics, 90 % will use it for cheating. It is a cheat bot. It is not a chat bot. It is terrible. And so like in our academic two hours, there is no chat functionality. We've tried and the kids all jailbreak it and get around it. And so it's terrible. And so kids are knowing less and less. And the current system is not set up to stop that. Writing is prompting. Kids write one prompt and they think I'm a writer, but writing is thinking, right? And the best way to rewrite, to learn something long-term deep and rewrite, restructure your schema is writing. And no kids are doing that anymore.

52:01There's also a whole set who are like, well, we don't need to know anything, right? We don't need facts in our brains because chat, GPT, there was a wave with Google years ago. I think there's some teachers like that now too. Yeah. And they're just like, we don't need to know that. But here's the problem. This next sentence out of the same parent's mouth is, but I want my kid to critically think, right? And that concept, there's no learning science that will support that concept. None. You know, if you have LLMs who try to reason with no facts, we call it hallucination. And that is basically what kids are doing.

52:34If you don't give them a fact base, then their opinions are just making stuff up. You have to reason over a fact base. So you have to put facts in. Now, AI in these learning things, we can put in those facts super fast. It's like Neo upload in the matrix, right? We can AI take away because it could cause cheating, but it also give it where you're like, OK, we can get kids in the kids brain 10 times faster. They don't have to spend six hours. But that concept, right, of all these things. So when you talk about policy and stuff, don't deploy chat GPT. Sorry, guys, you know, in its current form, go rebuild everything around learning science concepts.

53:12Right. You need basically the LLM to have the concepts of learning science, which inform it. And then if I was running a school the problem with schools is it is a bundle and you know i i talk to principals and superintendents in public schools and i mean their job's a hundred times harder than mine like theirs is because you don't as a product guy they don't have a customer base they have to serve everybody yeah and so you have customer and the opposite right so like there's three schools in austin that they're failing you know f's for years kids aren't learning and they the superintendent's like, okay, I'm going to shut it down and we're going to move the kids to a good school academically.

53:52The parents are protesting around the school and they're like, I don't care that the seventh grade math teacher is not teaching math because my older daughter had that teacher and she transformed her life. And so I'm willing to give up seventh grade math academics in order to get that other benefit. And so as a superintendent or principal, you're like, what are you doing? And so it's a hard problem for these to transform because your parents and your community base, right, want very different things in that bundle that they think is best for their kid. And so some version is going to be allow, you know, and funding for different versions of the bundle.

54:32Yeah, I guess if I had to do the it's I believe if you want to sit and say, what is the bundle? School choice is one way to do it. And that brings private market in, you know, but how do you support and buttress the public school system? I believe there are a set of academic things we can do where we are working with. We do have some pilots and, you know, a few thousand public school students where MTSS level three, if you know what that is, that's your bottom 10 percent kids where schools have the most flexibility. So, for example, we were doing one over in Fremont and, you know, the hardest part of it isn't, OK, does the app work?

55:09It's like motivation is 90 percent of the answer. How are you going to motivate the kid who has to sit in class still for six hours a day to actually engage with the app? And the kids are like, I'm not going to do it. Right. You can't take our it doesn't matter. Yeah. Ed tech doesn't matter. You put our ed tech and put it in his classroom. It's not going to work. It's the motivation model. And so we got the school because they're, you know, at MTSS level three, they're like, we can use gift cards. And you're like, OK, kid, do the lesson, just get a gift card. Right. And, you know, or, oh, wait, let's build a video game that they'll play or, you know, whatever it is where if you don't solve motivation, all this ed tech doesn't matter.

55:49Whether in AI to none of it matters. And the reason kids use AI to cheat is because they're just trying to get through the system, not trying to learn. and everybody's like, oh, I just hope they're self-driven learners who just have a love of learning. And you're like, there is 5 % to 10 % of the market. You should give them chat GPT and Socratic tutoring and they'll love it. The other 90 % are like, how do I get through this? And that's the, you know, if you talk to most kids and say what the highlight of your day is, 90 % of kids are like lunch, talking to my friends, recess. And I'm like, we waste 12 years of kids' lives, right?

56:23And we're just like, how about we stop that? Before we run out of time, can we talk a little bit about like where ed tech does matter or if you even considered ed tech, like where you are on the product today and what ambition do you have for it to like be better for engineers and researchers, whoever else would go work for you? Yeah, I mean, the problem with ed tech today and why it's failed and nobody wants to invest in it is you're trying to sell to a school system who actually doesn't care about academic outcomes back to the bundle. And you can't change the metrics that matter. And so you can't get any money for it.

56:54So there's no, right, There's no ARPU and then endlessly long sales cycles. And then second, your product's actually not that good. Sorry, EdTech guys. It's just not that good. And go rebuild a product based on the concepts of learning science and build an awesome product, right? Have a much higher standard of what your product has to do. And that, I believe, can change things. Like, you know, the fact, Math Academy, right? How many math apps are there? A zillion of them. I mean, the results that you get with Math Academy are just step function different than everybody else. You know, it only takes 28 hours for fourth grade Math Academy, 26 hours for fifth grade, 22, right, for sixth and seventh grade.

57:40I mean, to master the material. But there's all the other math apps. Don't do that. Right. But he has a 500 page book on the learning science behind Math Academy. And so that concept, right, if you're not, you have to go back and rebuild your product based on these fundamentals that just ed tech never adopted. And I believe then the second one I would do is in the meantime, because the school school straight to schools is a failed model. Parent willingness and propensity to pay for education that their kids love is enormous. So this is back to the other side of the market. It doesn't matter what your income is.

58:25Parents will pay 10 % of AGI, right, of their income on their kids' education. Societies pay 5%. I mean, it's a$7 trillion industry. We spend a ton of money in this country. And if you have a solution, right, that kids love to engage in, right, that does deliver awesome academic outcomes, parents will pay for that. And we need builders who wake up and say, that's what my job is, not running the bureaucracy at, you know, the school boards and all that stuff. So there's more flexibility with kids that are struggling in the public school system. If you're going to be more aggressive than that, what else would you do?

59:04The number one thing that I would do is the 100 for 100 program that we do, which allows kids to go back and master, right, all their basics, right, no matter what their age grade and knowledge grade are different. That program that we run, we need to run that for everybody in America. And for$400, maybe$500 of incentive. Remember, average education, right? We spend lots of we spend up to 20 grand a kid. 500 bucks. We can totally fix and change the trajectory and all these bad test scores and all of that by making sure we're motivating the kid to go back and do this. Why is this your mission? Like you have kids who have successfully gotten through, you know, old system, new system.

59:52Right. Or are almost through in the case of your younger daughter. You know, you're financially independent. You've built a company before. Like why go all the way way back into this mess of a very hard space? Yeah, because it's awesome. So I obviously had a good career beforehand and three years ago, my last three years in principle. So this would be my last message to the builders out there. I did fine before it was good. There was nothing to complain about. The last three years have been so awesome. Right. There is nothing more important for society than raising its next generation. Right. It is the definition of whether it continues.

1:00:28and kids are possible right and when you sit and say we can transform what their decades going to be like or their first 12 years or even beyond it right the the rewards you get out of this are just 10x right it's just and we didn't even get into the student stories coming out or the parent stories you know um you transform lives and so if you say what you know my kids now are gone right and so I spent the 20 years with them. I was, you know, and then now it's like, what am I going to do my next 20 years? This is going to be the best 20 years of my life. It's going to be awesome. And, uh, and so I believe what we do need, it's societally important and we need to go get builders like this to say, we're going to bring new insights, new ways, even business and capitalism to education.

1:01:19And I, I'm, I couldn't look forward to, you know, uh, more than I do. So this is incredibly inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.