← Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Can AI Replace Teachers? Inside the $40M Company Using AI Tutors to Teach 200% Faster | #233
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- [00:00]
Joe Lamont
If we're going to recreate school, that's going to get our kids ready for the AI age going forward. First principles, what would you do? The first and most important, which is the most radical thing we say is
- [00:12]
Peter Diamandis
us high schoolers at our historic lows in reading, math and science. Americans today perceive college as far less important. Today college graduates, they're the longest being unemployed. That's not sustainable.
- [00:27]
Joe Lamont
We've known that for 40 years. How kids could learn two, five or ten times faster. Unfortunately it doesn't work in a teacher in front of a classroom model.
- [00:35]
Mackenzie Price
We've really figured out how to use technology to deliver these really incredible learning results and do it in a fraction of the time.
- [00:43]
Peter Diamandis
Is everything perfect? What do you guys worry about? I love what you're doing. I just understand what's the flip side of the equation here.
- [00:49]
Joe Lamont
You know, the biggest issue. Now that's a moonshot. Ladies and gentlemen,
- [00:58]
Peter Diamandis
everybody, welcome to Moonshots. Today we're going to be speaking about the future of education and the role of AI in education. And this is not just for K through 12 university. It's also for reskilling. Right. Something that this rapid pace of AI is going to require every major company to start doing soon enough. This is a topic that we've been very outspoken about here on Moonshot. Specifically how secondary and post secondary education is failing us. It's failing our kids. It's not preparing them for the near term, let alone the medium term horizon. We're going to be diving into a new education model called Alpha Schools. I'm a fan that's gotten rave reviews. And discuss the pros and cons of AI driven education. Today we're joined by the leadership of Alpha Schools, Mackenzie Price and Joe Lamont. McKinsey is the co founder and CEO of Alpha Schools. It's a K through 12 program built around a two hour learning model that she helped to pioneer. Prior to Alpha Schools, price was for 17 years in the lending business and also working at Trilogy. A Stanford grad with a degree in psychology. She began questioning traditional schooling when she saw her own kid begin to lose enthusiasm for learning. I'm also proud that McKinsey is an Abundance360 member. All right. And Joe Lamont is the founder and CEO of ESW Capital and Trilogy, a billionaire entrepreneur who is actively playing a central role in funding and scaling Alpha Schools and playing the role as the principal, which I find incredible. He's built his fortune by buying and systematizing software companies, a playbook. He's now applying to Education. So first off, welcome McKenzie. Welcome, Joe. Good to have you guys.
- [02:47]
Mackenzie Price
Thanks for having us, Peter. We love talking education and I'm excited to be here.
- [02:51]
Peter Diamandis
And of course, I've got my much smarter, much more brilliant moonshot mates, Saleem Ismail and DB2. Guys, good evening. Welcome to the party here.
- [03:02]
Dave
And let me start by saying thank you for your service because you don't see a lot of highly, highly successful people turning back to work on K through 12 education. There's no real big money in it and it's purely a work of good in the world. So thank you so much for working on it.
- [03:19]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, for sure. What I'd like to do is actually kick off by sharing a few slides that show the state of education in America today. And it's not that great. So let me share these here. Here we go. This is unfortunate and very shocking us high schoolers at our historic lows in reading, math and science. Only 35% of seniors in high school 12th graders are at or above the reading proficiency level. This is down from 40% in 1992. Only 22% of seniors are math proficient and and only 31% are proficient in science. And this is going into a world where math and science and reading is so fundamentally critical for us. On the flip side of secondary education going towards college, here are some other numbers that are seriously troubling. And these blow me away, but they're very real. So Americans today perceive college as far less important. So back in 2010, 75% of Americans thought that college was important for your kids. That has dropped down from 75% to 35%. And as a result of this, we're beginning to see colleges going bankrupt. At the same time, tuition has grown 893% since 1983. As we're demonetizing and democratizing everything else, the cost of going to college is going up. And then here's the killer that today college graduates are the group that are out of jobs the longest. They're the longest being unemployed. And so for me, that just cannot. That's not sustainable. Right? I mean, Joe and McKinsey, you want to lean into those challenges right now,
- [05:31]
Mackenzie Price
I don't know where to even start other than it is a very disappointing picture. And half of seniors in high school today graduate knowing as much Math as a 99th percentile third grader. And that's a pretty troubling statistic along with what's going on. But I think it really points to the fact that schools aren't preparing people for the near future, as you mentioned, and more importantly, what this world is going to look like with AI. And it's even more critical that in addition to making sure that young people have academic knowledge in their brains to be successful and be great critical thinkers, we have to instill all of the other life skills that are going to be needed so that they can be adaptable in this new world and be able to keep up. And not just keep up, but stay on the frontier of what human knowledge is required. And we see this with parents all the time. Parents are coming to us with their little children saying, what in the world should school look like in this day and age? What is it supposed to be delivering 10, 15 years from now? And that's the challenge that Joe and I are excited every day to take on.
- [06:40]
Peter Diamandis
You know, the data shows that at Alpha School you're able to deliver a full academic program with only two hours a day of academic education. I will talk about the life skills portion in a moment. And that you're educating your students at. I think it's like two and a half to three times faster and still scoring in the one top 1%, top 2% of the country. I looked at some numbers here, and it shows that on average, SAT scores, Alpha School graduates are at 1410 compared to the national average at 1024, roughly 400 points lower. And that puts Alpha School graduates in the top 94 percentile.
- [07:25]
Mackenzie Price
Joe, actually, I'll correct you on that. 1410 is actually the average for our entire high school student body, freshmen through seniors. Our average SAT score for our seniors is 1535. And the reason I think that's important to say isn't just to brag on how awesome our students are, but, but really to show and highlight how easy it is to excel when students get a mastery based kind of tutoring experience, which is what has been made possible in this model of education. We believe any student is capable of being 99th percentile when it comes to reading and writing and math and science and being able to crush their APs. And of course, the beautiful part of it is it doesn't take long. All day, chained to a desk, plus hours of homework at night in order to get those results. We've really figured out how to use technology to deliver these really incredible learning results and do it in a fraction of the time.
- [08:27]
Joe Lamont
Yeah. So back to scores and academics and, you know, the two hours, you know, the. And I will, as the principal, I just did the meeting this week where they're taking, they were taking some practice Tests the freshmen and the freshman's goal this year is to have a minimum of 14, 10 as their SAT score as freshmen. So we have some who are already over 1500 as freshmen, which you can think about when you talk about, wow, think of how much time that opens up for the rest of what they want to do during high school. But aside from that, how do we do it? We've known for 40 years how kids could learn two, five, or 10 times faster. So there's a whole field of learning science that very few people know of, but it's been around for 40 years. The graduate schools of education of Stanford or Oxford or Harvard have been studying this how kids learn and develop papers. Back when I was in high school, Bloom's Two Sigma is a seminal paper where the paper talked about how kids could learn. All kids could learn, could learn and get to the top 2%, every kid, which you're seeing that data in alpha, you know, sort of 40 years later. And so what. What we've done, you know, and the reason it hasn't been implemented, though, is if you read the papers, you know, and there's probably 10,000 of them that have been published, you know, over the last 40 years, they all say kids can learn this fast. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in a teacher in front of a classroom model.
- [10:01]
Peter Diamandis
That's incredible. And the assumption.
- [10:04]
Joe Lamont
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's what every parent. You know, one of the things I realized, you know, after I became principal three years ago, was every parent wants their kid educated the way they were, and we don't know any different. And when I sit in the room with some of these learning scientists, you know, they will sit and say, we've known for 40 years. Teacher in front of the classroom is the worst way to teach kids. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We like the people in this room, right? Every parent in America thinks a teacher in front of the classroom is the best way to teach kids, right? And it's that dynamic, fundamentally, that we have to educate parents on and show that this new way that is grounded in learning science, right? We've known how this works. We know everything from the best ways to teach to the chemistry of the mind to be able to do this.
- [10:57]
Salim Ismail
And for the parents, it's what they knew. It's how they grew up, right? So you get this cascading generational effect.
- [11:05]
Peter Diamandis
Joe, I've heard you talk about what you call the five dimensions that make a school 10 times better than at least the schools that we all went to school and if you could recount that, because I found, number one, the idea of being able to make something 10 times better is something you typically don't think about in terms of schools. Yeah, yeah, please.
- [11:27]
Joe Lamont
So, you know, Back to when McKenzie and I were working on this, if, you know, you sit down and you say, the school's been the same for over 100 years, and if we're going to recreate school, that's going to get our kids ready for the AI age going forward. First principles. What would you do? Just ground up. What are the core things you'd really want to do? And so the first and most important, which is the most radical thing we say is kids must love school, right? If we're going to put our kids in it for a decade plus, kids should love school. And we actually measure it where over 90% of our kids love school. We measure every week we ask them. And over the last year, we actually upped it where we actually say, would you rather go to school or go on vacation? And 40 to 60% of our students say they'd rather go to school than go on vacation. A lot of it depends on what the vacation is, depends on what the workshop they're doing. You know, the highlight of my tenure as principal was this before summer, you know, six months ago, the two thirds of the Alpha High students sent an email and said, we don't want to take summer break. Can you keep the school open? And back to. We all know I didn't like high. You'd never catch me at high school asking if I could go to summer school. And so, but that principle and just talking about love of school, you know, it's one where, when you think about it, like, when we all build businesses, you know, just from the business world, you want to build an organization that people love to come to work for, right? Yet those same people, when they sit and look at their kids and say, what school's supposed to be? They're like, you're not supposed to love school. It's supposed to suck, right? School spinach. It's not supposed to be that. Like, we have this mental model that for everything else in our life, we're like, yeah, you totally should build an organization that people love, right? With school, we just had this backward way of looking at it. So the first principle and the core and the reason we work is because of that core principle. And when we talk to other schools about adopting this, they all ask about the edtech. Oh, you have this engine that teaches kids so much faster. And we stand up and say, look, if you're not willing to rebuild your school around the concept that kids must love school more than vacation, this isn't going to work. Right? And that core principle really, really matters. And that's what sort of everything that we do is downstream of that.
- [14:02]
Salim Ismail
That's an incredible achievement, by the way. Congratulations.
- [14:05]
Dave
Yeah, those statistics are mind blowing.
- [14:07]
Peter Diamandis
Everybody. You may not know this, but I've got an incredible research team. And every week myself, my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these Metatrend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com metatrends that's diamandis.com metatrenDS it's, it's
- [14:37]
Joe Lamont
actually when you think about it, if you step back though, you know, we spend an enormous amount of money on educating kids. Like you talked about how people don't go into a business, but we spend over a trillion dollars for K through 12, right? I mean we're spending 20,000 plus a kid. You know, some cities spend over $40,000 a student. And if you think about it, you're like, okay, I got a 10 year old and you're gonna give me 20 grand and I have to educate them and make them love every day. That's actually not the hardest problem in the world, right? That's a lot of money where you can actually build a day to have them both love it and learn.
- [15:16]
Peter Diamandis
So loving school is the first dimension. What else follows that?
- [15:19]
Joe Lamont
The second one is kids should learn 10 times faster. So back to this whole concept and this is where sort of I got in is we sat down and built this engine over the last three years where we basically took all the learning science and we took AI tutors, not chatbots. And we can get into why chatbots or cheatbots. And if chat GPT in schools is terrible, you know, but if you take AI, generative AI and you take learning science and you generate personalized lessons plans for every kid at whatever level they are, those kids can learn 10 times faster.
- [15:58]
Peter Diamandis
Did you build or buy, did you build or buy that tech? I'm curious.
- [16:02]
Joe Lamont
So we started by using off the shelf apps and then building around it, right? Sort of this AI wrapper around everything and we can talk of how to do it. We now for the most part have, we have both sort of the foundation, this platform Called Timeback and we use some third party apps that are best in class. So for any of you listening, Math Academy is the best app and you can just go download it. It's awesome. If you actually care about learning science Map the Math Academy way is free. 500 action packed pages of all the concepts of these, you know, 40 years of learning science that you should read and that they're a great team. We love to partner with them on it. We built a bunch of our own own apps, Alpha Write, Alpha Read, etc that, that sit on the platform as well. We put in over $100 million into this platform, so it's a big lift on being able to do this. But what we have today is a learning engine that teaches kids Basically K through 12 at 10 times faster than if they sat in class.
- [17:09]
Peter Diamandis
Okay? You gotta love it. It's 10 times faster. What you hit number three and then
- [17:14]
Joe Lamont
the second part is, you know, you come into school for two hours, right?
- [17:18]
Peter Diamandis
And.
- [17:19]
Joe Lamont
Cause we don't, you know, we learn over 2x in 2 hours. And so back to what matters is then what do you do the rest of the day? Because parents don't want you to send the kids home right after two hours. You gotta be there all day. And so then what do you do with the rest of the day? And it's, you teach them all these valuable life skills that we all think are important for the future because academics is not enough to get your kid ready. And so we have our Alpha Life Skills curriculum which is leadership and teamwork, right? Storytelling and public speaking, entrepreneurship and financial literacy, socialization and relationship building and grit and hard work. And so in the afternoon you're getting all these killer workshops, team based, super fun workshops run by adults in this environment that are teaching them all of those life skills to get them ready for the real world. And that's where if you see all the excitement and why we get so much hype, besides the academics, you sort of see what these kids do. We have kids, we have fifth graders running food trucks and running Airbnbs for their entrepreneur workshops, right? And just all these crazy TED talks, right? Just we have a, we have an Alpha High student who actually today submitted her research to Nature, which no high school student in history has actually been published in Nature, you know, and so just crazy great accomplishments because they have this awesome, you know, afternoons to work on them.
- [18:46]
Peter Diamandis
Mackenzie, can, you know, can you like dive a layer deeper for moms and dads and kids watching this to like, you arrive at the school and what's the Experience. What's the experience like? Can you sort of paint the picture for us?
- [19:03]
Mackenzie Price
You know, it's such a great question because people just don't understand what a school looks like where kids actually cry at the end of the week saying, why do we have to have breaks on the weekend? You know, why can't we go to school seven days a week? They just don't understand. And I think people often think, okay, some AI school, it's like robo Terminator, dystopian, antisocialized children. And nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, what's happened is the model of the day is one where kids get so much more time to interact with each other and to interact with the adults that are in the school building because of how we've set it. So you walk into school, first of all, it's feels more like a wework space than a traditional classroom. One of the things, you know, Joe and I both bonded over our mutual dislike and disdain for traditional school. And so we think again, school should be a fun, exciting place. That comes in.
- [20:04]
Peter Diamandis
The part that you didn't like about traditional schools were what teacher in the front and everybody at a desk.
- [20:10]
Mackenzie Price
You know, for me, and I think Joe and I were similar was I was always wondering, like, how is whatever I'm learning gonna relate to something I'm actually interested in doing? Like, where am I gonna make use for this in my life? What am I gonna do? And it was just so boring. I just found it incredibly boring. And I also think school is fundamentally traditional. School is fundamentally a place where they are teaching kids to sit still, raise their hand, don't talk unless called upon, ask permission to go to the bathroom. And you know, it really hasn't changed that much. And what we're wanting to our schools is teach kids all these awesome life skills. And that starts with you walk in at the beginning of the day and our kids all come together and they do what we call a limitless launch. Think Tony Robbins. For kids, this is a chance when they get together and they'll do some sort of challenging, often physical sort of experience together. And it's when we start incorporating some growth mindset strategies and practices that they take into the rest of the day. Then they go into their two hour core learning block. This is the academic period of the day and this is when k are on computers. The key difference here from when people think of COVID zoom classroom time is that kids are getting this one to one interaction on the computer that's meeting them at the Level and pace where they're challenged. They're in what we call the zone of proximal development, where the lessons that they're getting aren't too hard, that they turn off and not so easy that they're sort of bored and disengaged throughout that time. They take breaks every 30 minutes, get time to stretch and play and be a little bit more flexible with kind of what their best learning environment is. And by lunchtime they're finished with their academics and the rest of the school day is these super fun workshops. And so that's everything from 5 year olds who are learning how to climb a 40 foot rock wall or swim in the deep end of the pool, to high school students that are out building real businesses and doing big things. And there's just so much energy there. And that's what we found is so cool about this kind of this, this opportunity that kids have to get more socialization and time with each other. And one of the things Joe mentioned In those first three pillars of what we believe makes a school 10 times better, the fourth pillar is actually what enables us to deliver all of that, which is we have transformed the role of the adult in the classroom. Instead of having to spend their time creating lesson plans and delivering lectures and grading papers and homework, which we don't even have homework by the way, our teachers, we call them guides, their sole job is focus on motivational and emotional support, basically holding kids to really high standards, saying like, hey, you are capable, you can do big impossible things. And providing the support and the mentorship and the coaching that these kids need to be able to do great things. And so that human element has been able to be put really front and center. And that's what helps us make sure that kids are loving school and learning twice as fast in two hours and developing life skills. And then that leads to sort of that fifth pillar, which I think we all as parents can relate to. Ultimately what we really care about is, are our kids growing up to be good human beings? Do they have character and integrity? And so for us, that fifth pillar is character and culture and classmates. Who are these kids being raised to be and who are they surrounded by? And that sort of ties everything that I think makes the culture at Alpha so attractive to so many families around the country is, you know, when you can combine phenomenal, you know, kick ass academics along with developing these life skills and then do it in a nurturing, caring environment where things like socialization is actually practiced and coached on, as opposed to just saying, hey, we hope you survive, you know, the mean girl cafeteria world, you know, and eventually get through. I think that's kind of what we've done. And those five pillars is what every day everybody in our organization wakes up saying, how can we make sure that Alpha is a 10x better experience and really redefines what parents should expect out of their kids school.
- [24:40]
Peter Diamandis
Dave, I see you itching for a question here.
- [24:43]
Dave
I want to visualize even better this idea of a wework looking school because it just jumps out at me immediately. You see all the little chairs lined up with the little folding desk and the lecture in the front and you've got rows and rows and rows of these rooms in any school, middle school or high school, and it's all wasted space. And now you're saying, no, no, no, get rid of all that now. Make it feel much more like a work environment. But imagine it's not like our office, right? It's probably somewhere in between. Cause it's got to be more school. Like what would it look like?
- [25:14]
Mackenzie Price
I think it's picture like a really comfortable environment. In fact, I was in our kindergarten and first grade classroom at one of our schools this morning. And you've got some kids who are at a standup desk because those are some of the kids who realize they like being able to just move their feet as they're doing their work. You've got another group of kids who are sitting at a table and there's a guide sitting right next to them and they're working together. And my favorite, and I always see this when I walk into one of those classrooms, you'll see some kid who's like laying on a bean bag with his feet up against the wall and he's got his computer on his laptop and you might look at it and go, what's that kid doing? And I'll tell you what he's doing. He knows that he can get his work done and he can hit his goals and he's kind of earned that privilege of being able to relax. And that's another thing, you know, motivation is such a huge part of our culture at Alpha. And we've built in all these different motivation models to help kids be successful. And that can be everything from earning the privilege of getting to do your core work in a little tent fort, you know, or a cubby thing with stuffed animals surrounding you. So it's just kind of fun. I think it's really, it's the kind of school environment that again, when we kind of are saying we get to reimagine what education looks like and what school looks like. Let's build a school from the ground up that just is a place where kids want to be. Right. We're asking kids to spend a dozen years of their life, most of the time in a place and it should be something that feels nurturing and caring and inspires just curiosity and exploration. Not one of these. What I honestly think so many schools are just depressing. Right.
- [26:54]
Dave
So from the outside in, does it look like any other school with fields and, you know, field house locker rooms and all that and then you don't notice the difference till you get through the door?
- [27:04]
Mackenzie Price
No, I would say we're still a little different on that. You know, our schools, we've opened schools all over the country and the way we've started this because again, Alpha is such a foreign idea and concept to so many families. They need to see what it is. So we've opened schools up throughout the country and we've started them small. So we'll have schools with 25, 50 kids that are in that. You get a playground. Kids need to be outside. In fact, our students get an hour and a half of just non structured outside playtime every day because that's something really important to have. But yeah, it's not quite the traditional thing. And the same is true with the way we do our work workshops. Like, for example, you know, I was at our middle school this week and they're doing an incredible band music class, but they're creating a rock band. And as part of that, they're also learning about marketing and branding and mixing music in addition to playing instruments. You're not really going to walk into one of our schools and see kids all playing the recorder, you know, as part of their traditional music class.
- [28:10]
Dave
I see a lot of our, you know, when they reach college, you know, because I teach at MIT and a little bit at Harvard and at Stanford, and the kids that go to school in England arrive a full year ahead of the US educated kids and they can use that to, to take basically either a year of tuition back in college, you know, just getting advanced credits, or they can start a company while, you know, take a semester or two to start a company or just the extra time is worth its weight in gold. So if you start talking about, you know, 10xing the rate of learning, I imagine, and you know, 1400 SAT scores a freshman, I mean, you got to figure you're in that same maybe even a year ahead of that by the time you get to college.
- [28:48]
Joe Lamont
Yeah, when you think about that Time for sure. Two points. One, about your England comment. We have what we consider the world's best team of learning scientists who work for us. And what's very amazing is most of them come from England rather than the US and the, you know, in England, the academics actually have been going like this versus the US like that. And a lot of it's like these, this, these people from this team, you know, who have been for 15 years, you know, making sure that those concepts were put into the curriculum, which is why they're. They're ahead. You know, we're now putting it into our platform so everybody can get it. But that, that concept of just having lots of extra time, you know, in our high school, you know, they spend. Our high school's a little different in that you spend four years working on a passion project, right? So you have four. You know, when you, if you're going to come to Alpha High, it's not because you want to be quarterback of the Westlake football team, right? You'll go to Westlake if you're, if you're going to do that, but you're going to come because you have, you want to say, there's something I want to work on, right. That I really love now. They change their mind, their kids, right? And they, they, you know, these, these ideas change. But can you imagine if you said I had four years to work on something I really loved and get really good at it? And so we do. We have a, you know, we have a. We have one of our seniors who's putting on a Broadway musical, right? And it's going to be the first all teen, all produced, you know, musical. And she spent everything from I have to source the singers off TikTok to music rights, right. To how do you fill a whole venue? And all the sales and marketing, all of those things was. She took her. Okay, I love. I'm an arts theater girl, right. And now has had years to actually work on it, you know, as she loves.
- [30:39]
Peter Diamandis
Can I dive into a little bit about the guides? All right, so you don't call them teachers, you call them guides. And I'm curious how you source them.
- [30:49]
Salim Ismail
Right.
- [30:50]
Peter Diamandis
Super excited that Alpha is going to be opening up a school in my hometown in Santa Monica. How do you go about sourcing your guides? What's their background? Talk a bit more about their mission. Are they just not traditional teachers? Were they the top teacher someplace else? Help me get my handle around that.
- [31:12]
Joe Lamont
I'll give you, from the business aspect in. And then Mackenzie can talk on the other Side, the biggest issue, back to scaling schools. Schools don't scale because you're limited by teachers. Right. That's always the, the critical aspect. And so when I first looked at the teacher problem, you know, how are you going to be able to scale this? You know, the, the five things of what is required for a great teacher in a traditional school, not us, is you have to be a domain expert. I'm great in seventh grade science. You have to be good actually in teaching kids. Right. And, and, you know, not just a researcher. The third dimension is you have to connect and motivate students. The fourth is you have to be good with parents. And the fifth, depending on the organization, administration, you look at that and outside of the business world, you ask an HR guy 101, he's going to say, that's a complicated spec. Those are different skills. It's hard to have all five skills in one person. That's a hard spec. And so in education, what we've decided, the way we solve that problem is to underpay them. And then we're like, oh, my God, no one applies for this job. It's the hardest spec in the world, and we're going to underpay them. And you're like, well, this. And so fresh out eyes coming in here. If we're going to rebuild this, every HR guy is like, well, simplify the spec or pay more or both. And so at alpha, that's what we've done. Very much in our model is those first two items, which is seventh grade science expertise or how to teach it to kids. The 10,000 papers of learning Science of the best way to instruct kids. We don't need because the AI tutor write our software Time Back software does that for them. The third dimension, you have to connect and motivate kids. You have to be the world's best. Right. We push that to the max. So if you look at our students, you know, a great book that you know, I don't know if you've Dr. Yeager's 10 to 25 how to motivate kids from 10 to 25.
- [33:21]
Peter Diamandis
This is psychological motivations, right?
- [33:24]
Joe Lamont
Correct. And he has this concept of the mentor mindset, which is teens need high standards and high support. Right. And so he actually has developed our training program for our guides. Right. Which is how do we have guides who are able to hold high standards for kids but also provide the high support to get them there? And so you have to be the world's best. And so about, what is it McKinsey on the last count, it was like half come from traditional teaching background.
- [33:52]
Mackenzie Price
Just about half of our guides come from a traditional teaching background. And these are generally people who were phenomenal, loved the idea of working with kids, but realize that traditional system is just built to fail on there. But we get people who. We have a guide who was the principal of the year in the state of Florida in 2020. And after 14 years working as a principal, she was attracted to come back to Alpha because her desire was to get back in the classroom and impact and interact with kids. But in addition to that, we get. The majority of our guides come from different backgrounds. They wouldn't have been interested in a traditional teaching world, but they were experts in motivation. They come from professional and college level coaching and athletics. Because think about how much motivation and life skill development is taught through sports. In fact, that's the way most of us got a lot of our life skills development growing up. They come from corporate backgrounds, executive backgrounds. What they all have in common though is this idea of like, okay, I want to be able to positively impact and motivate and connect with kids and serve as a mentor. And then of course, to Joe's point, we've taken the opposite strategy as traditional education. We believe that anybody who is going to put their blood, sweat and tears into working with this next generation, they deserve to be paid well. So our guides start at six figure salaries and that's part of what has enabled us to really attract incredibly talented people. And I will say our process for applying to be a guide at one of our schools is, it's very challenging. I mean, we really have a high bar for who we want to be impacting and mentoring and coaching our school.
- [35:43]
Dave
Fundamental though, that's like if you said so, you know, in any given high school or middle school, you're going to have a math teacher, an English teacher, a history teacher, and their branding, their personal branding is tied to this very narrow kind of topic. And so by throwing all that out, of course you're going to get a much better standard in terms of the other baselines, the motivational skills and everything else. So is there any concept of a specialist at all across the guides or everybody is purely.
- [36:10]
Joe Lamont
Yeah, so and just to put some numbers behind it, right, we had 80,000 people apply for our teaching roles, right. So in our world we have just, you know, how many guides per school. And so, and this is where to answer that second follow up question. At the kindergarten level, we actually have 5, 6 to 1 ratio of student teacher at Alpha. And the reason for that is, that's the one place where our apps aren't fully developed, which is bootstrapping kids into reading. It's still not there. And so when you talk about specialists, we still have reading specialists to make sure kids get bootstrapped. Once you can read, I can teach you math, I can teach you all the other subjects. But the, basically the detection of a four year old. The AIs aren't good enough yet. We think we need another 18 months before AIs can do that.
- [37:06]
Dave
So that'll crumble too. That's interesting.
- [37:08]
Joe Lamont
It will, it will. But even then, you'll still have five to six to one. Oh, God, yeah.
- [37:13]
Mackenzie Price
Let me add a mom's perspective in here because in addition to reading, think about, I mean, you guys all went through this with your kids like kindergarten. We want our kids to feel loved and welcomed and we want kids who come into school curious and excited to maintain that. And we believe having these awesome adults who are supporting these kids and helping them do big things. Our kindergarteners learn how to ride a bike and do a five mile bike race as a team together. And as they're. I was just talking to one of our guides who was talking about a kid who was really feeling challenged around riding a bike. But this guide knows that he loves animals and so she has a stuffed kangaroo and she runs alongside of him and says, can you go faster than the kangaroo now, by the way, our guides are having to get their exercise points in on that too. But that's the other thing that's just so critical is what is the point of school? In addition to obviously education and socialization and relationship building, we need these adults who are kind of mentoring. And one other thing, I'll bring up Dave, when you were talking about specialists, the other fundamental skill that we have to learn how to teach young people is the ability of learning how to learn something. And when you talk about kids who are going off and building businesses in fourth grade, doing jewelry making businesses, or building mountain bike parks or Broadway plays or mental health apps, how in the world would you find a specialist who's an expert in that as a teacher? Instead, Our guides also have that skill of, you know what, we're going to come alongside each other and we're going to go learn how to become an expert in that field. We're going to learn how to connect you with experts in the field. Actually, today I spent time with two of our high school students who are meeting with a really successful Hollywood producer who was connected by the school to give these Kids, some mentorship around movie production and marketing. And that's one of the skills that our guides are really good at, is saying, okay, I can connect with a kid, see what they're interested in, and then help them go figure out how to go become an expert expert and jump in that field. So be careful because we'll probably be reaching out to all three of you now for mentorship and connections with our students.
- [39:27]
Salim Ismail
I'm not sure I'm qualified.
- [39:29]
Peter Diamandis
Saleem, you had a question, buddy.
- [39:30]
Joe Lamont
And then the other part of our model, though, as you get older, we increase the ratio. So, you know, and you guys have 14 year olds, you said, you know, by the time you're adolescent, you're like, whoa, you know, there's too many adults around here. Give me some space. And so we actually, on the business model side, we take that money out of the guides and we put it into these workshops, right? These crazy afternoon workshops that they can go do everything. But if you also think about motivation, right, and these alternatives, right? We have ex athletes, right? I have ex NBA assistant coaches. Jermaine o' Neal is teaching a middle high school program, right? And you're just like one.
- [40:11]
Mackenzie Price
He's.
- [40:11]
Joe Lamont
I mean, those kids will one because motivation is so important, right? They'll do anything, right? With these set, we have ex Olympians, right? Sets of coaches and athletes who are able to connect with these kids and provide that motivational emotional support that you really want. And that's a lot of the magic that makes this work is making sure you hire those, which is why we pay more, why we built our business model around doing it and source 80,000 of them to find the right ones.
- [40:43]
Dave
Well, that gives you a real head start on what's coming too, because the whole college curriculum at MIT moved online years ago, and it got off to a fast start, but then it completely fizzled. And the reason it fizzled is because it's so insanely boring to learn on your own through a browser. But what's coming next is the interactive AI version of that. And it's going to have exactly your favorite personality on the other side. So right now, when you talk to your high school math teacher, the person is who they are. They're not your perfect soulmate to talk to. The AI version of it can be any voice, any personality. It could be Shaquille o' Neal reincarnated as a math teacher, whatever. It's going to be so incredibly engaging. And it's not quite ready yet. It'll be there within a year, but you're going to have such a head start having seen how these guides interact with the kids who are just. Just the most naturally engaging people on the planet, and seeing the motivation that that creates. So that'll match the AI version that comes onto that two hours a day when they're in front of the screen.
- [41:44]
Joe Lamont
Yeah. We have one where our middle schoolers are allowed to pick their avatars. And so for history, like in AP World history, they're all like, okay, Genghis Khan. Right. It's going to be my avatar. And it yells at them if they're not studying. Right. And the kids are like, okay, we love. They pick it.
- [42:05]
Dave
Yeah. You know, actually I met with a couple of MIT junior or sophomores today, actually, that were saying that the Taylor series is now taught by Taylor Swift. They got a real kick out of that. It's like, yeah, okay, that's kind of cute. They're her avatar suddenly knows how to do.
- [42:23]
Salim Ismail
I have like a thousand questions here, but let me kick off a couple. One is, when you hire a teacher from the traditional side, there's obviously a transition period to kind of operating in this new modality. What's the average length of time that does that take?
- [42:37]
Mackenzie Price
Well, you know, one thing that's interesting, the last step in our hiring process, when they've gone through a series of interviews and tests, everything from cognitive aptitude tests to case studies and having to design workshops, the last thing that they do is they spend time in one of our schools shadowing and basically working. What. What's really interesting about that is once they get to that point, the most common reason for falling out and not getting hired is actually traditional teachers. And the reason is they are not willing to jump in and engage with the kids, kind of get at their level because traditional teachers are so used to kind of standing forward or standing back and sort of pointing, do this, do that, and being here. But. But for those traditional teachers who do make it through our process and come into our school, we've got some really great training that they're able to jump into and just being a part of being willing to jump in. And so that's everything from designing the limitless launch activities that we do and the workshops. And the other big thing is helping them remember that their job is no longer to teach academics. So if you walk into one of our schools, you're not going to see one of our guides sitting down and showing a kid how to carry the one or what to do. Instead, they're going to be helping kids again develop that skill. Of learning how to learn. So they might say, hey, did you check your resources? Were you able to find a video? Were you reading the explanation? And they're really working to coach on that now. They're also focused on motivation. An example of that we just today in that kindergarten classroom, I was watching a couple of kids when they would hit one of their academic goals, they would give a secret signal that the guides are watching. Touch your nose. And that would signal I hit one of my academic goals. And then that starts, get ready for it. A silent dance party. And that is a five second dance party where the guides would do this and the kid would do it. And then that was enough to get that kid psyched up and ready to say, okay, let me go hit my next goal. And it's just those little things that they can do. And then the other part of it, Dave, that you mentioned about how much more engaging, truly personalized learning with AI can be, I just want to take it also to what it looks like when you walk in a classroom. You can walk in a classroom and have two 7 year old boys sitting right next to each other, but each of them is working on something that's exactly at their pace. So for example, you can have one 7 year old kid who's doing algebra while the kid right next to him, his friend is working on his multiplication tables. And that's the beauty of personalized learning. It's not isolating, it's not making that kid have to march up two grades to go sit with older kids. Or even worse, being told by the school, you just need to chill out a little bit, you're too advanced, they can keep going and yet be right next to each other doing that and then having that collaborative environment. I also have to say the, the roller coaster that the kids incorporate. When a kid hits a big goal, the whole class does a roller coaster ride, which again looks a little like this. Those who are not listening on video are missing the magic of this movement. That's the thing that these guides are so good at doing, is figuring out what is that motivation. And that's everything from the silent dance parties to the fact that we pay our students alpha currency and teach financial literacy concepts for hitting goals. I love that all of that is really going on.
- [46:11]
Peter Diamandis
Entrepreneurship, baby.
- [46:11]
Mackenzie Price
Developing self driven learners. Yeah.
- [46:14]
Dave
So then what happens? What's the impact of that on the peer pressure? Everything I see in schools, you either care about your grades or you don't. And there's no room in between. And if you're near the top of the class. You get into this group of people that are really competitive about their GPA and those are the ones that end up going to MIT and Harvard. And then you're like, oh, I can't compete on that. So I'm completely competing on the basketball team. I'm going to put all my energy into that. It's really sad actually because most of these kids would be great at both. But the basketball coach cuts them from the team so you're not allowed to excel over there. And then the math teacher only cares about the top five students every year. And so you don't make the mind share of the math teacher and everybody ends up bucketed in very irrational ways. And that peer pressure is just pathetic. But it must be completely different in your school.
- [47:04]
Joe Lamont
Yeah. On the academic side, this is the difference between a time based system and a mastery based system. So all our kids master their grade level of material so they get hundreds on their standardized tests for each level. And so if you actually this is back to this dichotomy of as adults because of our system, we see the world so differently was if you ask Alpha parents and say, can you get 100 on the, you know, in our case the Texas Star is the state standardized test. You know, fewer than 10% of the parents are like, yeah, of course you can get 100 on the Texas Star only, you know, GT kids. Right. That kind of thing. If you ask the Alpha students, 95% say you can get 100 because they have. Right. Which is in a mastery based system, you don't move up to the next grade level until you master right. What you're on. And the tutor is going to sit there. Right. The system is going to give you the personalized lessons so you can. So all our students know they can crush their academics in two hours. It's also a function of when you have, when your classes are all top 1%, every grade level, every subject, all the students are like, oh, I can absolutely do well academically. And so back to the competition. You know, it moves it in a time based system. Right. The two things that determine academic success in a standard school is it's IQ coded and it's big five conscientious, miscoded. Are you a grinder? Right. And those are the people who do naturally well. Right. And that's 10% of the market. Right. 90% of kids don't. In a mastery based system, everybody can. And it. What if you ask your average Alpha student, it's not about iq, it's about effort. You Know, and that's why we call our software time back, where it literally tells the kid, you're 17 hours away, right? You're five hours away. And so it moves everything from I'm not smart enough or I'm not capable, which is so. Right. Debilitating, right? That's such a bad model that we just inflict on these kids to, oh, okay, well, I'm five hours, I'm five hours away from mastering it and getting 100. Right. And that's just a huge unlock around self confidence and resilience and all that. And once again, can't do a teacher in front of a classroom.
- [49:22]
Peter Diamandis
I love this. I just want to say this for everybody listening here. You know, the traditional school models are you start school at 100% score and every time you get something wrong, your score goes down. In the traditional video game models, you start at zero score and every time you learn something, your score goes up. It's completely different motivational system. And if you can tap into that as well as what you said earlier, the best video game designers know how to just come in at that perfect level of challenge and frustration. Yeah, that's great.
- [49:56]
Joe Lamont
If you think about learning and you think about this engine, because it does. Everybody's like, oh, these AI tutors and they're terrible. And you can imagine generating personal lessons for every kid that's based on what are you trying to teach them? What is their knowledge graph? What do they know and not know? What is their interest graph? Right? This is back to your, oh, Taylor Swift's My interest graph or Gigascon or whatever it is, right? And then actually you can actually take into account cognitive load theory, which is actually the chemistry of your brain, how many working memory slots you have, how many reps you require to store the long term memory to change your schema. And the AI can generate a personal lesson for you that makes sure it's at 80 to 85% accuracy, right? Not too easy, not too hard. At 99%, you're not learning, right? It's, it's, you already know it. And every game designer will tell you if you drop below 66, the kids disengage because it's too hard. So you can just imagine this unending stream of personalized content, right, for every kid, right at their zone. And this is why you can learn 10 times faster. You know, and, and we.
- [51:02]
Salim Ismail
What do you do with, what do you do with kids that are, some are auditory listeners, some are visual learners, etc. How do you navigate between the different learning Styles that different kids have fundamentally,
- [51:12]
Joe Lamont
you know, in learning science, right, there's dual coding, which is it is better to get it both visually and auditory at the same time. Right. So even though internally you think I'm a visual or I'm auditory, the actual science will show it's better to give it both at once. And so even though you have a preference, Right. You need the reinforcement of both channels at once.
- [51:40]
Peter Diamandis
Let me ask some of the difficult questions that you probably are asked. So you're asking parents to trust more screens in the classroom at the same time that there's a backlash going on for screens with kids. So what do you tell parents, you know, who want their kids on computers all the time? And then are you able to enforce sort of a distraction free use of their laptop so their kids aren't going off to play Minecraft or some other video game?
- [52:15]
Joe Lamont
Yeah, those are super valid concerns. Screen time and bad screen time, even AI and bad AI. So these are all super legit concerns by parents. And you know, here's how we look at it. And parents who come in, you know how they look at it, which is we believe there's good screen time and bad screen time, which is if you can learn 10 times faster right then, and it frees up the rest of the day to do all these great workshops and life skills, it's worth that trade off, right? Even if you don't like screens. And there are parents at Alpha who would say, I'm a no screen time household. And they're like, but if my kid can actually learn the academics in two hours instead of six and get that afternoons to do all these great things, that trade off is worth it. That would be sort of dimension A. Dimension B is to that point of AI. If you give kids chatgpt in a school, 90% of them use it to cheat. Chatbots are cheap bots. And so unmanaged AI is bad. Right. And so we don't have, in our mornings, we don't have chat functionality enabled. Like, even in our world we've tried. And even our best kids, they all use it to cheat, right? And you're all just so we.
- [53:33]
Peter Diamandis
I have to imagine people's preconceived notion of Alpha school is using ChatGPT in school as a, as a mechanism for learning, but it's not. So when a kid's on your platform, they're not able to go to Gemini 3 or Grok 5 or whatever the latest is. And are they disallowed from going and playing their favorite video Games as well.
- [54:03]
Joe Lamont
Yes you are. And so when you talk about chat functionality, what we tell the kids is if you're using chat in the morning, you're probably cheating, but if you're not using it in the afternoon on these life skill workshops, you're probably failing. Right. The student who's trying to do a musical needs help, right? So it's that dual sense that you have to have of that. But for putting facts, ideas and concepts in kids brain. ChatGPT sort of steals that away from the kids and you want to fill kids with ideas. Now our AI use is basically there's two dimensions of the AI use. One is generate the personalized lesson, right? And so it's the generative part of AI. It generates a dynamic lesson for the kid. Now the second part of what it's doing is the vision models. So it is watching the screen coaching you. So one of the things it's doing and it's actually the more expensive part, like we, we basically will stream the screen at, you know, to a soda model. You know, it's, we spend like 10 grand a kid right now, you know, in AI tokens because we're doing this because the AI is watching the screen and it's saying, look kid, you know, you're scrolling, you're guessing the answers or when you miss the question, you're not listening to the explanation and you're just trying to drive the next question without listening. And so it's coaching them into good self driven learning habits. And the core of this, and this is sort of a key and why ed tech isn't the solution. We talk about EdTech's like 10% of the answer, which is, you know, everybody says to educate a kid you need a motivated student and you need to put them in lessons of the correct difficulty. Not too easy, not too hard. Ed tech does the second really well. But how do you do the motivated student part? For us it's give the kids their time back, right? Where you say, look, engage in it. Once you finish the lessons, you get to do the workshops. Well, if you're not using the apps correctly, right? If you're skipping or guessing or you know, doing any of these anti patterns, you're not going to finish in the two hours, right? And so we literally have a waste meter in the corner where it's like, dude, you're wasting 50% of your time.
- [56:22]
Dave
That's mind blowing. You know, those vision models only came into existence since maybe a year ago and you've already got them deployed. That's incredible. 10 grand a kid is a lot of token usage though that'll come down a factor of 10. But it's impressive that you're, we're gonna
- [56:36]
Joe Lamont
get it down to on device. But that is our. And to be honest, like three years ago when we started, when I became principal, we literally had humans reviewing the video at night annotating like, oh wow, these kids aren't learning because you have to train a model. It's just like the, the, you know, Tesla, you know, autopilot.
- [56:55]
Dave
Yeah, yeah, of course.
- [56:56]
Joe Lamont
You have to train this model up of. Okay, this is good learning, this is bad learning. What are these kids doing? Oh wait, they're switching to another screen to ask chat GPT. Oh wait, they're playing Minecraft. And so all of those things, we're monitoring those and you know, our, our, our unit of measure is xp. Right. Whichever video. Right. Is one XP equals one point of learning.
- [57:19]
Salim Ismail
Yeah.
- [57:20]
Joe Lamont
One XP is one minute of focused learning. And so the kids know the AI is deciding, was this a minute of focused learning? Okay, you get credit for it.
- [57:31]
Dave
Yeah. I mean, just to make an analogy for the audience here, like if you've ever coached soccer or football or tennis, if you just imagine you could look at every single kid and study every footstep they take and say, oh wait, that step to the right should have been a step to the left. But you're in their AirPods telling them one on one coaching of every single move, that team will just take off. And the vision technology to actually do that through AI with the AI looking at every single motion, that's brand new in the world. And it would work in coaching just as well as it works in screen monitoring for teaching. But I can just completely see how every single action in the learning experience is now a measurable piece of data that can be personally analyzed. And it's brilliant to me that you actually had human beings trying to do that at night. That must have been the most laborious thing in the history of the world. But that's how you get a head start into knowing how you're going to deploy it with AI very soon thereafter. That's just, it'd be awesome.
- [58:28]
Salim Ismail
Take your system and put it into a traditional school and see how much time is being wasted there.
- [58:35]
Joe Lamont
Yeah, 90% is being wasted. I can tell you in any school, 90% is wasted. Right, for sure. Of course, that's, that's, that's for sure. But back and then just taking that last part that you were talking about, the data, what we have now and why Our learning keeps increasing, is. We have the. We're the only ones in the world with a closed loop data cycle.
- [58:53]
Peter Diamandis
It's rein. It's reinforcement learning for kids.
- [58:56]
Joe Lamont
It is.
- [58:57]
Peter Diamandis
It's our element.
- [58:57]
Joe Lamont
And so our. Our learning science team comes up with an idea and they're like, okay, let's implement this new idea and see they put it in, right? Generate the lessons. The kids do the lessons. You measure the learning. Did. Was this a better way to teach the kid? And this particular kid or whatever. And then they can see the scores based on standardized test results and then adapt to the learning. And so to give you a concrete example, so in August, I stood in front of all the parents. I'm like, we got a new math curriculum, K through 12. Kids are going to learn more in 20% less time. Right? We've made improvements. It's going to be 20% better. And eight weeks later, at the end of the first session, I got up, I'm like, okay. In good news and bad news, 4th through 12th, we're crushing it. We're above our thresholds. We're beating the 20%, you know, metric K through three. We're not. The kids are getting lost right in the path. We gave them too much freedom, you know, freedom of choice, got too much. So we're going to be changing that and changing that for the next eight weeks, right? And I can tell you now, we're back on track on that one. But that kind of science, it's learning science. It's literal science. How you learn identical.
- [60:11]
Dave
Peter and I went to 1x Robotics to interview Bert Bornick, and he had the exact same thing for the robots that are in the home. They gather every single motion. All the data comes back, gets transmitted into a nightly learning process that retrains the model. So you've got the exact same thing in education with.
- [60:27]
Joe Lamont
With probably.
- [60:28]
Peter Diamandis
Am I calling our kids robots?
- [60:32]
Dave
Well, when we podcasted Eric Schmidt, he said, you get these loops. Google is learning loops.
- [60:37]
Peter Diamandis
Yes.
- [60:38]
Dave
But this is a perfect example of one of Eric Schmidt's learning loops where the model will improve with that data.
- [60:43]
Mackenzie Price
McKenzie and Dave, you were talking about sports. And think about how much time is spent studying game film to see how you can improve. And that's never been done when it comes to learning in academics. It's like, again, just hopefully you're good at school or you're not good at school, and that's where we'll be. And we actually give kids the coaching where they learn. You know what the best way to go forward is? Actually to slow down, read the explanation, watch the video and then take your time to look at the question before you go answer it. And that's part of what really puts learning in the kids hands and gives them a sense of ownership over it. And they start seeing, you know what? I can get better, I can do better, I have the agency and the ability to improve if I put in the work and the good practices. And again that completely changes the way that a kid sees themselves. And that's really the magic.
- [61:41]
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- [62:45]
Peter Diamandis
I want to hit on some psycho emotional side. So I mean, some kids in particular, I think male teenagers probably need more scaffolding than others.
- [62:58]
Salim Ismail
Right?
- [63:00]
Peter Diamandis
How do you think about that? And then the other side of the equation I want to ask is, you know, how do you deal? Do you measure levels of stress and,
- [63:10]
Mackenzie Price
and
- [63:13]
Peter Diamandis
sort of the psychology of the kids to provide feedback and safety. So scaffolding first and then sort of the psychological side of the equation next.
- [63:23]
Mackenzie Price
Yeah, it's interesting from a scaffolding perspective in this way. The earlier that we have kids come into our system, the better we can build on those habits. Right. But you take, as you mentioned, a teenager, you get a kid who comes into us in middle school or high school and, and they've had years of conditioning in the traditional model, which is be passive, sit back, wait for someone to give information to you, and then move along whether you know it or not. And so which is the worst place
- [63:50]
Peter Diamandis
to be in life, right?
- [63:52]
Mackenzie Price
It is absolutely the worst place. Yeah, yeah. And so there are some bad habits that kids have picked up. But here's the good news is you can pretty quickly put kids into a situation where they're suddenly in a culture where they Feel a sense of ownership around the culture and where they've got adults who are practicing this mentor mindset with these kids of saying, hey, you are capable of doing big things. You may have thought in the past that you weren't a math kid, you weren't good at science, you're dyslexic, and therefore reading will never be your thing. That's not true. And let's put in some growth mindset. Let's give you some training around receiving feedback, around being able to connect and do that, they get that help. Then when they also are met with the level and pace. And here's a pretty scary statistic that I think it makes most parents kind of blood turn. We brought hundreds of students from all over the country into our alpha school at the beginning of this school year. And as part of their onboarding, they do assessments so we can figure out where they are. And Joe stood in front of our parents at the back to school academic night and he said, guys, I got some bad news for you. This will be a little hard to take. But basically we looked at where students are and we compared them to their transcripts from their previous schools and here's what we found. If they were an A student on their transcript in math class, for example, they were anywhere between one year ahead and three years behind in their academics. If they were a B student, they were between three and seven years behind. Three to seven years. And so here's the other part, and Joe's a pretty forward principal. He said, your schools have been lying to you. Gone are the days of teachers giving out Cs and Ds because you know what? Parents don't pay $40,000 a year to send their kids to schools where they get C's and D's, Right.
- [65:53]
Peter Diamandis
Worse yet, they don't get grades at all. They get sort of a written evaluation and then, and like, okay, I need some objective measurement. Is my kid doing well or not?
- [66:03]
Mackenzie Price
And they don't give that out. Now here's the next part that Joe said is he said, here's the good news. It's not going to take years to catch up. We're going to go and we're going to fill in some holes, give some personalized lessons that get you caught up. And you can do that pretty quickly and going through that exercise, which by the way, it sometimes takes a little bit of motivation, right? Modeling to get these kids excited about going back and revisiting fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade to catch up up. But they do. And that kind of changes. And then on top of it, when you think about kind of mental and emotional stuff, you know, all of our students, every week they get a one on one 30 minute meeting with their guides. Every single week they're getting that connection. And did you know the average amount of one to one time in a traditional school with a teacher and a student? 22 seconds a day. That's it. And when do they ever get those 30 minute times? It's that stuff. And, and here's another thing that's really interesting. We have an emporium in our school where kids can take the alpha currency that they earn for hitting their goals and they can buy stuff. It might be a Lego set or stickers or snacks or you name it. The number one most popular item in the emporium is a special lunch with their guide. Kids love that connection and that mentorship. And then the other part of kind of coming in as a middle school student or a high school student, you know, we are really serious about creating a culture where we are helping students understand that they can be creators and contributors, not consumers. And when you think about what society does, it naturally pushes kids into the consumer mode. Scroll TikTok all day, watch YouTube, play video games. Endlessly passive advice. Instead, we spend time helping our kids see one. What are their values? What are their talents? What are they interested in? They go through an ikigai values workshops that they then do a workshop where they spend 168 hours of their week tracking. Right? How do they spend that time and what are they actually doing with it? And pretty soon our guides are working with kids to realize, you know what, instead of playing a video game, why don't you go learn to vibe code and build a video game and then host your own tournament Instead of scrolling TikTok, build an audience that's promoting a message with a great app that you've built. And we find young people want to step into that role and we just need to help make that possible.
- [68:25]
Peter Diamandis
I love that.
- [68:25]
Mackenzie Price
And as a result, purpose first. Yeah, we see. And when you have that sense of purpose in that culture and students who are uplifting each other, we really have found that that's been a pretty good cocktail for healthy lives.
- [68:44]
Salim Ismail
One of the things we see a lot is when you try anything disruptive in a legacy environment, the, the immune system attacks you. So are you getting attacked by the legacy system?
- [68:54]
Joe Lamont
Well, you know, this is one of we, I, I've been trying to figure out, can you convert an existing school or do you have to be A new school like Alpha. And the answer is, you know, I, I've talked to, you know, the heads of some of the, you know, top 10 private schools in the country and I'm like, here's the difference. If you hear this pitch and you like it, you come to the Alpha info session, which is why there's a thousand people at New York's Alpha Info session. Because, you know, people want this new thing. All the people who don't like this message stay at your school. And so, you know, there is for sure a set of people who are like, I don't want that. And it's, it's twofold of what it is. There's a set of people who are like, I want it, but somebody else has to be first. You know, that everybody wants to come to an Alpha. And as we open up all these new cities, one of the things you realize is Once Alpha has 100 people, right, that everybody wants to come. Let's say nobody wants to be the first 20.
- [69:53]
Peter Diamandis
Let's talk about that.
- [69:55]
Joe Lamont
That's the key.
- [69:56]
Peter Diamandis
Let's talk about how you get your schools open. So you're opening one in Santa Monica, you've just opened one in Santa Barbara. So your typical, you go out and you find a real estate location, you're finding someplace that is enough to interest, that you've assessed. So you have a density and then McKenzie, you're looking at an opening class of what, 25 to 40 typically.
- [70:21]
Mackenzie Price
Yeah. In general we're calling these kind of micro schools with about 25 students is the start.
- [70:29]
Peter Diamandis
And then one of the things you mentioned to me is one of the advantages if you're like a founding family is, and I love this idea is that you can actually help create the opening class, right? You can get your kids, best friends in there and you can select. I mean, I think half of education is who you go through the educational process with, right? Are they people holding you up or pulling you down?
- [70:58]
Joe Lamont
And I think this is a good one. And I'll tell the McKinsey, this is the McKinsey story, which is, you know, when she was co founding Alpha, she woke up and said, I want to go find the 20 people who are going to be to surround my kids. Right? And I was actually, unfortunately I was a laggard. It took McKinsey two years to convince me to come to Alpha because I was like all the other parents is my kids. I went to Catholic school, didn't really like it, almost expelled because I skipped school all the time, you know, dropped out of college. But my kids are going to.
- [71:32]
Peter Diamandis
You've done pretty, you've done pretty well, Joe.
- [71:35]
Joe Lamont
Sure, sure. But you know, but my kids were going to Catholic school and she's. And I was like, this is such a weird school. Like so weird. Right. And. But she woke up and is what we would now call a founding family. Right. She founded Alpha.
- [71:50]
Dave
But we.
- [71:51]
Joe Lamont
In every city, you need the same thing. Because just cause Austin's going well doesn't mean Santa Monica or Santa Barbara or San Francisco, New York. They want to be like this one is it. And so the core of growth is going to a city and finding those first set of families who are like, yes, I'm in. And, and I'm actually going to go recruit the other families because it is a right, it is one where parents want to see. Okay, it's working for your kid. Okay. I trust it right there. That we. If I, I always say the two things parents need to, to move a kid from their school is they need a reference from an adult they trust a parent they trust in their city.
- [72:35]
Peter Diamandis
Yep.
- [72:36]
Joe Lamont
And they need to see a kid at the school do something their kid can't do. Whether it's love of school or academics or life, whatever they care about, they have to see those two things. And when they have the two things, then they'll move.
- [72:47]
Salim Ismail
Do you use a franchise model or do you own all your own school?
- [72:52]
Joe Lamont
So for Alpha, it's 100% US. We run it. There's no franchise. This is, we're 100% in charge of the quality control. You know. But, but the second part of it is Alpha's the high end private school. We designed this when we said what are we doing? It's price is no object. Right. It's expensive. It's the high end private school. How would you rebuild education now? With this time Back platform that we're building, think we're building a whole set of other schools based on it, which will be different models. So we've launched Texas Sports Academy. Right. Which is the afternoon is all sports. We've launched Gifted talented school, which is for the kids who love academics. When you say what would make you love more school? They're like more academics. And so, you know, those kids are learning like 5x learning like they're, you know, they'll be 1500 by, you know, 8th grade. And so you have different ones. We have a wilderness school. Right. So you can, we have a Montessori school. So you can imagine all these different models that as soon as you have this magic of two hour learning. You can start to say, what should we do in the afternoon? And so next year in 2026, you're going to see all these other models beyond just Alpha that roll out based on this Time Back software.
- [74:04]
Peter Diamandis
And what is your vision, the reaction
- [74:05]
Salim Ismail
of the authorities and government departments of education and that whole legacy side?
- [74:12]
Joe Lamont
Yeah, you're, you're public school. I'm going to be doing this for 20 years. McKinsey's in for 20 years. The public school side I think is going to be like the second decade, not the first decade, which is, we're doing a lot. It's all private. Right. It's without, you know, there's a whole set of schools. The Texas Sports Academy is a, is using the Texas vouchers, the billion dollars they just allocated where it, it's $300 a month parent pay. So you know, bringing the price way down from, from an Alpha. And so right now, you know, this is a private model and we've tried on the public side, McKinsey applied for 10 charters in 10 states for in person charters. Zero rejected 10 times.
- [74:59]
Mackenzie Price
One, one.
- [75:00]
Joe Lamont
We got Arizona virtual, but you got an Arizona, you got a virtual, not a physical physical, which is physical school. You know, the school boards literally say things like I was put on this earth to stop people like you.
- [75:11]
Peter Diamandis
Wow.
- [75:12]
Joe Lamont
You know, and so that's, that's what
- [75:13]
Salim Ismail
I, that's what I talk about when I say the immune system, the legacy likes.
- [75:17]
Joe Lamont
Yeah, for sure. And so I, you know, for us it's, you know, the back to the thing. The private school market's a 50 billion dollar market. Right. And so it's a big market. And for those parents who want to opt in, you know, it is radical, you know, so they, they can, we'd love to move into public as soon as they want to invite us, but you know, on charters we just said we, we know we're not wanted here, so whenever you want us, come call us. But otherwise we're done applying for, you know, charters.
- [75:46]
Mackenzie Price
And I think Saleem, we, what we see is we've got a lot of interest from the public education sector. You know, the Secretary of education came and spent the day at Alpha in Texas in September. We, we get people who kind of, of are inspired, but it's really the idea of can you really change the whole model of the day? Right. If academics only takes two hours, what do you do with the rest of the school day? And are you willing to change that role of teachers and all that? So I think right now Part of the reason we get a lot of attention, we are probably the most talked about school in the world, is because we are sort of serving as inspirational ideas for what's possible. And I actually love that part of it. I'm getting. I'm getting parents who reach out to me who have implemented a lot of what we do in their homeschool environments or taking pieces of that. I think eventually it'll get there. But right now our plan is to build the private distribution model at varying levels and price points, still delivering the academic excellence through the time back platform and the life skills development that just can be done in different ways. At Alpha, our students will learn adaptability and teamwork by doing a sailing workshop where they eventually sail from Florida to the Bahamas, you know, over five days. But you know what? You know what else you can do? You can get incredible life skills development by letting kids get out on the sports field, you know, starting at noon instead of at 4 o' clock and giving them time back to the thing.
- [77:12]
Peter Diamandis
So there's a lot of, is everything perfect? What do you guys worry about? What keeps you up at night? What are the problems that are having? I mean, you know, I don't want to be an. Listen, I love what you're doing. I just understand what's the flip side of the equation here?
- [77:26]
Joe Lamont
Here, here? Well, flip side is your average parent, when hearing this, think this is totally wacky and must not be true. So, you know, educating parents that this is actually this new model is not fake and false and a hoax and all of that, you know, is a huge lift, right? Our marketing department is, you know, our schools educate kids. We have to go educate parents.
- [77:51]
Dave
Parents.
- [77:51]
Joe Lamont
Because every parent literally thinks the opposite. That's one. The part I as principal is how do I scale with keeping quality, right? So every time we open a new location, every time we open a new, have a new guide, how are we making sure that you're getting that same level of love of school? Right? Academic performance, the life skills. You know, we spend a lot of time, like when you talk about life skills, we teach grit. What does that mean? Right? You can't just read a book, Angela's book, and be like, oh, my kid has grit. Right? We have to be able to say, our third graders in Santa Monica and Austin and New York have grit. What does that mean? What's the test to pass? Right? What is our, you know, Alpha cert, right, that we have? And so we spend a lot of time making sure that we're building this for scale, right? And making sure that, you know, every third grader can do a Rubik's cube. So we're like, ah, that's a good, you know, proxy for grit. And so the, the, the scaling part is, you know, critical. The other is our cost, right. I'm spending, I'm burning 10 grand on the AI. I got to drive that down. So tomorrow, if somebody flipped a switch and said, okay, everybody, finally, every parent wants it tomorrow, you know, we couldn't fulfill it. But you know, we, we, we got to drive the, that curve down to make that work. And then the biggest one that I think to hit scale building schools and rebuilding from scratch is, you know, I got 20 years. So we're going to build 10,000 schools, you know, and that's going to be great and I love it. But how do I get to a billion kids? Right? How do we drive this out to a billion kids? And if motivation is your number one issue. Issue, right. This engine part's easy in the scheme of things. How do you motivate kids when you don't own the school day? Right. The biggest motivator of a kid is giving their time back. So if I have six and I give you four hours back, I have the most important motivation. But for the billion kids where I don't control their school day, right. And they're not going to give it back to me, they're not going to restructure their school. We still have to get to those kids and we have to motivate them to do it. And so you're gonna see where we've actually, we're partnering with some of the best motivators in the world to figure out how do we package up both a motivational component with the learning component. So we have some of the world's best video game designers that that's going to be released in 2026. We work with some of these biggest influencers, right. And packaging all this up where it's a bundle motivation plus the learning. And that is hard. There's a big lift there. Right?
- [80:37]
Salim Ismail
So have you talked, have you talked to other governments? Because there's certainly countries around the world that are much more open to the future of education in a modern way than, than we are, say here.
- [80:49]
Joe Lamont
Yes, we do. We get to, we have demand everywhere. And you know, on governments what we find is it's the same thing almost everywhere, which is if, if countries have a private model, you absolutely can get take rate. On the private side. The issue is ministers of education or secretaries or departments of education are Pretty much globally, very much gonna wait and see until there's dramatically more proof, which I'm not against. I was, you know, Peter Attia was a, you know, his, his daughter went to the school and we were, I was comparing, you know, medical grade testing, you know, versus education. And you know, there aren't, you know, in education we roll stuff out to 55 million kids and there's no randomized control trial. Right. There's no million million user, like, does this really work? And I would love, you know, one of the things that we'd love to do is be able to, you know, as we get all this data out there in this, you know, time back at scale is do a million student randomized control trial so that every pharmaceutical grade trial so everybody can be like, this isn't a hoax. Right? This actually works. Oh my gosh. Right. We need some of that proof because a lot of things in education are. There's a lot of bad learning science in education that we need to undo. And I believe proof and pharmaceutical grade trials might be the way around that.
- [82:22]
Peter Diamandis
Incredible. As we close on this episode, I have one final question. But Dave and Salim, I wanted to give you a chance to ask yours.
- [82:34]
Dave
I would love to know how you deal with the rate of change of technology and what your process is. Because if you think about, if you start with a bad of say 6, 7, 8 year olds and you're planning that to end as 18 year olds, but in the intervening 12 years, half the kids will have neural links and the other half won't and they'll be doing something in the back of their mind you can't even see. How are you going to deal with this constant rate of change during that timeline?
- [83:01]
Joe Lamont
Yeah, we're humble enough to know we don't have all the answers. You know, we talked to Mackenzie and I talked to thousands of kindergarten parents, right? And the kindergarten parents are the ones who are, who want the biggest change because they are looking out at 12 years from now and they basic, they all know this current school system is not going to work, right? We need something different, right? They're, they're motivated to change versus if you have a senior in high school, you're like, let me just get them to college or get them out here. Right? But if you have to look Forward and Project 12 Years, you're going to want something new. And all we say at Alpha is we wake up every day and we feel we're the leading school that is saying how do we adapt to what the technology changes? So if you actually look at our high school kids. We have a concept called a brain lift, which is the data structure for human knowledge. Right. And it literally divides. This is the stuff LLMs are going to be good at at or are good at and will be. And this is the part that humans are good at. And we're teaching them as of today. And with, you know, what we can project in the future, this is as good as we can get, kids. And this is how we're preparing you for that world. And you know, and maybe Grok 7 is like, okay, well, it does everything the brainlift thought, you know, and we got to move on. But we believe there's a, you know, our view very much. And I think this is an important point about our culture. You know, McKinsey's best line is, this is the best time in history to be a five year old. Right. AI is going to impact adults very differently. We're in Austin. Ubers, Waymos, Robo Taxis, right? Not a good time to be an Uber driver. Right? But AI is going to give kids superpowers, right? It's going to transform their childhood. Good. It's going to let them do things that our generation never even dreamed of. And so putting them, putting your kid in that kind of environment, right, is going to be awesome for them. And you know, if you talk to, I have a, I have a dozen high school kids who are in my guide group, Sparta group. Shout out. Anyway, they, you know, they wake up every day and when you talk to them, they're like, yeah, you adult adults, man. It's wraps for you guys. We are gonna, AI is gonna like, give us superpowers and we're gonna take over the world.
- [85:26]
Dave
Well, infinite longevity too.
- [85:28]
Joe Lamont
Yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, they can't be more optimistic about the future. And I think that's the kind of
- [85:34]
Salim Ismail
thing, by the way, moving before us adults screwed up completely.
- [85:39]
Peter Diamandis
Let me hit on that.
- [85:40]
Mackenzie Price
Don't worry, they are.
- [85:41]
Joe Lamont
Don't worry. They are.
- [85:42]
Peter Diamandis
One of the reasons we move schools for our kids at one point was you have to assess the level of optimism of the teachers teaching your kids. If your teachers are pessimistic about the future, what do you expect your kids to be?
- [86:04]
Joe Lamont
I couldn't agree. Matt Ridley. Right. All our kids read Rational Optimist. Right.
- [86:10]
Peter Diamandis
They have to read abundance as well. Okay.
- [86:12]
Joe Lamont
Yeah. And he came to the school and he actually was sort of an AI doomer when it came to education. And I couldn't have been more proud as our students sat there and used his arguments from his books and examples from what their day is like, on why he needs to see the world differently, that this is gonna be awesome. Right? And so I think that's an important part of when you talk about culture that we need for our kids.
- [86:36]
Mackenzie Price
And, you know, Peter, we had a big foundation, a very large education philanthropy foundation came and visited at our schools. And at the end of the time, the head of the foundation said to my guides and me, they said, you guys are so happy. And I was kind of like, what? You know? And they said, we go and we visit schools and we talk to educators, and they're all just so. They're encumbered and they're depressed and they're like, it's so hard. And, you know, I was so happy to see my guide said, what do you mean? This is the greatest time in the world to be an educator, because we finally are unleashed to do what we got into this world to do, which is positively impact kids. And you can do those things. And the other thing I love and appreciate, and I think, you know, Joe is obviously a really great partner to have in this education endeavor. But one of the things I say is, if you come to one of our schools at the beginning of the school year, we're not going to just dust off the same old presentation that says, hey, here's what the school year looks like. This is the date of field day. This is the day for back to school night. Whatever. We're more like the Apple iPhone. We update every six weeks. We're constantly iterating, and we're constantly growing and learning, and we're seeing what works and what doesn't. And I will say families in our model, they have to flex their adaptability muscle as well, because we're always having kids do cool things and adjusting things as they work. And I think that's why we're able to see such rapid innovation. But as part of that, we are on the forefront of it. So it's kind of a fun and wild ride, which hopefully, Peter, you guys will get to be a part of in Santa Monica is seeing what that's like.
- [88:15]
Peter Diamandis
Amazing. Hopefully your AI works better than the Apple iPhone. AI Salim, why don't you wrap us up here, buddy?
- [88:24]
Salim Ismail
Yeah, I think that's what's great, is it's such a clear watershed between everything you're doing in a growth mindset and everything old in a fixed mindset. And I think you're probably pushing people over that line wonderfully. You launched, I think, 2016, if I remember right.
- [88:40]
Mackenzie Price
We Started the very first school in 2014 when my kids were in third and first grade. And Joe's daughters, who are the same age as my girls, came in a couple years later. And we now have sophomores in college and then seniors in high school. So this is. This is Joe's in my last year as Alpha parents, and then he'll be pure principal and guide leader, and I'll do whatever I do.
- [89:03]
Salim Ismail
If you go back to your founding, what would you have done differently that would have accelerated or changed things? What have you learned now that you wish you knew then?
- [89:15]
Mackenzie Price
Oh, boy.
- [89:17]
Peter Diamandis
To partner with Joe at the very beginning, guys, right?
- [89:20]
Joe Lamont
Well, part of. It's not like, you know, part of this. And back to the story. Three years ago, why I got involved was, you know, I put my kids in 10 years ago, but I was like, McKinsey, just like all education, this isn't scalable. This is great for Austin. It's great for our families. It wasn't until Gen AI came out when I said, this is the technology that can let us scale to a billion kids. So it really was that moment that said, okay, now I should get involved because we can get it out to everybody. And I would. I bring to the party. And so, so, you know, that. That would been it. And if you just rolled me back three years, you know, what would I. What would I have done differently? The understanding, the educating parents, you know, I. I wake up every day, and if you said, if I could wave a magic wand to fix education, it's actually not the students. The students are awesome. Right. The issue is I need the. Because parents are the blocker. The blocker to education reform is what's in parents heads. And so that whole concept of, you know, inertia. Three years I didn't do a podcast, right? And I did, you know, and now I realize educating parents, you know, McKinsey's been out there, we have to get out there. Because the single biggest impediment to making education great for our kids is what our parents believe.
- [90:49]
Peter Diamandis
Amen. McKenzie. Where can we point people to learn more about Alpha School? Where do they go?
- [90:54]
Mackenzie Price
Well, we've got Alpha Schools that are launching coast to coast. We had 13 new schools this year, and we'll be continuing to announce so you can go to Alpha School and learn more about our model. And then Future of Education on social media, on Instagram, I've got a podcast called Future of Education. And we spend a lot of time on those channels just giving parents a little bit of a taste of what's possible in school when you free kids time up to go do awesome things and develop. So, future of education and Alpha school.
- [91:27]
Peter Diamandis
And Joe, any particular targets you want to point folks at?
- [91:32]
Mackenzie Price
Oh, he's becoming an X star.
- [91:36]
Dave
Good, good.
- [91:37]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
J.
- [91:37]
Joe Lamont
You can get Jay Leemont is where I post. And you'll see sort of life as a principle and what all the education and the business. You'll see some stuff about the business of education as well as what Alpha kids are doing in our view around this.
- [91:54]
Peter Diamandis
And if family wants to go and visit an Alpha school to see if it's right for them, is that a possibility?
- [92:00]
Mackenzie Price
It absolutely is. In fact, that's kind of the key is, is students will come and do a shadow day to see if the school is a fit. And the one thing we warn parents is don't send your kid to a shadow day unless you are convinced that you want to move or your kids will rebel. They'll be like, I'm not going back to my old school. I want to go to this new school. And so that's one of the things we say. But yeah, we're hosting info sessions at all of these schools and getting kids in to kind of experience this. And again, that whole idea of love of school, it is so magical because when kids love school, it allows us to help them unlock their potential and do big things.
- [92:42]
Peter Diamandis
Amazing.
- [92:42]
Dave
I gotta say, I came into this podcast saying, well, I always learn something, but how big a deal can it be? And I'm coming out of it saying, this is so inevitable and so huge. This has been great.
- [92:52]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. Critical for America, critical for the world. I mean, the speed of change is so extraordinarily fast that if we are still using the old methodologies, we're hitting brick walls. We need some, not just Alpha school, hopefully many different mechanisms that are going to enable us to have our kids, our college kids, and even we didn't talk about it, but reskilling, using this technology to reskill our employees is going to be fundamentally critical goal. Yeah. Well, thank you, Joe.
- [93:27]
Joe Lamont
Thank you, guys. We really appreciate pleasure.
- [93:31]
Peter Diamandis
Salim, a pleasure as always.
- [93:33]
Salim Ismail
I want to attend the school.
- [93:35]
Joe Lamont
Absolutely, yeah.
- [93:37]
Dave
Reskill yourself.
- [93:40]
Peter Diamandis
All right, guys, have a beautiful day. Thank you. If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called Metatrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two minute read every week.
- [94:16]
Mackenzie Price
Week.
- [94:16]
Peter Diamandis
If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com metatrends that's diamandis.com metatrenDS thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.