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

27:35And we all grew up in a non-mastery-based system, which is then as you don't have mastery, the holes compound. and then all of a sudden the reason like if you look at the learning curves in the u.s they start to slow down in middle school and basically flatline in high school the average kid in the u.s like on this map score this nwa map there's a 300 point scale if you take i can't remember exact number um but if you take an eighth grader they will go up one point by senior year how the median that's the median one point like they learn nothing that's four years yeah four years of learning nothing now your top one percent back to this inequality kind of thing the top one percent probably go up six points a year right so your top one percent kids are still learning like this but your median person in the u.s is not learning in high school it's just based there's no academic learning going on and that's why there's a paper um i'm trying to think you i think uc san diego run of the top schools universities in our country right uh just published a paper that like 50 % of their freshmen can't answer fifth grade questions.

28:47Like back to holes and all this kind of stuff. Like the fact of how bad it is. It's like, you know, the learning and the holes that are in this system. Because once, you know, in the part of what happened with COVID, you know, everybody's waiting for the bounce back on COVID. There's going to be no bounce back on COVID. Because what happened to your point was the span, it used to be years ago. okay i'm a teacher and i'm a sixth grade teacher i got this gt kid who needs some seventh grade material and i got someone who's a little behind needs some fifth grade material post covid you're like now it's a seven year span yeah right you have people in middle school who can't read it's crazy i mean you can't if you can't read you can't it's just a going to school is a waste time yeah right unless you know if you're not if you're in middle school you can't read all that matters is that somebody's teaching you to read.

29:33And everybody got socially passed too, right? So it's like, oh, you're another year older. Therefore, instead of addressing the actual issue, we're going to kick the can to somebody else and we're going to start fresh with this different group. And the pressure, I totally feel. If I was a, I could not do the public school job. I could not be a principal at a public school because it is really hard because the product you have is this bundle, right? And it's political. And there's political and all, just it's totally impossible. And, you know, and you do. So there used to be rules that you couldn't pass third grade if you couldn't read.

30:06Right. And the problem is social promotion where people are just like, OK, you are going to psychologically damage my kid if you hold him back. Right. And so then you just promote him to fourth grade for all these other reasons. Which is more damaging. With this concept of, OK, someone's going to teach him, right? Yeah. But the problem is the fourth grade teacher is not set up to teach third grade reading. They stopped teaching reading in grade three. Right. Because K through three is learn to read. Yeah. And then fourth through 12th is read to learn. Right. That's the flip point where you're like, OK, I'm learning.

30:41I'm bootstrapping to learn how to read. And then in fourth grade, you're like, OK, we all know you read now. So now you're going to learn science and social studies. And, you know, you're going to get word problems on your math test because you can read. And if you can't, if you miss that bar, then all of a sudden you're all of a sudden all this material. And it's just, you know, it could be like me handing out Greek to you. And then it's like a negative flywheel, right? Like every year it gets worse and worse. And then you probably feel like I want to give up. There's nothing I can do. So like why bother?

31:10Why try? And then I'm disruptive to the class. I start skipping class. You know, my life takes a very different path. Exactly. Exactly. And with a mastery-based AI tutor, you can go to those kids, right? And just say, I'll make sure you get the third grade phonic. So explain the mastery-based AI tutor. It's basically like, okay, we're going to start, everybody's going to start in sixth grade. We're going to figure out what you're strong at, what you're weak at, and then we're going to go teach you the things you don't know. And we're going to maybe not get you ahead in the things that you do until we've caught up in the things that you don't know.

31:44Yeah. So you should think, you know. But you don't know we're teaching you a third grade level. So there's like no social stigma to it either. Correct. So you just think about, you know, back to learning science. There's 10 ,000 papers written about learning science about how kids can learn better. The zone of proximal development, like give them questions where they're getting them 80 to 85 percent correct. Where if it's like 99, they're not learning because they already know it. If you get down to 50, like they disengage because it's too hard. So you want this crate zone. Every video game developer knows this.

32:15Keep the kid engaged. And so what you really want in a perfect world is imagine an AI tutor, an app, whatever you want to call it, giving your kid an unending stream of questions at 80 to 85 percent accuracy, right? Where if it gets harder, they're going to tune it up, down. And it's going to be – and think of the knowledge graph of everything they need to know. Here's the third grade curriculum. You can ask, AI tutors are good at figuring out what you know and don't know, right? Assessments or tests, right? And so you can just have the kid take a test and be like, oh, you don't know this stuff over here.

32:50Let's give you these lessons until you know it, right? And then you can, then once you know it, we'll move you on to the next grade. Same thing at the next grade. And just keep progressing you up at whatever rate you go at, right? And this is the, but here's the part that's just crazy town. Kids can learn 10 times faster. So if you take, like just here's a metric for you. Our subjects, like take seventh grade science. In a normal standard school, you have 180 school days. Yeah. So an hour a day. Maybe some homework. A couple hundred hours. Right? The average kid in our system with Time Back, which is our app, Learned it in 22 hours to mastery, to mastery.

33:41Math, science, right? Between 20 and 30 hours. If you're thinking K through eight, you should think between 20 and 30 hours per grade level per subject. That means you can basically be done school in September, like based on the current model. If you were gonna, now, part of the problem is if you put kids in it for six hours a day, they're gonna disengage. And we'll talk about why we designed the two hours and how we came up with that. But the material is just not that much. And that's why our kids can do 2X, right? Because everybody's like, it's just too much to know. And you're like, it's really not that much.

34:15And when you get it, right? For parents, anybody who's looking, you should go. There's a great math app out there called Math Academy. They wrote a 500-page book that you can download. Justin who wrote it. That goes through all the learning science. They also publish how many hours it takes. Their app, I think, starts in fourth grade. But from how long, fourth grade math, fifth grade math, sixth grade math, right? And it's, I mean, it literally is. It's like 28 hours and 22 hours and just not many hours to master material at these subject levels. And so that, when you talk about the unlock, it's just, you know, when you say, why do kids?

34:53And we, you know, think of your kid, you know, where he's bored out of his mind in school. We waste 90 % of their time. Like we know that teacher in front of the classroom is the least effective way to teach. You know, you can argue whether it's 5 % retention, but literally we're wasting 90 % of the kids' time because we're teaching them in a very ineffective manner. Now, back to the thing. We didn't have a better way for the last 40 years. You're like, you know, if you're head of – you're like, you know, schools, you got to have a teacher in front of a classroom because I can't give everybody a tutor, right?

35:28And so there was nothing better. So let's not just tell everybody like you could learn 10 times faster, but sorry. Now, now there's no excuse for it. We can get everybody learning that fast. And I guess the hitch is like, oh, we've always done it this way. So there's an inversion. And then starting something from scratch, you're like, well, I have no sunk costs in the way that teaching should be. So I can experiment with something different and head these results are off the charts and we're crushing everybody else. Look here. We should all be doing this. So why aren't more public schools reaching into this and going like, we should be experimenting with this even in one subject if we don't do it for everything.

36:05Maybe math class looks like synthesis or math academy or something like that where you're using an AI-based learning system instead of a teacher. Why don't they do that? It's really hard to change the system, right? Which is the first off, first off, nobody believes, right? So the first thing you do when you look at alpha, right, and see our results is you're like selection effects. It's only rich kids and that's it. And so you sort of reject it and don't seriously consider it. But even in places that do, there's a lot of high-end private schools who their largest donors are like, I want my kid to have this two-hour learning.

36:46Go take a meeting. Right? So I spend my time like there. I definitely do. I've met a lot of boards and heads of school of the top schools in this country, private schools who charge, you know,$50 ,000,$75 ,000. And they really struggle to sort of believe that this works because fundamentally learning science, this concept of learning science, they're not trained in it. They haven't read the 10 ,000 papers. They haven't built and seen it. They don't know the world. They don't have a team like we do of seven of the 10 best learning scientists in the country working on it. Right. Who have all these unlocks and they definitely don't have the data loop that we have.

37:25Like we know because we measure every single thing, how long the kid took to do it and what the scores are and what are the results and, you know, that whole closed loop. And so there's just massive skepticism, you know, around it. And there, you know, it's a classic disruptive problem of. I wonder if I'm less skeptical by default because my kids grew up playing Prodigy and I watched how much of an impact that had on their math skills and actually more importantly, their love of math. Like they loved playing that game and you had to answer questions to like cast spells and stuff. There's a group of people and those are our early adopters, right?

38:03Who comes to an alpha? It's going to be, you know, families like yours. we call them founding families, you know, because they're like, I think I've seen enough homeschool families. Like if you ask the average homeschool family, they know two hours is all you need. Right. There's actually that's all they've ever done. That's all they've ever done. There's two groups, actually, when you talk about who believes the two hours versus not traditional school just doesn't believe. They just they just don't believe it. The people who do homeschool people, absolutely whatever their view is. Why is that so expensive?

38:33Because I do homeschool. Yeah, I do the same thing. Yeah. And so and absolutely. The other group actually is athletes, which is IMG, which is our head of high school actually came. He used to run academics at IMG because for big time athletes like at IMG, you do the academics in the morning, play sports all after. Yeah. Right. And that's why our sports academy is all is being designed. It's just they know it, too, because that's how they catch up. Right. Because they got all this time already used. And so so there is a small set of group of people. There's others, you know, if you, you know, there's a couple, you know, real experts of learning science, you know, Dean Schwartz, who runs Stanford School of Education.

39:12He's published a book on learning science. What do we know, like, about learning that so AI customized? I want to get into, like, how, you know, kids are doing effective behaviors versus ineffective behaviors. But, like, what do we know about teaching them through AI? Like what makes – like I'm not just giving you a same math lesson that I would give somebody else. Yeah. Yeah. So it's – well, it's important that – more important than the AI is the learning science. Like if I had to pick the two, but it's the combination. Right. So how do they – But let me be clear. Let's dive into what I don't mean by AI.

39:48Chatbots is – I am not talking – our school does not teach people by giving them chat GPT. Chatbots are cheatbots. 90 % of kids who are using chatbots for academics are cheating and not learning. And, you know, in our schools, you know, we do the academics in the morning and then we do all these great life skills in the afternoon. And, you know, for that world, we say, if you're using a chatbot in the morning, you're probably cheating. And if you're not using it in the afternoon for your life skills and all that stuff, you're probably failing. So AI needs to be, chatbots have a use, just not on the academic side.

40:26Now, how we use AI in the morning to teach is what AI, it's the generative AI part, not the chat part. It's we generate personalized lessons for every kid, right? That's the part. And so imagine if you had an LLM and you fed it the following. You fed it the curriculum you're trying to teach, right? You fed it the kids' knowledge graph. What do they know and what do they not know? You also feed it the kids' interest graph. What do they like? Oh, they like baseball. Because then, right, one of the fastest ways to learn is analogies, right? Back to engagement. If I'm teaching you in something you love and that you're good at, you learn both faster and more engaged.

41:07It's sort of a combo effect. And then there's a fourth one, which is we're adding. It's not in our current one, but it will be in 26, which is cognitive load theory, which is a whole set of learning science of how your brain works. And you should think your brain is like a chip, a register, where you have these working memory slots and everybody has a different number. And so you have four working memory slots. And then every person needs a different number of reps to take something from short-term memory and put it into long-term memory. Think of how many times do you have to look at a flashcard.

41:38It's an easy way. But each person is different. But you could imagine an LLM that sits on top of all that data and generates the perfect next lesson for you. Right. And so that's that's where we use the generative AI, not to have kids do a Socratic, you know, tutoring thing, because they're just you're instead saying I'm going to generate a perfect lesson. And those lessons are all based on learning science. So I'm going to make sure that they're engaging and not passive. Right. It's going to be a worked example in math because that's actually the best way to teach kids. You know, I'm going to be measuring if it's too hard, if it's, you know, and you get it wrong, I'm going to go back.

42:17And I can tell from the other questions, even if it's multi-choice, the AI is going to make them so that if I'm unsure if you really know it, I'm going to put some questions in there that'll tell me whether you know that prior knowledge or you don't. All of those things are all baked into what we're generating and creating as a lesson. We can do it as a video with text and audio overlay, make sure it's short so it's not passive and disengagement. So we can do all that as generating those lessons. And that's the key to the unlock. And you might be getting that second grade lesson. Yeah. And I'm getting the first grade lesson, you know, because we're in the same class because the AI is just giving us whatever we need.

43:01Or maybe you probably need the 12th grade lesson. I need the first grade lesson. But, you know, it's generating that. Now, the second – so that's one element. And then there's a second element. And this is actually the most expensive part of our AI. And one of our limitations right now is we burn a lot of AI, $10 ,000 a kid right now. And we'll get it down to less than$1 ,000 and then$100. We're driving it down. But think of basically streaming the screen to a SOTA model, to one of the best ones. And then we have set things up to prompt the kid how to learn. It coaches. It's a coach. so it's like look kid you're skipping those videos you keep skipping the videos right you're not learning as if as effectively as you could yeah and so literally in the bottom of the corner there's a little waste meter where it tells the kid you're wasting time and so this is back to the whole product design you have to do right where you know when we our product name is time back.

44:07The most important part to educate a kid is motivating. So to educate a kid, every educator will tell you, you need a motivated student and you need to put them in lessons of the correct difficulty. Now, AI does that second part well. It knows what you know and don't know, and I'll give you second grade or fourth grade. It'll put them in the right difficulty. But how do you solve motivation? How do you solve motivation? So on my first week as principal, I have to make the kids love school. And so I went up to the fifth graders and they were brand new to school too. And I was like, do you love school?

44:41They're like, no. And I was like, what would make you love school? And they're like, less school. I'm like, how much less? And they're like, none. I'm like, okay, that's right. And we basically negotiated two hours. I was like, look, if I, would you engage in the apps? Cause I need you to engage in the app. If you don't engage and you're spinning in your chair, you're not going to learn. Would you engage for two hours if I gave you the four hours back to go do awesome stuff? And they're like, okay, that seems pretty fair. And I went to my team. I went, great, we got two hours, right? Let's get every learning science paper.

45:13Let's read the crap out of them. Let's figure out exactly what we need to do so they can learn all the material in two hours, right? And so that's sort of the design of how we got the engine and the waste meter. So if you're a student and when you first come in, you're sort of screwing around and you're not really engaged. And so all of a sudden your two hour learning is three hour learning. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought this was two hour learning. And you're like, your waste meter is at 50%. You're wasting 50 % of your time, dude. Right. And then all of a sudden it's like, well, go change these behaviors and you'll get out of here in two hours.

45:47So the unlock is like at the sports academy, right? It's a little meter and they have to be in the lessons until it goes green. Yeah. And then they get to go play basketball or soccer or whatever. Right. You know what the sport is. Then you can go do the other thing. Yeah, and their coach, their coach is like, guys, stop screwing around. Like, get it done so we can all go play. Yeah. And their friends are playing. And so all of a sudden you have motivation where they want to go do what they want to do. They just have to, and it's not hard because we keep them at 80 to 85%. They just can't screw around.

46:17Stop, wait, just use effective techniques. Every kid, like, they scroll, you know, if they have a lesson they're trying to read. Yeah. They scroll to the bottom, look for some questions, search. You know, they try to skip reading the article. And you're like, look, you actually have to read the article if you want to learn how to read. Yeah. You know, and, you know, we also now can generate the article. So they're interested back to engagement interest levels. You can take that second, third grade boys like I hate books. And then you're like, no, no, no. What's your favorite movie? The Avengers.

46:46Who are your buddies? And all of a sudden you're doing a choose your own adventure where you and your buddies are saving the world. And that kid will click page by page for an hour. Yeah. And you keep the Lexile level, right, within 10 % of his difficulty level so he doesn't get – it's not too hard. You can funnel new vocabulary words to him, right? All these kind of things where you can – these AI tutors, when you solve the motivation problem, can fill these kids' head with awesome knowledge, right? And one of our design principles is we're given 12 years, right? Parents give us 12 years to fill their kid's head with awesome knowledge because we think we should make kids' heads an interesting place to hang out in because they have to hang out there for the rest of their life.

47:30Right? And that's – we've reserved as societies, right, this amount of time. And it is great to fill it up. And the kids actually are engaged. And if it is interesting and applicable, right, they do like it. And then there's also just a learning science concept that the more you know, the faster you learn. So acceleration curves, like where the average American in a time-based system, right? Or it's not even American, global, slows down. Yeah. Ours accelerate. Like if you actually took our high school kids. Yeah. Right? And measured them on how fast they're learning versus 2x. One, because the denominator is going way down because the other kids aren't learning.

48:10But also how much our kids learn, right? We'd be at 5 to 10x at high school because you have this effect going. And that's why you can see some tweets I did where I have all these kids like 790, 790, 790 math, 800 math, SAT. And it's all very doable. And it's just you and I in our world are like, this all sounds like magic and hocus pocus and all that stuff. And that's what sort of my job now is and why we're getting it out and opening the alphas and getting this everywhere. is we have to educate everybody that this is possible. Like, you know, if you have a parent in your audience and there's three things that I could put in their brain, right, that they don't believe today.

48:56Like if they have a kid in school, I need them to think A, not B, right? A is your kid can love school, must love school, like more than vacation. That should be the standard you hold, right? Right. Second, they can crush, crush their academics in just two hours a day. This six hours a day in homework, it's not necessary. Right. We have the highest test scores in the freaking country. Two hours a day. Right. If you're going to go more than that, it's because you have to really catch up because you're behind. Right. And, whoa, OK, you got to do three to catch up, you know, two hours a day. Crush it.

49:33And then third is the key to your child's happiness is high standards. right and that is one that you know it's a hard one because i i struggle with it as a parent too i have two daughters right and you know you want to hold high standards but when they're struggling it's hard right but that high standards is why our kids love school so much talk to me more about the high standards part of it yeah so generally you know if you're trying to build a school around that they love, there's this view of, oh, just let them play all day, right? But that's actually not going to make them want to come during the summer, right?

50:11They have to be working on things that are ambitious, right, and significant to be able to do that. If they're just scrolling TikTok or playing Fortnite, they're not going to come, right? They can do that at home, right? Kids want to do awesome stuff. They do, right? Kids are awesome and they want to do awesome stuff and we need to give them an environment and we start in kindergarten like our our kindergartners like here's the you know the thing that freaks everybody out right and we do this like on a shadow day because we're like come test it right no one's gonna just drop their kid in this weird thing come test it so we do a shadow day and one of the things we do is like we have a 40-foot rock wall for kindergartners and parents are like oh my kid is not doing that right that seems scary i'm kindergarten it's all safe it's i mean they're all right in harnessed in harnessed in and stuff but and you know we teach the kids growth mindset, right?

50:59And then you mic them up, you know, they're climbing up and they're like halfway out and they start to struggle and you can see the parents, but our guides, right? Our guides and coaches who this is what they do all day, right? Our guides and coaches, their whole job, when you say, what's the different role of the teacher? Cause we don't sit in front of the classroom. Think of a mentor who's going to guide and coach you. And their job is to hold high standards, but give you high support, right? To help coach you through it, just like a great coach. And then they'll see the kid get to the top. And when that kid gets down, they're beaming.

51:32They're beaming because they accomplished something hard. Right? And every child development expert in the world will say the struggle, the cycle of you need to struggle and fail. I add in as a principle, sometimes cry. On your road to success, supported by a caring adult. That loop is what child development is. Right? And it builds self-confidence. It builds resilience. It's why people, 50 % of America puts their kids in after-school sports because everybody expects that cycle to be run in sports. But in schools, it's just not run. And we're like, every kid needs this. It shouldn't just be in sports.

52:14They want to go do hard things. And so we start in kindergarten, but we'll talk middle school is like when we talk about middle school. So, you know, we have a middle school epidemic of scrollers, what we call consumers, right? They've been caught in the dopamine TikTok or the Fortnite playing, right, loops. And they're just not engaged, right? And so when you come, when you move into an alpha middle school, we run a program, right? Which is, well, what are you interested in, right? How are we going to engage or how are we going to get you out of that? And, you know, as a society, we create a world where all those kids sort of get stuck in it.

52:52So we do a values chart, a Japanese ikigai, right? Think of a vision board, you know, fifth or sixth grade where you're just like, who do you want to be? And if you ask all these kids, they want to do awesome stuff. They want to do awesome stuff and they diagram it out, right? And it's just like, I want to be this. And it's awesome, right? And then you say, okay, we make them do a 168-hour project. track every hour of your week and then they're like oh and then because you are what you do yeah you are what you do and so literally they then come in and like oh i guess i'm gonna be the world's best tiktok scroller and they're just so disappointed because they realize this is who they want to be but this is what they're doing this is how i'm spending my time yeah and i'm just like well that's our job as a school right our guys and coaches this is what because you're not spending all your day in academics we have afternoon workshops where they're able to go figure out their passion project where they can get out of it you know and i i why the world has to change and why everybody wants to change education is because we have too many people there was a kid who came in and he was talking to our high school because he went through our program but he was talking to the the next set and he's just like you know if you had told me like when i first started you know the the whole program and said i'll pay you a hundred dollars an hour for the rest of your life to play video games and just till you're dead and like literally just like plug into the matrix he's like i would have sold my soul for that and he's like and then i went through the program and he's like now i don't even have time to play video games right and he's like because he's engaged on stuff of who he wants to go be right and that's what's happening to a lot of our kids right in society and you totally can break them out right but that's what we have to do as a school.

54:35And back to high standards, the kids want to do it because it's hard. That guy, kids has never worked harder, right? On that project that he's doing, that's transformed him to pull him out of the video game, you know, loop. And the kids want to do it. We have, you know, our second graders, you know, our, our afternoons are all these great project-based workshops that teach life skills, right? And our life skills are leadership and teamwork, storytelling and public speaking grit and hard work entrepreneurship and financial literacy and socialization and relationship building so there's five categories of those and you know our our second uh uh second grade teacher right faith this was a year ago she's like All my second graders can run a 5K.

55:22And I was like, oh, I don't. That. She's like, kids are limitless. I'm like, oh. Because parents, right, back to the standards, you don't want to see your kid fail. Parents, naturally, it's right, protective. You don't want to see them struggle and fail. I'm like, oh, the parents are going to really not like this. She's like, don't worry. And I'm like, how are you going to get them to run a 5K? First of all, she's like, we're going to teach atomic habits. and you know most of us as adults read it what 25 or whatever you know after college but she's like second graders understand one percent better yeah every day they do and so she gets all the kids you know we teach growth mindset right and so she's like how many of you think it's impossible all the kids are like oh it's impossible miss faith you know can't do it and she's like well i signed you up for the jingle 5k at christmas this is in august i signed you guys all up we got to go run it and she brings them out to the track and they're all oh, this is impossible.

56:12And she walks the track the first day with them all. And every single one finishes. And she's like, okay, so we've all established we're all going to finish the race, right? And then she comes out the next time and they run a quarter of the lap, walk the rest. And half a lap, walk the rest. Every time. And by December, they're all running 35-minute 5Ks. And when they cross the finish line, you know, at the Jingle 5K to their parents, they're just like, oh, look. So proud. They're like, dad, I can do anything. Yeah. because I can just 1 % better every day. I can do 50 push-ups. I'll do one today, two tomorrow, right?

56:46And they just learn these life skills that we don't learn till late because school doesn't teach them. But when you have all day, when you're not sitting in class, you can teach these things. And you teach it via hard things that the kids love, right? That they're engaged in doing things that they think are impossible and learning how to do the impossible. It sounds like guides and teachers are very different. What makes for a good guide? Yeah. So teach, you know, when I think of a speck, You know, there's a huge teacher problem, right? Teachers are burned out. They can't hire enough. You know, it's just, it's tough, right?

57:17You know, and just once again, me coming from the outside, right? General HR, you know, HR 101, if I'm a business person, you know, okay, you can't hire a spec, you know, what's the problem? Either the spec's too hard, you're not paying enough, whatever, you're targeting the wrong one. So there's five things really, if you're gonna be a teacher in a standard school, right? Standard teacher in front of a classroom model to do well. First, you have to be a domain expert in seventh grade science. Second, you actually have to be good at teaching. Like what are the effective teaching? We all know researchers who know a lot, but they're really bad teachers, right?

57:51Third, you have to connect and motivate with kids. Fourth, you have to deal with parents. And then fifth, in a lot of our schools, you have a lot of administration and, you know, school systems. And those are five hard things to be good at, right? And so when you have a hard spec, then we go and say, okay, let's underpay them. And you're like, and it's a surprise that no one applies for the jobs, right? And that's why there's huge to fall and all this stuff. And so in our world, I'm like, okay, well, how would I fix that, right? We're re-envisioning school. So how do we re-envision the role of a teacher?

58:23Well, we take, you know, what do teachers really want to do, right? And if you go talk to teachers, teachers did not become teachers to grade seventh grade science quizzes. They became teachers to connect and transform kids' lives. And we all had one or two teachers who did that for us. And it wasn't because she marked her paper up well. It was because she connected with you and got you to go see a bigger picture, right, and just inspired you to greatness and pushed you, right? And that is what great teachers do, and that's what they want to do. So we just narrowed the scope where we're like, nope, you don't need to know seventh grade science because AI does that.

59:05You don't have to know the 10 ,000 papers that are written on learning science of how to teach kids well and all that's AI tutor, learning science based will do that. Connect and motivate kids. OK, you need to be the world's best. Are you the best at connecting and motivating kids? Can you hold high standards and high support? Right. And if you're great on that, we want to hire you. And then the parent side, we actually have a dean of parents. So we designed the school where they don't have to do that. Because when I first got in, the guy who was going through the teachers was like, oh, this teacher is great with kids but not good with the parents.

59:42So don't promote. This person is not as good with the kids, but they're great with parents, so they should be promoted. And I was like, okay, no. I'm going to, we're going to build a school where the kid, they're great with kids and we'll find a way to deal with the parents. Right. Cause there are different skills. Yeah. And then. And the more important skill is the kids. No, all you care about. I mean, I'm parents obviously wish they were good about it, but you really care that these kids connect, right. That these guides connect with your kids and we call them guides and coaches because they're not doing academic teaching.

1:00:13Right. So what's their background? Is it like coaching and sports or. So it's a set of – one, they're the best. We get the top 1 % of teachers who want to move over and, you know, come on over. So we get those, and we're just like, you're not going to be teaching. And, you know, that's always the biggest surprise. They're like, this is what I want to do all day. During those two hours, you know, since they're not in front of class, they're pulling the kids out one-on-one, you know. What do those conversations look like? So those conversations are going to be like, you know, back to connecting.

1:00:41Hey, how was your weekend? How was the softball tournament? Did you win? Did you not win? And, you know, we've been working on this goal setting about your, you know, vision. You don't seem to be engaging in it. Do you really not like it? Is it too hard? You know, they connect with the kids and then sit there and help them understand, you know, what are you trying to do? How am I helping you hit your goals? Just what you would call coaching. It's absolute coaching. So how much of the kid's success then would you describe to, I don't want to disappoint this person who's now paying attention to me versus like if you go into a classroom of 30 kids it's like i can get away with almost anything yeah you know i can like sort of like check in a little bit but now this person knows my name they know what i'm doing on the weekend that i'm gonna get questions on this yeah no there's i mean our guides have great relationships with the kids i mean if you really want to get into it like at high school when we we ask quite we measure everything because if we're going to scale i need the metrics to make sure the quality stays high You know, so in middle and high school, we actually asked the parents, do you trust your alpha guy so much to hold high standards so you as the parent can provide, can only have to provide the unconditional love and support?

1:01:58Right? Because you want to hold high standards, but you also want to provide support. And as kids get to adolescence, it gets hard for a parent to be both. When you're holding high standards, they rebel against you. Right? Yeah. And I'll just take myself as a personal example. So my oldest daughter, you know, she's putting her Stanford application in. And I'm like, can I read it? And she's like, no. Right. She does not want to be judged by parents. Adolescents do not want parents judging on them. And I was like, OK. And I just gave her a hug. I'm like, good luck. Because I knew Chloe, her guide, was going to hold high standards.

1:02:33And, you know, Chloe, back to we get really the best in the world, right? She's a Harvard grad. I know she knows the standard, you know, to get in. And Kate, my daughter, has a great – such a relationship with Chloe. She trusts her. And she trusts her to get her in, right? And, you know, even now she's in college and when she comes back to Austin, she goes to lunch with Chloe still, right? So she has – you build these great relationships with them. And it's – you know, everybody when they think of AI Tutor, they think of robot terminators and all that. And the answer is, you know, in 20 years, you know, predict the future.

1:03:09What's going to be the same in 20 years? Parents are going to drop their kids off at a building. In the building are going to be other kids and adults, right? There's we're not you're not getting rid of school. School is going to be there. Now, if we do our job, what happens in those six or seven hours is totally different. And the roles are different. And it's 10 times more awesome. But you're going to drop your kid off at school because you want them around other kids. And you need – kids don't grow up on their own. They need caring adults who are going to mentor and coach them, right, and help, you know, build – hold high standards.

1:03:45And so that whole loop is going to continue. And when we talk about building schools, that's going to be the future. It's just right now the whole day is six hours in class, right, where we waste 90 percent of the kids' time. And we're like, okay, let's just stop that. Let's just stop that, right? And so that's what back to our thing of how we design school. The first part was, you know, they must love it. The second part was they need to learn 10 times faster. They can't sit in class all day. Right. And so that's this engine we built that teaches kids 10 times faster. That's the time back. That's time back.

1:04:17Our time back engine. That's 10. And today it's an alpha. You know, in 2026, everybody in the world is going to be able to access it. And so everybody who wants to build a school based on time back is going to be able to next year. You hear that development team? the whole world's waiting my kids are waiting everybody's waiting for that so that's the second part the time back right the engine where they learn 10 times faster the third is there's a set of life skills that we think really matter to kids that aren't just pure academics and we went through them but you do care about leadership and teamwork and entrepreneurship and financial socialization and relationship building those skills socialization and relationship building right they matter so much.

1:04:58And we don't teach kids. Now, you experience socialization in school, some good, some bad, right? If you're at Westlake High School and you're the quarterback and the homecoming queen, it's really great, right? Mean Girl High School, right? Cafeteria, there's tons of movies made about it, right? But you can teach kids skills, right? You can teach them all these relationships. How do you teach the life skills? Are you doing anything different there than we would think? You would think these great project-based workshops in the afternoon to teach these skills. So we're like, okay, how do we teach 1 % better?

1:05:30How do we teach atomic average? Okay, let's have them run a, you know, 5k. You know, we teach financial literacy. It really is like our fifth and sixth graders launching food trucks, running Airbnbs, right? And so you can teach them when you have all afternoon, you have all this time to teach them. Now, the biggest thing we do versus probably most others is we try to quantify everything. A lot of life skills are very soft. soft right and that i i can't run a scalable system if everything's hey you know maybe it works so like we talk grit everybody wants their kid to you know have grit right you can't read like angela duckworth's book and okay great right that doesn't mean anything so every third grader in our school can do a rubik's cube every kindergartner can do a hundred piece puzzle And so we, right, every eighth grader has passed a teamwork grit test, which is they all run a Tough Mudder, if you know what the numbers are.

1:06:30Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Tough Mudder and pass cross the finish line at the same time. Oh. Right? That's awesome. And, you know, and back to bonding and hard things. You know, and parents back to, they're like, you know, especially at a high and private school, some of these moms are like, my daughter's not rolling in the mud. That's never happening. Right? And then at the end of the race, they're all covered in mud and they have all the pictures of they all bonded as a team to go through this really hard challenge. And so you're teaching – so we have metrics where – and we try to make them quantifiable.

1:07:04All our fifth graders, fourth and fifth graders can pass Wharton's leadership and teamwork simulation challenge that Wharton MBAs take. Amazing. Right? And so we have all these quantifiable metrics across those skills. right entrepreneurship can you make a thousand dollars can you go raise ten thousand dollars you know all those kind of things um you know character building which is character building is always the hardest one because it's really hard to measure but it's the only thing parents care about is my kid a good kid right but like our example we just we have examples which is our we have middle and high schoolers who are building an app uh where they're trying to convince a hundred million And teenagers, the key to their happiness is contributing to their community, right?

1:07:47And just that whole concept of how contributing to your community is a great character-building exercise. They all have been experiencing. They're like, oh, we can build this into an app and get this out to everybody. So you have people learning how to vibe code with Cursor, right, in their afternoons. Those are the kind of apps, right? And they're working with some of the biggest influencers on the planet to do this, right? Where they're like, okay, I want to come in this weekend. I don't want to go on some work break because I'm working on something hard and significant. The hard thing is really interesting.

1:08:17When my kids went back to school after COVID, I switched schools and I put them in a different language. So they didn't speak it. They went to a French school. So for grade seven, they started and they didn't speak very much French at all. And if I had to sum up the difference of that school from the one they were in previously, it would be high standards. and it was they were consistently on the kids and they would be like no you should be getting 100 i'm going to teach you how to get 100 and it was you know small classes but it was a very strict old school french school uh and i did that because i wanted my kids to wake up like they were sort of like sleepwalking through school a bit and i was like oh well you're going to go learn a different language and for three months my oldest kid came home and he was crying like almost every night this is so hard like i got the word right i'm like but you missed the accent he's like yeah well they give me a zero they should at least give me like three quarters of a point and i'm like well you have a choice right like they're telling you what the standard is you can choose to live up to that and push yourself or you can choose to fight it for the next two years and which of those do you think is going to result in a better okay anyway by the end of december so they have exams So they test the kids like crazy.

1:09:34So these kids have never taken a test before. And by the time they're done these two years, they've done over 200. So they just like, there's no stigma around testing or anything. By the end of December, he's going into exams. He's like, oh, I love this school. Like this school is amazing. I know exactly what's expected of me. And I know exactly how to accomplish what's expected of me. Exactly. So I love that story. That is, now, if every parent thought like you, we would have a different school system today. We would not have the academic results at our schools. One of the things I've learned as principals is your mindset that you just described is very rare.

1:10:11That parents in general want low standards at their school. And part of why schools, even private schools, right, react. Why does Harvard have grade inflation? Harvard, right? And it's because there is pressure from parents and students to lower standards. and that it is hard to keep high standards. That's the participation award that, you know, everybody seems into these days. And the problem with that is it doesn't, you know, when I, where it really starts to manifest is in middle and high school, where you're like, these kids are disengaged. They are addicted to TikTok and Fortnite and they have mental health problems and all these issues that are occurring.

1:10:53And they're the outcome of low standards, not high standards. People think it's, no, it's too hard. If kids don't engage, if humans don't engage in challenging things, right, that they love, that they can go do and accomplish, right, they do lose meaning. There is no meaning in a TikTok loop. And eventually it catches up with you. You can't eat sugar all day, right? It just eventually it's going to catch up with you. And instead, right, we need schools where we show kids. It can be so fun. Like, you know, if you took out our first one, kids must love school more than vacation, parents would not send their kids to the school because they'd be terrified of the high standards.

1:11:34And it's only because their kids come home every day and they're like, this was the greatest thing ever. I don't like, you know, they do. They're like, parents are just like, my kid used to never, like, you know, these middle school sports kids. They're like, they used to skip school all the time, never on time, all these things. Absenteeism is a huge thing. they're like they wake me up and they're like we better not be late like alpha kids are like is it monday yet yeah why is why do we have to go to school and we why don't we go to school on saturdays that's incredible and that's and that is one there was there was one where that those stories are just they they do love doing hard things and you know they can do hard and they can do hard things they love it they have to be supported by an adult so you have to have a guide who's awesome you can't if you just throw them in the deep end that's not going to work right but Get a guide who's going to bond with them, right?

1:12:23And we spend enough money, right? We pay teachers, right? Just let's refocus their role around what they want to do anyway. Transform kids' lives, right? Let's get them all focused on transforming kids' lives where they're supporting them, high standards, right? Exactly the one or two that we knew, right, that transformed ours. And just get that going in all the schools. But to do that, you know, back to it's a tough one. Now, that's why we have to go build. we're going to go build 10 ,000 schools, right? I want to talk about scaling in a second. I do want to come back to my son for a second. So when he was coming home crying, I was also very supportive.

1:13:02I'm like, you can do hard things. I don't want to be reported child services or anything like that. From people listening, this is me and my life. No judgment about how you raise your kids. Totally. The video monitoring thing sounds super interesting. I want to come back to this for a second. As a parent, I'm like, this is amazing. You're teaching my kids effective behaviors and effective behaviors as an employee. I'm like, oh, wait, what? Talk to me about that. So let's talk about the monitoring, which is it's actually really interesting, which is I just went through this with some of our middle schoolers, which is kids like the monitoring and the coaching because I want to get better.

1:13:41So do parents. Parents don't like AI monitoring. They're terrified of it. Right? There's this boogeyman of AI monitoring. Kids, they're like, I want a human to do that, not an AI. The kids are like, I don't want a human to look at me ever because I'm judged by adults. Kids don't want to be judged by adults. They're like, let me talk to the AI. Yeah. Like if you tell like we have an app that grades your public speaking and you're like, do you want to practice with the human to give you the feedback? Or do you want to practice with Ori, this app, you know, till you get to 90 percent? And it does, you know, filler words and, you know, pacing and all that.

1:14:21And they're like, give me the Ori. Yeah, my kids would 100 percent. Because they all want the AI because it's not judgmental to them. They don't feel all that pressure. Parents are the opposite. it. And so it's this very dynamic where I'm like, guys, the kids want this. And I know you don't like it, but you got to get over it because your kid wants it. And it's, let's do what they want. And so the kids love the AI tutoring, right? They love the feedback. They love the monitoring. Okay, I'm wasting time how to do better. Right? And now the second part is if you don't have a motivation on the coaching, like on why they should do it, like I, because I tell like other school districts She's like, great, I'm going to go put this in my class.

1:14:59Give me this time back thing and get magic. I'm like, if you put this in a standard school day of six hours, it's not going to work. Like ed tech generally has failed. And it's generally failed because the kids aren't motivated to engage with it. If you don't give them their time back, they're not going to engage. And that's why it might be part of the problem with like normal schools adopting it. You know, you're the principal of a school, head of school. And you're like, what am I supposed to do? Like two hours a day and they're not really teaching. and what do they do the rest of the day? It's a whole, it's a rebuild.

1:15:31Sounds like a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It's, you know, and there's not enough proof yet. And you have a bunch of parents who are like, I don't want screen time anyway. And so you have all these good excuses to slow it down. Now, if you look at Alpha's like, we're the most talked about school in the world, right? It's just give us one more year, right? Give us one more year and everybody's just gonna be like, okay, we need to do this stuff, right? And so that's part of our job and that's part of why I'm out there, is just educating parents, right? Our schools educate kids, our marketing department, we have to educate parents that this is all doable.

1:16:08But that's when you look at sort of this whole loop is, you know, it's hard to put it in a normal school right now because you do have to do a rebuild. They need more proof and data. But why don't they babysit? We were talking about this a little bit before we started recording. Like, why don't they just say, oh, we're going to do math tutoring. uh we're just going to do that so math class now is going to be an ai tutor whether uh you know whatever product that is and then we're going to see how that goes we don't have to switch the whole curriculum we're just going to take the 30 minutes or 40 minutes we've assigned a math class yeah so there's there's a few few different reasons on that just tactical practical reasons first is they've been lying to their parents so i and i i don't know public schools much but let's talk about high-end private schools, right?

1:16:53I know the high-end private school market. The high-end private schools are all lying to their parents by giving kids A's when they don't deserve it. So like we pulled in, you know, so we had hundreds of kids join, you know, whatever, a couple months ago across the country, right? And these are people coming from 40, 50 ,000, $75 ,000 private schools. And we give them our assessment test, right? And if you had an A, if your transcript was an A coming into alpha, you are from, there's some students who are one grade level ahead, super awesome, all the way and many more of them were three years behind.

1:17:28Oh, what? Three years behind. So this is seventh graders who, when we give them the fourth grade test, are missing a significant number of problems. If you got Bs, you are from three years behind to seven years behind. So these are high schoolers who are like, okay, I need to have you in third grade. There's third grade material you're missing. And that's a B. And so the problem is parents in our world, A's and B's, like A's are good. B's, okay, do better next time. But they don't give out C's, D's, and F's anymore. So A's and B's have to cover the whole range. And so parents basically are being lied to because they're using their old point of reference, 80 % of kids at Harvard get A's.

1:18:11Just they've had such grade inflation that the school is like, oh, my God, I can't do the AI tutor because I'm going to show the kid needs fourth grade material. And the parent doesn't know that. And as soon as they put it in, it's going to be obvious. The assessment is going to show them. Right. That's actually what causes lots of people to move to Alpha. Yeah. Just give them the assessment. They're like, what's going on? Like if you go to our website, we have testimonials of people. You know, we opened San Francisco. Right. And this guy's like, I've had my kid in a$50 ,000 school for eight years.

1:18:42And he couldn't answer some fourth and fifth grade questions. It's not the kid's fault. Right? And the parent didn't know because the school's giving him A's. It's a good brand. Good brand. Thought he knew it. Everything's working great. Everything's fine. Yeah. And so you have that. That's number one. Let's get over that one. Now let's get to the second one. There, in this I fought. Like this was that 100 for 100 we were talking about. I went my first year to the seventh graders. And I'm like, guys, you have holes. I got to get you to do earlier work. You got to some fourth and fifth grade holes.

1:19:14You got to go fix it. And let me tell you about motivating a kid and making them love school. When you tell a seventh grader they have fourth and fifth grade material. Non-starter. Non-starter. There's only one person who hates it worse. Their parents. Oh, my God. I was yelled at so many times by parents. My kid must be a grade level. Why are you putting him in earlier stuff? Every parent's been trained. my kid must work at grade level, which is just the learning. That is not right. They just don't know learning science. That is not what the learning science says, right? You got to go back and fill, right?

1:19:46Mastery of the basics, master the basics. But the parents hate it. That's why eventually I still to this day don't know how to fix the parents. So I sort of went around them. And that's when we came up with 100 for 100.

1:19:56Joe Liemandt:I'm like, guys, I got to get you to do it. And that's how it came out. I'm like third grade. They did it. Fourth grade. And then they moved up. And that does – it also has this other real thing about academic performance, the self-confidence it does. All these kids are like, okay, I can get 100 on any standardized test back like your son. The same thing where once you show them how to do it, you give them the ability. They're like, oh, I can get 100. So we have a thing now where we'll advance you at 90 % to the next grade level. So when you score 90 % on a standardized test, your state standardized test, it shows you have mastery.

1:20:36we'll let you go to the grade above it but you get 100 for 100 if you get 100 and so all the kids are like okay that's a couple extra right yeah and you're like oh my god a couple an hour or two and i'll get the extra questions because even if you miss them you can go back and learn them and retake and so but it just sets that mindset of every kid's like of course i could get 100 the reason we get so many 790s and 800s on the sat is all our kids are like of course i could get a perfect score on the SAT. It's just how many hours is it? It's an hour question, not a capability, which is that unlock we did about IQ.

1:21:09Most people think it's IQ and I'm like, it's effort. It's effort, not IQ. Well, this is the fundamental thing, right? Because a lot of people just look at that and they're like, some kids are smarter than others. And I think my hypothesis is that we could get 90 % of kids, if not more, to effectively perfect SAT scores. Totally. There's a little, SAT has a little bit of IQ coding. Any time test has a little bit of IQ coding. But yes, fundamentally, you should think 1350, which is top 10%. No problem. 1550, which is your top 1%, it gets a little dicey on, you know. Well, it's a 90 % then, right?

1:21:50For 90 % for sure. Like just off the charts. And we measure all this. And we're like, well, how many can we get to 1550 plus, right? If you're on our honors, our high school program, non-honors is$13.50 minimum. Honors is$15.50. And the difference is it's three hours a day to do honors, which is$15.50 plus fives on your APs. $13.50 and a four or five on your AP, that only takes two hours. So it's just – and to kids, it's an effort issue. You want two hours, you want three hours. Just pick – it's extra time. That's it. And so – but anyway, but that whole thing, you change their mindset. But back to this why a standard school can't do it.

1:22:31You have the parents screaming at you if you try to put your kid to do the whole filling, as we call it, right, to go backward and do fourth grade. They're like, I want the teacher to teach my kid seventh grade. Because that's – and it's just – so you have that problem in the schools. They're just like – You want the outcome. I want my kid to be educated. Right. Well, and the problem is a lot of parents are like, my kid's good. Just give me the A. You get the E. It's an A, right? And then what happens is then when they take their PSAT or SAT, it's not as high as they want it. But then it's like the school's like, well, too late.

1:23:05And then some parents hire, you know, massively expensive after school tutoring. Right. I mean, the after school tutoring marks like$50 billion. It's insanely. It's insanely huge because schools, parents, even at high end private schools, like the percent of kids at a high end private school who also have a tutor. Right. When I look, I was like, this is insane. Aren't you sending your kid to the school to like learn? Yeah. Why do they need a tutor? Why is there a huge afterschool tutor market? I'm like, we commit that your kid will learn during the day. They don't need that time and you don't have to hire a tutor.

1:23:36That's insane. I was asking my kids last night what questions I should ask you. And they came up with two. So one asked, how do you teach physics to high schoolers? And what program you use? And let's tackle that one and then we'll talk. So there's a great, so Math Academy is the best math app out there. And they do physics as well. There's a new one called Physics Graph who they're online and they are the physics version of Math Academy. Okay. And so I would go get it. I don't know. I think, you know, back to AP. I'm trying to remember exactly their product. There's like physics. I was ABC, one, two, three, whatever it is on the AP test.

1:24:18The first one is based on algebra. And then the third one is based on calculus. Okay. And so I don't know if they've released the calculus one yet, but on the algebra or the other, you just use physics graph. Awesome. Physics graph is the way to go. I know a couple other products that are about to be released next year. But if you're in it right now, if you're – That's the one. Great. Then I would do that. And then the other question was what happens after? You've had a couple years now of students graduate. They go to university or go out in the real world or whatever it is they're doing, college.

1:24:51What happens? Because now they go from the structured environment, high coaching, high standards, a lot of hands-on to good luck. Yeah. So, well, one of the things, even though we have high support, all our kids are self-driven learners, right? They have to, during the two hours, learn how to be able to learn on their own, right? And so that's one of our tests of are you a self-driven learner? Our eighth graders all know how to get a five on an AP on their self. Like every eighth grader actually knows everything I want to learn is on YouTube. Right. Everything. Yeah. And so you're just like, okay, pick some random AP that you're interested in.

1:25:31You know, not one of the core hard ones, but just pick one, right? And go learn it. And go figure out. And there's all the resources are available. And then, you know, so that's how we show, okay, you're a self-driven learner. or you can learn anything for the rest of your life, you know, without somebody spoon feeding you, you know, the material. But at the college level, so we had, let's see, here's one. Where do people go? So our first class was we had 12 graduates. 11 of them went to college. The 12th is one of the world's best water skiers. And so he's building his media empire while he water skis.

1:26:09It was like, I'm not going to college. The other ones all got into their first choice colleges. We get into Stanford or Vanderbilt or NYU Shanghai or wherever you want to go because our academic scores are just through the roof. Then we also have these killer Alpha X projects in the afternoon where kids have four years to work on a passion project. We didn't even get into this. And so they look just – they look like a completely different character than the average college grad. They stand out. There's a contrast. Huge contrast and super impressive, right? I mean this one, she'll probably kill me because I'm not supposed to talk about it.

1:26:43But, you know, we may have no high school student has ever been the lead researcher on something published in Nature. And we have an alpha kid who's submitted. It hasn't been accepted yet. And so that's why she doesn't want to mention it yet in case it does it. But literally, like no one, right, that's usually, I mean, if she was a Ph.D., that would be considered like one of the most impressive things of her career. And she's literally 17 years old in high school. and it's because they're they have four years to work on awesome things and do just amazing things um and so uh anyway so in college i now it's not two-hour learning now it's college no so here's what they did no so they do so we went so um i i met with them at christmas after they all the 11 who went and uh it was six or seven of them and i was like okay guys how we doing everybody had a 4-0.

1:27:37They were crushing it. They loved college, the whole social environment and stuff. And, you know, some are in sororities and, you know, they're doing all the different things and they loved it. And I was like, well, what's the worst part? They're like, okay, those lectures are a total waste of time. They are a complete waste of time. Literally, I sit in there and they're just terrible. Four of them had written editorials to their school papers about, can we stop the charade that are these lectures? Literally, there's 200 people in a class. None of them are paying attention. They're all on their computer, like scoring TikTok or just doing other stuff.

1:28:07Right. The teacher is terrible, is not a good teacher. Right. And this is just a waste of time. And they all learn, you know, so like back to my daughter is a math English major, you know, and she's like, I just use math Academy. She's like, she's, you know, she, I used to skip classes when I was, I didn't like school. I was not like my older daughter. And she always had disdain for me where she's like, you should go to class, dad. And now that once she finally went, she's like, okay, I get it. I get why you skip class because it's totally a waste time. And so I believe in college, you know, Harvard published a paper that their best teaching classes, their physics 101 class, one of their best, you know, teachers.

1:28:51And they did an AB test with AI tutors versus them. And they published that Harvard, you know, there's a great paper. Harvard says AI tutor is better than Harvard teachers. And, you know, they learn twice as much using the AI tutor as going to class. And so it's just facts, right? And so 100 series classes in university are going to go away. Like as soon as everybody figures out this AI tutor stuff, they're just going to go away. Now, small group seminars, they love it, right? You know, a small group writing seminar that's super awesome, like in her writing classes and stuff. So it's not like universities are going to go away because some kids still need time to grow up, right?

1:29:31And they need socialization and all those other things. But the big lecture classes, those are gone. Those are a waste of time. What were you like as a student? The world's worst student. Tell me more about this. I was, you know, academically, you know, people would definitely say, I can't believe Joe's doing education if you knew me at Stanford. I dropped out. You know, this is, you know, back to every kid has a passion for learning. It's just not always academics. And that was me. Right? I just, I didn't care. I hated school.

1:30:11Joe Liemandt:And I'm just like, I don't care about these classes. Right? And, you know, when I dropped out, you know, and I started my company, I went from, I used to do the minimum amount of work. I mean, I literally, like, in my high school, the way our grading system worked is you got four points for an A. But there's no A-, no A +, no nothing, just, right? And an 89.5 rounds to a 90, which was an A. and I literally would do the minimum work to get an 89.5, like not an 89.6. I remember one time I didn't turn in, I didn't answer all the questions on a test because I knew I didn't need to finish the test to get the 89.5 in the grade.

1:30:55And my teachers were just like, what, right? I was just a nightmare because I just, whatever the minimum was. And, you know, my parents weren't really excited about it. Now it was a minimum bar of, okay, I'm still going to get in Stanford because I wanted to go there. But I wanted to go there because I wanted to start a company. I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And so I go, and then I'm in class at Stanford. I'm like, in some Spanish class. I'm like, okay, what am I doing? And so anyway, I drop out. So there's nobody who thinks I was a good student. I wasn't a good student, but there wasn't like, oh, I was like nobody.

1:31:25Everybody was like - You were just misunderstood. Right? No, no, no. It's definitely not a good student. And then I drop out. And then I started working 100 plus hours, sleeping under the desk, right? Super passionate. because you're motivated i got i loved it i'd found right my spark i found what i loved and i'd never worked harder in my life like it was insane and my dad who you know there's this he was not happy that i dropped out right but 18 months later when we were talking he's like god i'm so glad you dropped out he's like you know and he's like you know i was so worried that you were a lazy little shit your whole academic career you were just a shirker right You just you never engage in anything.

1:32:06You know, as a parent, like you don't want your kid to be just, you know, a slacker you want. And he's like, and you found it. You found what you love and you're working your ass off on it. And it's just great. Right. And our my view of that is that concept, what I found after dropping out of college, we want to get that into kids in middle and high school. Like, what do they love? Like, as they hit an adolescence, who do they want to be? What do they love? and let's get them started on that, right? Now, there's some minimum academics you have to do, right? You want to start a business plan, you got to know some math.

1:32:40You want to write good proposals, right? You have to be able to write. So it's not like you can skip all the academic side, but you do it motivated by stuff that you love, right? And back to if we want to get kids, we're competing with TikTok and Fortnite, but kids' vision of who they want to be is awesome. So let's go get, right, associate with what they want to be there, right? And that's what's going to drive and motivate them to, you know, learn all the skills they need. If you look at our kids doing these huge Alpha X projects that are so impressive, right, it's because they're working on stuff.

1:33:20I mean it's harder stuff than we ever worked on in high school. For sure. But they don't think it's work because they love it. You know, no, we have a girl. And you didn't think it was work when you were sleeping on the floor. Exactly. Work's not. It's like my now job, which, by the way, just as a sidebar, everybody should go into education. If you're like wondering like what you should do the next 10 years, come into education. It's awesome. But because it is fun. But we have a high school. She's doing a Broadway musical, right? Launch all team produced Broadway musical. She sourced all the singers off TikTok.

1:33:55Million streams the first week when they went. They can fill. They filled like four times. They filled a venue. It's not big enough to be on Broadway. It's still like not quite big enough, but they're doing it. And, you know, you listen to her and she's like having to learn about music rights, right? And legal content, right? And all this stuff. I mean, it's harder than any high school class. But that's how we should teach. And this girl will spend endless hours on it because she loves it because she's putting on her musical. It's hers, right? And the team and all. And just think of those projects for all kids, right?

1:34:24Everybody can do that, right? And that's where when we talk about what this – if we're going to get them ready for this AI world that's coming, that's what we need to get them ready for. Not bore them for six hours a day in class where we waste 90 % of their time learning a bunch of material that is becoming commoditized. LLMs are reducing the value of that knowledge. Now, AI also, it's taking it away on that side, but it's also letting you learn 10 times faster. yeah so you know it's sort of this balance of just you gotta you figure out what part you want to learn i remember elon in interviews had something that made a ton of sense to me it's like traditional schools teach you like here's a wrench here's when you use it when they should be like here's an engine let's fix it oh you need a wrench to like take that off so like we got to figure out what it's used for and like it's sort of like that's the approach that you're taking exactly you take so like and let me i'll give you example like our sports academy like we want to teach public speaking right storytelling and public speaking is such a great skill right for kids or for adults everybody and but you go to a 10 year old boy and you're like we're going to teach you public speaking you like okay they've turned off but our sports excuse me at a sports academy post-game press conference are you ready for it yeah and these kids are like okay like right and you're going to learn all those skills those same public speaking skills were arise going to grade you into it.

1:35:47Of course they want to do that, right? Or you're going to learn financial literacy. Roll the eyes. We got to work on your Nike$5 million contract. All of a sudden they're ready to, right? They're going to learn, they're going to dive in and become the world's experts in all those skills. And so the thing that when you talk about stuff, associating it with stuff kids love that's in their interest, right? Back to, I understand their interest graph. kids will love it and work because it's, and everybody knows this, right? If it's related to what your interests are, you'll spend endless time on it.

1:36:23There's kids, like, just think of how long they spend on YouTube on some obscure thing

1:36:28Joe Liemandt:where you're just like, oh my God. Like, no, we have a kid who can, like, he knows everything about World War II battles. And you know, like those geolocators who know anything in the whole world and it's a little picture and it's there. This kid knows it for every World War II battle. Like you can show him any picture from a battle. He's like, oh, that was in Poland in 1943 and whatever. I mean, it's just insane, right? But he's interested in it, right? Kids will learn endless stuff if they're interested. And what we have to do as schools is say, okay, this is what we want them to learn. Because there are fundamental things you want to learn.

1:37:03But we need to do it where they're doing projects that are hard and have meaning to them.

1:37:35Joe Liemandt:Microsoft 365 Copilot Copilot. You mentioned your father. Is it true that he didn't invest in your company? Yeah, no, that's totally true. My dad very much was worried about me being a spoiled kid. He grew up with nothing and then got to success later in his life and so was terrified of that. And so he's like, look, if you have a good idea, other people are going to invest in it. And if I'm investing in it, it just means it was such a crappy idea, no one else would give you money. He's like, so go convince people that it's a good idea. Um, you know, back to the standard, which is a true statement, right?

1:38:14If, if it's your parent, you know, you know, if, if your parents leading, right. Or giving you money, then, uh, if they're leading you around, maybe you don't have a good idea. You don't have a good idea. Go convince somebody else. And so he used to work for Jack Walsh. Yes, he did. And so he was Jack's strategic planner. Um, uh, Mark, his son, you We'd play hockey, go skiing together. And so I had a business background upbringing, which is maybe why I knew I wanted to be a amateur. Well, tell me more about that because I remember reading one anecdote. Actually, you had two conversations with Jack Walsh, one when you were 12 about gross margins.

1:38:48Do you remember that one? I had a lot. I spent a lot of time with Jack. So Jack, my dad passed when I was 25. And so these will probably be the later ones you're talking about. And Jack called me and is like, look, I'll be your mentor going forward. And so every year I would actually fly up and spend a couple days at GE and at Jack's house with him coaching and helping. What was the most memorable conversation you had with him? Oh, God, there was a lot. So, you know, between he and my dad, there's a ton of them if you want to, which is, you know, one was Mark and I were playing hockey and we were small for our age.

1:39:26And both our dads played hockey, Jack and my dad. And so we weren't good at it. And so we're like, we want to switch to skiing. Don't tell a hockey dad that you want to be a skier. Okay. My dad was from, I was born in Minnesota. So, you know, hockey is. I'm from Canada. It's like religion for us. It's the religion. And he's like, and so Jack's like, okay, I'll only do this. There's a race at the end of the year. Jiminy Peak was the name of it. He's like, you two need to come in first and second. And if you guys are willing to do that, I'll let you switch over to skiing. And he's on the phone with my dad.

1:40:06He's like, Greg, our kids are going to be first and second in the race. So they're going to have to work really hard. So buy your kids some skis. You know, literally, we would literally, you know, during the summer, like you run up the mountain. Literally after school, they drop us off. Weekends, drop us off ski. End of the year, Mark came in first. I came in second. and jack's like wasn't it worth it you know and just back to high standards like that guy crazy high standards um gross margin you brought up that one you know where they had sold their um they'd swapped their business with uh i think it was thompson medical at the time where they had tvs g had tvs and thompson they swapped it for their cat scanners because they had g medical and it's you know one of these deals and i was like dude like tvs are the only cool thing you guys make, you know, when you're young, right?

1:40:56Cat scanner, really boring. And Jeff's like, let's talk about gross margin, right? Because TVs have none and cat scanners make a lot of money. And so I was learning about gross margin and I'm going to bring that back. I'll go back to the story, but I'm going to bring it to a related one. So we have kids who launched a food truck, our fifth graders like launched a food truck at Alpha. And so I was talking with them and I was like, why did you guys, you know, pick breakfast foods, you know, on for your food truck? They're like, have you seen the gross margins on a breakfast food? And I was like, okay, this is the most awesome thing ever, which is because they're building a real business and you got to know gross margins.

1:41:34Right. And these are fifth and sixth graders. Right. And, and so kids loved it, just like I learned and loved it young.

1:41:39Joe Liemandt:Everybody can learn this stuff. If you're, if they're interested, we have other kids who don't like, you know, launching food trucks, but for those who do. It was awesome. And then once I, once, you know, back to my twenties, when I was building my business, you know, Jack, Jack was both super, you know, harsh, you know, when you talk about high standards, high support, it's both where he would just be like, I remember this particular story was, I was the youngest self-made member of the Forbes 400, right? I'm with a cover. and so i'm flying up to uh you know where my annual mentoring thing that i was gonna do with them and i'm all like right check this out right i'm all that and i do you want a signed copy yeah exactly jack i'm sure you want to say copy of this right and i mean i i fool myself obviously and um i get there and you know he's we're talking about stuff and he's trying to understand because he's astounded by you know how much my company was worth and all that stuff and um uh so at the end of he's like okay so i guess if i had to classify you you're like uh i'm trying to remember the g levels you're like a level eight project manager product manager you know like that's why like he's like that's sort of like your skill set right and at the time realistically it was right i i had I had this set of skills, but fundamentally that's what I was.

1:43:09And he's just like, you know, Joe, you have to decide whether you're going to sit here and, you know, be full of yourself and decide that you're awesome. Or if you're going to decide, you are now at the case where you can go spend the rest of your life and freaking crush it. Right? Is this your first step or your last step? Right? Are you done? Have you just declared victory and, hey, everybody look at me. I won the race. or are you like oh my god i'm only on the first step of the race and then he is the most inspirational person because he sort of had to he shocks you a little bit with the who are you know and then inspires you to greatness right where i remember i was flying back from that trip and i that whole plane ride back i had i was writing a hundred things down that i had to go do right I was sure, I made sure I was going to be on the first step, not on my last step.

1:44:04And so just that kind of great inspirational, he was amazing at. And other level setting, like this was a big one for me, was in 97, we won e-commerce product of the year. And 97 went back to Baccom. It was a big e-commerce year. I won the e-commerce product. That's why we were very successful in one of the things. And GE had used it, GE Medical had used it, Milt's group. And literally I met with Jack and he's like, yeah, I hear Med doesn't like your product. I'm like, freaking one e-commerce product of the year. And I was like, Joe, I don't care if it comes from heaven above. If GE doesn't get an ROI, your product, you and your company suck.

1:44:52That where's our ROI? and it was like an eye-opener to me where i was literally just a product guy where i was like i delivered a good product and he's like if your customers don't get value nothing matters right and i was just like huh right and it totally reset my whole view of like what a company would have to do and you know i if i had to apply it to education now education thinks their job is sort of just to put kids through school. Ours is to actually have learning, right? Kids have to love school and they have to learn, right? And when we designed our educational system, I think we're the only school in the world who, if a kid's not learning, it's our fault.

1:45:38It's the system's fault.

1:45:39Joe Liemandt:It's not the kids, right? If our kids aren't learning two hours and they're failing, it's my fault. What did I do wrong? Is my motivational model not right? Do I need a different guide? Was the lesson I gave them not the right level? Was it not a good lesson? Was I not coaching them the right way? But what did I do wrong? Versus a lot of school systems are like, ah, kids fall, right? And you can draw it sort of back to his resetting me of are they getting value out of what you're doing? And I'm like, oh, it's my responsibility to make sure all the kids learn these days. So anyway, so yeah, I had all those kind of things.

1:46:16It was awesome. What a crazy experience. At one point, you were going to IPO Trilogy, and you IPO'd PCOrder.com, right? Yes, we did. And then you ended up buying it back. I want to hear the story about that. And then what changed your mind about being public with Trilogy? The PCOrder story helped me realize I didn't want to be public. So PCOrder was actually one of the Trilogy co-founders, Christy, had this idea of, okay, I'm going to build PCOrder, which was online selling computers online back in dot-com days and you know built it up super successful had all the biggest resellers aboard and then she went public and then basically dell put her customer base out of business and so then she her business went terrible and so the stock went from 50 to 5 or something i can't exactly remember but you know down 90 90 plus percent So it went public, ran up in all the hype, and then imploded.

1:47:17And then we bought it back and just said, OK. And for me, so I've kept Trilogy private. To this day, it's still private. And a lot of it is just I prefer just to be 100 % in control, frankly. frankly just my my daughters give me t you know marcus limonis on uh the prophet if you know that tv show he has i'm 100.0 in charge that's pretty much my attitude um is it like that with everything or the things you're completely hand off like are you hands off or completely hands-on but nothing in between correct yeah i'm i am i'm in charge or hey i'm the your biggest supporter good luck around it. But yeah, I don't do well on the 50-50 consensus kind of stuff.

1:48:11I push the edge on radical stuff. And I'm like, I don't want to vote. You don't get to vote on this, right? We're going to do this. It's not a democracy. Yeah, it's not a democracy. We're going to do this. And if you want to come on board, we're going to do this. If you want to come and start a school on time back, you're going to do two X in two hours. And there's a whole set of people who are like, well, how about we do 1X in one hour? Because 1X is as good as every other school. And I'm like, well, go do that with somebody else's software. If you're going to use mine, all these coaches who are setting up these sports academies, they're like, well, some of the parents don't care.

1:48:45I'm like, sorry. We're going to do it this way. Delivering awesome academic outcomes, right? That's just, it's who I am. And that's just, I don't want to vote around that. It reminds me of something Alan Mullally said, which is like when he was turning around Ford, He was like, here's how we're going to do it. And if you don't want to choose to be a part of that, that's on you. But if you're here, this is how we're going to. Yeah. No alignment. Like we like, you know, we do the three commitments to the kids. Your kid will love school. They'll learn two X and two hours and then life skills. Those, those, those three commitments.

1:49:21Every kid, every kid, we have to do that for every kid. And if you're in my organization, you wake up every day and say, I'm going to deliver that. And you can never blame the student. You can never make an excuse. around that. And if you don't like that, just don't come because that's what we're going to be about. Right. We lose about 50 % of our educators when we tell them they're accountable for the kid learning because they're not used to it. Right. And they're like, no, it's a kid's fault. What if he doesn't do this? Or what about that? I'm like, yeah, our guides are measured on, do they deliver the three commitments to every kid, every kid.

1:49:56Right. And that's, you know, It's just really important. And you have to have that focus. Now, one of my public schools, when I first came in, you can imagine there was skepticism because I would say crazy stuff. There will be no adults academic teaching in this building. Now, with hindsight, you're like, well, duh, it works. But before that, that's crazy talk, whether you're a parent or a teacher, right? It's just it's it's and, you know, but the set of teachers and parents who stayed, you know, who were like, OK, I'm in. I was there was one who was, you know, basically from public school. And I was like, you know, and I'm an evil billionaire, you know, and so every evil billionaire does education, all those all those, you know, appropriate memes.

1:50:45And I was like, eventually, what was it that won you over to stay and be part of it? And she was like, it was because you're just constant focus that it had to be every kid. That we'd come in and we'd be like, okay, we got 90 % of the kids there. And you're like, let's focus on the ones we want and what do we have to do and what do we have to fix to get that for every single one. And that's back to building a system that if we're going to get this out to a billion kids, that's the mental, that's the model we have to have. And that's, you know, back to being 100.0 % in charge. It makes it so great.

1:51:21is, you know, if you're going to be on time back and using this system, it's going to be every kid. What's the biggest problem with scaling? There's a lot. So scaling's hard. This is, you know, this is sort of back to your Elon example. This is, you know, building your first prototype is really easy. And how do you build the factory that churns it out? And so a lot of what I've been doing in the last three years is how do I build the system that's going to allow this to scale? And so time backs, you know, a key element on the academic side. But that sounds like it would scale pretty easy. Once you figure out the compute and bring the cost to compute down.

1:51:55Totally. That part's going to be easy. That's easy. You could add a billion people to it effectively if you had the compute power for it. Yes. And that wouldn't be. Exactly. So that part's, we've commoditizing the six hours a day down to cover. Got that. Now, let's talk about all the other hard parts. Let's talk about there's physical and then virtual. So on physical schools, how do you measure guides and how do you have the metrics? So as you open new buildings, right, new schools, that you're sure what happens in all the other schools, right? So, you know, we call them painfully insightful metrics.

1:52:36So we wake, you know, our org, you know, every summer when we're redesigning, you know, for the next year, we sit down and we say, what are the painfully insightful metrics that we need to know such that we know that new school we opened that we've never visited is as good as our Austin flagship, right? And all our guides, you know, and everybody in the org is like, we can't, every year they get better. Like, how do I know I don't have a bullying culture, you know, somewhere, right? What's the question? What's the survey question? What's the metric I can collect to know that? So obviously on the academic side, right?

1:53:13We have the best closed loop system in our, you know, that collects all the data. So I know on a daily basis, if you're learning, right? And so I have all that, but how do I know if my culture is good? How do I know if I've hired the right guide? What if I have a wrong guide, right? How do I measure all that? So we have the same level of metrics that we do around our school and our system that we do around our academics. So I know within eight weeks, whether my guide's good or not. And a lot of this, so a lot of it comes from results. Are they delivering three commitments to all the kids? But it's everything also surveys.

1:53:51We ask the kids. Every adult had one or two teachers who transformed their life. Is your guide that for you? Right? To the parents, do you trust your guide to hold high standards so you can provide unconditional love, right? You know, at kindergarten,

1:54:05Joe Liemandt:do you love your guide? But we ask, you know, so you just are asking these questions right um to to get the data that you need we have quantified all the metrics on the life skills so i know it's not just oh yeah our kids have grit or oh they're good public speakers i'm like no everybody in our class scored 95 on our eye and every fifth grader beat a wharton mba in teamwork and leadership and so we we quantify everything right so that we and measure it and then can react to it if we have a problem. Because you do, right? Every guide's not perfect, but then can we swap one out quickly? So part of scaling, it sounds like, is quickly identifying, surfacing problems so they can be addressed while they're small, not letting them fast.

1:54:54Exactly. And it's asking the hard question. It's easy to ask easy questions, right? It's why we move the question from do you love school to do you love school more than vacation? Because do you love school? My comparison, when you say that to a kid, it's like, well it's better than my old school my old school sucked yeah right but you're like better than vacation though that's a harder standard your old school if you're comparing your old school it's too easy better than vacation that's a hard state as a parent i would also feel like i'm not giving my kids a very good vacation if they want to well but that's that back to our thing right your kids are with their friends all day doing awesome doing the stuff they love and they're doing the stuff they love that's hard and challenging with a guy who's supporting them right it is hard to beat that That is why on Saturdays they're like, God, I wish I could go to school.

1:55:36Just building all that kind of stuff. So but you're always trying to figure out what is that extra question, right? Like how do we know if the parents really love the school, right? What is it? Like will the parent create testimonial videos, you know, of their school? Because it's totally crazy, right? Because people are always like you go to that weird school where they don't have teachers and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so like we went through back to our standard, which is we opened all these schools, all these new locations. I'm like, how do I know if they're good? Well, we have six and a half hours of testimonial videos from families who joined the last 10 weeks about them saying, you know, it's only been 10 weeks and my kids life's transformed.

1:56:15And so you just you're out there trying to figure out what's the hard question to ask. You show it publicly. We show all our grades publicly. We give all the, you know, all these testimonies. We see everybody around it. And that's our control, right, for that. And then the other part's just core culture, right? Just your core culture of do you believe in delivering the three commitments to every kid? And if you don't believe in that, don't come. And everything's based around it. And if you're a guide, you have to deliver to your students. But if you're on my academic team creating lessons, you do too.

1:56:51Yeah. So like if a kid is struggling and can't get through your lesson, the guy who did the lesson is going to get a call with them. Yeah. Right. Back when I lose 50 percent of them, when you have some of these learning science researchers and they realize they have to deal with kids and are accountable. So much easier on paper. Exactly. And you lose some because they don't want to do it. But you build that culture of, you know, and back to even growth. So like our growth team, right, because we're expanding, you know, they wake up every day and the first thing they work, you know, we have three concentric circles.

1:57:21The first is, is there something you need to do to deliver three commitments to every existing child in the school? And if there is, go do it. Like if there's a problem in an existing campus and you can fix it, don't worry about some new campus. Go fix it. Then the second is, have we filled every school that we already have? Because the number of classmates is an important part of school, right? And when you start a school, it's smaller and then you want to grow it. And so the second thing we're doing is we want to make sure for our existing students that we're giving them awesome classmates, right?

1:57:55And then and only then after you do those first two circles do you say, should we open to a new location, right? And building that culture is hard, especially we're the most talked about school in the world. We have demand through the roof. We're called from every country. Secretary of Education is down here. I got 10 governors who are coming down. Everybody wants this model. And I'm like, high quality at all times. Never relent on quality because we have to deliver every kid and we'll get it to everybody. So those are our physical school rules. right now i'm not going to be able to get to a billion kids next year if i have to build the schools and so then i get to the second when we talk about virtual how can i you know scale it without that so one way is you know that the time back software works so we're going to let people build on it right and so anybody who wants to build a school now's the time right if you have an idea of what the afternoon should be right come do it we're hiring a thousand coaches right through Texas, in Texas for Texas Sports Academy for these middle schools, right?

1:58:59We have, you know, 500 GT schools for gifted, talented kids. I have somebody who loves Montessori, so we're going to have a Montessori school. We have a wilderness school, right? Where if you think the wilderness in the afternoon. So there's all these great opportunities for entrepreneurs, right, who want to go then build schools. So there's just going to be a, think of Shopify for micro school or for schools, right? That's what Timeback is going to be and it's going to explode it. And then there's the pure virtual, which is, well, homeschoolers, right? And everybody else. That's what my kids want.

1:59:31They want the two hours on the weekend. Great. Well, so here's what they're going to get. So here's what they're going to get. And here's our problem and what we've been working on is, you know, if 10 % of it is the ed tech, you know, the time back, how are you, if I let it out of my environment, I no longer can give the kids a time back. If I own all six hours and I give you four, I got the motivation. I got the motivation. But at homeschool, I don't have that. Or after school, no one wants, you know, I can't tell you how many. My daughters are like, no one wants to go to school after school.

2:00:02My kids will. You'll make them, right? But no, I need to make them love it more than vacation, right? Not just, there's a set of parents who will make them for sure. Well, I know what will happen. They'll start doing it and then they'll be like, why do I have to go to school? Exactly. And that's what I want, which is, so how do we, 90 % motivation, so how do we solve it? So we've spent all our time, and when we release Time Back next year, the set of motivations for these kids are going to be awesome. Right? Give me an example. So, well, let's just take middle school boys. Their number one motivation is video games.

2:00:38So imagine if you got some of the world's best video game designers, like the best, not your prodigy guys, right? The best ever who made the world's best video games. and you got 150 of them in a building and said, go build the world's best video game on top of this, where the kids are going to play it two hours a day and become top 1%. Right. I bet your kids, if they're video gamers, are going to love to play that and be super interested in that. Or let's talk about an after-school for kids who need after-school tutoring. We just ran this as a test. Imagine they – like Kumon, if you know some of these students.

2:01:20Everybody hates it, right? Yeah, of course. Oh, my gosh. It's all terrible. They're in dingy building. What if you just went to Dave & Buster's? Yeah. And then in the Dave & Buster's, like in the little birthday rooms or whatever, they did their hour with the tutor. And you earned like – And you earned your little card and then you went out in the afternoon. Or what if online after you did that, you were able to go into a 10 ,000-person Twitch stream with some of the best video gamers in the world, right? Who's your famous – who's the streamers you like, right? Who are the influencers you like?

2:01:52So imagine there's influencers, right, where you're getting social cred, right, based on being able to do this. Now, and if you want, as parents, what if I allowed you to do 100 for 100? So just take our system and you as the parent could put in the money, right? And all of a sudden, the kid gets it, right? And what if especially when I took that money and I didn't let them spend it, it went into the Robin Hood for Kids account to teach them financial acumen and investing and financial literacy? What if it was that? Or what if I had an associated life skill project where it funded your trip to New York so that you could go meet the producer for your musical?

2:02:36Or it funded your robot war that you were going to do, all ideas. Or just more mundanely, what if it was what managed your screen time? So every parent struggles with how much screen time. Well, what if there's just the time back that's like, guys, let me be in charge of your kid's screen time because I'll make sure they get to top 1%. And if they're top 1%, you're going to give them some more screen time? Yeah. Totally. Right? And so it's going to manage all that for the parents, right? And the parents are going to be like, oh, my God, my kid's top 1%. And they're super happy because they hit this and then, oh, my God, I got some gaming time or I got some TikTok time or whatever it is.

2:03:15I was able to control, you know, those kind of elements. So wrapping in all the motivational stuff, there's just there's 100 ways to motivate kids. Right. There's going to be social peer gaming. Like we have a multi-user version where the kids are just competing. Right. Think of video games, but just, you know, you're competing on academics. And, you know, the 10 percent of kids who really love academics. They love that. I mean, oh my God, those kids, they just run out of curriculum. There's just not enough to teach them. They just blow through the top of the charts. What does the science say?

2:03:50I can imagine this would be controversial about paying kids to learn. Yeah, external and extrinsic motivation versus intrinsic. There's a huge debate about it. And I believe we'll have the biggest real data set in the world. um uh what are the and so here's there's there's both there's there's there's both sets of papers which is um there's a paper that literally that you should you could look up that says there's no such thing as intrinsic motivation because even if you're intrinsically motivated it's because of something yeah you know even a good student they want the accolades of being a good student yeah is there a true love of learning or is there a true love of accomplishment yeah and what's the accomplishment getting you.

2:04:34And so you can go read that paper and have a very strong view of there's no difference between paying kids and booze. It's why in sports, parents often hold their kid back a year. So they're bigger. So then they win a little bit. And then once they win, they get jump-started and then they're good. And now they like it because they keep getting accolades that they're good at it. Academics is the same way. You just need to jump-start them on paying. And then like those kids, so in our middle school, we'll pay any kid$1 ,000 to become top 1%. So when they transfer in, oh my God, top 1 % is too hard.

2:05:07You pay them$1 ,000, they get to top 1%. It changes their internal view of themselves. That I'm like, oh, I am a good student. Then you don't have to pay them anymore. And all of a sudden they're going to do it themselves because they change their internal view. And so part of all of this stuff is when you talk about extrinsic and intrinsic is if you can change the kid's internal view of their capabilities, It's worth using whatever motivation you can, right? Back to our guides. They use whatever lever they need to pull with the kid to break through. Kids have – part of education is kids have blocks about what they can do.

2:05:43I'm not a math science girl, right? And you're like, that just doesn't exist. There's no like brain chemistry that like I'm a middle school girl. I can't learn math science, right? Yes, you can. So I have to – so our guides have to break through that. And they'll do whatever it takes. And if paying them$1 ,000 is it or bringing them out to an event or let them go to an off-campus lunch. Do an off-campus. Oh, you guys want to do an off-campus lunch? You know, whatever the currency is, social peer pressure. Oh my God, all the other girls are there. Whatever it is, our guides will use to get them there.

2:06:16Then once they're top 1%, right? Boom, right? They're there forever. Our kids at college aren't getting paid. They're all 4-0 students, right? It's just you change kids' capability to become self-driven learners to do that. But there is a fear of it. And I'm sure there's a bad way to do it. But starting in kindergarten, our kids earn alphas. Because if you want to teach financial literacy, which every parent wants, you earn alphas. You learn how to save, earn, save, spend, invest, and donate. And they start that cycle in kindergarten and then move it all the way up. and it gets bigger dollars as you get older, but you want your kid in seventh grade.

2:06:59Like if you give them some phantom stock thing to teach them to invest in seventh grade, I can tell you that's terrible. Because one, it's not real money. They didn't earn it and they're going to YOLO it. It's like a casino. It's not investing. It's just gambling, right? Versus, wait, I just earned this thousand dollars. That's money. Real money. And it was hard. and it's mine and I'm going to invest it, right? Now we do let them YOLO it and do something stupid and lose all their money. But then they've lost real money. And it's the best lesson and it's better to learn that in seventh grade than 27 years old, right?

2:07:37And so all those things around it where trying to take out – one of the things is there's a bunch – Montessori, right? Maria Montessori in Montessori schools, she very much believed that kids should be involved in real world things. She actually has things where she's like kids, adolescents should earn money. Right. And, you know, that this having them do work and the value of work and that their work has value is a good thing for child development. And we find, you know, I think if you the best thing you can do is ask alpha parents are like, no, this is all really good. This isn't we're not poisoning the kids and getting them to be this coin addicted person who if they don't get paid, they won't do any learning.

2:08:20Right. But instead – That's not how it works. It's just not how it works. I mean – and you could get kids on this. And it's not like there aren't times where the kid's like, okay, I'm going to do some extra things because I want something. Yeah. Right? And so – But that's life. But that's just – yeah. Correct. No, the musical, Maddie, who's doing the musical, she wasn't wanting to do the 790. She got a 790 on Math SAT. She was below it. And sorry, Maddie. I just outed you. You know, she was below it. But she wanted – she needed money to go fly to New York to meet the producer so she'd get money to do her thing.

2:09:01And I was like, well, what does time back tell you how many hours, right? It's going to take you to get to 790. We were actually trying for 800, right? And it was like X. And I'm like, OK, go do it and you'll earn the money and we'll buy your plane ticket up there, right, to do it, right? And so she did. And then she got her plane ticket. Right. And it was just and it's just this concept of, oh, it was work. And, you know, she was happy at 750 or 760 or whatever it is. And then you just move it up. It's work. But she also knows and learns that she's capable of doing more. If she pushes herself, puts in extra effort.

2:09:35It's just it's effort based. Do you want to do it? And back to just how life is. She's like, yeah, I want this thing. And now I have the world's best Broadway musical. I'm going to change my world. Right. Change what, you know, she's going to go back in college. And she's like, I'm going to go, you know, be arts theater forever. And that's why the math. She was like, it was enough on her because she's an arts theater girl. It also sounds like a small enough effort, you know? Like whereas before, even with a teacher or guide, it's like this ambiguous thing. It's huge. It's big. It's far away. I'm not even going to try because it sounds like a lot of work.

2:10:07Well, it's 200 hours. Yeah. Right? I mean, we're 20 hours, not 200, right? We're 10 times faster. And so there's the two parts. There are two. Both things you said were totally correct. It was ambiguous. so I could just put a bunch of time in. And if you don't have an AI tutor, you can study for a long time and your SAT scores don't go up, right? And so the first is we're not ambiguous. We're like, here it is. You're 17 hours away. You're four hours away. Like in our dashboard, it literally says, you're six hours from finishing, six weeks from finishing it. If you go do an hour of homework, you're like a week away, right?

2:10:44So it literally can just tell you based on your work, how long to get there And when you put the goal setting in, it'll tell you, you know, all of that. And so not being ambiguous, right, and being definitive to the students, critical. And then the second, the numbers are small. It's definitive and small. Yeah. Right? So it's manageable. It's super manageable. Math Academy, every parent, go look at Math Academy. It's going to be like, oh, 28 hours away. I want to say they just released like their SAT program. They've been updating it. And I want to say it's 180 hours. We're going to try that this weekend.

2:11:19My kids want to explore it. Well, you should. You totally look at it. But I want to say it's like 180 hours. Yeah. Matt, like, that's it. Yeah. But, you know. And then you're, it's crazy. Joe, this has been a fascinating conversation. We always end with the same question. And I think I have an idea of what you're going to say here. But what is success for you? That we transform education for 1 billion kids. so that it's nothing like what we had. And the tagline, if I had to give my tagline, is our job is to make this the best time in history to be a five-year-old. That's incredible. That might be the best answer ever.

2:12:01Thank you for taking the time today. This was a fascinating conversation, one that rings true to me, so I really appreciate it. I loved it. Thanks for the time.