← No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
Reinventing K-12 Education Using AI with Alpha School Principal Joe Liemandt
01:01:49
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- [00:05]
A
Hi listeners welcome back to no priors today we're here with joe lamont the founder of the legendary technology company trilogy and now the principal of alpha school he wants to educate a billion kids differently and also recruit a generation of builders to work in education joe thanks so much for doing this with us.
- [00:24]
B
Yeah good to see you great thank you i appreciate this so you have.
- [00:27]
A
An amazing story as a technology entrepreneur trilogy is a legend of a company can you just talk a little bit about how you went from that to being principal of a school absolutely rolling.
- [00:39]
B
Back on background in high school i actually wrote a paper on ai and it literally had a paragraph on neural nets that said this is decades away and back then it was all expert systems ontologies and all of that and i went to stanford and actually was in a class with ed feigenbaum the father of expert systems ended up dropping out to build a ai company you couldn't call it back then because ai was bad back then and it was the first product in the nineties to sell a billion dollars of ai so we built a software company and did that for twenty five years but then.
- [01:15]
A
That helped with sales configuration yeah sales.
- [01:17]
B
Configuration and all of that and so think just classic saas enterprise software both organic build and acquisitions but then ten years ago and sort of how we got to the school is mackenzie price who's a stanford grad who i'd hired into trilogy back in the nineties she started a school started alpha very different school and we can talk about how i got but for two years i was just saying i'm not going to go to your weird school and eventually all my kids went and then three years ago when genai came out i was like wow neural nets are finally here and now we can scale this the problem with all education is it's not scalable there's lots of point good education systems and what my view was wow this is finally a technology that can get this to a billion kids and take the magic of alpha which was great for austin kids and my kids and get it out to everybody and so i'm a product guy and i said i guess i have to be principal to go figure this out and what happens when fifth graders get in a fight and what do parents yell at you about and how do you design a product from the ground up if you just did you know let's start with parents are going to drop their kids off at a school at a building and there's going to be other kids in the building and there's going to be adults in the building what would you do to sort of unleash human potential if you had twelve years to you know re envision.
- [02:45]
A
It so what was your original thinking about your kids going to mackenzie school like what was the resistance and what was the reason they eventually went well.
- [02:52]
B
Lots i mean i is every parent basically wants their kid educated the way they were right that's what you've experienced we've all experienced the same model for a couple hundred years i went to catholic school i didn't even like it but my kids were going to it right and so they're in the local school and mckinsey's giving this other you know weirdness and i'm just like no.
- [03:14]
C
What was weird about it or what.
- [03:15]
B
Was different well she was they were using apps in the morning right and it was you know it was a mix it wasn't what we are today but it was the the formation of it and you're like a kid's going to learn really with an app and no teacher really seriously like everybody knows good school equals good teacher good teacher equals good school and you're like no this app dreambox back then was the app and i'm like that's better in math and so you just have that hangup and that's true today right that when we look to open a new location basically everybody wants to go to an alpha once there's one hundred kids in the school no one wants to go when you're the first twenty it takes somebody like a mckinsey who's like i want to be a founding family because the bundle that is education part of what she loved was i get to go find the other kids and that i want to surround my kids with right and so it took her two years but eventually she got you know and my our daughters are all now best friends and have been for.
- [04:15]
C
A decade but you're taking an even more radical approach i think right you're basically saying kids really just need two hours a day with structured classwork or you know some interaction with applications et cetera and then the rest of the day can go to other things could you extrapolate on that a little bit more because i think it's a very.
- [04:29]
B
Interesting model well if i had to step back when we just talking about how we re envisioned it yeah right there's you know the pillars of reinvention and if you say if you could reinvent a school and had to make it ten times better what would it be so the first one and the most important and this was mckinsey's co founder who actually was the one who told me this ten years ago i said what do i not know about school that i should know he's like two things first kids must love school and i'm like ah you know it's finished sometimes he's like no you're going to learn kids must love school and i said what second he's like when kids love school your expectations of your kids are too low and i'm like whoa whoa i have really high expectations my kid there's no chance he's like call me back in a hundred days and both of those turned out to be true so when we three years ago when i was like okay now with gen ai what we do our first view is kids must love school more than vacation so we literally survey our kids you know if we say kids do you love school ninety six percent say yes we get between forty and sixty percent of kids depending on the vacation they have or how their workshops or afternoon workshops went saying every eight weeks okay i love school more than vacation and that is a magic that every parent should expect that if we're going to put kids in a place for twelve years we should just have that expectation which is not standard you're like okay how do i make them love school and so for me once i took that commitment that mckinsey had and i was principal i went to the kids and this is where your two hours coming in i went to the kids and i was like okay the new fifth graders had come in and it's my first week i'm like all right kids do you love school and they're all like no and i'm like okay what would make you love school and they're like less school yeah and i'm like how much less and they're like none and i'm like that seems a little light we were.
- [06:24]
C
Talking about this earlier where school is kind of a bundle right it's academics it's physical activity it's socialization and in some sense it's child care for the parent so there's a variety of things.
- [06:34]
B
That school is exactly and so what.
- [06:37]
C
Specifically are they referring to and so.
- [06:39]
B
On this one they're just like the academic part if you want me to love school and you just can put me in class for six hours a day i'm not going to love school and so we negotiated basically i was like two hours right if would you because you know there's ed tech that's been deployed forever but you know edtech's deployed and test scores keep going down so it's not working and the issue is just engagement that you know if you use dreambox you know even ten years ago it would work but you know there's a lot of studies that like between five and ten percent of people are the people who actually engage with con right and there's five to ten percent of people who are self motivated but the other ninety right don't and so what we developed i went back to my team i'm like okay and i was like to the kids two hours a day in the apps like real engagement but then you get four hours of awesomeness right is that a fair trade and they're like yes and so i went to my team i'm like okay we got two hours we got to jam everything in these kids heads in two hours and it has to be there forever right change the whole scheme of their brain the good news was there have been learning science papers written for forty years back you know even before i went to high school that talked about how kids could learn two five or ten times faster they just don't work in a teacher in front of a classroom model and so we just literally just would pull papers off dean schwartz at stanford has a book on it and we were like okay let's do chapter k in this book and put it in and so we built a learning engine that teaches kids ten times faster it's all based on the principles of learning science and so then now we can commit to kids you just need to do two hours a day and you're going to crush your academics so top one percent performance in only two hours a day now they engage in the app and then once they finish it goes green and they get the four hour afternoon to go do life skills and all the set of things that both they love as well as when you talk about a bundle what parents really care about right that when you start saying what do i want my kid to learn especially with ai coming it's very confusing what are we supposed to teach kids for the first twelve years when ai is going to know everything but you start thinking about leadership and teamwork and grit and hard work and entrepreneurship and financial literacy storytelling and public speaking relationship building socialization that bundle parents are like oh okay i like that and what's really great about those is you can build awesome workshops that kids love that drive them through that.
- [09:06]
A
Can you make that like easy to picture for parents or builders listening here like i am a new fifth grader at an alpha school like what does my day look like your day looks.
- [09:17]
B
Like this you come in you do limitless launch think tony robbins for kids right and it's all about growth mindset you're going to be able to do this right our view kids are limitless they're awesome and we need to create an environment that helps unleash them so you jump into that then you literally sit down at your app and so you're going to have a ai tutor that's going to be there for two hours that's going to give you personalized lessons right based on your right your level age grade and knowledge grade are two totally different things right the number of people in the average sixth grade class in this country who actually needs sixth grade content is very small and so this is why all the test scores keep going down is a sixth grade teacher's job is to deliver sixth grade content her audience right her students actually aren't ready for it that just to give you like we just had hundreds of kids join the last couple of weeks as we started across the country and you know my message to the parents you know my first academic talk to them was i hate to tell you this it sounds extreme but your fifty thousand dollars private school that you were at for however many years has been lying to you your student academically on standardized tests that we use are somewhere between one grade level ahead if they had a straight a transcript transferring into us one grade level ahead to three grade levels behind and if they're a b and if they're a b three grade levels behind two to seven years behind i have freshmen who are transferring in you know who have can't write a third grade grammatically correct sentence right and it's just and these are coming from high end private schools right and so that's the first part the second part though and this is where the ten times faster learning matters i'm like don't worry we can catch you up right and this is why we get such great academic performance is learning science engine you know the content when you talk about ten times faster the average grade level subject combo so matt fourth grade math sure takes between twenty and thirty hours to master that's it so you think there's one hundred eighty school days hour a day plus you have homework so you're thinking the average when i'm behind it's hundreds of hours we're like you're twenty or thirty hours and so these kids who come in instead of our two hours a day they they can do a third hour and they can do it at school or at homework if they want and so you're literally like well you're really only sixty hours behind which is sixty days we'll catch you up to grade level quickly these are like sixty.
- [11:51]
A
Pretty hard hours right because i don't know what your memory was but in elementary school i spent a lot of time like drooling doodling on my desk because there wasn't anything going on and so this is this is like hard focused work how do you get a second or fifth grader to do that.
- [12:06]
B
Yeah so when you talk about hard focused work part of what you're trying to do with the you know your engine is there's a zone of proximal development and what you actually want to keep kids at is between eighty and eighty five percent right so you can't have ninety nine percent because you know that mean they already know it and they're just you're giving them content they know but if you drop down when you say hard work and it drops down to sixty six percent or below you get disengagement right and every video game designer knows that right yeah so.
- [12:35]
A
I'M in the like fun struggle and.
- [12:37]
B
So you have to be in the eighty to eighty five percent and what an ai tutor can do that an alpha that a teacher in front of a classroom can't is generate an unending stream of content for each kid at eighty to eighty five percent so i can keep you engaged because i'm not going to make it too hard right if you're struggling on this concept right i need this concept right if the leap is too big i can just create scaffolding right and so then you just do the scaffolding lesson you're like oh i get this and so we're able to figure out is the kid and create content for them that that keeps them in that zone of proximal development so they actually it's not to say it's never hard right but there is relative to what when you're put in over your head there's a view of throw kids in way over their head and the learning science does not support that right the learning science does not say there's a concept of desirable difficulties versus productive struggle it's a whole debate on but if you gave me an mcat i would fail it and you can tell me to struggle through it all day long right and have grit you need to roll me back to freshman bio right and then build me up and ai tutors can do that for every subject like the third grade lesson when these high school kids can't write they're going to go through third fourth six hours right they're going to just learn it right and be able to progress through it and in a matter of weeks all of a sudden they're going to be writing at ap language get a five on ap lang in an frq right and so you can roll these kids back you do not want to push them too hard and you just want to deliver them perfect content which accelerates their learning and that's the magic of all of this is the way we learned or thought to learn of just putting them in over their head is actually not the best way to learn this has.
- [14:34]
A
Happened what what's going on the rest.
- [14:35]
B
Of the day so then in the afternoons it's all project based workshops so you're going to go in and you know depending on you know the grade level in the workshop it's going to have something that you're going to love as well as something that teaches a life skill and before i get into the workshop one of the things this is where our love of school really comes in but you have to believe one statement that lots of people do not believe you know the three things that if i could wave a magic wand and every parent believed we could fix education one your kid must love school as much as vacation which a lot of parents don't think number two they can crush their academics in two hours a day and then this one is that the key to your child's happiness is high standards kids want to do awesome things right and they want to do hard things right and they want to accomplish things and if you take that away right by setting low standards then there is no way that they get the love of school and.
- [15:34]
C
That'S actually a bunch of human history right if you look at just apprenticeship of people in different crafts over the centuries it was very common for children to effectively start working in the context of their parents environment and apprentice in something and accomplish something you know make something build something and if even you.
- [15:50]
B
Take even a modern day one most parents actually when you apply to academics they don't they don't agree they don't think my kid's gonna get happier if i hold higher standards but it's actually true at least at our schools but they all believe it was sports everybody wants their kid on the championship team with the coach who's gonna be like guys this is gonna be the hardest thing we ever did but we were in last place last year we're gonna be in first next year but we're gonna get there and grind it and work and it's gonna be awesome and we're gonna have teamwork and leader right and every parent's like oh i want my kid to go through that which is why they all put them in after school sports is to get those life skills but kids want to do it just even outside of sports i mean they want to do it in sports but they want to do it on everything so our workshops we have kindergarteners who climb forty foot rock walls and the parents when they first see it because parents want to protect their kid their job is to keep safety parents don't want their kid to struggle fail and i add as principals sometimes cry on their road to success supported by a caring adult every child development expert in the world will say you wanna run that cycle on kids as much as you can that's the key to self confidence resilience growth and for us it's also the key to love school and so our workshops do that but as a parent you're naturally like this seems too hard i don't wanna see my kids struggle and fail right and that's what our school set up is we have guides because we don't have adults teaching seventh grade science so we hire the best motivational emotional support experts right and it changes by age you know you know kindergarten is going to be mallory and charity wrap your kid in love right versus you know at high school i have ex nfl athletes ex nba coaches right who can take those set of video game playing you know middle school boys and be like guys we're going to go do.
- [17:42]
C
Something does this radically change how you compensate people i think in the context of schooling people always say teachers are undercompensated and the salaries are too like is this a different salary band so.
- [17:50]
B
We pay a minimum of one hundred thousand doll at our schools for the guides and you know that allows us one we get the best teachers because you know back in there's a whole different thing of like what's the future of teachers teachers became teachers to transform kids lives and your best teacher she was great because she found you and convinced you you could do awesome stuff right and she wasn't the reason they didn't become teachers to grade that seventh grade science quiz and they weren't you didn't think they were great because they marked your paper up really well right it's because of the motivational emotional support so we go hire them and say this is what you get to do all day you know during the two hour blocks we do twenty five minute pomodoros of you know math science language reading and they take a kid out during the twenty five minutes and they're like okay you're not doing math today you know come talk to me and hey how was your weekend and you win the softball tournament what's going on and you're having trouble on engagement right and they get to know the kids at a level that no teacher can i was just up at the san francisco campus last night and one of the parents it's been open twenty three days and the parents like in twenty three days this guy knows more than the teachers did in years in the prior world and i'm like because that's what they do all day they don't stand in front lecturing they spend the time getting to know the kids so yes so comp is different and if we want to go even edgier if you talk to our middle and high schoolers and we'll go really edgy on the high school side our high schoolers interview the guides before they get hired which everybody thinks is terrible and that whole rate my teacher they're gonna have low standards the difference is when you have kids who want to go be great and in this environment they want adults who are gonna help them and so they hold really high standards for this you know the guides that we.
- [19:35]
A
Hire the sports analogy is really interesting cause i'm like i would totally believe that you know there's a bunch of motivated high schoolers who are gonna go pick the coach that will make them most successful but the instinct is that they won't if it's academics correct yeah.
- [19:47]
B
And there really is we have two different ethos in america about sports versus academics and steph who runs k through eight for us right she came out of the sports world and she's like my job is to bring the athletic ethos to academics and when you talk about the guides we hire and things like that that model that parents actually believe in that does develop life skills right is and kids love it and so yes if we could change that.
- [20:13]
A
That would be huge how universal do you think this is because let's just say like i have a couple kids they have different temperaments right some of them are sports oriented they have more natural resilience some are less so you know some people are more motivated about learning less so like how do you how do you handle that as alpha school for a particular type of kid.
- [20:31]
B
Our job is to get this to a billion kids so we're working to make it available to everybody both price point as well as personality type and a lot of it is when we talk about love of school it helps you design your product which is you know i get all the guides we've opened besides alpha we opened up different schools branded schools for different afternoons so i have a sports academy where you play sports all afternoon i have a gifted talented school where in the afternoon you do academic enrichment robotics math olympia write a book and a lot of it is when we ask the guides we're like okay we only had forty percent of the kids love school instead of vacation how do we juice that to seventy five the gt guides are like want more academics they want a third power hour you know and what are we going to do and that's what fires them up my oldest daughter is like that like she read calculus books in high school and you know she's a double major at stanford now and she literally is like these stem boys can't write and so she wrote an english writing class that's equation based writing to help teach them right and so if she can do academics all day she loves it my younger daughter who's still in high school wakes up every day and while academically does great and you know just took the sat hopefully has as good scores as her sister is like is this the last academics i have to do right am i done is calc pc like the last math i have to do or i've done she has millions of followers on tiktok you know and you know she built an online ai dating app for high school boys and you know and wakes up and is like i just want to be social all day and build relationships and so you know it's that continuum and it's finding what is the passion for your kid and then saying okay we're going to put you in an environment where you get more of that right and that then drives your academic performance in the morning which is you know if you're going to give the kid the time back right our product name is time back give the kid the time back that's the single biggest motivator we can talk motivation about later but the biggest motivator for kids is don't waste my life don't waste my twelve years because that's what you're doing and we all know you sit in class ninety five percent of the time's wasted you know all that and so we're like great two hours and then we're going to make sure your afternoons are awesome can you.
- [22:57]
C
Talk about that a bit more actually like your focus on incentives and i think you've been very forward thinking in terms of like just give them any incentive as long as it motivates them to do the things you want them to do could you extrapolate on that.
- [23:06]
B
A little bit sure you know this is once again we do obviously controversial things but motivation is one of the biggest ones where we wake up every day and say how do we motivate these students and do it in a way where they're going to love school and have great results and high standards and so and our guides literally create all these different motivational programs there's an astral codex article that one of our gt parents wrote and you know his summary was alpha bucks right where we give them you know bucks is the number one motivator which that's not actually true which is it we'll talk about when money matters but time back by far is the biggest motivator of kids where if you took our westlake high school our you know in austin where they do six hours a day in class four hours a day homework if you're on ap iv track right you can't pay those kids enough money to be happy right they are just grinding it and if they love academics great but for everybody else it's a grind and they hate it yeah but if you tell those same kids look it's two to three hours a day you can still get fifteen fifty plus on your sat and fives on your aps but then you get afternoons four years of afternoon in high school to do awesome stuff you love and that's true across all of them now when do we use other motivations you know every guide wakes up every day and says i have to make this kid love school and set high standards right high support high standards what's going to motivate the student to do it and sometimes it's a sticker right every kid has different motivations some are competition so we have leaderboards and we have people who are like i'm going to win just because i want to what is the.
- [24:41]
C
Incentive system for the guide is there differential compensation based on how well their students do is it some other incentive.
- [24:47]
B
System so the guides have to deliver all three commitments to all their guide group right and they are accountable for it so if you are not delivering all three commitments love school two x learning and life skills to all your kids you won't be at alpha long.
- [25:02]
A
So it's not a ten year system.
- [25:03]
B
There'S no ten year system it is you are here to deliver that second we survey the students and say every adult had one or two teachers who transformed their life is your guide that for you and that's the standard that they have to live up to at kindergarten it's like do you love your daughter but as you get older and then there's a second one if you're going to be our middle high school guide which is at middle and high school one of the things we tell parents is you know the key is high standards high support high standards is hard with an adolescent right and so our question we ask parents is do you trust your alpha guide to hold the high standards so you as the parent can provide the unconditional love and support which totally transforms your relationship with your teen if you trust them like my oldest daughter you know she's like no dad i'm not gonna let you read my stanford application and i'm like you know and i'm like she's like no because she doesn't want feet right teens don't want that but for me chloe who's her guide right harvard grad who wants to you know chloe's like don't worry i got it right and it's gonna be fine and that's what you want the same way you outsource to a coach in sports right every parent's like yeah he's gonna make this super hard for my kid we're go they're gonna be great at it yeah right and we don't expect teachers that's how we call teachers being ten x better is that kind of relationship and so yes you can make more and there's you know different bands and are you a lead guide and all of.
- [26:39]
A
That so one of the things that was like most controversial to me when we were first speaking is i feel like you know schooling is mixed up with a lot of philosophy that makes it complicated and i think there's a popular view of like if you give kids a bunch of extrinsic motivators right it could be stickers it could be time back you're hurting their building of intrinsic motivation they should just want to do it how do you react to.
- [27:04]
B
That no the answer is just very clearly that's just not true okay but explain it's a belief and i know everybody believes it yeah and i was trying to i i paused because like should i go through like the research that goes into yeah i'm like i.
- [27:15]
A
Can'T pay my kid when they're thirty to be a self actualized person but.
- [27:18]
B
Here'S here's what you're paying them so let's talk about paying so paying is the most controversial side and so let's just we hit it we start in kindergarten you can earn an alpha buck and we we have an economy based on this where kids learn how to earn right okay i did work i earned it i learned how to save i learned how to spend i have an emporium and i have to decide where am i going to you know spend my money i i learn how to donate right and so we learn how to save and invest and donate as that ecosystem and it's important that the kids are earning it being given it and as you go up when you talk about our middle school right parents are like we have a system where if you're not top one percent coming into our middle school we will pay you a thousand dollars when you hit top one percent in your subject.
- [28:07]
A
It'S a lot of money for a.
- [28:08]
B
Middle schooler and that thousand dollars now there's two and parents are like okay i hate that i'm like wait but then that money then goes and feeds their robin hood for kids account right which then now they have real money to invest right which really matters for them well it's some of the seven you know they're going to yolo it and lose it and you know and i have parents who are like how'd you let them lose all that money and you're like this is the best time for them to learn not to do that and actually learn good investing behavior and not gambling and if it's not real money right and if it's just like a oh a shadow account right or a fake account it actually teaches dysfunctional behavior because it actually teaches you to yolo because there's no downside this actually is their money and it teaches them good habits you mentioned you.
- [28:54]
C
Could also apply that i think to projects or other things as well so do you want to talk about that.
- [28:57]
B
A little bit and then the second part is they use it for their passion project so we had a girl who was building the first all teen produced broadway musical and you know she had to do her math she got up to seven hundred ninety math sat it funded and it allowed her to get the money to fly to new york to meet the producers to figure all of that out and parents on either end of those are like okay those seem like good examples right and you get the motivation on the academics and it unlocks what they can do and then second funds things that parents are like okay this is all good.
- [29:31]
A
That is kind of how achievement as an adult works as well a hundred.
- [29:35]
B
Percent it's one hundred percent but getting back to the core about you're worried about intrinsic to extrinsic kids have part of when you're trying to make kids help kids realize they're limitless and there's no blocks kids all have inherent blocks on what they can do i'm not smart enough i'm not a top one percent kid i'm not here i don't have the daily habits and so if you can use money to create the daily habits every parent should right because the daily habits are what's going to help them more than the downside the second part is if you can break a block that's in their head you should pay it so here's my example is my my oldest daughter was self motivated on academics so it didn't matter but my youngest daughter is just like when she got to middle school she's like yeah i'm top ten percent dad but that's good enough i'm just i'm not like my older sister who's the smart one and i'm not and i'm not top one percent and i was like you know well the one thing i know about you you love to shop and i was like i bet you a thousand dollars you can't get to top one percent this is how one thousand dollars came and she was like and she literally filled an amazon gift card with all these things and every day she'd look at it and then she would go into the apps and this causes controversy like my wife we had a lot of family discussions about this right because the two things are you're paying kids and second are you setting standards too high right and so after she hit the thousand dollar hit the one percent got the thousand dollars bought everything she wanted she sat down with my wife right and she's like mom look i know you didn't like this but here's what you have to understand which is i never thought i could do this i never thought i was top one percent and i now realize i'm actually as smart as my older sister and i can do anything she can do if i just put in the work that changing of how she saw herself right every parent would pay one thousand dollars right we spent twenty grand a year just in america we spent thousand dollars to get every kid to believe i can do anything and there's not these inherent blocks i'll give you one other one if i was we had the secretary of education down at alfa last week and i was like here's the number one thing if i was in charge of education to fix is and it uses money which is the reason kids can't learn and why our education in america starts to slow down in middle school and by the time you get to high school kids basically aren't learning anything the median high school student in america goes up one point on a three hundred point scale in four years right now your top ninety nine percent go about six points a year so they're still crushing it but your median person literally doesn't learn anything in high school and it slows down in middle school and the reason is is because we have a time based system not a mastery based system and every learning science paper says is you just get swiss cheese holes if you haven't mastered fractions algebra's gonna be really hard and if you haven't mastered algebra chemistry is gonna be bad right it's just it's all hierarchical and so what you what we do when we get these middle schoolers who are behind is we come in and we developed you know back to motivation really mattering i sat down with the seventh graders you know this is three years ago and i'm like look guys you need to go back and fill a fourth grade hole and i learned immediately that seventh graders do not want to do that there's no world where they want to go backward and the only people who want that less is their parents i mean i was yelled at i mean my kid needs to be a grade level i'm like that is not what the learning side says he needs to go back and fix this and anyway i eventually had to give up on the parents and i could never convince them and so i just went to the kids i'm like guys you could get one hundred on the texas star the standardized test they're like no i can't mister lamont i'm like no no no i'll give you a hundred dollar bill for a hundred one hundred for a hundred yeah like it's still impossible mister lee i'm like no no no there's a catch any grade level and they're like i can take a kindergarten test you're giving me a hundred bucks i'm like well texas star starts in third grade and they're like done they took third grade test get a hundred yeah take the fourth grade they're can i do fourth grade yeah one hundred they go to fifth grade and don't get one hundred they get an eighty five or seventy five the ai back to personalized why the personalized tutor matters it generates all i'm like do you want it to generate all the lessons to get you to one hundred that you missed that you need they're like let me see how many yeah they're like i could do that in a week right they do it right and you move them up and that we need to do that for everybody in america right because it does two things back to it one it whole fills all their issues right which will stop them from slowing down on learning it'll keep it linear and then second their perception there's a view that the only people who get one hundred on a state test on a standardized test are the smart gt kids everybody can right everybody can get one hundred that you separate that it's iq versus effort and i feel if you said why the athletic ethos doesn't come to academics is because every parent because of the time based system we have and the system we do have in most schools it is based on iq right if you're good in normal school you are both iq coded and big five conscientious coded right just all the data says that and this our system literally separates that where it's just like we're going to give you personalized lessons at eighty eighty five percent and if you just put the time in you can master every subject right through the eighth grade how do you think.
- [35:13]
C
About there's sort of this broader societal context right now where there's the sort of hate book around cuddling of the american mind and sort of things being too easy lack of resilience et cetera there's a separate thing which is sort of mental health wave that's gone through schools where if you look at things like autism spectrum disorder it went from one in a few thousand to three percent of the population in terms of diagnoses you have massive adhd diagnoses in a lot of kids on ritalin which is effectively certain types of drugs you have very strong perception of mental health crisis for teenage girls and a lot of them end up on ssri's and so you have a mix of medication diagnosis all these other things that is really the milieu for the context for schooling how do you all think about that in the context of alpha yeah.
- [35:54]
B
All those things are true and i believe part of it is because we have this terrible twelve year system that we subject the kids to and if you literally sat down and said from first principles what do we expect if we set low expectation waste ninety five percent of kids life and put endless pressure on them what happens after twelve years you're like not good things and so a lot of the diagnoses ieps and whether you're you know it also.
- [36:20]
C
Gives kids more time in the school to take tests yeah and so there's.
- [36:24]
B
There'S this whole thing where fundamentally what an iep is is trying to give your kid a personalized education right everybody knows an individual tutor is better than one teacher in front of thirty kids and so all these ieps and what.
- [36:38]
C
Does it not stand for so that.
- [36:39]
B
It'S it's it's a plan in a public school that gives you basically it's an individualized plan yeah right for each kid and you want a diagnosis because then you get one exactly right dyslexia dysgraphia whatever adhd whatever it is and you know when parents come to our school first you just talk to our parents who had all these diagnoses and now they're at alpha which is you know the once you go to alpha you're like well your kid's not gonna sit in class for six hours and be bored you have the oh he's disruptive in the class yeah you know and he's he's a problem child right and all these things and i need to met him up you know to solve it no you don't you just need them to engage for two hours of the app and then have the rest of the afternoon not that right and it completely transforms the kid and you know back to just the over diagnosing i believe it's i don't know if it's over diagnosing given the system it is but in the alpha system it's completely different and i would say the second part about mental health issues i believe a lot of it comes back to this low standards where you know we get into the middle like back to we'll focus on middle school right in middle school you get in a whole set of girls you know who are like i'm not a math science girl on the academic side and second i scroll tiktok all day right and you're like where is this going yeah right and it's not going to be good right and at our school first of all we have to make the kid love school right and we have all day we have half the day to do awesome stuff yeah and so our workshop one of the workshops we do is you do a values chart who do you want to be right vision board and these kids have awesome things they want to do right and then you say we do japanese ikigai right for all those who know and what are you good at and what's your passion and what does the world need and then we do one hundred sixty eight hour project what do you spend every hour of your week and you know and this girl came and she's like well mister liman i guess i'm going to be the best tiktok scroller and it's the exact opposite of what her vision chart was but it was the realization of that discrepancy and then our job is to use her afternoons to have her become a creator as we say like our middle school basically will take consumers and turn them into creators and what parents need to understand is every kid actually wants to be awesome and wants to be a creator and they don't wake up saying i just want to be a video game player tiktok scroller they don't want to be but our schools don't give them an out right and that's where this environment can totally unleash them because you're like well they don't have.
- [39:12]
A
To do that this sounds like a very awesome experience for the kids and very ambitious it also sounds very expensive so how do you you said like the goal is a billion kids how do you pay for a billion kids to have this type of experience sure.
- [39:26]
B
And so we're talking about alpha and so just back to the things we're building so at alpha it's a high end branded school so there's going to be in one hundred cities there's going to be an alpha model it's going to be expensive literally when it was designed we said pretend price is no object you know and just and set that there but now we're building out other schools right at half the price and lower to where we actually have schools now down to fifteen thousand which is lower than your average public school spends today and so where now it changes what your product is yep so for example a sports academy is actually for kids who love sports you don't need all these expensive workshops you just need a field and a coach and you can have twenty five to one right so things of how where you lower cost ratios schools are driven by how much you pay the teachers and what's the student teacher ratio now crazy part about the student teacher ratio is you know in normal school because you're trying to just replicate an individualized learning smaller class size is better you know in a lot of cases but in our schools it doesn't matter right and if you actually ask our high school guides and i was like okay i can double the pay for a guide but you're going to have twice as big a class size what do you guys want they all vote for twice as big a class size they want a more awesome person to help coach them right and so you can fix your economics and drive that so gt school also is very cheap the gt kids are like oh i want to do math olympiad and robotics and the relatively inexpensive workshops and so those those are you know at a right now they're twenty to twenty five thousand dollars we're opening a montessori one at that price point sort of next gen montessori and but we expect we will have hundreds of schools in texas this texas sports academy next year a billion dollars of vouchers are coming you get ten ish to eleven thousand dollars you know at fifteen grand so four or five hundred dollars a month parent pay and we can make this available to everyone.
- [41:32]
C
And you're running this as a for profit is that correct yes so we.
- [41:35]
B
We run it as for profit we also have a big scholarship fund right.
- [41:39]
C
And what sort of people are you trying to attract because i know one conversation that we were all having earlier was how people often wonder can you make money in education and focused on let's build something incredibly impactful incredibly useful that also makes money are there specific types of people that you want to have join you on this effort or.
- [41:54]
B
Yeah no that's so my my best goal out of this would be education is seen as it has to be nonprofit it has to be funded by donations and you have to be you can't make any money and anything that makes money or if you bring capitalism to education you are bringing evil into the world and there's examples so there's reasons why that you know historically but that's not necessarily true right and that's what we're trying to show is that you can build great businesses right that are for profit right but that both have mission and money as a purpose and so i'm trying to attract builders who you know if we're going to reinvent education right if every kid i guess wait here's the if every kid's going to learn everything they need to know in two hours a day and there's gonna be a tablet less than one thousand dollars for everybody in the world that's coming one thousand dollars for everybody in the world in two hours a day of what we spent all day in class for every family and society has to say well now how are we gonna educate our kids and what are our values and what do we want to allow and i think part of what i'm trying to do is let's go get a bunch of builders to go build awesome products right low school build or something for builders.
- [43:09]
C
Are you most looking for engineers are you looking for operations people to run these schools at scale are all of.
- [43:14]
B
Them so we're releasing time back which is going to be a platform that you can build schools on so literally you don't have to know you know all the learning science it's going to be all packaged right and then you basically do the afternoon right and so that's what this texas sports academy is it's literally it's coaches you know in a thousand school districts around texas so there's that that aspect there are set of coders and builders which is once you start most of ed tech does not use learning science right which is one of the biggest issues and once you say i'm going to build an app from the ground up based on learning science right you all of a sudden can say kids can learn in twenty hours math academy is like the best math app that's out there right and that's a great awesome team who if you want to learn about it just go research all their stuff but we need that for every subject right and so we need builders and parents will pay i'll give you one aspect on top of time back that's being done is there's a aaa video game game team right who is building a video game on top of it and this video game is going to be both free to learn for everybody on the planet but they also believe it'll be the most profitable video game ever built right that there's just easily you know just in america alone there's ten million moms will pay one hundred bucks a month to have their kid be in the top one or five percent and so as you think about you know getting it down to scale there is a software element right that is going to be available for the software builders but it is even builder we need sort of the full stack you know you're going to have buildings and real estate and guides and teachers but i think you know i think there's going to be just an explosion of different opportunities i think for our audience.
- [44:55]
A
There'S a lot of tech and business people they'd be like oh well you know joe's a software guy he seems like a pretty competent executive and he's about to run into the wall of like the slowness of the education system and regulation and the fact that but like most kids go to public school and there's a bunch of restrictions around what you can do and you can't get that time back and so how do you think about like this is parallel system and how quickly you can make that transition or how like everyone.
- [45:21]
B
Should think about it no this is a great because in my first year part of when i got into this i'm like ah how do i make a business out of this and you know i i put in the first billion and just said okay this is my seed fund big seed fund to be able to go figure this out and but a lot of it is i got to get this to product market fit that then can go funding to rebuild education is going to take hundreds of billions of dollars there's ten thousand buildings that need to be built right it's a huge endeavor every country is going to want its own llm right because when you talk about sovereign ai the number one use case of sovereign ai it's either military education obviously education is the one everyone wants to talk about and so the investment here is going to be enormous and so how do you build profitable models so one of the things about education as you're doing your whatever mental model of which are beachhead the private school market is huge so the private school market in us is already over fifty billion dollars and so if you want to go build a multi billion dollar company it's easy because these guys haven't innovated in a hundred years right and so you don't have to fix public education on day one you can go just fix private you know back to scale there's a million kids in america who could afford fifty thousand dollars tuition so if you want to go high end there's also as you go as you go move down the amount of private school vouchers and funding that's opened up is enormous so when you think about the scale texas spends one hundred billion dollars a year on education annually they just released a billion dollars in vouchers that are going to be available next year you can go build a great billion dollar business and those are only going to increase over time if you look at the big government the federal bill that just passed if you actually do all the math i think bloomberg just did it they're like there's two hundred billion dollars of vouchers that are going to be available to parents to use on private school education and so there's enormous amounts that are either already out there that parents pay for or second that are coming right and if you can build low cost school models or these you know good protected awesome products for whatever your vision and niches where's you know arts theater music school.
- [47:45]
C
Given how much is available from a market perspective or revenue perspective why has there been so little innovation so a.
- [47:52]
B
Lot a lot is everybody only knows their education so here's the big breakthrough you have to have to believe this back to the one is if you think the only way to educate a kid is a teacher in front of a classroom you can't do this the model does not work you have to be willing to break that and ninety nine point nine percent of parents are not willing to think of that because even if i go build it how do i convince parents to come to my school it took mckinsey two years that's a really long sales cycle you know for one family yeah and so you're that's part of what we're trying to do and you know get out there and be the exemplar for everybody is you have to be willing to break the teacher in front of a classroom model and then once you do you're like okay now everything can change and i can rebuild if you could.
- [48:45]
A
Convince every relevant policy or lawmaker that has to do with education of something what would you what would you say because i'd say like well one thing is to make the default something that is time back powered or follows this.
- [49:01]
B
Model more school's a hard bundle and this is the problem we got to get it to public school eventually i believe it is going to be a long lift right i think it is going to be a decade to get it to public school and part of what we are doing is we have to show we got to get the data right there's all these fads in education ed tech one more oh my god it's not going to work all that i'm like what data in particular.
- [49:24]
A
Like academic performance data you have well.
- [49:26]
B
Not my end's not big enough right let's go get a million kids right and why don't we do pharmaceutical grade randomized control trials for education we don't do that at all right any latest fad is like oh this is what we're doing in schools these days right and i'm like no let's actually sit here and have the government sit and do you know studies where we're going to be able to say this works right the learning science is there right where you could build products run them through a test right and then be able to say we should adopt this wholesale there's been a lot of things that have been adopted in the last twenty five years that are terrible that you're just like oh my god i can't and what's an example there's a new wave coming back which is the science of reading but how we taught most of the kids to read you know twenty years ago is why they can't read right well i'll take modern ones let's just take modern ones okay we're not going to have kids memorize their multiplication tables that's bad and i'm like that is the worst thing you could do to a kid that you know all the cognitive load theory right you know you have working memory slots and then how many reps it takes to store into long term schema and your working memory slots you can't do advanced math problems if you're in the middle if you have limited work you're.
- [50:43]
A
Spending it trying to correct if you're.
- [50:44]
B
In advanced math problem and you're doing seven times eight and seven times eight to you is still a calculation yeah right you're doomed right there's just there's no way around it you'll start making careless errors you know i have plenty of stories around this all the kids who transfer into our school from you know public and private do not know their memorization their multiplication division it's considered.
- [51:04]
A
Bad now i would say it's considered.
- [51:05]
B
Terrible okay and so you're like like let's go back to this there's a bigger wave coming there's a bigger wave coming which is the current school system does not know what's about to hit it chatgpt first of all we didn't even get into the technology chat is literally the worst thing in the world if you give kids chatgpt in school and academics ninety percent will use it for cheating it is a cheap bot it is not a chatbot it is terrible and so like in our academic two hours there is no chat functionality we've tried and the kids all jailbreak it and get around it and and so it's terrible and so kids are knowing less and less and the current system is not set up to stop that writing is prompting kids write one prompt and they think i'm a writer but writing is thinking right and the best way to write to learn something long term deep and restructure your schema is write it and no kids are doing that anymore there's also a whole set who are like well we don't need to know anything right we don't need facts in our brains because chatgpt there was a wave with google years.
- [52:11]
C
Ago like that now too yeah and.
- [52:12]
B
They'Re just like we don't need to know that but here's the problem this next sentence out of the same parent's mouth is but i want my kid to critically think right and that concept there's no learning science that will support that concept none you know if you have llms who try to reason with no facts we call it hallucination and that is basically what kids are doing if you don't give them a fact base then their opinions are just making stuff up you have to reason over a fact base so you have to put facts in now ai in these learning things we can put in those facts super fast it's like neo upload in the matrix right ai take away because it could cause cheating but it also giveth where you're like okay we can get kids into kids brain ten times faster they don't have to spend six hours but that concept of all these things so when you talk about policy and stuff don't deploy chatgpt sorry guys in its current form go rebuild everything around learning science concepts you need basically the llm to have the concepts of learning science which inform it and then if i was running a school the problem with schools is it is a bundle and i talk to principals and superintendents in public schools and i mean their job's a hundred times harder than mine theirs is because you don't as a product guy they don't have a customer base they have to serve everybody and so you have customer and the opposite right so there's three schools in austin that they're failing f's for years kids aren't learning and the superintendent's like okay i'm gonna shut it down and we're gonna move the kids to the good school academically the parents are protesting around the school and they're like i don't care that the seventh grade math teacher's not teaching math because my older daughter had that teacher and she transformed and so i'm willing to give up seventh grade math academics in order to get that other benefit and so as a superintendent or principal you're like what are you doing and so it's a hard problem for these to transform because your parents and your community base want very different things in that bundle that they think is best for their kid so some version is going to.
- [54:29]
A
Be allowed you know and funding for different versions of the bundle yeah i.
- [54:34]
B
Guess if i had to do the it's i believe if you want to sit and say what is the bundle school choice is one way to do it and that brings private market in you know but how do you support and buttress the public school system i believe there are a set of academic things we can do where we are working with we do have some pilots and you know a few thousand public school students where mtss level three if you know what that is that's your bottom ten percent kids where schools have the most flexibility so for example we were doing one over in fremont and the hardest part of it isn't okay does the app work it's like motivation's ninety percent of the answer how are you going to motivate the kid who has to sit in class still for six hours a day to actually engage with the app and the kids are like i'm not going to do it right you can't take our ed tech doesn't matter yeah ed tech doesn't matter you put our ed tech and put it in his classroom it's not going to work it's the motivation model and so we got the school because they're you know at mtss level three they're like we can use gift cards and you're like okay kid do the lesson just get a gift card right and you know or oh wait let's build a video game that they'll play or you know whatever it is where if you don't solve motivation all this ed tech doesn't matter whether in ai too none of it matters and the reason kids use ai to cheat is because they're just trying to get through the system not trying to learn right and everybody's like i just hope they're self driven learners who just have a love learning and you're like there is five to ten percent of the market you should give them chatgpt and socratic tutoring and they'll love it the other ninety percent are like how do i get through this and that's the you know if you if you talk to most kids and say what the highlight of your day is ninety percent of kids are like lunch talking to my friends recess and i'm like we waste twelve years of kids lives right and we're just like how about we stop that.
- [56:25]
A
Before we run out of time can we talk a little bit about like where ed tech does matter if you even considered ed tech like where you are on the product today and what ambition do you have for it to like be better for engineers and researchers whoever else would go work for you.
- [56:39]
B
I mean the problem with edtech today and why it's failed and nobody wants to invest in it is you're trying to sell to a school system who actually doesn't care about academic outcomes back to the bundle yeah and you can't change the the metrics that matter and so you can't get any money for it so there's no right there's no arpu and then endlessly long sales cycles and then second your product's actually not that good sorry edtech guys it's just not that good and go rebuild a product based on the concepts of learning science and build an awesome product right have a much higher standard of what your product has to do and that i believe can change the things like you know the fact math academy right how many math apps are there a zillion of them i mean the results that you get with math academy are just step function different than everybody else you know it only takes twenty eight hours for fourth grade math academy twenty six hours for fifth grade twenty two right for sixth and seventh grade i mean to master the material but there's all the other math apps don't do that that right but he has a five hundred page book on the learning science behind math academy and so that concept right if you're not you have to go back and rebuild your product based on these fundamentals that just edtech never adopted and i believe then the second one i would do is in the meantime because the school school straight to schools is a failed model parent willingness and propensity to pay for education that their kids love is enormous so this is back to the other side of the market it doesn't matter what your income is parents will pay ten percent of agi of their income on their kids education societies pay five percent i mean it's a seven trillion dollars industry we spend a ton of money in this country and if you have a solution right that's that kids love to engage in right that does deliver awesome academic outcomes parents will pay for that and we need builders who wake up and say that's what my job is not running the bureaucracy at you know the school boards and all that.
- [58:57]
A
Stuff so there's more flexibility with kids that are struggling in the public school system if you're going to be more aggressive than that what else would you.
- [59:05]
B
Do the number one thing that i would do is the hundred for one hundred program that we do which allows kids to go back and master all their basics right no matter what their age grade and knowledge grade are different that program that we run we need to run that for everybody in america and for dollar four hundred maybe dollar five hundred of incentive remember average education right we spend lots of we spend up to twenty grand a kid five hundred bucks we can totally fix and change the trajectory and all these bad test scores and all of that by making sure we're motivating the kid to go back and do this why is.
- [59:45]
A
This your mission like you have kids who have successfully gotten through you know old system new system right or are almost through in the case of your younger daughter you know you're financially independent you've built a company before like why go all the way weighed back into this mess of a very hard space.
- [60:05]
B
Yeah because it's awesome so i obviously had a good career beforehand and three years ago my last three years in principal so this would be my last message to the builders out there i did fine before it was good there was nothing to complain about the last three years have been so awesome there is nothing more important for a society than raising its next generation it is the definition of whether it continues and kids are awesome right and when you sit and say we can transform what their decade's going to be like or their first twelve years or even beyond it right the the rewards you get out of this are just ten x right it's just and we didn't even get into the student stories coming out or the parents stories you know you transform lives and so if you say what you know my kids now are gone right and so i spent the twenty years with them i was you know and then now it's like what am i going to do my next twenty years this is going to be the best twenty years of my life it's going to be awesome and so i believe what we do need it's societally important and we need to go get builders like this to say we're going to bring new insights new ways even business and capitalism to education and i couldn't look forward to more than.
- [61:24]
C
I do so this is incredibly inspiring thank you so much for joining us.
- [61:27]
B
Today thank you thank you very much.
- [61:28]
A
Appreciate it find us on twitter opriorspod subscribe to our youtube channel if you want to see our faces follow the show on apple podcasts spotify or wherever you listen that way you get a new episode every week and sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no dash priors dot com.