← The Knowledge Project
Loading summary
Transcript157 lines
- [00:01]
Joe
this ai world is coming and we're all terrified of what it means why
- [00:09]
Interviewer
does education seem fundamentally broken today when it didn't thirty years ago the biggest
- [00:15]
Joe
picture i think if you talk to parents of why there's agitation for change is this ai world is coming and we're all terrified of what it means but what we do know and we don't know exactly what it means but what we do know is the education system that we all went through isn't going to prepare the kids for that world right and i feel that as a catalyst for people to say the old system wasn't working or the old system needs to change that's just a huge driver like if you know i talk to lots of kindergarten parents you know and they're just looking and saying in a dozen years you know if i put my kid in standard school that i went through is that going to prepare them for this ai world and they're like no that's not so there's a drive that we need something different but even ten years ago it
- [01:08]
Interviewer
was different like your daughter right before ai even hit the scene i felt it you felt it like something is not working with the school system yeah
- [01:18]
Joe
well and schools are failing you know that if you look at you know just pure academic results just take academic results independent of ai you're you're right test scores keep going down every year
- [01:30]
Interviewer
how is that possible we keep spending
- [01:32]
Joe
more and more money it's you know you know there's there's a lot of reasons around it it's a comp a school is a complicated bundle and academic performance is only one element and it's one fundamentally that schools have basically say it doesn't matter that much anymore and so everybody's willing to let everybody involved in the ecosystem has been willing to let the standards drop and i believe part of it is because the way our system is built today you know there's basically a couple truisms about you know the standard school system the first is the way it's structured is a time based system where you move up every year and you have a teacher in front of a classroom there's basically you have two attributes for people who do well in that system one it's iq coded which is higher iq better is better and second it's big five conscientiousness coded if are you a natural grinder you know sort of and if you have those two attributes you do really well in our existing school system but if you don't you don't do well right and so and the system doesn't adapt for anybody who doesn't do well in those two those two elements and so you you have that as sort of one dimension of why the system's not working because it's if you're not one of those two and then the second dimension over here is fundamentally about resources and factually independent of any political or anything it's just factually one of the strongest determinations of whether you learn your educational outcome and how much you know is based on your family's income and the whole system is just geared that way sort of just look at the results and so you sort of have these just two systems like this and that's why there's like okay we'll spend more money and all these things but fundamentally it's just broken because those elements aren't being changed right if you have a time based system that's based on iq and conscientious you can pour all the money you want into it and it doesn't change those it doesn't make kids more give them higher iq give them more conscientiousness and so it doesn't fix the problem and so that's a lot of the issues that
- [03:43]
Interviewer
you have do we admit as a society that there is a problem or is it just sort of like yeah
- [03:48]
Joe
this is this is i think where it gets complicated at least and you have us versus globe is a little different which is as a society everybody in america is like wow our schools suck you know it's just there's every article right just constant stream of and there's an unending stream of look at how bad all these school scores and grades go down and everything that covid was even worse but you know just everything's bad eighty percent of the great inflation everybody knows you're like you know eighty percent of people at harvard get a's now it's like oh just give a's out to everybody and so we all know that the standards have been dropped but the thing in the us that's different especially and if you look globally is in the us there's a big disconnect between educational outcomes and your earning potential which is they're not as tightly correlated as they are in the rest of the world right they're very tightly correlated in the rest of the world and not in the us and so there's a big thing among parents parents who are just like the academics don't matter that much there's all these other things the life skills and all these other skills that matter more than the academics and so i don't really care as much and i guess a good story about this was when you know i became principal three years ago and you know our first product the way i positioned it you know was two x learning your kid will learn twice as much and fundamentally i got incredible pushback from parents about that like surprising amounts of pushback and i was so surprised i mean i i was doing hundreds of parent teacher meetings right with you know and explaining it and i'd be in a meeting you know and i'd be like you know mom dad and johnny and i'd just be like look johnny's not learning two x because you know when he misses the question the video that comes up that explains why he missed it and how he can do the next one right he skips it he just skips it you know and but he could learn two x twice as much if he just watched the video and then they're
- [05:44]
Interviewer
probably like why are you pressuring him why are you why are you pressuring
- [05:48]
Joe
johnny to learn two x and i'm like well i okay got it and it took me hundreds of meetings to realize the parents don't value it now ten percent of the market does ten percent of the market totally cares about great academics right and so those guys they demand it like they don't like two hour learning because it's not enough learning but we switched so that was my our big problem product market fit if you had to say the biggest pivot you know from a marketing point of view that unlocked you know sort of all the all the stuff around alpha was and i was slow but hundreds of meetings in i'm like i'm going to change this message and i'd have mom dad same johnny same mom and dad look i'm trying to get johnny out of here in two hours so he can do all the cool stuff the rest of the day trying to get him out of here and you know he skips the videos and if you just watch them he'd be done in two hours and then mom's like johnny what's wrong with you don't you want to get out of here right people want to get out of the learning right they want to get out of the academics and when it's only two hours then everybody's aboard and now we still teach two x in two hours right we just emphasize the two hour part just how you no we literally took it was two x in two hours and i'm like let's just drop it and call it two hour learning where you learn two x
- [07:00]
Interviewer
in parentheses well let's talk about alphaschool
- [07:02]
Joe
what is alpha school so alpha school is a high end private school expanding nationwide we'll have twenty five campuses around the country this year and the way to think about alpha school is if you could revisit and just say we need to build an educational system that's going to be ready for when ai comes whatever world's going to be here in a decade what would you do just ground up rewrite ignore everything you and i went through right six hours a day in class and homework and all that and just rewrite it of what are the skills the kids need how should they spend the day how do you do that what would it be and so that's what we're doing at alpha school the other part we do is we also say we definitely took off budget constraints it's a high end private school we're like if if money's no object which is gives us a sort of our high end design now we're going to get the cost down and drive it down but for the first version this alpha school it's it's it's the high end and so we we we have built a school that that is totally different than every other school out there and the principles that we underlie that underlie it you know first you know we said if look if you're going to redo school and we're going to put our kids in this for a decade the number one rule is kids must love school they must love school right and you know that is our core principle and it's what makes everything happen and when i talk about you know to principals and superintendents and other heads of school i'm just like if you don't believe that all this other stuff you hear about you know to our learning and it's not going to work you have to believe that core value that kids must love school and we got our ranking like i think it was like ninety six the last we survey our kids every eight weeks and it was you know ninety six percent of our kids said yes but we actually raised it we got too high it's not a good metric when everybody says yes so we added a second question which was do you love school more than vacation right and we get about forty to sixty percent of our kids forty to sixty percent of our kids who say they'd rather go to school than vacation which is that's the metric now that we wake up every day is we're like we have to build a school where the kids want to go instead of vacation the highlight of my time as principal three years ago was when i started in may of this year two thirds of our high school kids sent me a note and they're like miss lemont can we keep the school open this summer cause we don't want a summer break and i hated high school like the school i would never have asked ever in the a million years and i was just like okay we are you know and there's a lot to unpack why they wanted it and all that stuff but that's the core if we're gonna put our kids in for right a decade twelve years of this stuff we as parents right should just say they should love it like you know and and there's this view that no it's spinach you know and that i i had that view you know that you know i wasn't the founder of alpha but i was talking to mckenzie and brian started it and i was talking to brian when i first put my kids in it and i was like what are the things i don't know about education that i should know he's like kids must love school like love school and i'm like it's spinach he's like you don't get it your kids are going to come here and you're going to figure it out and now i'm like total religion right that they absolutely have to and it makes all the magic happen and what's interesting is when i talk to other business executives you know about this no it should be spinach i'm like is that what you think for your employees do you like wake up and say man you know what this job just sucks and it should suck and no i'm not going to try to make them like this job just suck it up but literally they turn around to their kids and say the same thing like dude suck it up right no it's ridiculous that you should like school that's just insane because we didn't like it and we went through the system but if we're rebuilding it we just need to totally undo that thought process we have that you know kids should hate school they should
- [11:00]
Interviewer
love it i think that was the moment where i started to question the school system which was just about pre covid and you know i was made to feel like my kids were the problem and i was like i don't like they're not a problem at home why are they all of a sudden a problem at school like what's going on in the classroom and then when it shut down and we all get to peer inside what's going on in the classroom i'm like oh my god like one hundred percent agree with my kids you know this is crazy is this what you're doing all day like is this what they're learning and how they're learning and but before we get to all of what you're doing different
- [11:33]
Joe
like what are the results yeah so let's talk about the result so the alpha school you know one our our kids love school it's just they're phenomenal results when you talk about academically we're the best academic performing school in the country just bar none so you can measure us on we we are big believers in standardized tests because no one when you hear about the whole how alpha works nobody believes it'll work and so even you know a lot of parents don't believe in standardized tests when they come in and i'm like okay your kid's only doing two hours a day and they're like well how do i know they're learning i'm like trust me they're like no i don't trust you right and so when they score you know top seven hundred ninety and eight hundred math sat they're like okay it's working or on standard na map test is the one we use nwa you know when they're top one percent every single class every single subject is top one percent every single year every single class yes every grade every subject top one percent and we publish them right back to we publish all these results we also our kids fundamentally in the two hours are learning twice as fast as if they sat in school for six and did homework and so like for example on the map test you know there's it's a three hundred point scale and so if you have like a two hundred twenty and you're a fifth grader at you know seventy fifth percentile you know coming into alpha you know it's going to say you're gonna go up five points you know if you're a normal kid you're gonna go five points this year okay at alpha you're gonna go up ten points okay right and so it's just quantifiable so the parents can log in yeah and be like wow right my kid learned twice as much and they only had to spend two hours a day doing it and so you know and so the the part that is just amazing about alpha is you know there are a lot of private schools that just select for good students right which is one one way to do it the other way is to make them develop them and so ours is all about growth we'll take kids right and get them from bottom half to top half to top one percent that the growth rate of alpha is what the just unbelievable parts are like if you you can go download our off our website like our results and you can put it into chat gpt and you're like analyze the growth rate of alpha versus any other school in the country and it's like four standard deviations off the track because nobody does this because we take people who are behind and catch them up but we take the top one percent and we move them years ahead because it's the same thing there's even a gt program at normal school where you get one year ahead i have third and fourth graders who outscore fifty percent of the high school graduates of this country that's amazing in the end our product's gotten better over time my oldest daughter was in the school and she's now at stanford and she was back and she was meeting some of the third and fourth graders and she was looking at some of their scores and she's like they are getting the scores i got in seventh and eighth grade oh wow right and she's like so that we're we're we're even improving the product like we're not done like when we get into learning science if you want to talk about that and stuff like it's it's human potential is unlimited and we are tapped in and have that improvement cycle going so the amount kids can learn in a great environment that they love is just it's going to explode like what what our generation thought was knowing a
- [14:54]
Interviewer
lot you're in meetings all day you're trying to stay present but you're also worried you'll forget the decision the action item the important next step that's where granola comes in granola is an ai powered notepad for meetings you jot down rough notes like you always do and in the background granola transcribes and turns them into clear useful notes when the meeting ends there are no bots joining your calls no distractions just a clean notepad that helps you focus during or after the call you can chat with your notes you can ask granola to pull out action items help you negotiate make a decision write a follow up email and so much more i even use it when i'm listening to podcasts once you try it on a first meeting it's hard to go without head to granola ai shane and get three months free with the code shane that's granola ai shane you know people talk a lot about product market fit sales tactics or pricing strategy the truth is success in selling often comes down to something much simpler the system behind the sale that's why i use and love shop pay because nobody does selling better than shop shopify they've built the number one checkout on the planet and with shop pay businesses see up to fifty percent higher conversions that's not a rounding error that's a game changer attention is scarce shopify helps you capture it and convert it if you're building a serious business your commerce platform needs to meet your customers wherever they are on your site in store in their feed or right inside their inbox the less they think the more they buy businesses that sell more sell on shopify if you're serious about selling the tech behind the scenes matters as much as the product upgrade your business and get the same checkout that i use sign up for your one dollar per month trial period at shopify dot com knowledgeproject all lowercase go to shopify dot com knowledgeproject upgrade your selling today shopify dot com slash knowledge project imagine the pushback i mentioned to somebody i was talking to you today and this is probably common pushback but they were like oh yeah they're self selecting it's a bunch of rich kids in austin and you know so their parents care they have tutors they have all these resources and i don't have that so have you like what's the pushback on that argument no so
- [17:16]
Joe
here's selection effects are a great discussion which is i'll answer that second part of okay what if you're not rich after it but before you know in in most education there's a view and this maybe because my background because i'm not and i'm a product guy you know when i came into education there's a view that you must serve everybody all at once or you will serve nobody right that's that's just sort of the view around everything that you have to serve everybody all at once and that selection effects are bad i am like as a product guy i'm like you must use selection effects to build your product which is you have to select for the right person who you're designing your product for right and so yes there's no school that doesn't have selection effects and yes at alpha we select for those and we absolutely have an easier cohort than there's other cohorts that we'll talk about that are harder than the ones we get but compare us to every other high end private school in the country right i agree don't compare us to really hard situations have us go compare us to the best go take other ninety nine percent kids and see why ours are learning three times faster than those kids right you can get the score that says we benchmark our ninety nine percentile kids not against the average kid we benchmark them against the top one percent kid and our top one percent kids kill everybody else's top one percent kids so and design you know so selection effects matter so for example we have another school that's not alpha so we have to get this down to everybody you know mike i'm gonna spend twenty years on this i gotta get to a billion kids so i gotta solve all the different right demographics and and issues so we have a school rolling out we have a dozen that we've opened so far texas sports academy right and so on this one back to selection effects our tuition is going to be fifteen thousand dollars for this school it is fifteen thousand dollars for the school and with the vouchers it's in texas and texas has a new voucher program that they announced billion dollars of vouchers so it'll be twelve thousand dollars vouchers so any family who's income eligible for it rich people can't get it but if you're income eligible for it you get twelve thousand dollars check so it'll be a dollar three hundred a month parent pay to go to this school we're going to have generally people who come in the bottom half academically yeah right but they're all people who love sports right and it's it's a middle school for d one aspirational athletes right people who wake up and they're like i love sports because back to us i have to build a school they love more than vacation yeah so i need to know what like lights them up what drives them and what drives them and so i'm like great so we can do that so we already have you know and we'll have a you know we'll publish all the results but these kids coming in they go in to the same app set that you get at alpha right they do the same two hours right so now
- [20:20]
Interviewer
we have a wider funnel of kids coming in from a academic background different
- [20:25]
Joe
academic backgrounds and you're going to be able to see and we'll be able to publish those results that those kids can learn too right back to the thing is you know we talked about
- [20:34]
Interviewer
why kids are learning machines it's almost like we get in the way of
- [20:38]
Joe
it as adults and the problem with the kids learning isn't the kid it's the system like we talked about that at the beginning where the system's coded high acute conscientiousness and how do you unlock those we've built a system that breaks those two things which is if you have a mastery based ai tutor right that only allows you to advance after you've mastered the material right right master the basics right which everybody in sports understands right if it's that's what our system does that makes it independent of iq that makes it effort based not iq based and we have a ton of results which is we run a program and we have a school you know back to the schools every kid can get one hundred percent on their state standardized test and we run this program called one hundred for one hundred to teach these kids so we'll have middle schoolers coming into our sports academy yeah and they'll go into the system and we'll be like well we'll pay a hundred dollars if you get a hundred percent on the test and they're a seventh or eighth grader they're like i i can't get a hundred on the test and we're like no no no pick your grade level they're like you're going to let me do a third grade test and get a hundred and we're like absolutely and so they go take the third grade test and they do get a hundred on the third grade test and they're like can i do fourth grade and then you do fourth grade then on fifth grade they only get a seventy five because they have holes they didn't learn all that material in fifth grade and then the ai tutor they're like do you want the ai tutor to generate the lessons you're missing and they're like let me see how many and they're like i can do that like in a week or so and you're like another one hundred bucks and so we get more hundreds on state standardized tests in a building of two hundred people than a school district of a hundred thousand and back to this concept that you have to change with parents if you interview alpha parents or any parents and say can your kid get one hundred on the state standardized test fewer than ten percent of parents say yes because in our generation like only the gt kids did that right none of us got that right if you ask alpha kids they're all like of course of course you can i got one right because it's effort based not iq based right there's nothing like and if you back to that whole correlation it's just you know there's no concept in us common core through the eighth grade that everybody can't understand right it's built that way so it's just a matter of do if and if you're having trouble it's usually because you don't have the prereqs right and that's all and that's the difference between a time based teacher in front of a classroom model and a mastery based ai tutor well
- [23:21]
Interviewer
it's interesting because as you're saying that it strikes me that part of the problem is for a teacher in a normal classroom who's standing at the front of the room and teaching let's say grade sevens you have grade sevens who are effectively in the one percent of each you have the ninety ninth percentile and you have the one percentile and you have teach not only do you have to teach to that classroom and try to keep everybody's attention which sounds impossible i have a ton of empathy for teachers on the flip side side you're supposed to be teaching grade seven but the student that we you just said this well they passed grade three but in grade four or five you know they only got seventy so they have gaps in their knowledge that you're not and everything is so cumulative especially with math and reading and all knowledge it's cumulative like so if you can't do that you're going to fail in high school you're going to hate math by the time you get to high school but it's because you didn't learn
- [24:16]
Joe
something in fifth grade that's one hundred percent of the problem which is you have holes in your knowledge and knowledge is cumulative and so when you start slowing down it's because of your prereqs and the system is set up the teacher it's not there for teachers are awesome teacher in front of the classroom is terrible right you have to separate these two concepts and that's one of the things parents we all sort of put them together but they're two separate things and that's why everybody's trying to get small class sizes because you basically want a teacher to give your kid individualized lessons i mean for the rich families who hire tutors after school all the tutor does is gives them the fourth and fifth grade lessons that's all they're doing is they're just going back and saying oh you don't know fourth and fifth grade let's do it but you're a sixth grade teacher you have to hand out sixth grade material like we were working with a school with bottom ten percent kids right and you know back to me being new i go my first day to see the sixth grade teacher teachers as a sixth grade teacher and bottom ten percent in america means you can't read you don't know seven times eight right and you know i go into the classroom and she's handing out sixth grade material well i'm like you know you know they can't read yeah it's just they can't read and that kid needs a first grade phonics lesson right and that guy needs a second grade math question right and you can't but the teacher they can't sit here and every kid give them right it's just that's not they're a sixth grade teacher there's actually laws in state various states that you must teach at grade like it's illegal for a teacher not to teach at grade level right which is just totally insane right and so you have all these problems that are systemically designed in the system and it's one now that parents because they're you know and if you talk to people we've known this back to learning science for forty years there have been papers written about how kids could learn two five ten times faster but they don't work in a teacher in front of a classroom model bloom's two sigma which is a famous one and everybody fights about it but it's a good paper which is you know in this is when i was in high school it's like if you do not an ai tutor a human tutor with mastery based you get two sigma better performance okay right just crazy better performance but you know the problem with that paper is you can't give everybody a human tutor right and then second you also have to enforce mastery which is hard in a lot of ways
- [26:41]
Interviewer
when we took the basic mastery mean
- [26:42]
Joe
mastery means do you do you know the material cold like think of whenever i talk about mastery think about sports just move to sports which is if you're a point guard and you're going down the court what percent of the time is the coach going to let you lose the ball right right and whatever that number is is mastery right because it's not very often right versus in academics kid gets an eighty percent you're like oh he seems to know got a b you know in this thing sometimes an a now you know and if point guard was losing the ball twenty percent of the time going down the court the coach would be like master the basics we're not working on dunks right we're not working on new stuff right we're going to master the basics and you're going to get up to ninety nine point whatever and so do you know it cold and there's a view though in a time based system that you're like look it's time to move on and we all grew up in a non mastery based system which is then as you don't have mastery you know the holes compound and then all of a sudden the reason like if you look at the learning curves in the us they start to slow down in middle school and basically flatline in high school the average kid in the us like on this map score this nwa map there's a three hundred point scale if you take i can't remember exact number but if you take an eighth grader they will go up one point by senior year the median that's the median one point like they learn nothing that's four years yeah four years of learning nothing now your top one percent back to this inequality kind of thing the top one percent probably go up six points a year right so your top one percent kids are still learning like this but your median person in the us is not learning in high school it's just based there's no academic learning going on and that's why there's a paper i'm trying to think you i think uc san diego one of the top schools universities in our country right just published a paper that like fifty percent of their freshmen can't answer fifth grade questions like back to holes and all this kind of stuff like this back to how bad it is it's like you know the the the the learning and the holes that are in this system because once you know on the part of what happened with COVID you know everybody's waiting for the bounce back on covid there's gonna be no bounce back on covid because what happened to your point was the span it used to be years ago okay i'm a teacher and i'm a sixth grade teacher i got this gt kid who needs some seventh grade material and i got someone who's a little behind needs some fifth grade material post covid you're like now it's a seven year span yeah right you have people in middle school who can't read it's crazy i mean you can't if you can't read you can't going to school is a waste of time right unless you know if you're in middle school you can't read all that matters is that somebody's teaching you
- [29:33]
Interviewer
to read and everybody get socially passed too right so it's like oh you're another year older therefore instead of addressing the actual issue we're gonna kick the can to somebody else and we're gonna start fresh with these different groups well
- [29:46]
Joe
and that's and the pressure i totally feel if i was a i could not do this public school job i could not be a principal at a public school because it is really hard because the product you have is this bundle right and it's political and there's political and all just it's totally impossible and you know and you do you have so there used to be rules that you couldn't pass third grade if you couldn't read right and the problem is social promotion where your people are just like okay you are going to psychologically damage my kid if you hold him back right and so then you just promote him to fourth grade for all these other reasons which is more damaging with this concept of okay someone's going to teach them right yeah but the problem is the system the fourth grade teacher's not set up to teach third grade reading they stop teaching reading in grade three right because k through three is learn to read and then fourth through twelfth there's read to learn right that's the flip point where you're like okay i'm learning i'm bootstrapping to learn how to read and then in fourth grade you're like okay we all know you read now so now you're going to learn science and social studies and you know you're going to get word problems on your math test because you can read and if you can't if you miss that bar then all of a sudden you're all of a sudden all this material and it's just you know it could be like me handing out greek to you and then
- [31:02]
Interviewer
it's like a negative flywheel right like every year it gets worse and worse and then you probably feel like i want to give up there's nothing i can do so like why bother why try and then i'm disruptive to the class i start skipping class you know my life takes a very different path
- [31:18]
Joe
exactly exactly and it with a mastery based ai tutor you can go to those kids right and just say i'll make sure you get the third grade
- [31:26]
Interviewer
phonic so explain the mastery based ai tutor it's basically like okay we're going to start everybody's going to start in sixth grade we're going to figure out what you're strong at what you're weak at and then we're going to go teach you the things you don't know and we're going to maybe not get you ahead in the things that you do until we've caught up in the things that you don't know yeah so you should think but you don't know we're teaching you a third grade level so there's like no social stigma to
- [31:50]
Joe
it either yeah correct so you just think about you know the back to learning science there's ten thousand papers written about learning science about how kids can learn better the zone of proximal development like give them questions where they're getting them eighty to eighty five percent correct where if it's like ninety nine they're not learning because they already know it if you get down to fifty like they disengage because it's too hard so you want this crate zone every video game developer you know he knows this keep the kid engaged and so what you really want in a perfect world you know and sort of what is imagine an ai tutor an app whatever you want to call it giving your kid an unending stream of questions at eighty to eighty five percent accuracy right where if it gets harder they're going to tune it up down and it's going to be and think of the knowledge graph of everything they need to know here's the third grade curriculum you can ask ai tutors are good at figuring out what you know and don't know yeah right assessments or tests right and so you can just have the kid take a test and be like oh you don't know this stuff over here let's give you these lessons until you know it right and then you can then once you know it we'll move you on to the next grade same thing at the next grade and just keep progressing you up at whatever rate you go at right and this is the but the here's the part that's just crazy town kids can learn ten times faster so if you take like just here's a metric for you our subjects like take seventh grade science in a normal standard school you have one hundred eighty school days so an hour a day maybe some homework a couple hundred hours right the average kid in our system with time back which is our app learned it in twenty two hours to mastery to mastery math science right between twenty and thirty hours if you're thinking k through eight you should think between twenty and thirty hours per grade level per subject that means
- [33:53]
Interviewer
you can basically be done school in september based on the current model if
- [33:57]
Joe
you were going to now part of the problem is if you put kids in it for six hours a day they're going to disengage and we'll talk about why we designed the two hours and how we came up with that but the material is just not that much and that's why our kids can do two x right because everybody's like it's just too much to know and you're like it's really not that much and when you get it right you know for parents anybody who's looking you should go there's a there's a great math app out there called math academy they wrote a five hundred page book that you can download justin who wrote it that goes through all the learning science they also publish how many hours it takes their their app i think starts in fourth grade you know but from how long fourth grade math fifth grade math sixth grade math right and it's i mean it literally is it's like twenty eight hours and twenty two hours and just not many hours to master material at these subject levels and so that when you talk about the unlock it's just you know when you say why do kids and we you know think of your kid you know where he's bored out of his mind in school yeah we waste ninety percent of their time like we know the teacher in front of the classroom is the least effective way to teach you know you can argue whether it's five percent retention but literally we're wasting ninety percent of the kids time because we're teaching them in a very ineffective manner now back to thing we didn't have a better way for the last forty years you're like you know if you're head of like you know schools you got to have a teacher in front of a classroom because i can't give everybody a tutor right and so there was nothing better so let's not just tell everybody like you could learn ten times faster but sorry now now there's no excuse for it we can get
- [35:37]
Interviewer
everybody learning that fast and i guess the hitch is like oh we've always done it this way so there's an inversion and then starting something from scratch you're like well i have no sunk costs in the way that teaching should be so i can experiment with something different and hey these results are off the charts and we're crushing everybody else look here we should all be doing this so why aren't more public schools reaching into this and going like we should be experimenting with this even in one subject if we don't do it for everything maybe math class looks like synthesis or math academy or something like that where you're using an ai based learning system instead of a teacher why
- [36:13]
Joe
don't they do that it's really hard to change the system which is the first off first off nobody believes it right so the first thing you do when you look at alpha right and see our results is you're like selection effects it's only rich kids and that's it and so you sort of reject it and don't seriously consider it but even in places that do there's a lot of high end private schools who their largest donors are like i want my kid to have this two hour learning go take a meeting right so i i spend my time like there i definitely do i've met a lot of boards and heads of school of the top schools in this country private schools who charge you know fifty seventy five thousand dollars and they really struggle to sort of believe that this works because fundamentally learning science this concept learning science they're not trained in it they haven't read the ten thousand papers they haven't built and seen it they don't know the world's they don't have a team like we do of seven of the ten best learning scientists in the country working on it right who have all these unlocks and they definitely don't have the data loop that we have like we know because we measure every single thing how long the kid took to do it and what the scores are and what are the results and you know that whole closed loop and so there's just massive skepticism you know around it and they're you know it's a classic disruptive problem of i wonder
- [37:42]
Interviewer
if i'm less skeptical by default because my kids grew up playing prodigy and i watched how much of an impact that had on their math skills and actually more importantly their love of math yeah like they they loved playing that game and you had to answer questions to like cast spells and stuff and
- [38:00]
Joe
there's a there's a group of people and those are our early adopters right who comes to an alpha it's going to be you know families like yours we call them founding families you know because they're like i think i've seen enough homeschool families like if you ask the average homeschool family they know two hours is all you need right there's
- [38:17]
Interviewer
actually that's all they've ever done that's
- [38:19]
Joe
all they've ever done there's two groups actually when you talk about who believes the two hours versus not traditional school just doesn't believe they just they just don't believe it the people who do homeschool people absolutely whatever their view is why why is alpha so expensive because i do homeschool yeah i did the same thing yeah and so and absolutely the other group actually is athletes which is img which is our head of high school actually came he used to run academics at img because for big time athletes like at img you do the academics in the morning you play sports all after right and that's why our sports academy is all is being designed it's just they know it too because that's how they catch up right because they got all this time already used and so there is a small set of group of people there's others if you there's a couple real experts of learning science dean schwartz who runs stanford school of education he's public published a book on learning science what do
- [39:15]
Interviewer
we know like about learning that so ai customized i want to get into how you know kids are doing effective behaviors versus ineffective behaviors but like what do we know about teaching them through ai like what makes like i'm not just giving you a same math lesson that i would give somebody else yeah
- [39:34]
Joe
so it's well it's important that more important than the ai is the learning science like if i had to pick the two but it's the combination right so how do they but let's let me be clear let's let's dive into what i don't mean by ai chatbots is i am not talking our school does not teach people by giving them chatgpt chatbots are cheap bots ninety percent of kids who are using chatbots for academics are cheating and not learning and you know in our schools you know we do the academics in the morning and then we do all these great life skills in the afternoon and for that world we say if you're using a chatbot in the morning you're probably cheating and if you're not using it in the afternoon for your life skills and all that stuff you're probably failing so ai needs to be chatbots have a use just not on the academic side now how we use ai in the morning to teach is what ai it's the generative ai part not the chat part it's we generate personalized lessons for every kid right that's the part and so imagine if you had an llm and you fed it the following you fed it the curriculum you're trying to teach right you fed it the kid's knowledge graph what do they know and what do they not know you also feed it the kids interest graph what do they like oh they like baseball because then right one of the fastest ways to learn analogies right back to engagement if i'm teaching you in something you love and that you're good at you learn both faster and more engaged it's sort of a combo effect and then there's a fourth one which is we're adding it's not in our current one but it will be in twenty six which is cognitive load theory which is a whole set of learning science of how your brain works and you should think your brain's like a chip register where you have these working memory slots you have a certain and everybody has a different number and so you know you have four working memory slots and then you every person needs a different number of reps to take something from short term memory and put it into long term memory think of how many times do you have to look at a flashcard right an easy way but each person's different but you could imagine an llm that sits on top of all that data and generates the perfect next lesson for you right and so that's that's where we use the generative ai not to have kids do a socratic you know tutoring thing because they're just you are instead saying i'm going to generate a perfect lesson and those lessons are all based on learning science so i'm going to make sure that they're engaging and not passive right it's going to be a worked example in math because that's actually the best way to teach kids you know i'm going to be measuring if it's too hard if it's you know and you get it wrong i'm going to go back you know and i can tell from the other questions you know even if it's multi choice the ai is going to make them so that if i'm unsure if you really know it i'm going to put some questions in there right that'll tell me whether you know that prior knowledge or you don't right all of those things are all baked into what we're generating and creating as a lesson you know we can do it as a video right with text and audio overlay right make sure it's short so it's not you know passive and disengagement so we can do all that as generating those lessons and that's that's the key to the unlock and you might be getting that second grade lesson yeah and i'm getting the first grade lesson you know because we're in the same class because the ai is just giving us whatever we need or maybe you probably need the twelfth grade lesson i need the first grade lesson but you know it's it's it's generating that now the second so that's one element and then there's a second element and this is actually the most expensive part of our ai and one of our limitations right now is we burn a lot of ai ten thousand bucks a kid right now and we'll get it down to less than a thousand and then one hundred we're we're driving it down but think of basically streaming the screen to a soda model to a one of the best ones and having and then we have set things up to prompt the kid how to learn it coaches it's a coach so it's like look kid you're skipping those videos you keep skipping the videos right you're not learning as as effectively as you could yeah and so literally in the bottom of the corner there's a little waste meter where it tells the kid you're wasting time and so this is back to the whole product design you have to do right where you know when we our product name is time back the most the most important part to educate a kid is motivating them yeah so just educate a kid every educator will tell you you need a motivated student and you need to put them in lessons of the correct difficulty now ai does that second part well it knows what you know and don't know and i'll give you second grade or fourth grade it'll put them in the right difficulty but how do you solve motivation yeah right how do you solve motivation so on my first week as principal you know i have to make the kids love school and so i went up to the fifth graders and they were brand new to school too i was like do you love school they're like no and i was like what would make you love school and they're like less school i'm like how much less they're like none i'm like okay that's right and we basically negotiated two hours i was like look if i would you engage in the apps because i need you to engage in the app if you don't engage and you're spinning your chair you're not going to learn would you engage for two hours if i gave you the four hours back to go do awesome stuff and they're like okay that seems pretty fair and i went to my team i went great we got two hours right let's get every learning science paper let's read the crap out of them let's figure out exactly what we need to do so they can learn all the material in two hours right and so that's sort of the design of how we got the engine and the waste meter so for if you're a student and when you first come in you're sort of screwing around and you're not really engaged and so all of a sudden your two hour learning's three hour learning and you're like whoa whoa whoa i thought this was two hour learning and you're like your waist meter is at fifty percent you're wasting fifty of your time dude right and then all of a sudden it's like well go change these behaviors and you'll get out of here in two hours so the unlock is like at the sports academy right it's a little meter and they have to be in the lessons until it goes green yeah and then they get to go play basketball or soccer or whatever right you know whatever the sport is
- [46:00]
Interviewer
then you can go do the other
- [46:01]
Joe
and their coach the coach is like guys stop screwing around like get it done so we could all go play and their friends are playing and so all of a sudden you have motivation where they want to go do what they want to do they just have to and it's not hard because we keep them at eighty to eighty five percent they just can't screw around stop wait just use effective techniques every kid like they scroll you know if they have a lesson they're trying to read they scroll the bottom look for some questions search you know they try to skip reading the article and you're like look you got actually have to read the article if you want to learn how to read yeah you know and and you know we also now can generate the article so they're interested back to engagement interest levels you can take that second third grade boy who's like i hate books and then you're like no no what's your favorite movie the avengers who are your buddies and all of a sudden you're doing a choose your own adventure where you and your buddies are saving the world and that kid will click page by page for an hour yeah and you keep the lexile level right within ten percent of his difficulty level so he doesn't get it's not too hard you can funnel new vocabulary words to him right all these kind of things where you can these these ai tutors when you solve the motivation problem can fill these kids head with awesome knowledge right and you know one of our design principles is we were given twelve years right parents give us twelve years to fill their kids head with awesome knowledge because we think we should make kids heads an interesting place to hang out in because they have to hang out there for the rest of their life right right and that's we've we've reserved as societies right this amount of time and it is great to fill it up and the kids actually are engaged and if it is interesting and applicable right they do like it and then there's also just a learning science concept that the more you know the faster you learn so acceleration curves like where the average american in a time based system right or it's not even american global slows down yeah ours accelerate like if you actually took our high school kids yeah right and measured them on how fast they're learning versus two x one because the denominator is going way down because the other kids aren't learning but also how much our kids learn right we'd be like we have we'd be at five to ten x like at high school because it's sort of you have this effect going right and that's why you can see some tweets i did where i have all these kids like seven hundred ninety seven ninety seven ninety math eight hundred math sat you know and it's it's it's all very doable and it's just you and i in our world are like this all sounds like magic and hocus pocus and all that stuff and that's what sort of my job now is and why we're getting it out and opening the alphas and getting this everywhere is we have to educate everybody that this is possible like you know if if you know if i to your if i was if you have a parent in your audience and there's three things that i could put in their brain right that they don't believe today like with their if they have a kid in school i need them to think a not b right a is your kid can love school must love school like more than vacation that should be the standard you hold right second they can crush crush their academics in just two hours a day this six hours a day in homework it's not necessary right we have the highest test scores in the fricking country two hours a day right if you're going to go more than that it's because you have to really catch up because you're behind right and whoa okay you got to do three to catch up you know two hours a day crush it and then third is the key to your child's happiness is high standards right and that is one that you know it's a hard one because i i struggle with it as a parent too i have two daughters right and you know you want to hold high standards but when they're struggling it's hard right but that high standards is why our kids love school so much talk to me more about
- [49:55]
Interviewer
the high standards part of it yeah
- [49:58]
Joe
so generally you know if you're trying to build a school around that they love there's this view of oh just let them play all day right but that's actually not going to make them want to come during the summer right they have to be working on things that are ambitious right and significant to be able to do that if they're just scrolling tiktok or playing fortnite they're not going to come right they can do that at home right kids want to do awesome stuff they do right kids are awesome and they want to do awesome stuff and we need to give them an environment and we start in kindergarten like our our kindergartners like here the you know the thing that freaks everybody out right and we do this like on a shadow day because we're like come test it right no one's gonna just drop their kid in this weird thing come test it so we do a shadow day and one of the things we do is like we have a forty foot rock wall for kindergarteners and parents are like oh my kid is not doing that right that seems scary i'm kindergarten it's all safe it's i mean they're all right in harnessed in harnessed in and stuff but and you know we teach the kids growth mindset right and thinking and then you mic them up you know they're climbing up and they're like halfway out and they start to struggle and you can see the parents but our guides right our guides and coaches who this is what they do all day right our guides and coaches their whole job when you say what's the different role of the teacher because we don't sit in front of the classroom think of a mentor who's going to guide and coach you and their job is to hold high standards but give you high support right to help coach you through it just like a great coach and then they'll see the kid get to the top and when that kid gets down they're beaming they're beaming because they accomplished something hard right and every child development expert in the world will say the struggle the cycle of you need to struggle and fail i add in as a principal sometimes cry on your road to success supported by a caring adult that loop is what child development is right and it builds self confidence it builds resilience right it's what why people fifty percent of america puts their kids in after school sports because everybody expects that cycle to be run in sports but in schools it's just not run right and we're like every kid needs this right shouldn't just be in sports we should just they want to go to do hard things and so like we start in kindergarten but we'll talk middle school is like when we talk about middle school you know we have a middle school epidemic of scrollers what we call consumers right they've been caught in the dopamine tick tock or the fortnite playing right loops and they're just not engaged right and so when you come when you move into an alpha middle school we run a program right which is well what what what what are you interested in right how are we going to engage or how we can get you out of that and you know as a society we create a world where all those kids sort of get stuck in it so we do a values chart a japanese ikigai right think of a vision board you know fifth or sixth grade where you're just like who do you want to be and if you ask all these kids they want to do awesome stuff yeah they want to do awesome stuff and they diagram it out right and it's just like i want to be this and it's awesome right and then you say okay we make them do one hundred sixty eight hour project track every hour of your week and then they're like oh and then because you are what you do yeah you are what you do and so literally they then come in and they're like oh i guess i'm gonna be the world's best tick tock scroller and they're just so disappointed because they realize this is who they want to be but this is what they're doing this is how i'm spending my time and i'm just like well that's our job as a school right our guys and coaches this is what because you're not spending all your day in academics we have afternoon workshops where they're able to go figure out their passion project where they can get out of it you know and i why the world has to change and why everybody wants to change education is because we have too many people there was a kid who came in and he was talking to our high school because he went through our program but he was talking to the next set and he's just like you know if you had told me like when i first started you know the whole program and said i'll pay you one hundred dollars an hour for the rest of your life to play a video game games and just till you're dead and like literally just like plug into the matrix he's like i would have sold my soul for that and he's like and then i went through the program and he's like now i don't even have time to play video games right and he's like because he's engaged on stuff of who he wants to go be right and that's what's happening to a lot of our kids right in society and you totally can break them out right but that's what we have to do as a school and back to high standards the kids want to do it because it's hard that guy kid has never worked harder right on that project that he's doing that's transformed him to pull him out of the video game you know loop and the kids want to do it we have you know our second graders you know our our afternoons are all these great project based workshops that teach life skills right and our life skills are leadership and teamwork storytelling and public speaking grit and hard work entrepreneurship and financial literacy and socialization and relationship building so there's five categories of those and you know our our second second grade teacher right faith this was a year ago she's like all my second graders can run a five k and i was like oh i don't that she's like kids are limitless i'm like oh because parents right back to the standards you don't want to see your kid fail parents naturally it's right protective you don't want to see them struggle and fail like all the parents are going to really not like this she's like don't worry and i'm like how
- [55:41]
Interviewer
are you going to get them to
- [55:41]
Joe
run five k first of all she's like we're going to teach atomic habits and you know most of us as adults read it what twenty five or whatever you know after college but she's like second graders understand one percent better yeah every day they do and so she gets all the kids you know we teach growth mindset right and so she's like how many of you think it's impossible all the kids are like oh it's impossible miss faith you know can't do it and she's like well i signed you up for the jingle five k at christmas this is in august signed you guys all up we got to go run it and she brings them out to the track and they're all oh this is impossible and she walks the track the first day with them all and every single one finishes and she's like okay so we've all established we're all going to finish the race right and then she comes out the next time and they run a quarter of the lap walk the rest and half a lap walk the rest every time and by december they're all running thirty five minute five ks and when they cross the finish line you know at the jingle five k to their parents they're just like oh so proud they're like dad i can do anything yeah because i can just one percent better every day i can do fifty push ups i'll do one today and two tomorrow right and they just learn these life skills that we don't learn till late because school doesn't teach them but when you have all day when you're not sitting in class you can teach these things and you teach it via hard things that the kids love right that they're engaged in doing things that they think are impossible and learning how to do the impossible kayak gets my flight hotel and rental car right so i can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong bro sky coin way better than points never fly during a scorpio full moon just
- [57:16]
Interviewer
tell them manager you'll sue instant room
- [57:19]
Joe
upgrade stop taking bad travel advice start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right bad advice you talking to me kayak got that right protein is now at starbucks and it's never tasted so good you can add protein cold foam to your favorite drink or try one of our new protein lattes or matcha try it today at starbucks
- [57:47]
Interviewer
it sounds like guides and teachers are very different what makes for a
- [57:51]
Joe
good guide yeah so teach you know when i think of a spec you know there's a huge teacher problem right teachers are burned out they can't hire enough you know it's just it's it's tough right you know and just once again me coming from the outside right general hr you know hr one hundred one if i'm a business person you know okay you can't hire a spec you know what's the problem either the spec's too hard you're not paying enough whatever you're targeting the wrong one so there's five things really if you're going to be a teacher in a standard school right standard teacher in front of a classroom model to do well first you have to be a domain expert in seventh grade science second you actually have to be good at teaching like what are the effective teaching we all know researchers who know a lot but they're really bad teachers right third you have to connect and motivate with kids fourth you have to deal with parents and then fifth in a lot of our schools you have a lot of administration and you know school systems and those are five hard things to be good at right and so when you have a hard spec then we go and say okay let's underpay them and you're like and it's a surprise that no one applies for the jobs right and that's why there's huge to fall and all this stuff and so in our world i'm like okay well how would i fix that right we're re envisioning school so what's how do we re envision role of a teacher well we take you know we what do teachers really want to do right and if you go talk to teachers teachers did not become teachers to grade seventh grade science quizzes they became teachers to connect and transform kids lives and we all had one or two teachers who did that for us yeah and they and it wasn't because she marked your paper up well it was because she connected with you and got you to go see a bigger picture right and just inspired you to greatness and pushed you right and that is what great teachers do and that's what they want to do so we just narrowed the scope where we're like nope you don't you don't need to know seventh grade science because ai does that you don't have to know the ten thousand papers that are written on learning science of how to teach kids well and all that ai tutor learning science based will do that connect and motivate kids okay you need to be the world's best are you the best at connecting and motivating kids can you hold high standards and high support right and if you're great on that we want to hire you and then the parent side we actually have a dean of parents so we designed the school where they don't have to do that because i when i first got in the guy who was going through the the teachers is like oh this this teacher is great with kids but not good with the parents so don't promote this person's not as good with the kids but they're great with parents so they should be promoted and i was like okay no i'm gonna we're gonna build a school where the kid they're great with kids and we'll find a way to deal with the parents right because they're different skills yeah and then and the more
- [60:46]
Interviewer
important skill is the kids the kids
- [60:47]
Joe
no all you care about i mean i'm parents obviously wish they were good about it but you really care that these kids connect right that these guides connect with your kids and we call them guides and coaches because they're not doing academic teaching right so what's their
- [61:00]
Interviewer
background is it like coaching and sports
- [61:02]
Joe
or so it's a set of them one they're the best we get the top one percent of teachers who want to move over and you know come on over so we get those and we're just like you're not going to be teaching and you know that's always the biggest surprise they're like this is what i want to do all day during those two hours you know since you're not in front of class they're pulling the kids out one on one you know those conversations look like so those conversations are going to be like you know back to connecting hey how was your weekend how was the softball tournament did you win did you not win you know we've been working on this goal setting about your you know vision you don't seem to be engaging in it is do you really not like it is it too hard you know they connect with the kids and then sit there and help them understand you know what are you trying to do how am i helping you hit your goals just what you would call coaching it's absolute coaching so how much
- [61:51]
Interviewer
of the kids success then would you describe to i don't want to disappoint this person who's now paying attention to me versus like if you go into a classroom of thirty kids it's like i can get away with almost anything you know i can like sort of like check in a little bit but now this person knows my name they know what i'm doing on the weekend i'm going to get questions on this
- [62:12]
Joe
yeah no there's i mean our guides have great relationships with the kids i mean if you really want to get into it like at high school when we we ask we measure everything because if we're going to scale i need the metrics to make sure the quality stays high you know so in in middle and high school we actually asked the parents do you trust your alpha guy so much to hold high standards so you as the parent can provide can only have to provide the unconditional love and support right because you want to hold high standards but you also want to support and as kids get to adolescence it gets hard for a parent to be both when you're holding high standards they rebel against you right yeah and i'll just take myself as a personal example so my oldest daughter you know she's putting her stanford application in and i'm like can i read it and she's like no right she does not want to be judged by parents adolescents do not want parents judging bottom and i was like okay and i just gave her a hug i'm like good luck because i knew chloe her guide was going to hold high standards and you know chloe back to we get really the best in the world right she's a harvard grad and i know she knows the standard you know to get in and kate my daughter has a great such a relationship with chloe she trusts her and she trusts her to get her in right and you know even now she's in college and when she comes back to to austin she goes to lunch with chloe still right so she has you build these great relationships with with them and it's you know everybody when they think of ai tutor they think of robot terminators and all that and the answer is you know in twenty years you know predict the future what's going to be the same in twenty years parents are going to drop their kids off at a building in the building are going to be other kids and adults right there's we're not you're not getting rid of school school is going to be there now if we do our job as we what happens in those six or seven hours is totally different and the roles are different and it's ten times more awesome but you're going to drop your kid off at school because you want them around other kids and you need kids don't grow up on their own they need caring adults who are going to mentor and coach them right and help you know build hold high standards and so that whole loop is going to continue and when we talk about building schools that's going to be the future it's just right now the whole day is six hours in class where we waste ninety percent of the kids time and we're like okay let's just stop that let's just stop that right and so that's what back to our thing of how we designed school the first part was they must love it the second part was they need to learn ten times faster they can't sit in class all day right and so that's this engine we built that teaches kids ten times
- [65:00]
Interviewer
faster that's the time back that's time
- [65:02]
Joe
back our time back engine that's ten and today it's an alpha you know in twenty twenty six everybody in the world's going to be able to access it and so everybody who wants to build a school based on time back is going to be able to next year hear that development team the whole
- [65:17]
Interviewer
world's waiting my kids are waiting everybody's
- [65:20]
Joe
waiting for that so that's the second second part the time back right the engine where they learn ten times faster the third is there's a set of life skills that we think really matter to kids that aren't just pure academics and we went through them but you do care about leadership and teamwork and entrepreneurship and financial socialization and relationship building those skills socialization and relationship building right they matter so much and we don't teach kids now you experience socialization in school some good some bad right if you're at westlake high school and you're the quarterback and the homecoming queen it's really great right right mean girl high school right cafeteria there's tons of movies made about it right but you can teach kids skills right you can teach them all these relationships how do you
- [66:03]
Interviewer
teach the life skills are you doing anything different there than we would think
- [66:07]
Joe
you would you would think these great project based workshops in the afternoon to teach these skills so we're like okay how do we teach one percent better how do we teach atomic habits okay let's have them run a you know five k you know we teach financial literacy it really is like our fifth and sixth graders launching food trucks running airbnbs right and so you can teach them when you have all afternoon you have all this time to teach them now the biggest thing we do versus probably most others is we try to quantify everything think a lot of life skills are very soft right and that i i can't run a scalable system if everything's hey you know maybe it works so like we talk grit everybody wants their kid to you know have grit right you can't read like angela duckworth's book and okay great right that doesn't mean anything so every third grader in our school can do a rubik's cube every kindergartner can do a hundred piece puzzle and so we write every eighth grader has passed a teamwork grit test which is they all run a tough mudder if you know yeah yeah tough mudder and pass cross the finish line at the same time oh right that's awesome and and you know and back to bonding and hard things you know and parents back to they're like you know especially at a high end private school some of these moms are like my daughter's not rolling in the mud that's never happening right and then at the end of the race they're all covered in mud and you know there's they have all the pictures of they all you know bonded as a team to go through this really hard challenge and so you're teaching so we have metrics where and we try to make them quantifiable all our fifth graders fourth and fifth graders can pass wharton's leadership and teamwork simulation challenge that warren mbas takes amazing right and so we have all these you know quantifiable metrics across those skills right entrepreneurship can you make a thousand dollars can you go raise ten thousand dollars you know all those kind of things you know character building which is character building is always the hardest one because it's really hard to measure but it's the only thing parents care about is my kid a good kid right but like our example we just we have examples which is our we have middle and high schoolers who are building an app where they're trying to convince one hundred million teenagers the key to their happiness is contributing to their community right and just that whole concept of how contributing to community is a great character building exercise they all have been experiencing they're like oh we can build this into an app and get this out to everybody yeah so you have people learning how to vibe code with cursor right in their afternoons or those are those are the kind of apps right and they're working with some of the biggest influencers on the planet to do this right where they're like okay i want to come in this weekend or i right i don't want to go on summer break because i'm working on something hard and
- [69:00]
Interviewer
significant the hard thing is really interesting that when my kids went back to school after covid i switched schools and i put them in a different language so they didn't speak it they went to a french school and so for grade seven they started and they didn't speak very much french at all and if i had to sum up the difference of that school from the one they were in previously it would be high standards and it was they were consistently on the kids and they would be like no you should be getting one hundred i'm going to teach you how to get one hundred and it was small classes but it was a very strict old school french school and i did that because i wanted my kids to wake up like they were sort of like sleepwalking through school a bit and i was like oh well you're going to go learn a different language and for three months my oldest kid came home and he was crying almost every night this is so hard i got the word right i'm like but you missed the accent and he's like yeah well they give me a zero they should at least give me like three quarters of a point and i'm like well you have a choice right like they're telling you what the standard is you can choose to live up to that and push yourself or you can choose to fight it for the next two years and which of those do you think is going to result in a better okay anyway by the end of december so they have exams so they test the kids like crazy so these kids have never taken a test before and by the time they're done these two years they've done over two hundred so they just like there's no stigma around testing or anything by the end of december he's going into exams he's like i love this school like this school's amazing i know exactly what's expected of me and i know exactly how to accomplish what's expected
- [70:39]
Joe
of me so i love that story that is now if every parent thought like you we would have a different school system today we would not have this academic results at our schools one of the things i've learned as principals is your mindset that you just described is very rare that parents in general want low standards at their school and part of why schools even private schools right react why does harvard have grade inflation harvard right and it's because there is pressure from parents and students to lower standards and that it is hard
- [71:16]
Interviewer
to keep high standards that's the participation award that you know everybody seems into
- [71:21]
Joe
these days and the problem with that is it doesn't you know when i where it really starts to manifest is in middle and high school where you're like these kids are disengaged they are addicted to tick tock and fortnite and they have mental health problems and all these issues that are occurring and they're the outcome of low standards not high standards people think it's no it's too hard if kids don't engage if humans don't engage in challenging things right that they love that they can go do and accomplish right they do lose meaning there is no meaning in a tiktok loop and eventually it catches up with you you can't eat sugar all day right it just eventually it's going to catch up with you you and instead right we need schools where we show kids it can be so fun like you know if you took out our core our first one kids must love school more than vacation parents would not send their kids to the school because they'd be terrified of the high standards and it's only because their kids come home every day and they're like this was the greatest thing ever i don't like you know they do they're like parents are just like my kid used to net like you know these middle school sports kids they're like they used to skip school all the time never on time all these things absenteeism is a huge thing they're like they wake me up and they're like we better not be late like alpha kids are like is it monday yet yeah why is it why do we have to go to school and why don't we go to school on saturdays that's incredible and that's and that is one there was there was one where that those stories are just they they do love doing hard things totally and you know
- [72:56]
Interviewer
and they can do hard things they
- [72:57]
Joe
can do hard things they love it they have to be supported by an adult so you have to have a guide who's awesome you can't if you just throw them in the deep end that's not going to work right but get a guide who's going to bond with them right and we spent enough money right we pay teachers right just let's shrink let's refocus their role around what they want to do anyway transform kids lives right let's get them all focused on transforming kids lives where they're so supporting them high standards right exactly the one or two that we knew right that transformed ours and just get that going in all the schools but to do that you know back to it's a tough one now that's why we have to go build we're going to go build ten thousand schools right we're in this i want to talk
- [73:38]
Interviewer
about scaling in a second i should i do want to come back to my son for a second so when he was coming home crying i was also very supportive i'm like you can do hard things i don't want to be reported child services or anything like that from people listening you know this is me in my life no judgment about how you raise your kids totally the video monitoring thing sounds super interesting i want to come back to this for a second as a parent i'm like this is amazing you're teaching my kids effective behaviors ineffective behaviors as an employee i'm like oh wait what yeah talk to me about that so let's
- [74:12]
Joe
talk about the monitoring which is it's actually really interesting which is i just went through this with some of our middle schoolers which is kids like the monitoring and the coaching because i want
- [74:26]
Interviewer
to get better so do parents
- [74:29]
Joe
parents don't like ai monitoring they're terrified of it oh right there's this boogeyman of ai monitoring kids they're like i want a human to do that not an ai the kids are like i don't want a human to look at me ever because i'm judged by adults adults kids kids don't want to be judged by adults they're like let me talk to the ai yeah like if you tell like we have an app that grades your public speaking and you're like do you want to practice with the human to give you the feedback or do you want to practice with ori this app you know until you get to ninety and it does you know filler words and you know pacing and all that and they're like give me
- [75:07]
Interviewer
the ori yeah my kids would one
- [75:09]
Joe
hundred percent they because they all want the ai because it's not judgmental to them they don't to want feel all that pressure parents are the opposite and so it's this very dynamic where i'm like guys i the kids want this and i know you don't like it but you got to get over it because your kid wants it and it's let's do what they want and so the kids love the ai tutoring right they love the feedback they love the monitoring okay i'm wasting time how to do better right and now the second part is if you don't have a motivation on the coaching right like on why they should do it like i because i tell like other school districts like great i'm gonna go put this in my class let me give me this time backstock thing and get magic i'm like if you put this in a standard school day of six hours it's not gonna work like ed tech generally has failed and it's generally failed because the kids aren't motivated to engage with it if you don't give them their time back they're not gonna engage and that's why it might be part of the problem with like normal schools adopting it you know you're the principal of a school head of school and you're like what am i supposed to do like two hours a day and they're not really teaching and what do they do the rest of the day it's a whole re it's a it's
- [76:15]
Interviewer
a rebuild sounds like a lot of
- [76:17]
Joe
work it's a lot of work it's you know and there's not enough proof yet and you have a bunch of parents who are like i don't want screen time anyway and so you have all these good excuses to slow it down now if you look at alphas like we're the most talked about school in the world right it's just give us one more year right give us one more year and everybody's just gonna be like okay we need to do this stuff right and so we're we're that's part of our job and that's part of why i'm out there is just educating parents right our schools educate kids our marketing department we have to educate parents that this is all all doable but but that's that's when you look at sort of this whole loop is you know it's it's hard to put it in a normal school school right now because you do have to do a rebuild they need more proof and data but why don't they babysit
- [77:06]
Interviewer
we were talking about this a little bit before we started recording like why don't they just say oh we're going to do math tutoring we're just going to do that so math class now is going to be an ai tutor whether you know whatever product that is and then we're going to see how that goes we don't have to switch the whole curriculum we're just going to take the thirty minutes or forty minutes we've assigned a map class yeah so
- [77:26]
Joe
there's there's a few few different reasons on that just tactical practical reasons first is they've been lying to their parents so i and i i don't know public schools much but let's talk about high end private schools right i know the high end private school market the high end private schools are all lying to their parents by giving kids a's when they don't deserve so like we pulled in you know so we had hundreds of kids join you know whatever a couple months ago across the country right and these are people coming from forty fifty thousand seventy five thousand dollar private schools and we give them our assessment test right and if you had an a if your transcript was an a coming into alpha you are from there's some students who are one grade level ahead super awesome all the way and more many more of them were three years behind oh what three years behind so this is seventh graders who when we give them the fourth grade test are missing a six significant number of problems if you got b's you are from three years behind to seven years behind so these are high schoolers who are like okay i need to have you in third grade there's third grade material you're missing and that that's a b and so the problem is parents in our world a's and b's like a's are good b's okay do better next time but they don't give out c's d's and f's anymore so a's and b's have to cover the whole range and so parents basically are being lied to because they're using their old point of reference eighty percent of kids at harvard get a's just they've had such grade inflation that the school is like oh my god i can't do the ai tutor because i'm gonna show the kid needs fourth grade material and the parent doesn't know that and as soon as they put it in it's gonna be obvious the assessment's gonna show that right that's actually what causes lots of people to move to alpha yeah just give them the assessment they're like what's going on like if you go to our website we have testimonials of people you know we open san francisco right and this guy's like i've had my kid in a fifty thousand dollars school for eight years and he couldn't answer some fourth and fifth grade questions it's not the kid's fault right and the parent didn't know because the school's giving him a's it's good brand good brand thought he knew it everything's working fine everything's fine and so you have that that's number one let's get over that one now let's get to the second one there in this i fought like this was that one hundred for one hundred we were talking about i went my first year to the seventh graders and i'm like guys you have holes i gotta get you to do earlier work you gotta some fourth and fifth grade holes you gotta go fix it and let me tell you about motivating a kid and making him love school when you tell seventh grader they have fourth and fifth grade material real non starter non starter there's only one person who hates it worse their parents oh my god i was yelled at so many times by parents my kid must be a grade level why are you putting them in earlier stuff every parent's been trained my kid must work at grade level which is just the learning that is not right they just don't know learning science that is not what the learning science says right you got to go back and fill right mastery the basics master the basics but the parents hate it that's why eventually i still to this day don't know how to fix the parents like so i sort of went around them and that's when we came up with one hundred for one hundred i'm like guys i gotta get you to do it honey and that's how we came up that's how it came out i'm like third grade they did it fourth grade and then and then they moved up right and that does it also has this other real thing about academic performance the the self confidence it does all these kids are like okay i can get any i can get one hundred on any standardized test back like your son the same thing where once you show them how to do it you give them the ability they're like oh i can get a hundred like so we we have a thing now where we'll advance you at ninety percent to the next grade level so when you score ninety percent on a standardized test you know your state standardized test that shows you have mastery we'll let you go to the grade above it but you get one hundred for a hundred if you get one hundred and so all the kids are like okay there's a couple extra right and you're like oh my god a couple an hour or two and i'll get the extra questions because even if you miss them you can go back and learn them and then and retake and so but it just sets that mindset of every kid's like of course i could get one hundred the reason we get so many seven hundred nineties and eight hundreds on the sat is all our kids are like of course i could get a perfect score on the sat it's just how many hours is it it's an hour question not a capability which is that unlock we did about iq most people think it's iq and i'm like it's effort it's effort not
- [81:58]
Interviewer
iq well this is the fundamental thing right because a lot of people just look at that and they're like some kids are smarter than others and i think my hypothesis is that we could get ninety percent of kids if not more to effectively perfect sat scores totally
- [82:15]
Joe
there's a little sat has a little bit of iq coding at any time test has a little bit of iq coding but yes fundamentally you should think thirteen fifty which is top ten percent no problem fifteen fifty which is your top one percent it gets it it gets a little dicey on you know
- [82:33]
Interviewer
what it's a ninety percent then but
- [82:35]
Joe
for ninety percent for sure like just off the charts and we're right we measure all this we're like well how many can we get to fifteen fifty plus right if you're on our honors our high school program non honors is thirteen fifty minimum okay honors is fifteen fifty and the difference is it's three hours a day to do honors which is fifteen fifty plus fives on your aps thirteen fifty and a four or five on your ap that only takes two hours so it's just and to kids it's an effort issue you want two hours you want three hours just pick it's extra time that's it and so but anyway but that whole thing you change their mindset but back to this this why a standard school can't do it the kid how do you have the parents screaming at you if you try to put your kid to do you know the the hole filling as we call it right to go backward and do fourth grade they're like i want the teacher to teach my kid seventh grade because that's you know and it's just so you have that problem the schools are just like you
- [83:30]
Interviewer
know you want the outcome i want my kid to be educated right right
- [83:33]
Joe
and well and the problem is a lot of parents are like my kids get just give me the a you get the ego it's an a right and then what happens is then when they take their psat or sat it's not as high as they want it yeah but then it's like the school's like well too late and then some parents hire you know massively expensive after school tutoring right i mean the after school tutoring mark is like fifty billion dollars it's insanely it's insanely huge because schools parents even at high end private schools like the percent of kids at a high end private school who also have a tutorial right i was like this is insane aren't you sending your kid to the school to learn yeah
- [84:11]
Interviewer
why do they have why do they
- [84:12]
Joe
do it why is there a huge after school tutor market i'm like we commit that your kid will learn during the day they don't need that time and you don't have to hire a
- [84:21]
Interviewer
tutor that's insane i was asking my kids last night what questions i should ask you and they came up with two so one asked how do you teach physics to high schoolers and what program you use and let's tackle that
- [84:33]
Joe
one and then we'll talk great so there's a great so math academy is the best math app out there and they do physics through twelve there's a new one called physics graph who they they're online and they are the physics version of math academy okay and so i would go get it i don't know i think you know back to ap i'm trying to remember exactly their product there's like physics i was abc one two three whatever it is on the ap test the first one is based on algebra and then the third one is based on calculus okay and so i don't know if they've released the calculus one yet but on the algebra the other you just use physics graph awesome physics graph is is is the way to to go i know a couple other products that are about to be released next year but if you're in it right now if you're
- [85:24]
Interviewer
if that's the one great then i would do that and then the other question was what happens after you've had a couple years now of students graduate they go to university or grow it in the real world or whatever it is they're doing college what happens now they go from the structured environment high coaching high standards a lot of hands
- [85:44]
Joe
on to good luck yeah so well one of the things even though we have high support these all our kids are self driven learners right they have to during the two hours learn how to be able to learn on their own right and so that's one of our tests of are you a self driven learner our eighth graders all know how to get a five on an ap on their self like every eighth grader actually knows everything i want to learn is on youtube right everything yeah and so you're just like okay pick some random ap that you're interested in you know not one of the core hard ones but just pick one right and go learn it and go figure out and there's all the resources are available and then you know so that's our that's how we show okay you're a self driven learner you can learn anything for the rest of your life you know without somebody spoon feeding you you know the material but at the college level so we had let's see here's one where where do people go so our first class was we had twelve graduates eleven of them went to college the twelfth is one of the world's best water skiers and so he's building his media empire wiley water skis and was like i'm not going to college the other ones all got into their first choice colleges we get into you know stanford or vanderbilt or nyu shanghai or you know wherever you want to go because our academic scores are just through the roof then we also have these killer alpha x projects in the afternoon where kids have four years to work on a passion project we didn't even get into this and so they look just they look like a completely different character right than the average
- [87:18]
Interviewer
college grad so they they stand out
- [87:20]
Joe
contrast huge contrast and super impressive right i mean this one i she'll probably kill me because i'm not supposed to talk about it but you know we may have no high school student has ever been the lead researcher on something published in nature and we have an alpha kid kid who submitted it hasn't been accepted yet and so that's why she doesn't want to mention it yet in case it does it but literally like no one right that's usually i mean that if if she was a phd that would consider be considered like one of the most impressive things of her career and she's literally seventeen years old in high school and it's because they're like they have four years to work on awesome things and do just amazing things and so anyway so in college i but now it's not two
- [88:07]
Interviewer
hour learning no it's college no no
- [88:10]
Joe
so they do so we went so i i met with them at christmas after they all the eleven who went and it was six or seven of them and i was like okay guys how we doing everybody had a four zero they were crushing it they loved college the whole social environment and stuff and you know some are in sororities and you know they're doing stuff all the different things and they loved it and i was like well what's the worst part they're like okay those lectures are a total waste of time they are a complete waste of time literally i sit in there and they're just terrible four of them had written editorials to their school papers about can we stop the charade that are these lectures literally there's two hundred people in a class none of them are paying attention they're all on their computer like scrolling tiktok or just doing other stuff right the teacher's terrible is not a good teacher right and this is just a waste of time and they all learn you know so like back to my my daughter is a math english major you know and she's like i just use math academy she's like she's you know she i used to skip classes when i was i didn't like school i was not like my older daughter and she always had disdain for me where she's like you should go to class dad and now that once she finally went she's like okay i get it i get why you skip class because it's totally a waste of time and so i believe in college you know harvard published a paper that their best teaching class is their physics one hundred one class one of their best you know teachers and they did an a b test with ai tutors versus them and they published that harvard you know there's a great paper harvard says ai tutors better than harvard teachers and you know they learn twice as much using the ai tutor as going to class and so it just it's it's just facts right and so one hundred series classes in university are going to go away like as soon as everybody figures out this ai tutor stuff they're just going to go away now small group seminars they love it right you know a small group writing seminar that's super awesome like when in her writing classes and stuff so it's not like universities are going to go away because some kids still need time to grow up right and they need socialization and all those other things but the big lecture classes those are gone those are a waste of time what were you
- [90:25]
Interviewer
like as a student the world's worst
- [90:27]
Joe
student tell me more about this i was you know academically you know people would definitely say i can't believe joe's doing education if you knew me and at stanford i dropped out you know this is you know back to every kid has a passion for learning it's just not always academics and that was me right i just i didn't care i hated school and i'm just like i don't care about these classes right and you know when i dropped out you know and i started my company i went from i used to do the minimum amount of work i mean i literally like in my high school the way our grading system worked is you you got four points for an a but there's no a minus no a plus no nothing just right and an eighty nine point five rounds to a ninety which was an a and i literally would do the minimum work to get an eighty nine point five like not an eighty nine point six i remember one time i didn't turn in i didn't answer all the questions on a test because i knew i didn't need to finish the test to get the eighty nine point five in the grade and my teachers were just like what right i was just a nightmare because i just whatever the minimum was and you know my parents weren't really excited about now it was a minimum bar of okay i'm still going to get in stanford because i want to go there but i wanted to go there because i want to start a company right i knew i wanted to an entrepreneur and so i go and then i'm in class at stanford i'm like in some spanish class and i'm like okay what am i doing and so anyway i drop out so there's nobody who thinks i was a good student includ i wasn't a good student but there wasn't like oh i was like nobody it was just misunderstood right no no i was definitely not a good student and then i drop out and then i started working one hundred plus hours sleeping under the desk right super passionate because you're motivated i got i loved it i'd found right my spark i found what i loved and i'd never worked harder in my life like it was insane and my dad who you know there's this he was not happy that i dropped out right but eighteen months later when we were talking he's like god i'm so glad you dropped out he's like you know and he's like you know i was so worried that you were a lazy little your whole academic career you were just a shirt worker right you just you never engage in anything and you know as a parent like you don't want your kid to be just you know a slacker you want and he's like and you found it you found what you love and you're working your ass off on it and it's just great right and our my view of that is that concept what i found after dropping out of college we want to get that into kids in middle and high school like what do they love like as they hit an adolescence who who do they want to be what do they love and let's get them started on that right now there's some minimum academics you have to do right you want to start a business plan you got to know some math you want to write good proposals right you have to be able to write so it's not like you can skip all the academic side but you do it motivated by stuff that you love right and back to if we want to get kids we're competing with tiktok and fun fortnite but kids vision of who they want to be is awesome so let's go get right associate with what they want to be there right and that's what's going to drive and motivate them to you know learn all the skills they need if you you know if you look at our kids doing these huge alpha x projects that are so impressive right it's because they're working on stuff i mean it's harder stuff than we ever worked on in high school for sure they don't think it's work because they love it you know no we have a we have a girl she's and you didn't
- [94:15]
Interviewer
think it was work when you were
- [94:16]
Joe
sleeping on the floor exactly works on it's like my now job which by the way just as a sidebar everybody should go into education if you're like wondering like what you should do the next ten years come into education it's awesome but because it is fun but we have a we have a high school she's doing a broadway musical right launch all team produced broadway musical she sourced all the singers off tick tock million streams the first week when they went they can fill they filled like four times they filled a venue it's not big enough to be on broadway it's still like not quite big enough but they're they're doing it and you know you listen to her and she's like having to learn about music rights right and legal right and all this stuff i mean it's hard it's harder than any high school class but that's how we should teach and this girl will spend endless hours on it because she loves it because she's putting on her musical it's hers right and the team and all and just think of those projects for all kids right everybody can do that right and so and that's where when we talk about what this if we're going to get them ready for this ai world that's coming that's what we need to get them ready for not bore them for six hours a day in class where we waste ninety percent of their time you know learning a bunch of material that is becoming commoditized right llms are reducing the value of that knowledge now ai also it's taking it away on that side but it's also letting you learn ten times faster so it's sort of this balance of just you gotta you figure out what parts you want to
- [95:42]
Interviewer
learn i remember elon in interview said something that made a ton of sense to me he's like traditional schools teach you like here's a wrench here's when you use it when they should be like here's an engine let's fix it oh you need a wrench to like take that off so like we got to figure out what it's used for and like it's sort of like that's the approach that you're taking exactly you
- [96:00]
Joe
take so like and let me i'll give you example like our sports academy like we want to teach public speaking right storytelling and public speaking is such a great skill right for kids or for adults everybody and but you go to a ten year old boy and you're like we're going to teach you public speaking you like okay they've turned off but in our sports excuse me at our sports academy post game press conference are you ready for it and these kids are like okay like right and you're going to learn all those skills those same public speaking skills where arise going to grade you into it of course they want to do that right or you're going to learn financial literacy roll the eyes we got to work on your nike five million dollars contract all of a sudden they're ready to right they're going to learn they're going to dive in and become the world's experts in all those skills and so the thing that when you talk about stuff associating it with stuff kids love that's in their interest right back to i understand their interest graph kids will kids will love it and work because it's and everybody knows this right if it's related to what your interests are you'll spend endless time on it there's kids like just think of how long they spend on youtube on some obscure thing where you're just like oh my god no we have we have a kid who can like he he knows everything about world war two battles and you know like those geolocators who know anything in the whole world and he's a little picture and it's there this kid knows it for every world war two battle like you can show him any picture from a battle he's like oh that was in poland in nineteen forty three and whatever i mean it's just insane right but he's interested in it right kids will learn endless stuff if they're interested and what we have to do as schools is say okay this is what we want them to learn because these are fun there are fundamental things you want to learn but we need to do it where they're doing projects that are hard and have meaning to them this episode is brought to you by venmo with the
- [97:58]
Interviewer
venmo debit card a taco in one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking your rewards nice get a up to five percent cash back with venmo stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your venmo debit card pick a bundle with your
- [98:11]
Joe
go tos and start earning cash back
- [98:14]
Interviewer
do more stash get more cash visit venmo dot com to learn more venmo
- [98:18]
Joe
stash bundle terms and exclusions apply see
- [98:20]
Interviewer
terms at venmo dot me terms max dollar one hundred cashback per month
- [98:26]
Joe
this episode is brought to you by nespresso introducing virtuoup the latest in a long line of innovation from nespresso it's innovation you can touch sense and taste in every single cup with a three second start easy open lever and dedicated brew over ice button it's even easier to enjoy your coffee your way sip for yourself shop virtuo up exclusively at nespresso
- [98:50]
Interviewer
dot com you mentioned your father is it true that he didn't invest in
- [98:55]
Joe
your company yeah no that's totally true he yeah my my dad very much was worried about me being a spoiled kid you know he grew up with nothing and then got to success later in his life and so was terrified of that and so you know he's like look if you have a good idea other people are going to invest in it and if i'm investing in it right it just means no it was it was such a crappy idea no one else would give you money he's like so go convince people that it's a good idea you know back to the standard which is a true statement right if if it's your parent you know you know if if your parents leading right or giving you money
- [99:32]
Interviewer
then if they're leading you around maybe
- [99:35]
Joe
you don't have a good idea you don't have a good idea go convince
- [99:38]
Interviewer
somebody else and so he used to
- [99:39]
Joe
work for jack walsh yes he did and so he was jack's strategic planner mark his son you know we play hockey go skiing together and so i had a business background upbringing which is maybe why i knew i wanted to
- [99:53]
Interviewer
be tell me more about that because i remember reading one anecdote actually you had two conversations with jack walsh one when you were twelve about gross margins
- [100:01]
Joe
do you remember that one i i i had a lot i spent a lot of time with jack so jack you know my dad passed when i was twenty five and so these will probably be the later ones you're talking about and jack called me and is like look i'll be your mentor going forward and so every year i would actually fly up and spend a couple days at ge and at jack's house with him coaching and what was the
- [100:23]
Interviewer
most memorable conversation you had with him
- [100:25]
Joe
oh god there was a lot so you know between he and my dad they they there's a there's a ton of them if you want them which is you know one was mark and i were playing hockey and we were small for our age and both our dads played hockey jack and my dad and so we weren't good at it and so we're like we want to switch to skiing don't tell a hockey dad that you want to be a skier okay they're my dad was from i was born in minnesota so you
- [100:57]
Interviewer
know hockey is i'm from canada it's
- [100:59]
Joe
like religion for us it's the religion and he's like and so jack's like okay i'll only do this there's a there's a race at the end of the year jiminy peak was the name of it he's like you two need to come in first and second and if you guys are willing to do that i'll let you switch over to skiing and he gets he's on the phone with my my dad he's like greg our kids are going to be first and second in the race so they're gonna have to work really hard so buy your kids some skis you know literally we would literally you know during the summer like you'd run up the mountain literally after school they drop us off weekends drop us off ski end of the year mark came in first i came in second and jack's like wasn't it worth it you know and just back to high standards like that guy crazy high standards gross margin you brought up that one you know where they had sold their they'd swapped their business with i think it was thompson medical at the time where they had tv's ge had tv tv's and thompson they swapped it for their cat scanners because they had g medical and it's you know one of these deals and i was like dude like tv's are the only cool thing you guys make you know when you're young right cat scanner really boring and jack's like let's talk about gross margin right because tv's have none and cat scanners make a lot of money and so i was learning about gross margin and i'm going to bring that back i'll go back to the story but i'm going to bring it to a related one so we have kids who launched a food truck truck our fifth graders like launched a food truck at alpha and so i was talking with him and i was like why did you guys you know pick breakfast foods you know on for your food truck they're like have you seen the gross margins on a breakfast food and i was like okay this is the most awesome thing ever which is because they're building a real business and you got to know gross margins right and these are fifth and sixth graders right and and so kids loved it just like i learned and loved it young everybody can learn learn this stuff if you're if they're interested we have other kids who don't like you know launching food trucks but for those who do it was awesome and then once i once you know back to my twenties when i was building my business you know jack jack was both super you know harsh you know when you talk about high standards high support it's both where he would just be like i remember this particular story was i was the youngest self made member of the force four hundred right i'm with the COVID and so i'm flying up to you know where my annual mentoring thing that i was going to do with them and i'm all like right check this out right i'm all that and i do want to signed copy yeah exactly jack i'm sure you want to sign copy of this right and i mean i i follow myself obviously and i get there and you know he's we're talking about stuff and he's trying to understand because he's astounded by you know how much my company was worth and all that stuff and so at the end of he's like okay so i guess if i had to classify you you're like i'm trying to remember the g levels you're like a level eight project manager product manager you know like that's my like he's like that's sort of like your skill set right and at the time realistically it was right i i i had other i had this set of skills but fundamentally that's that's what i was and he's just like you know joe you have to decide whether you're going to sit here and you know be full of yourself and decide that you're awesome or if you're going to decide you are now at the case where you can go spend the rest of your life and freaking crush it right is this your first step or your last step step right are you done have you just declared victory and hey everybody look at me i won the race or are you like oh my god i'm only on the first step of the race and then he is the most inspirational person because he sort of had to he shocks you a little bit with the who are you know and then inspires you to greatness right where i remember i was flying back from that trip and i that whole plane ride back i had i was writing a hundred things down that i had to go do right that i was on the i was sure i made sure i was going to be on the first step not on my last step right and so just that kind of great inspirational he was amazing at and other level setting like this was a big one for me was in ninety seven we won e commerce product of the year and ninety seven went spec to botcom it was a big e commerce year i'm like i won the e commerce part that's why we're very successful one of the things and you know ge had used it ge medical had used it in meltz group and literally i met with jack and he's like yeah i hear med doesn't like your product i'm like it freaking won e commerce product of the year and i he literally was like joe i don't care if it comes from heaven above if ge doesn't get an ro roi your product you and your company suck that where's our roi and it was like an eye opener to me where i was literally just a product guy where i was like i delivered a good product and he's like if your customers don't get value nothing matters right and i was just like huh right and it totally reset my whole view of like what a company would have to do and you know if i had to apply it to education now education thinks their job is sort of just to put kids through school ours is to actually have learning right kids have to love school and they have to learn right and when we designed our educational system i think we're the only school in the world who if a kid's not learning it's our fault it's the system's fault it's not the kids right if if our kids aren't learning two x you know in two hours that they're failing it's my fault what did i do wrong how do is my motivational model not right do i need a different guide was the lesson i gave them not the right level was it not a good lesson was i not coaching them the right way but what did i do wrong versus a lot of school systems like huh kids fault right and that can you can draw it sort of back to his resetting me of are they getting value out of what you're doing and i'm like oh it's my responsibility to make sure all the kids learn these days so anyway so yeah i had all those kind of things it was
- [107:30]
Interviewer
it was awesome what a crazy experience at one point you were going to ipo trilogy and you ipo pcorder dot com right yes we did and then you ended up buying it back i want to hear the story about that and then changed your mind about being
- [107:44]
Joe
public with trilogy the pc order story helped me realize i didn't want to be public so pc order was actually one of the trilogy co founders christie you had this idea of okay i'm going to build pc order which was online selling computers online back in dot com days and you know built it up super successful had all the biggest resellers aboard and then she went public and then basically dell put her customer base out of business and so then she her business went terrible and so the stock went from fifty to five or something i can't exactly remembers but down ninety ninety plus percent so it went public you know ran up in all the hype and then imploded and then we bought it back and just you know said okay and you know for me so i've kept trilogy private you know to this day it's still private and a lot of it is just i prefer just to be one hundred percent in control yeah frankly just my my daughters give me t you know marcus lemonis on the prophet if you know that tv show he has i'm one hundred point zero percent in charge that's pretty much my attitude is
- [109:03]
Interviewer
it like that with everything or the things you're completely hand off like are you hands off or completely hands on but nothing in between correct yeah i'm
- [109:11]
Joe
i am i'm in charge or hey i'm the your biggest supporter good luck around it but yeah i don't do well on the five thousand fifty consensus kind of stuff i'm just i push the edge on radical stuff and i'm like i don't want to vote you don't get to vote on this right we're going to do this on a democracy yeah it's not a democracy we're going to do this and if you want to come bored we'll do this like if you want to come and start a school right on time back you're going to do two x in two hours and there's a whole set of people who are like well how about we do one x in one hour because one x is as good as every other school and i'm like well go do that with somebody else's offer you know if you're going to use mine you're all these coaches who are setting up these sports academies they're like well some of the parents don't care i'm like sorry we're going to do it this way we delivering awesome academic outcomes right yeah that's just it's who i am and that's just i don't want to vote around that reminds
- [110:11]
Interviewer
me of something alan mulally said which is like when he was turning around ford he was like here's how we're going to do it and if you don't want to choose to be a part of that that's on you but if you're here this is how we're
- [110:23]
Joe
going to yeah no alignment like we like you know we do the three commitments to the kids your kid will love school they'll learn two x in two hours and then life skills those those those three commitments every kid every kid we have to do that for every kid and if you're in my organization you wake up every day and say i'm going to deliver that and you can never blame the student you can never make an excuse around that and if you don't like that just don't come because that's what we're going to be about right we lose about fifty percent of our educators when we tell them they're accountable for the kid learning journey oh because they're not used to it right and they're like no it's a kid's fault what if he doesn't do this or what about that i'm like yeah our guides are measured on do they deliver the three commitments to every kid every kid right and that's you know it's just really important and you have to have that you know focus now i had one of my public school one of my there was a teacher when i first came in you can imagine there was skepticism you know because i would say crazy stuff there'll be no adults academic teaching in this building you know just if now with hindsight you're like well done works but before that that's crazy talk whether you're a parent or a teacher right it's just it's it's and you know but the set of teachers and parents who stayed you know who were like okay i'm in i was there was one who was you know basically from public school and i was like you know and i'm an evil billionaire you know and so educate every evil billionaire does education all those all those you know appropriate memes and i was like eventually what was it that won you over to stay and be part of it and she was like it was because you're just constant focus that it had to be every kid that we'd come in and we'd be like okay we got ninety percent of the kids there and you're like like let's focus on the ones we want and what do we have to do and what do we have to fix to get that for every single one and that's back to building a system that if we're going to get this out to a billion kids that's the mental that's the model we have to have and that's you know back to being one hundred point zero percent charge that makes it so great is you know if you're going to be on time back and using this system it's going to be every kid what's the biggest
- [112:40]
Interviewer
problem with scaling
- [112:43]
Joe
there's a lot so scaling's hard this is you know this is sort of back to your elon example this is you know building your first prototype is really easy and how do you build the factory that churns it out and so a lot of what i've been doing in the last three years is how do i build the system that's going to allow this to scale and so time backs you know a key element on the academic
- [113:02]
Interviewer
side but that sounds like it would scale pretty easy once you figure out the compute and bring the cost of compute down like totally it's that's part's going to be easy that's easy you could add a billion people to it effectively if you had the compute power for it yes and that wouldn't be
- [113:17]
Joe
exactly so that parts i we've commoditizing how the six hours a day down to a couple got that now let's talk about all the other hard parts let's talk about there's physical and then virtual so on physical schools how do you measure guides and how do you have the metrics so as you open new buildings right new schools that you're sure what happens in all the other schools right so you know we we call them painfully insightful metrics so we we wake you know our our org you know every summer when we're redesigning you know for the next year we sit down and we say what are the painfully insightful metrics that we need to know such that we know that new school we opened that we've never visited it is as good as our austin flagship right and all our guides you know and everybody in the org is like we can't every year they get better like how do i know i don't have a bullying culture you know somewhere right what's the question what's the survey question what's the metric i can collect to know that so obviously on the academic side right we have the best closed loop system in our you know that collects all the data so i know on a daily basis if you're a learner learning yep right and so i have all that but how do i know if my culture is good how do i know if i've hired the right guide what if i have a wrong guide right how do i measure all that so we have the same level of metrics that we do around our school and our system that we do around our academics okay so i know within eight weeks whether my guide's good or not and a lot of this so a lot of it comes from results are they delivering three commitments to all the kids but it's everything also surveys we ask the kids every adult had one or two teachers who transformed their life is your guide that for you right to the parents do you trust your guide to hold high standards so you can provide unconditional love right you know kindergarten like do you love your guide but we ask you know so you just are asking these questions right to to get the data that you need we have quantified all the metrics on the life skills so i know it's not just oh yeah our kids have grit or oh they're good public speakers i'm like no everybody in our class scored ninety five on our eye and every fifth grader beat a wharton mba in teamwork and leadership and so we we quantify everything right so that we and measure it and then can react to it if we have a problem because you do right every guide's not perfect but then can we swap one out
- [115:57]
Interviewer
quickly so part of scaling it sounds like is quickly identifying surfacing problems so they can be addressed while they're small
- [116:06]
Joe
not letting them fast exactly and it's asking the hard question it's easy to ask easy questions right it's why we move the question from do you love school to do you love school more than vacation because do you love school my comparison when you say that to a kid it's like well it's better than my old school my old school sucked yeah right but you're like better than vacation though that's a harder standard your old school if you're comparing to your old school it's too easy better than vacation that's a hard standard as
- [116:30]
Interviewer
a parent i would also feel like i'm not giving my kids a very good vacation if they want to well
- [116:34]
Joe
that's that back to our thing right your kids are with their friends all day doing awesome stuff doing the stuff they love and they're doing the stuff they love that's hard and challenging with a guy who's supporting them right it is hard to beat that is why on saturdays they're like god i wish i could go to school just building all that kind of stuff so so but you're always trying to figure out what is that extra question right like how do we know if the parents really love the school right what is it like will the parent create testimonial videos you know of their school because it's totally crazy right because people are always like you go to that weird school where they don't have teachers and you know all that kind of stuff and so like we went through back to our standard which is we opened all these schools all these new locations i'm like how do i know if they're good well we have six and a half hours of testimonial videos from families who joined the last ten weeks about them saying you know it's only been ten weeks and my kids life's transformed and so you just you're out there trying to figure out what's the hard question to ask you show it public we show all our grades publicly we give all the you know all these testimonies we see everybody around it and that's our control group right for that and then the other parts just core culture right just your core culture of do you believe in delivering the three commitments to every kid and if you don't believe in that don't come and everything's based around it and if you're a guide you have to deliver to your students but if you're on my academic team creating lessons you do too so if a kid is struggling and can't get through your lesson the guy who did the lesson is going to get on a call with them back when i lose fifty percent of them when you have some of these learning science researchers and they realize they have to deal with kids and are
- [118:19]
Interviewer
accountable so much easier on paper exactly
- [118:21]
Joe
and you lose some because they don't want to do it but you build that culture of of you know and back to even growth so like our growth team right because we're expanding you know they wake up every day and the first thing they work the you know we have three concentric circles the first is is there something you need to do to deliver three commitments to every existing child in the school and if there is go do it like if there's a problem at an existing campus and you can fix it don't worry about some new campus go fix it yeah then the second is have we filled every school school that we already have because the number of classmates is an important part of school right and when you start a school it's smaller and then you want to grow it and so the second thing we're doing is we want to make sure for our existing students that we're giving them awesome classmates right and then and only then after you do those first two circles do you say should we open to a new location right and building that culture is hard especially we have we're the most talked about school in the world we have demand you know through the roof we're called from every country secretary of education's down here i got ten governors who you know are coming down everybody wants this model and i'm like high quality at all times right never relent on quality because we have to deliver every kid and we'll get it to everybody so those are our physical school rules right now i'm not going to be able to get to a billion kids next year if i have to build the school schools and so then i get to the second when we talk about virtual how can i you know scale it without that so one way is you know that the the time back software works so we're going to let people build on it right and so anybody who wants to build a school now's the time right if you have an idea of what the afternoon should be right come do it we're hiring a thousand coaches right through texas in texas for texas sports category me for these middle schools right we have you know five hundred gt schools for gifted talented kids i have somebody who's loves montessori so we're going to have a montessori school we have a wilderness school right where if you think the wilderness in the afternoon so there's all these great opportunities for entrepreneurs right who want to go then build schools so we're there's going to be a think of shopify for micro school or for schools right that's what time back is going to be and it's going to explode it and then there's the the pure virtual which is well homeschoolers y right and everybody else that's what my kids want
- [120:43]
Interviewer
they want the two hours on the
- [120:45]
Joe
weekend great well so here's what they're going to get so here's what they're going to get or here's our problem and what we've been working on is you know if ten percent of it is the edtech you know the time back how are you if i let it out of my environment i i no longer can give the kids a time back if i own all six hours hours and i give you four yeah i got the motivation i got the motivation but at home school i don't have that or after school no one wants you know i can't tell you how many my daughters are like no one's go to school after school
- [121:14]
Interviewer
yeah my kids will right you'll make
- [121:17]
Joe
them right but no i need to make them love it more than vacation right not just there's a set of parents will make them for sure well
- [121:23]
Interviewer
i know what will happen they'll start doing it and then they'll be like why do i have to go to
- [121:25]
Joe
school exactly and that's what i want which is so how do we ninety percent's motivation so how do we solve it so we've spent all our time and when we release time back next year the set of motivations for these kids are going to be awesome right
- [121:41]
Interviewer
like give me an example so well
- [121:45]
Joe
let's just take what let's take middle school boys their number one motivation is video games so imagine if you got some of the world's best video game design trainers like the best not your prodigy guys right the best ever who've made the world's best video games and you got one hundred fifty of them in a building and said go build the world's best video game on top of this where the kids are going to play two hours a day and become top one percent right i bet your kids if they're video gamers are going to love to play that right and be super interested in that or let's talk about like an after school for kids who need after school tutoring we just ran this as a test imagine they like kumon if you have some of these students everybody hates it right yeah oh my gosh it's all
- [122:35]
Interviewer
terrible they're in dingy building what if
- [122:37]
Joe
you just went to dave and buster's yeah and then in the dave and buster's like in the little you know birthday rooms or whatever they did their hour with a tutorial and you earned like and you earned your little card and then you went out in the afternoon or what if online after you did that you were able to go into a ten thousand person twitch stream with some of the best video gamers in the world right who's your famous who's the streamers you like right who are the influencers you like so imagine there's influencers right where you're getting social cred based on being able to do this now and if you want as parents what if i allowed you to do one hundred for one hundred so just take our system and you as the parent could put in the money right and all of a sudden the kid gets it right and what if especially when i took that money and i didn't let him spend went into the robin hood for kids account to teach them financial acumen and investing and financial literacy yeah what if it was that right or what if i had an associated life skill project where it funded your trip to new york so that you could go meet the producer for your musical you know or funded your robot war that you were going to do all ideas or just more mundanely what if it was was what manager screen time so every parent struggles with how much screen time well what if there's just the time back that's like guys let me be in charge of your kids screen time because i'll make sure they get to top one percent yeah and if they're top one percent you're going to give them some more screen time yeah totally yeah right and so it's going to manage all that for the parents right and the parents are going to be like oh my god my kids top one percent and they're super happy because they hit this and then oh my god i got some gaming time or i got some tiktok time or whatever it is i was able to control you know those kind of elements so wrapping in all the motivational stuff there's just there's a hundred ways to motivate kids right there's going to be social peer gaming like we have a multi user version where the kids are just competing right think of video games but just you know you're competing on academics and you know the ten of kids who really love academics they love that i mean oh my god those kids you know they just run out of curriculum there's just not enough to teach them like they're just you know they just they blow up blow through the top of
- [125:01]
Interviewer
the charts what does the science say i can imagine this would be controversial
- [125:06]
Joe
about paying kids to learn yeah external extra external and extrinsic motivation versus intrinsic there's a huge debate about it and i believe we'll have the biggest real data set in the world what what are the and so here's there's there's both there's there's there's both sets of papers which is there's a paper that literally that you should you could look up that says there's no such thing as intrinsic motivation because even if you're intrinsically motivated it's because of something yeah you know even a good student they want the accolades of being a good student yeah is there a true love of learning or is there a true love of accomplishment and what's the accomplishment getting you and so you can go read that paper and have a very strong view of of there's no difference between paying kids and boost it's why in sports parents often hold their kid back a year so they're bigger so then they win a little bit and then once they win they get jump started and then they're good and now they like it because they keep getting accolades that they're good at it academics is the same way you just need to jump start them on paying and then like those kids so in our middle school we'll pay any kid one thousand dollars to become top one percent you know so when they transfer in oh my god top one percent is too hard you pay them one thousand dollars they get to top one percent it changes their internal view of themselves that i'm like oh i am a good student then you don't have to pay them anymore and all of a sudden they're going to do it themselves because they change their internal view and so part of all of this stuff is when you talk about extrinsic and intrinsic is if you can change the kid's internal view of the their capabilities it's worth using whatever motivation you can right back to our guides they use whatever lever they need to pull with the kid to break through kids have part of education is kids have blocks about what they can do i'm not a math science girl yeah right and you're like that just doesn't exist there's no like brain chemistry that like i'm i i'm a middle school girl i can't learn about science right you yes you can so i have to so our guides have to break through that and they'll do whatever it takes and if paying them one thousand dollars is it or bringing them out to an event or let them go to an off campus lunch do an off camp oh you guys want to do an off campus lunch you know whatever the currency is social peer pressure oh my god all the other girls are there whatever it is our guides will use to get them there then once they're top one percent right boom right they're there forever our kids at college aren't getting paid they're all four o students right it's just you change kids capability to become self driven learners to do that but but there is a fear of it and there is i'm sure there's a bad way to do it but you know starting in kindergarten our kids earn alphas because our if you want to teach financial literacy which every parent wants you know you earn alphas you learn how to save earn save spend invest and donate and they start that cycle in kindergarten and then move it all the way up and it gets bigger dollars as you get older but you want your kid in seventh grade like if you give them some phantom stock thing to teach them to invest in seventh grade i can tell you that's terrible because one it's not real money they didn't earn it and they're going to yolo it it's like a casino it's not investing it's just gambling right versus wait i just earned this thousand dollars yeah that's mine real money and it was hard and it's mine and i'm going to invest it right now we do let them yolo it and do something stupid and lose all their money yeah but then they've lost real money and it's the best lesson and it's better to learn that in seventh grade than twenty seven years old right and so all those things around it where trying to take out you know one of the things is there's a bunch monor right maria montessori in montessori schools she very much believed that kids should be involved in real world things she actually has things where she's like kids adolescents should earn money right and you know that this having them do work and the value of work and that their work has value is a good thing thing for child development and we find you know i i think if you the best thing you could do is ask alpha parents they're like no this is all really good this isn't we're not poisoning the kids and getting them to be this coin addicted person who if they don't get paid they won't do any learning right instead that's not how it works it's just not how it works i mean and you could get kids on this and it's not like there aren't times where the kid's like okay i'm going to do some extra things because i want something something yeah right and so you know but that's life yeah correct no the the the musical maddie who's doing the musical she wasn't wanting to do the seven hundred ninety she got a seven hundred ninety her math sat she was below it and sorry maddie i just outed you you know she was below it but she wanted she needed money to go fly to new york to meet the producer so she'd get money to do her thing and i was like well what's what what does time back tell you how many hours right it's going to take you to get to seven hundred ninety we were actually trying for eight hundred right and she it was like x and i'm like okay go do it and you'll earn the money and we'll buy your plane ticket up there right to to do it right and so she did and then she got her plane ticket right and it was just and it's just this concept of always work and you know she was happy at like seven hundred and fifty or seven hundred and sixty or whatever it is and then you just move it
- [130:42]
Interviewer
up it's worked but she also knows and learns that she's capable of doing more if she pushes herself puts in
- [130:47]
Joe
extra effort it's just it's effort based do you want to do it and back to just how life is she's like yeah i want this thing and now i have the world's best broadway musical i'm gonna change my world right changing what you know she's gonna go back in college and she's like i'm gonna go you know be arts theater forever and that's why the mask she was like it was enough on her because she's an arts theater girl it
- [131:08]
Interviewer
also sounds like a small enough effort you know like whereas before even with a teacher or guide it's like this ambiguous thing it's huge it's big it's far away i'm not even gonna try because it sounds like well it's two
- [131:21]
Joe
hundred hours yeah right i mean we're twenty hours not two hundred right we're ten times faster and so there's the two parts there are two both things you said were totally correct it was ambiguous so i could just put a bunch of time in and if you don't have an ai tutor you can study for a long time and your sat scores don't go up right and so the first is we're not ambiguous we're like here it is you're seventeen hours away you're four hours away like in our dashboard it literally says you know you're six hours from finishing you know six or six weeks from finishing it if you go do an hour of homework you're like a week away right so it literally can just tell you based on your work how long long you know to get there and when you put the goal setting in it'll tell you you know all of that and so not being ambiguous right and being definitive to the students critical and then the second the numbers are small it's definitive and small yeah right manageable it's super manageable math academy every parent go look at math academy it's going to be like oh twenty eight hours away i want to say they just released like their sat program they've been updating it and i want to say it's one hundred and eighty hours
- [132:30]
Interviewer
we're gonna we're gonna try that this weekend my kids want to explore it
- [132:34]
Joe
well you should you totally look at it but i want to say it's like one hundred eighty hours yeah matt like that's it yeah you know and
- [132:42]
Interviewer
then you're you're it's crazy that's it joe this has been a fascinating conversation we always end with the same question and i think i have an idea of what you're going to say here but but what is success for you
- [132:54]
Joe
that we transform education for one billion kids so that it's nothing like what we had and the the tagline if i had to give my tagline is our job is to make this the best time in history to be a five year old that's incredible that might
- [133:13]
Interviewer
be the best answer ever thank you for taking the time today this was fascinating conversation one that rings true to me so so i really appreciate it
- [133:20]
Joe
i loved it thanks for the time