491: MacKenzie Price—The Most Talked About School in the World

Summary

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

Episode 491: “MacKenzie Price—The Most Talked About School in the World”

Release Date: June 23, 2026
Guest: MacKenzie Price, Founder of Alpha Schools
Host: Mike Rowe

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Mike Rowe sits down with MacKenzie Price, the founder of Alpha Schools, which she dubs “the most talked about school in the world.” Together, they examine the deep-rooted flaws in conventional K–12 education, focusing on how Alpha is upending old models with mastery-based, AI-driven instruction and radically reimagined roles for educators. MacKenzie shares her journey from parental frustration to educational pioneer, details the transformative results her students are experiencing, and discusses how she hopes her ideas might find their way into public schools. The conversation is passionate, peppered with humor, insightful anecdotes, and plenty of healthy skepticism about both disruptive technologies and ingrained tradition.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Problem with Traditional Education

• Industrial Model Inertia: Traditional schooling, born of the Industrial Revolution, hasn’t changed meaningfully in over 200 years—even across countries and income levels.
• One-Size-Fits-All Pitfall: “We’re still putting one teacher in front of 30 kids of wildly different abilities, marching them through material at the same time, at the same pace.” — MacKenzie Price [10:08]
• Learning Gaps & Lost Motivation: With nearly two-thirds of students below grade level in reading and math, foundational gaps mount year after year, turning classrooms into sites of chronic confusion and boredom—the “enemies of education.”
• Teacher Burnout: Teachers are overwhelmed, underpaid, and asked to fix an impossible mismatch between curriculum and student needs.

2. The Alpha School Model

Core Principles

• Kids Should Love School: Engagement is key—students should want to be at school, even preferring it to vacation.
• Accelerated, Personalized Academics: AI tutors assess and teach each student at their unique pace and level, working toward mastery, not arbitrary time-based progression.
• Teachers as Guides: In-person adult “guides” focus on motivation, emotional support, connection, and mentoring, not delivering content.
• Time Efficiency: “Kids can learn twice as much in only two hours a day.” — MacKenzie Price [28:32]
• Afternoons for Real-World Learning: With core academics done by lunch, afternoons are devoted to physical activity, projects, entrepreneurship, team-building, and life skills.

Structure & Results

• Classroom Setup: Students of different levels work side by side, each advancing at their own pace using computers and headphones, monitored and encouraged by guides.
• Mastery-Based Progress: No student moves on without demonstrating conceptual mastery (not just test passing).
• Across the Spectrum: Kids excelling or behind both show >80th percentile growth; the model “raises the floor and blows the ceiling off what’s possible.” [30:39]
• Motivation Over Measurement: Reports sent to parents are “a report card on us, not your child.” If a child’s not engaged and achieving, it’s the school’s responsibility to adapt and motivate.
• Extrinsic & Intrinsic Motivation: Kids can earn “alphas” (school currency) for meeting learning goals, redeemable for a curated in-school marketplace of prizes. “First you use extrinsic motivation to get them in the game, but the longer-term goal is to build intrinsic drive.” — MacKenzie Price [65:16]
• Financial Literacy & Entrepreneurship: Earning, investing, saving, borrowing, and real-world economic lessons are baked into the culture.

3. Transformational Examples & Memorable Moments

• Failure as Fuel: “Failure is fuel. We'll get 'em next time.” — MacKenzie Price, recounting a 7-year-old who lost at board games but internalized growth mindset [84:06]
• Escape Room Positivity Scores: Students are coached in collaboration and leadership; group exercises are recorded and measured for “uplifting” language (target: 80% positive) [68:22]
• Dream Launcher & Ikigai: Kids chart what they love, what they’re good at, what the world needs, and how they spend their time—leading to personalized deep-dives and career exploration.
• Real-Life Projects: Students create podcasts, launch businesses, build go-karts, train with Navy SEALs, and even sail boats to the Bahamas, connecting academics to tangible achievement [72:18, 75:49].
• Guide Salaries: Guides start at a minimum of $100,000/year to reflect the importance of their new motivational/mentoring role [63:16].

4. Addressing Common Concerns and Criticisms

• Screen Time & Human Connection: The school day is a blend of digital and face-to-face interactions, with abundant community-building and collaboration in both academic and project activities.
• Private School Exclusivity:
  • Tuition at Alpha’s flagship schools runs $40,000–$75,000 a year, but MacKenzie notes that with school choice programs (e.g., Texas Sports Academy), many students now access the program for free.
  • “Three times as many students will pay no tuition this fall as pay full tuition. We want to scale in the same way Tesla did: start high-end, refine, then democratize.” — MacKenzie Price [98:00]
• Skepticism Around Technology: Mike voices concerns about AI “unleashed kraken”-style, and MacKenzie responds, drawing analogies to calculators, writing, and other inventions initially greeted with alarm but eventually embraced. [43:23]
• Motivation & Socialization: Alpha emphasizes cultivating motivation even in the disengaged and sees peer-driven culture as a key force for positive behavior.

5. Socratic, Apprenticeship, and Humanities Traditions

• Mentorship: The historical gold standard of education—one-to-one mentorship, Socratic dialogue, and apprenticeship—is recaptured via personalized AI coupled with dedicated guides.
• Humanities Still Matter: Reading, writing, arithmetic remain core, but are supplemented with “the C’s”: creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and character [55:12].

6. Path to the Future: Mainstreaming the Model

• Scaling to Public Schools:
  • MacKenzie foresees Alpha’s model being available in more and more public districts, not just elite private settings—where innovative superintendents opt in.
  • Education Savings Accounts and state-level school choice policies are pivotal for wider access.
  • “In 10–15 years, parents will still want to drop off their kids with caring adults and pick up smarter, happier kids at the end of the day. The delivery will look different.” [111:29]
• Higher Ed & Lifelong Learning: Disrupting college as well, Alpha is piloting intensive AI-first programs for undergrads and adults, focused on acquiring 10X the value in condensed time frames [105:58].
• Outcome: Lifelong learners, creators, contributors—not just consumers.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

“The time has come to at least consider the possibility that everything you know about education is...not wrong, but subject to review.”
— Mike Rowe [00:55]

“I questioned [school] during my own experience...I watched my daughters embark on that same journey, and that's when the alarm bells went off.”
— MacKenzie Price [11:45]

“Less than a third of students are reading or doing math at grade level. How is that teacher supposed to catch these kids up while teaching 5th grade material?”
— MacKenzie Price [13:18]

“If [the traditional education] model worked, then it would be awesome. But it’s just not.”
— MacKenzie Price [46:17]

“Our school reports are not a report card on your child. They’re a report card on us.”
— MacKenzie Price [37:41]

“We’re creating self-driven learners who are developing the skill of learning how to learn...and the sky’s the limit on what they can do.”
— MacKenzie Price [31:59]

“Failure is fuel.”
— MacKenzie Price relaying a student, [84:06]

“All good ideas come in the way you’re coming into the market. It’s not cheap. To get it in every classroom, to get it in every kitchen, you know, that’s the trick...You start elite, refine, then democratize.”
— Mike Rowe [109:06]

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Content Highlight | |------------|---------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:03–01:27| Mike’s introduction: traditional school problems & Alpha intro| | 08:26–15:37| MacKenzie’s critique of current educational system | | 27:11–32:59| Overview of Alpha’s AI-based “two hours a day” model | | 35:05–41:19| Retention, mastery, and financial literacy/empowerment | | 41:42–56:17| Socialization, motivation, new ways to teach, and the "4 Cs" | | 57:23–78:14| Mastery, project-based/real-world learning, exemplars | | 78:15–83:59| Results data, access, public school scaling | | 84:06–94:29| Character and virtue education; vulnerability & feedback | | 98:00–104:45| Cost, scalability, public school prospects, government interest| | 105:56–111:29| Higher education impact and future scalability | | 112:49–114:30| Closing remarks; resources for parents and educators |

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Conclusion & Resources

MacKenzie and Mike wrap up with pragmatic optimism: while the traditional “teaching to the average” model is failing, real change is possible—now, not just through private innovation, but increasingly via public and open-access routes.

• Learn more:
  • futureofeducation.org — Free resources for families and schools
  • Alpha Schools Official Site
  • Follow MacKenzie: Instagram, X (Twitter: @MacKenziePrice), Substack

The episode leaves listeners with a sense that educational transformation is not only urgent and achievable, but already underway—perhaps coming soon to a school near you.

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Transcript

[Mike Rowe]

Hey, guys. It's the way I heard it. I'm Mike Rowe, and the title of this episode is not let's get Educated, even though it should be. I know. Yeah. I mean, there's still time to change it, but I don't think so. I don't think so either. We're gonna call it the most talked about school in the world. My guest is MacKenzie Price, who I know through an organization called Stand Together. And. And what MacKenzie has done is built a series of schools over the last decade or so. They're called Alpha Schools. And, you know, I don't know if we actually said this in the conversation, but what I was left with. And this is an amazing talk, by the way, if you've got kids or if you were one. Yeah. Once upon a time. Or if you know any. Yeah. Or if you've ever been to a school or driven by one. The time has come to at least consider the possibility that everything you know about education is. I won't say wrong, but subject to review. I would have gone with entirely wrong, but. Well, see, that's the problem, Chuck. As broken as our public schools are, you and I are still products of them. And we're sentient. We're functioning. I think they're different. I think they change because when we were kids, I remember, like, giant kids who were in a grade that you thought, you should have a job by now.

[MacKenzie Price]

Dude.

[Mike Rowe]

And you're, you know, you're in the ninth grade. What is happening? Yes, there was a time when if you failed, the consequences were not moving forward. Right. You were left behind. But then there was no child left behind, and they took it quite literally. And so the results today, as many of you know, are just some of the most dismal test scores imaginable. We've got giant cohorts of high school graduates who can't do basic math and who struggle with basic literacy. And if it's not a national scandal, it ought to be. And as we wait for the scandal to unfold. Well, not everybody is waiting. You know, we featured a couple people on this podcast who have really taken it upon themselves to find a better way to educate our kids. And mackenzie is one of those people. But she now has a tool at her disposal that really nobody's ever had before, and that's essentially an AI tutor. And so for me, what really came out of this is that the greatest form of education that ever existed was Socrates and Aristotle. You know, and the way that Alexander learned how to be Alexander the. The great who went on to conquer the world. That was a mentorship program. It's the opposite of a cookie cutter approach. It's the opposite of a teacher presenting a lecture to a room full of kids. And my guest today believes that AI can fundamentally replace the Plato and Socratic method and be a proxy for that. And. And the data is crazy. Oh, yeah. I mean, they're finding that a two hour lesson with a guide and an AI approach that is bespoke to the kid in question is just so exponentially more effective than what we're doing now. Yes, the students in her school, according to the stats, perform in the top 2% nationwide and learn to two times faster. Yeah, which begs the question, what do you do with all that spare time? And we will spend a fair amount of time talking about that because these kids at these Alpha schools are engaged in ways that I think at one point I say it sounds like the Boy Scouts. It sounds like the merit badge program. So many different ways. It's not just athletics or speech or school plays. It's everything you can imagine. The engagement levels are off the charts. And look, it's pretty unique right now. I mean, there's a very small percentage of people who are going to these schools, but the schools are growing rapidly. And at the very end of the conversation, she just casually mentions that Alpha is the most talked about school in the world. And according to the very AI with which we've been focused on it is with which we've been focused on. What a great example of a sentence fragment that is the product of a public education. Folks, we can do better than this, but I doubt you'll hear a more passionate conversation anytime soon. MacKenzie's on a mission. Totally. It's the way she heard it, it's the way I heard it, and hopefully in mere moments, it'll be the way you listen to it. Mackenzie Price, right after this. I hate to say I told you so, but do you remember last year when I started telling people that PureTalk was the best wireless company that I'd ever used? Well, some people were skeptical. And that's fine. People should be skeptical. People should do their homework. But I thought it might be worth mentioning that Consumer reports just asked 120,000 people to rate at every wireless company in America, including the big boys. Well, guess what company was the only company to get five stars in every category? Yeah, Pure Talk coverage, support, value and data. Five stars across the board. No service contracts, no cancellation fees. Just great US customer service on a crazy fast 5G network for a fraction of what You've been paying the big boys. I'm not gonna say I told you so. And I'm not gonna say take it from me because you don't have to take it from me anymore. Take it from Consumer Reports. If you want five star value, five star service, five star coverage and five star data, then you want the only wireless company in America with five stars across the board. And that would be PureTalk. Switch today. PureTalk.com RO that's PureTalk.com ROE Yes. I'm sorry, I can't help it. I told you so. We rolling? Yep. Fantastic. Look at this. Look at you. Look at all this press, man.

[MacKenzie Price]

It's crazy, man. I'm out there.

[Mike Rowe]

What is? Like, when did this happen? When? I mean, everywhere I look now people want to. They want a piece of mackenzie change in education.

[MacKenzie Price]

One kid at a time. That's what we're trying to do.

[Mike Rowe]

This journey began over a decade ago. I'm reading from. What do you guys call this? Like a leaf behind.

[MacKenzie Price]

What do they call it? It's like a press kit, some sort of a press package that tells you a little bit about who I am, I guess. You guys look at that and decide, do we actually want to talk to this lady?

[Mike Rowe]

I did not look at this.

[MacKenzie Price]

Okay, well, someone on your team probably did.

[Mike Rowe]

Unlikely.

[MacKenzie Price]

And we do. But I will tell you, I think I'm more interesting than a piece of paper. There you go.

[Mike Rowe]

I have it right there as well know. Oh, you do? Oh, look at that. Okay, that's page one. I didn't print that up because it had autograph, basically. Wait a minute, is that how you spell your name? Yeah, we got it right. The first and the last name.

[MacKenzie Price]

That's it.

[Mike Rowe]

Good.

[MacKenzie Price]

That's my name.

[Mike Rowe]

For the record, it's mackenzie Price. All she's doing is changing education as we understand it in the free world. I have so many questions for you. Full disclosure, no, I didn't see you interviewed on any of these things. I first heard your name from friends at Stand Together.

[MacKenzie Price]

Oh, wonderful. I love those guys. And they were like so much great stuff.

[Mike Rowe]

They connected me last year with an organization called Vela.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yes, I've heard of them.

[Mike Rowe]

And I thought this whole notion, you know, they're all about bottom up solutions in lots of different categories. And I just can't imagine a category more in need of a bottom up solution than education. So I sniffed around, saw what you were doing, saw you interviewed in various places. And I listened to a guy called, I think Joe, who must be your principal. He Was fabulous.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah, he's pretty great.

[Mike Rowe]

So before we talk about how you're fixing it, what's busted and how bad

[MacKenzie Price]

is it, how long do you have? Mike?

[Mike Rowe]

This is how long do you have? I mean, honestly, this tape's cheap and Chuck's asleep already, so. Wait, what? Sorry, are we talking to me? We got all the time you need.

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, so I think education is such an interesting area for a couple reasons. First of all, everybody has their own personal experience with education, right? We all grew up in it. And really we all grew up in a relatively similar situation. So I think you and I could probably say we went to, you know, a school. I actually went to kind of a, a one room schoolhouse for a little bit my early days. Yeah, public school, because I was, was born in North Dakota, lived out in the country and then went to like a little farm school, you know, country school. I actually rode my horse to school and then during recess we would ride horse and it was, that was awesome. We should bring that, that component totally back into schools. But here's the story with that. I was one of those kids who was really good at school growing up. Were you good at school?

[Mike Rowe]

I was clever, I was facile. I think I didn't really like the structure, but I, I adapted.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah, I was good at it. I knew how to get the grades, I knew how to do that. But I hated school growing up. And I was always that kid who would raise my hand and be like, sorry, why do I need to know this? Like how does this apply? What do I do? I would sometimes get in trouble with my teachers for being a little too smart back to them in terms of just like that questioning. And they didn't like that. And I think what I noticed is what I think is a bigger issue in education, which is this one size fits all teacher leading a group of kids who are all at wildly different levels through material in a time based system. And that system was born out of the industrial revolution.

[Mike Rowe]

So Todd Rose talks about this.

[MacKenzie Price]

Todd is such a smart, smart dude. He understands it. And it's, it's really not that hard to understand the benefits that came out of that system when it was started, you know, 200 years ago that they needed to raise compliant, obedient, rule following workers who would follow rules, do as they're told. And that system was really helpful for educating the masses because prior to that education was for the elite, what every

[Mike Rowe]

parent dreams of for their kid. Right. A subservient, one dimensional prone.

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, but yes. However, I'm Going to compliment a little bit of it. Kids were learning basic reading and writing and math skills. Right? They were doing that. But what's interesting is in the last 200 years, nothing has really changed in that model. It's the one place where we haven't seen a difference. And if you go to a rural school in India or you go to some high end private boarding school in Connecticut, you're gonna see basically the same thing, which is a teacher leading a group of kids that are all about the same age through material at the same pace. Building might be nicer in one versus the other, but it's that model. And that model is something that I as a kid, notice myself as a problem. And we're seeing it as a big issue. Not now. Not to mention the fact that it's not preparing kids for this new world we're in. It's not even doing a good job of teaching the academics that it used to do better at. And that has become something that is so apparent that more and more families are realizing, like, okay, school needs to change. And it's the one place that has been so resistant to change.

[Mike Rowe]

Why?

[MacKenzie Price]

I think that first of all, we have this feeling of, well, hey, I. I grew up in it and I turned out fine. This is just something you do. And another attitude that people have around school is that school is like spinach. It's good for you. You may or may not like it, but that's just the way it is. You're just going to spend your time. And for me, I questioned that during my experience growing up. And then when I became a mom and watched my own two girls embark on that journey, it's where the alarm bells started going off and like, is this really. Is this really what we need to expect?

[Mike Rowe]

Well, the other thing Todd wrote about, I mean, he talks a lot about the impact of the industrial model on the academic model. Everything from bells ringing to just all the rigor you would expect to find on an assembly line somehow got pulled into the way we teach kids. Crazy. He also talks about the end of average and this idea that the average thing becomes the target, but average doesn't really exist. And so in your example, if there's a teacher in front of 30 kids, a percentage of them are confused because they're not getting it. And another percentage are probably bored because they already understand it. And I can't imagine a bigger enemy of education than boredom or confusion, which

[MacKenzie Price]

are both primary characteristics of our traditional education system right now.

[Mike Rowe]

Because who's left in the way of A student in that 30 student example who actually is just sitting there like getting it. I don't know that anybody really is.

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, and yeah, it used to be more than it is now. And if you look at our country, less than a third of students are reading or doing math at grade level. So you think about that fifth grade teacher who is expected to teach fifth grade math curriculum. And she's got 2/3 of her students who are behind grade level. She's got some kids who are sitting there bored stiff because they could be doing more, and a very small percentage of kids that are at that curriculum. How in the world is that teacher supposed to go in and catch these kids up while teaching fifth grade material when it's like, and by the way, you've got nine months to do it, 180 days. That's what it is. And so I think that's part of the reason we're seeing so much trouble in the teaching industry. Teachers are leaving the field in droves. It's hard to attract good talent to come in because they have been put in this model that is such an uphill battle. It's impossible. So we see burnt out teachers and of course our answer to that is, let's make sure we also pay you very little amounts of money. And so it's just a, it's a broken system and it's not doing the service that we need. And of course, it's only gotten worse since COVID happened because everybody talked about, we're going to have a Covid catch up, get kids back in school and they'll catch up. And then, and the problem is, if you're a student who has missed fundamental knowledge in first, second, third, fourth grade, you can't go do the more sophisticated concepts. The worst time to be learning your multiplication tables is when you're trying to understand algebra. And so when you think about education, it is very much this. Think of a Jenga tower, right? Your building blocks, Kindergarten, first addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, doing more on that. You can see where my math skills end. I can't go beyond division on this. But you, you look at that and then you realize, okay, when kids miss certain foundational pieces, you're building a Jenga tower that's got holes in it. And at some point that's when you're going to see people fall off this cliff and they don't learn. And I'll tell you what, you're going

[Mike Rowe]

to see the whole tower come down.

[MacKenzie Price]

The whole tower comes down. And on top of that, that's where you also see just more and more disengagement people there and go, what is the point of this? I'm literally not learning anything. I am confused or bored. And add to it a whole other side of it, which is how is this applying to what I might go out and do in the working world?

[Mike Rowe]

So all that tracks, what is my

[MacKenzie Price]

future going to look like?

[Mike Rowe]

All that tracks for me. Like, I mean, how else would you realize the system was broken unless you were self aware enough to test and watch and observe and then ultimately conclude we've done all those things, but we're still doing it. We're not only still doing the same thing, the same way that's been demonstrably proven to leave the majority of kids behind. We're, we're just doubling and tripling down.

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, you think of the trillions of dollars that have just been put down the drain. And the challenge is that everyone thinks, okay, the thing to teach us, we got to do better teacher training, lower student teacher ratios, do that. But what all of that is, it's like trying to put lipstick on a pig. Right? You can't change the fundamental issue, which is that this one person teaching to many same size fits all, it doesn't work. And we've actually known for 40 years, researchers have done studies to understand that kids can learn 2, 5, 10 times faster if they're put in a one to one mastery based tutoring experience. Right. If you and I were sitting here and you were able to teach me math at exactly the level and pace that I needed and when I had a question, I could say wait, Mike, I don't understand this part. And you could either say let's go over it this way or you know what, let's go revisit a concept that will help you understand this new concept better.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, isn't that how we got, Isn't that how we got Alexander the Great?

[MacKenzie Price]

Absolutely.

[Mike Rowe]

I mean, wasn't it Plato and Socrates and Aristotle?

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah, to Alexander the Great. And you know, people were doing amazing things. The other thing that's kind of interesting about that example with Alexander the Great is young people were doing big things back in the day. And today's society a of people lot, I think we so underrate what young people are capable of and as a result we treat them like they're kind of in prisons at school. It's like you don't have permission to go to the bathroom, you've got assigned seats at lunch, you've got protection around what kind of recess you can do what activities? And that's the kind of thing that's

[Mike Rowe]

just like, I mean, never mind learning. The system is designed to make you conform to the system itself. And I guess the devil's advocate would argue, well, look, the alternative is chaos. You've got 30 kids in a room. You just can't have them getting up and leave whenever they feel like it. And, you know, raising hands, maybe that becomes a doorway to manners. You know, I mean, it's not like it's completely nuts. It's just that it's all been weighed and measured and found wanting.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah. Now, there are still fierce defenders of this model, but I will tell you, I wasn't one of them. I realized there's got to be something different. And that really hit home for me when I was watching my kids go through the experience.

[Mike Rowe]

You know, I'm going to say too personally, when I think about the Aristotelian or the Socratic method of teaching and learning. Like, there is a corollary in modern times. It's called the apprenticeship model. It's not like we lost it. We just took it out of the kind of learning that you're describing that typically takes place in public schools. And maybe, I mean, we kind of brought it on ourselves. We took shop class out of high school, which was really like, that's the gateway to an apprenticeship model. You know, Dumb. What would you say a majority of employers consider to be the most important quality in a new hire experience? A long list of compelling references? Basic hygiene, maybe? No. According to cnbc, it's enthusiasm. Enthusiasm for the job is the single most important factor among hiring managers when evaluating someone for a new role. Which begs the obvious question, if you're hiring, how can you preemptively identify those candidates who are genuinely enthused about the opportunity at hand from those who are just kind of, eh, meh. The answer is ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that quickly lets you see the most interested, enthused, qualified candidates first, so you meet the right people faster. And when it comes to hiring these days, speed really is everything. That's why ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. And because their matching technology connects you with enthused, qualified candidates instantly and allows those candidates, in their own words, to make a case for themselves and tell you why they're interested in your job. It's also why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get an enthusiastic candidate within the first day. Again, try them for free at ziprecruiter.com ro that's ziprecruiter.com ro the smartest way to hire.

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, and it's also, you know, school should be a place that helps unlock your potential and helps you find that intersection between your passions and your talents. Like, what are you good at? What do you love to do? And what does the world need? And there are so many different ways that we need to get young people out there in the world trying things instead of saying, you know what, maybe you'll be interested in this when you graduate college, have a bunch of debt that comes out of it, and, and finally get your first job to then realize, oh, I don't like this job, I don't like what I'm doing. And I think so much of what we've thought about when we're kind of reimagining what education can look like is trying to get better answers to those challenges and give kids that time to go get their hands dirty, try something, fail. I mean, how great is failure as a lesson for people? And when you think about this, you said you were a pretty agile student growing up. I was a great student growing up. And I will tell you that the relationship I had with failure was stay away from anything that might hurt my gpa, right? That might hurt my ability to have this facade of like I'm a good, smart, talented student who should be able to get into Stanford University. And that's the exact opposite thing. We want. We want kids to have opportunities to go out and try things, see what again they're good at and take that experience with them. And failure is a huge part of it.

[Mike Rowe]

And the school itself, it just seems, it's so schools get all the press, you know, when we talk about the Ivy League, when we talk about Harvard, Westlake, when we talk about these premier schools, it just seems like the real rock stars are the teachers. Like I remember three or four teachers who affirmatively changed my life had nothing to do with the school that they happened to be teaching in or that I happened to be attending. Again, back to the human hands on model.

[MacKenzie Price]

And I would even go further. And this is a question we ask our students. We say every adult would say they have one or two teachers. It sounds like you had three or four. We say one or two teachers that change their life is your guide who's the equivalent of a teacher in our school system, that person for you. And I think that's something that is so important. But I'm going to challenge you a Little bit about this, too. Think of how many teachers you had throughout your. Your school career.

[Mike Rowe]

Sure.

[MacKenzie Price]

And that you say, okay, three or four made a difference for me. My fifth grade teacher was awesome. My business teacher in high school was great. But I'll tell you what I liked about them most. It wasn't how they taught business to me. Right. It was the way they made me feel connected. And they were. They had enthusiasm and engagement, and that's what I think matters. And it's part of what we've taken the magical parts of the education model, which is, first of all, socialization in terms of having your friends around and adults that now have time to actually connect and mentor and focus on motivation, which, unfortunately, teachers in our traditional system, they just don't have that time.

[Mike Rowe]

I had an English teacher who said something that was so impactful to me. I got an A minus on a paper that I had written. And she told me later that it's the highest grade she ever gave. She doesn't give A's. She only. A minus is the highest grade. She get.

[MacKenzie Price]

Amazing.

[Mike Rowe]

And she had a whole thesis for that. But her only comment at the bottom was she said, mike, you have a big decision to make. Dan Rather had a career that you could maybe have, and so did J.D. salinger.

[MacKenzie Price]

Wow.

[Mike Rowe]

And I wasn't super familiar with either of these, you know, and you couldn't

[MacKenzie Price]

Google them at that time. You had to go hit the Dewey

[Mike Rowe]

decimal system to go to the library. I had to go to the library. And I realized it was such an extraordinary compliment to get as a. As a senior. And it certainly wasn't anything to do in, you know, the compendium or the curricula or. I mean, that's just a. Such a bespoke thing to say. And it really impacted. Yeah.

[MacKenzie Price]

She showed. She believed in you. She said, you are capable of greatness.

[Mike Rowe]

She believed in a version of me that didn't exist.

[MacKenzie Price]

Right. But she was like, there is something here. And that's what, you know, adults, when they are freed up to really make that positive impact that I think everyone who gets into education wants to do, they just need to be put in a situation where they can have that time to really get to know their students. And do you know Carol Dweck? She's a professor at Stanford University. She's all around growth mindset and grit. She teaches those things.

[Mike Rowe]

Yes.

[MacKenzie Price]

Grit. Yeah. And she does a lot of stuff around growth mindset. And she was working on trying to figure out how we could help improve outcomes in algebra classes. And here's the story she told that was so interesting. She wrote a script that the teacher would state on the first day of class and then about halfway through the semester and, and it was basically real short. It's like a minute and a half long. I believe that you're all here in this class because you're capable of being algebra superstars. And you know, you're going to be able to put in the work and we're going to work together to make sure that you understand this material. And if you're ever struggling, come into my office hours and we will walk through and go through this because I believe you are capable and you can do it. And so what she found was the teachers who read these scripts during this semester, their kids reports and results were way higher than teachers who didn't. Here's the biggest problem she had. She couldn't get the teachers to read the scripts. And I looked at her, I'm like, what do you mean? And she said, yeah, they're like a minute and a half long twice in a semester. Can you guess why teachers weren't reading the scripts? I gave you a hint in that story.

[Mike Rowe]

Because they're illiterate.

[MacKenzie Price]

No. You know why? Because one of the pieces in that script was coming come to my office hours and teachers don't have time. They are so overburdened that they were like, oh my gosh, if I tell my kids, like, come to my office hours, I might get to, you know, I don't have time to do that. I don't even have office hours. I was on Twitter yesterday and there was a teacher talking about we don't have scheduled bathroom breaks. Like, we can't do this. And you think about how hard this system has been built to actually produce, you know, excellent results. And I would argue that even those kids who do succeed in the system, and I would be an example of one of them, I still think most often they're just learning how to play the game, how to check the boxes, how to do the thing, and puts them on sort of this path of just go grab the next carrot, you know, versus really use school to help develop. Who are you going to be as a person and what are the skills that are going to take you out in life?

[Mike Rowe]

All right, we could spend hours talking about what's broken.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yes. Yeah, it's way more fun to talk about what works.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. I mean, but it's also shocking. So the results you're seeing in your own words, go ahead and tell me how you want me to process it, because it's a lot. But you've.

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, let me tell you first what it is, because I think people are always wondering. They hear something about the AI school and they think this robot, dystopian human void environment and kids isolated, you know, locked in computers and couldn't be further from the truth. What we have done is we have really reimagined what school can be around a few fundamental concepts. First, kids should love school. And when I say love school, we even ask, like, would you rather go to school or go on vacation? Would you have ever gone to school over vacation, Mike?

[Mike Rowe]

Um, as a rule, no.

[MacKenzie Price]

As a rule, no.

[Mike Rowe]

But every once in a while, there were times.

[MacKenzie Price]

Okay.

[Mike Rowe]

Chuck and I went to the same high school.

[MacKenzie Price]

You did.

[Mike Rowe]

Wow.

[MacKenzie Price]

Longtime friends.

[Mike Rowe]

We had a music teacher who made it great. I mean, it was really, really fun. And he was. But he's an outlier. You know, he was Mr. Holland and every day was Mr. Holland's opus. Right?

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

And so when we were engaged in projects or plays or whatever. Yeah.

[MacKenzie Price]

You like going there?

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, yeah, that's great.

[MacKenzie Price]

I love that. Then, you know, God bless that teacher. Love those people who are able to do that. I will tell you, I was so glad when I graduated, and I literally tipped my head and said, there is no more school in my future. Like, I'm done. But we think that school should be a place that kids love being at. Because when kids love school, we enable them to go do hard things. They'll take on challenges. It doesn't mean every day is Disneyland at school. Sometimes kids will struggle, they'll fail, maybe even cry on their road to success. But when you have this kind of fire in the belly engagement where kids are excited to be there, that's super important. Now what do we do in that day to make kids love school so much? Kind of. Our second commitment is kids can learn twice as much in only two hours a day. And this is kind of the magic difference. We do not use academic teachers. Teachers to teach academics. So we're not doing a six hour school day, 45 minutes of math. Then you go to science. Instead, we are using an AI tutor to do a few things. Number one, very precisely and accurately, measure and assess what a kid knows and what they don't know. And then create the lesson plan that puts them in the exact level and pace in that subject that is right for them.

[Mike Rowe]

So I'm still in a room with 20 other kids.

[MacKenzie Price]

You're still in a room. You're hanging out with your buddy, sitting Next to you and, and what's cool is you can literally see two kids sitting right next to each other. One 7 year old is working on algebra while the kid right next to him, same age, is doing his addition and subtraction tables.

[Mike Rowe]

Are they on a screen? Are they got a phone?

[MacKenzie Price]

They are on computers. Yeah, some kids are on headphones. One of the things that's great about this way of learning is you can have kids learn with auditory, visual support. They can be watching videos, they can be reading, they can be engaging in this stuff. And that's the key right there is what this AI tool has enabled us to do is put kids into these adaptive app learning experiences where it's hitting them at exactly that right level that keeps them engaged, not too hard, where they kind of turn off and get overwhelmed and not too easy, where they're just sort of like do, do, do, going through the motions. And what we're finding is that these students are able to not just complete academics in two hours a day, but, but crush their academics. So Our classes top 1% across all grade levels, all subjects. And one of the things that's really interesting about these results is we don't select students based on they already have to be great, right? We'll take kids from wherever they are because we can meet them at their needs. So we can take a kid who shows up to us in the 95th percentile and we can have them growing at rates in the 80s and 90s, which by the way is up unheard of in a regular school that a kid who's already really excelling is excelling even more. Usually they're told to like chill out, you know, like you're, you're learning well. But we can also take that kid who comes to us in the 15th percentile and we can show them with growth rates in the 80s and 90s. So what AI has enabled us to do is raise the floor for the kids that need help and just blow the ceiling off of what's possible. And we're doing all of that in that two hour period now in the same classroom, in the same classroom, kids

[Mike Rowe]

are like, wait a minute, so what happens to gifted and talented?

[MacKenzie Price]

They're hanging out right next to the kid who needs some extra, you know, extra help.

[Mike Rowe]

And that's not a, that's not a, doesn't pose a social.

[MacKenzie Price]

No. And actually this is the best part about it. Every kid is working at their own pace. So there's not this competition or this feeling of like, gosh, I'm dumb Because I don't understand what the teacher teacher's saying. But my friend here is already finished with the test, you know, in five minutes everybody's put on there. And fundamentally that's what we're doing. We're creating self driven learners who are developing the skill of learning how to learn. And they're very proactively finally in the driver's seat where they sit down and say, okay, these are the goals that I have for my academics each day. Here's how I'm doing against those goals versus sitting in a traditional classroom with where you go into your seat and you sit back and you go, all right, I'm here for 45 minutes. I'm just gonna listen to what comes through.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, let's just get through this.

[MacKenzie Price]

And by the way, once we get through it, I may never see that material again because it's over, it's done. Whereas for us, we're teaching in this mastery experience where kids don't move on until they've mastered the material. And that's what makes such a difference.

[Mike Rowe]

Hey, if you were a fan of returning the favorite or people, you should know you need to be listening to a podcast called an army of Normal Folks because you will love it. This is done by my old friend Bill Courtney, famous football coach and the subject of a documentary called Undefeated. The doc told the story of Bill's impact on the football team at a very poor school in a very poor part of Tennessee. I think it was. You should watch it, it is terrific. Anyway, Bill is hosting an army of Normal Folks, a podcast that shines a light on the people that I used to call Bloody Do Gooders. Just the normal everyday people who take it upon themselves to go on a mission to do something to make their zip code a better place. Usually with some kind of bottom up solution. Bill calls these bloody do gooders his army of normal folks. And every week he shares one of their stories. These are just regular people who are genuinely moving the needle in a surprising way on any number of issues. He's done over 150 episodes, all of which prove the power of what can happen when regular like minded people decide to attack a problem from the bottom up. The stories are all true. They're inspirational, empowering, some are funny, most are poignant. But they're all guaranteed to leave you feeling hopeful about the future and about our species. Listen and subscribe to an army of Normal Folks on Apple, Spotify, Iheart, or just go over to normalfolks.org, it's a great and this is a terrific podcast. You'll love it. But be advised, listening to Bill and his guests has been known to inspire in his many listeners an overpowering desire to make a difference in their own communities. It could happen to you too. So heads up. Listen and subscribe to an army of normal folks wherever you listen to podcasts. Yeah, I'm super interested in retention and memory and the way sometimes you would think six hours of intensive focus and work would lead to a stickiness. Right. That might be a little more profound.

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, except six hours of intensiveness and focus too much. That's not what's happening in schools. Right. Think about your 45 minute math class that you used to sit in. Well, first of all, there's 10 minutes of getting your books out and sit down and teachers saying, oh, get over here, and hey, did you turn your homework in? And there's a few minutes to kind of clean up at the end. And then during this time, again, the level of information you're getting may not meet you where you need to be. And so we have this mistaken kind of memory of what school is and it's just not happening at that level. Whereas what we're able to do is take all these learning science principles, everything from, again, mastery based learning, the one to one go at your pace, as well as, like split space repetition, which is that whole thing of you study a concept and then you revisit it again, you see it later, you don't miss it two months from now, if you're learning a new concept and we realize, okay, you're struggling with this concept, you know, why you got to go back and fill some holes from third or fourth or fifth grade. And that is something that is, that is so easy to do with technology.

[Mike Rowe]

So what's the Cohort? Is it K12?

[MacKenzie Price]

So we have, yeah, our youngest students are four and our oldest are seniors in high school. And we're seeing that this is working across the board. You know, we are able to make this work. Now, I want to just make one thing super clear. It is not our ed tech that is making this work. There is a huge graveyard of failed ed tech, you know, experiences that have not proven to be that holy grail answer in schools.

[Mike Rowe]

Educational technology.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah, educational technology. That does not work. Here's the secret for why this works. Two things we have focused on giving kids their most valuable resource, which is time, time back to go do the things that they love in the afternoons, which is what they get to do at our schools. Starting after lunch. They're Doing project based group workshops, they're doing physical activity, they're doing passion projects, all those kinds of things. That's one of the things. But number two, we are focusing on the motivation issue, the motivation challenge. And the way we're able to do that is because we have transformed the role of the teacher in the classroom. Instead of having to spend their time planning lessons and delivering lectures and grading homework and trying to figure out how to meet 20 plus kids at different needs, their whole focus is motivational and emotional support and figuring out how to get kids connected and finding their why and implementing growth mindset strategies. All of that.

[Mike Rowe]

On a percentage basis, where does motivation fall?

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, I will tell you, I think it's 90% of what creates a good learner, 10% is getting the right level and pace of learning. And think back again to traditional school. If a kid's not doing well in school, it's considered the kid's fault. You know, it's either like, oh, he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, you know, he's not. Or he's not willing to put in the work, he's not willing to study for the test, he's not willing to spend time writing the paper, he doesn't turn in the homework, whatever, he doesn't pay attention in class. You know, those are those things. At our schools, we take the exact opposite approach. In fact, our quarterly kind of accountability reports that we put out every seven weeks. At the top of it, it says, this is not a report card of your child. This is a report card on us. How are we doing of delivering to your kid? Because we realize if we can't figure out a way to motivate your child, that's on us. And we are willing to do anything to motivate kids to get them engaged. Because when you get a kid who's motivated and you pair them with the right level and pace of material, the sky's the limit on what they can do.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, say it the other way too. If you get a kid who's not motivated, who cares how good the delivery system is? Sure.

[MacKenzie Price]

It doesn't work.

[Mike Rowe]

You're not, you're.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah. And that's why again, sitting a kid in front of our time back learning platform, and if they're spinning in their chair or they're not even in front of the computer, or they're just going D d D and randomly guessing, that's not going to work. And so the reason we've had this success is because of that transformed, empowered role of the Adult in the classroom. And so what you see in our schools, these are full, full day schools in person. You know, you've got kids all hanging out next to each other and you'll have what we call guides. They're not teachers, they are guides. Although about 50% of our guides come from a traditional teaching background. They are there to coach kids on how to learn and they are there to motivate kids. And that's everything from. Did you know we pay our students for getting their academic goals done?

[Mike Rowe]

I did not know that.

[MacKenzie Price]

They make cash, baby. So they actually get paid in what are called alphas. It's one alpha is equal to a quarter, so four alphas to a dollar. And, and they can take this money. And first of all, they're learning the life skill of earning, right? They earn based on hitting their goals. Then they can take this alpha money and they can go buy stuff in the emporium that, by the way, the guides have specifically curated, knowing that, you know what, Mike loves tractors and we're going to have a tractor Lego set in there because he's excited about that.

[Mike Rowe]

You've got a curated emporium?

[MacKenzie Price]

We do.

[Mike Rowe]

In every alpha school.

[MacKenzie Price]

We do.

[Mike Rowe]

How many alpha schools are there?

[MacKenzie Price]

Oh, gosh, we're getting pretty big now. We're kind of going all over the country. It's hard to keep track, but we'll probably have like 30 open in, you know, in the fall of 2026.

[Mike Rowe]

How many students?

[MacKenzie Price]

So far we've got over a thousand students that are in our in person schools. And then this is pretty exciting. We've got a whole other thing called Texas Sports Academy. A little bit different thing. Same academic model, same learning platform. The difference is what kids get to do in the afternoons there. And when you think about motivation, they get to go out on the sports field or the court starting at noon instead of after school, you know, doing this. And we're giving kids again time back to go do the things they love and are excited about. We've got thousands of kids who will be a part of that program. So it's kind of spreading and it's going there. But I think what, you know, what we think about with getting these kids excited about, you know, financial literacy, right? When you can earn money based on the work you put in, go spend. We also teach how to invest, we teach how to save.

[Mike Rowe]

That's its own course.

[MacKenzie Price]

We teach how to donate. Well, it's just baked into the whole culture because kids are earning their alphas every day and then they're they're learning that they can invest in, you know, they can invest in something. We've got kids who invest in Bitcoin, real Bitcoin. They are able to put their money in a savings account. We even have a credit card system where kids are able to borrow. And then also learn the realities of high interest rates because the alpha credit card is pretty steep.

[Mike Rowe]

All right. It's great. Can I just kind of be a douche for a second?

[MacKenzie Price]

Let's go. That's what I think. Micro douche kind of douche. I've heard it before. Wow. Actually, I've said it before. Maybe that was Jade who said that. Okay.

[Mike Rowe]

Quite likely. So I've been spending a fair amount of time talking with some real eggheads over at some of the biggest Silicon Valley companies. I mean, from Nvidia, everybody in the AI space.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

And I'm painting with too broad a brush, which, of course, is the exact reason we're here today. One size fits all. Makes no sense. But let me generalize and just say that it seems like two thirds of the country is deeply skeptical about the Kraken being unleashed. Right. And we're scared. We're not sure what kind of bargain it is we're in the midst of making. And a lot of the guys I'm talking to at these big companies, they've realized that, you know, and they're looking at a $10 trillion infrastructure build out, and they need to hire hundreds of thousands of electricians and plumbers. And so they're. They've got skin in the game all of a sudden. But the reason there's such a threat is because we haven't accepted this new tool yet. And I guess maybe in the same way a microscope or a calculator, or maybe it's not quite the same, but there's always a period of time where we have to get through that skepticism. And so I think.

[MacKenzie Price]

I mean, remember when writing was going to ruin the art of communication and storytelling? I mean that really.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, I'm happy to say I don't recall that, but I do. Yeah, I remember reading something about it.

[MacKenzie Price]

We're not that old. Yes, exactly. But I think you're right. And we are at this tipping point right now where everybody's talking about, what is AI going to do to our world? What is it going to do to our skill set, our jobs and everything? And we are on the precipice of making a decision. We can either use this for good, or we can just get run over by it. But the Kraken has been let out.

[Mike Rowe]

It's out. Okay, well, we'll circle back and really dig into the AI Isn't rotting very

[MacKenzie Price]

douchey in that conversation?

[Mike Rowe]

Well, I didn't get to the douchey part.

[MacKenzie Price]

Okay, got it.

[Mike Rowe]

Okay. Okay. All right. He likes to warm up to it, you know, so, you know.

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, you did say it takes a while. Like you. In small doses. And then as I get to know you better. Okay, so at the end of the podcast, we'll see how it goes.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. To really know me is to be ultimately disappointed. Why am I gonna send my kids to this janky school where they can learn about Bitcoin and dive into a screen that I'm already nervous they're spending too much time in front of? And what's gonna happen to collaboration? And aren't they gonna go.

[MacKenzie Price]

That's the douchey part. Now I get it. That's it.

[Mike Rowe]

Aren't they gonna be. Aren't you going to turn them inward at a time when I. I want my kid just completely immersed and engaged and, you know, I'm not so sure I don't feel nervous about him not feeling as smart. You know what? Like, I like you are.

[MacKenzie Price]

You're doing such a good job of getting, like, every single critical, skeptical thing into that one statement. And I.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, you're such an upbeat lady. And it's also, there's so much the

[MacKenzie Price]

technical stuff going on, and I love this line of questioning, because here's what I find. And I talked to thousands of people around the country now about what our schools are, and there's always this initial fear, skepticism, and even just downright disgust. I know I would never want to send my kid to a school like that. And then what I find is when they take just a couple of minutes to really look under the hood and realize a few things. First of all, giving kids the ability to really have great academic knowledge in this world. With AI, you have people going, oh, I guess is it time to just outsource all thinking and not do that? And the answer is absolutely not. We need to make sure that people are always going to be on that gray frontier of what's new knowledge acquisition. AI knows the black and white of what's there. How are we going to make sure that people have the critical thinking skills and the knowledge in their head to go out and create new knowledge? Because I'll tell you what, people doing critical thinking without knowledge in their heads. You know what that's called? Hallucination. Right? It is. It's hallucination so first of all, it's imperative that we make sure kids are learning. They're not learning in this current system. If that model worked, then it would be awesome. But they're not. We're showing that it does.

[Mike Rowe]

And that's why I wanted to spend

[MacKenzie Price]

20 minutes shorter time.

[Mike Rowe]

Yes. That's why I think it's really important to set the time table.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah, you have to set the.

[Mike Rowe]

We're not in some sort of like, hey, it's all the same. Which flavor do you prefer?

[MacKenzie Price]

Everybody also compares things to like Prince Charming. You know, like there's this version of this perfect education Charming. That's all perfect. And unfortunately that's not the reality of what the current system is. But when you can sit there and say, okay, we have a way to deliver academic knowledge that meets every kid where they're at and leads to that success, and do it in a shorter time to give more room for, I think so much of what you described, which is engagement with others, collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, you know, all of those things are what people are gonna need to have those skills.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, you mentioned athletics. I mean, athletics is a big deal. That's where a lot of kids learn how to grow up. And leadership.

[MacKenzie Price]

It's actually probably the main place that people learn, you know, those skills, sports. But you know, where else they learn them is in those after school activities. Speech and debate and the performing arts, band, music, all of those kinds of things. And what we're doing is we're giving kids the ability to spend the majority of their school day engaging in that stuff with each other, with other kids, and with caring adults who are serving as mentors and coaches and connecting. And then add to the fact that, you know, there's no homework to do at night. And I'm going to throw in one more thing you talked about this Kraken that's been unleashed. AI. What are we going to do with it? Most schools around the country are burying their heads in the sand. They're saying, okay, we're going back to pen and paper. We are going to not allow any AI. Here's what we need to do. We need to teach young people and old people too, how to use AI tools to give them the skills that give them an advantage, not to outsource their thinking, not to cheat, but instead be able to say. And so examples of that is when you can help kids learn tools like using OpenCLA to create businesses that are generating revenue of four and five figures a month for a 16 year old. Those are Some of the skills we want. And really what it fundamentally gets down to is that idea of learning how to learn, learning how to put in the work and finding that thing, which is going to be honestly even more important in this new world where we could at some point just plug into the matrix and just kind of hang out. You gotta find what's the thing that's gonna get you out of bed every morning and excited to go contribute. And we are raising creators and contributors, not consumers.

[Mike Rowe]

As most of you know, I don't build houses for a living, but I know a lot of people who do. And aside from hiring skilled tradespeople, they all have the same primary complaint. They're drowning in information. Their days are spent chasing down PDFs, scrolling through text threads, or trying to figure out which version of a plan is the most current. That's why builders across America are turning to Diggs. Diggs is an AI powered platform that connects everything into one. Visual workflow, plans, documents, selections, product information, conversations, approvals. All of it stays tied together. With Diggs, builders instantly find answers to all kinds of questions, like what flooring option did the homeowner approve? And what paint color did we use in the primary bathroom? And where's the spec sheet for this particular appliance? And so forth. Without spending 30 minutes digging through folders or calling three different people, builders using digs have reported saving 40 to 50 hours per project and catching costly mistakes before construction even starts. Less rework, less confusion, and a much smoother build experience for homeowners. If you're a builder, see how much simpler your life could [e-mail]? and if you're having a home built, make sure your builder knows about Diggs. It makes everybody's life a whole lot easier. That's diggs.com diggs.com can you dig it? Okay. You know, there's a scene in the Matrix. I keep quoting this thing because it was on the other night. Okay, there's so many great moments, but what you just said reminded me of my. My favorite beat, which is when Morpheus or maybe Neo asks Trinity if she knows how to fly that helicopter.

[MacKenzie Price]

Oh, yeah. And she's like, not yet, not yet.

[Mike Rowe]

Now I do, right? And you talk about compartments and like people's brains. As I understand, like the basic IQ testing, part of what that evaluates is how many compartments you have and how you're able to access those compartments. And I mean, God, I'm just hoping a question comes out of this free association, but isn't it ultimate? Like when do you figure out if you're smart?

[MacKenzie Price]

Oh, this is such a cool topic.

[Mike Rowe]

Thank God I got to it.

[MacKenzie Price]

You did? That was good, Mike. I was worried about you, but I felt like I brought you out. I brought you to where you need to go.

[Mike Rowe]

If there's one thing that's worse than

[MacKenzie Price]

being consistent, you threw me a softball. Cause I'm so excited about this. Here's what you're actually talking about. We're talking about working memory and something called cognitive load theory. It's a learning science principle that basically understands how much information can a person take on and at what point does their information they're learning go from their working memory to their long term memory. Now you, Mike, might have like 12 slots available of working memory and I only have four. And so the way I come at some new material is going to be different than the way you come at it. And again, in a traditional school we're getting it thrown at us at the same time. Whereas when we can really personalize education where it's like, okay, Mackenzie, I get it, you're a little bit slower on this. But they don't say that. Right. We can go in and we focus on making sure that you're. Your working memory gets put in your brain so that you can put it over into your long term memory. And I'll give you a real practical example of that. Let's say you're taking on a harder. Let's say you're actually looking at the revenue for your TV show for the year and you're calculating what was your net profit, what were you doing? And if it takes you a while to go, well, wait a second, what's 100 minus 63? That's working memory. That's going on here for versus. If you just know, okay, that's 37 and I am able to go on. That moves your brain available to go do higher order thinking.

[Mike Rowe]

You play darts?

[MacKenzie Price]

I will say I don't really play darts. Have I played darts? Yes. My brother's a farmer in Minnesota and we do sometimes find ourselves in the like little rural town bars. And they seem to always have darts. But no, I don't.

[Mike Rowe]

There's a game. There are a lot of dart games, but you know, the big one is called. It's either 3:01 or 5:01 and you basically race to zero and you start at whatever number it is.

[MacKenzie Price]

Oh yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

When you see these guys playing, you gotta double in or double out. And there's trips and of course there are all the numbers there and you know, you've gotta work your way down to an out that you can cleanly hit. My point is there's so much math that's going on in a game of 01. I know they don't teach that in school.

[MacKenzie Price]

That. That is a great workshop idea. We can do fast math with darts, right? And you're exactly right. That's the thing. We want to make sure that people have that kind of knowledge just embedded so that it's quick. And did you know, by the way, they're not, they're not teaching fast math in schools. They have stopped teaching multiplication tables in schools.

[Mike Rowe]

What are they, what are they teaching in they?

[MacKenzie Price]

That well, so there's a couple things that this gets into a little bit bigger debate that happens in education. We at Alpha are big fans of direct instruction, which is just like, hey, memorize your multiplication tables, right? So we have games we built, we've got apps where we're just doing it. We even do calisthenic physical exercise where our guides are having kids go through their fast math. But I think a lot of other theories that have come out about school in recent years is kind of like, hey, kids will learn math by, like, going to the grocery store and calculating how many apples and how much does it cost. And they'll kind of like, figure this out. And it's really been a move towards like, project based learning. And I think project based learning is great. But the problem we've had with some alternative schools is they've, they've gotten rid of, like, direct instruction and worked examples, you know, in, in order to do this. And what we found, and I think why our model is doing so well, is we're really taking the best of both worlds again. Rigorous academics and doing it in less time to open up time for all those other really cool things.

[Mike Rowe]

So it's reading, writing, arithmetic. Still the basics. But what's replaced reading, writing, arithmetic? I mean, is there another? I don't know, something like, I read something about collaboration and like. And like the Cs. I forget what they are.

[MacKenzie Price]

Oh, yes. Thank you. You've kind of done your homework. Yeah, I always talk about the four C's.

[Mike Rowe]

I've always kind of done my homework. MacKenzie?

[MacKenzie Price]

No, it's creative creativity. It's collaboration, communication, and what is my other one? I always forget. I can't.

[Mike Rowe]

The other C. Character.

[MacKenzie Price]

What? That's a huge part, right? We think about character, but creativity, collaboration, communication, and, I don't know, critical thinking, you have to have all those things. And those are such Important skills. And you know, again, when we have all of the information that we could possibly know right there at the tip of our hands on our phones, what are we going to teach people to do with that information and our answers? We believe you still have to have it and you have to know then what to do with it, how to become an expert. And I don't know if you've seen this in your day to day world, but I am finding every day something new is coming out that I'm like, okay, I didn't even know about this and now I gotta go learn. Like the days of saying, you know what? I've learned everything I need to know to be successful at my job and it's gonna get me through the next 20 years. The half life of knowledge is like three months right now. The jobs we're gonna do are so different.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm exhausted. This is another one of those conversations where I've been, I've been really lucky for the last 25 years to interview a lot of people and work on a lot of different shows and you know, I've written a lot of stories about people who were consequential in our, in our time. And I forget, I'm starting to think something's, I mean, I've been drinking from my own fire hose. That sounds dirty, but you know what I mean, I've been so busy saying, hey America, get a load of him, get a load of her. And then the next one comes along and maybe it's my random access memory, like people are getting pushed out before I've had a chance to fully appreciate the. Again, if there's a question in here, it's like, how much time do you need to have as a student to sit with whatever enlightenment just smacked you over the head. And does Alpha give you enough time to do that if the whole lesson thing is happening in two hours?

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, I think it absolutely does. Especially when you add the fact that kids are learning to mastery, right? So it's not like, okay, you do your two hours of learning on this topic and then the next day the topic is different, you go back to what you're doing. And I'll give you an example of this, okay? On a Monday when a kid comes in and says, okay, I've got my two hours of work to do, I'm going to do 25 minutes and I'm going to earn, you know, 25 XPs. That's what kind of experience points. We've borrowed a game from Video Game or a term from Video Game knowledge around this. They're saying, okay, I'm going to focus on learning fractions. Well, at the end of the day, if they're not finished with that unit, they come back the next day and they're still working on their fractions. So what's happening is they're taking the time that their brain need to truly absorb and remember this information. And then it's something that they revisit. There's no world where it's like, I took one test and then that was the end of it, no matter what I got on the test, Right? Think about in school, if you get a 70% on a test, you know, teacher maybe curves it and you move on, you don't learn all of that material. And so that idea of having kids really be able to sit down and think through the academic core knowledge that they're getting and learn its mastery makes for better retention. It makes for more success as they go into more sophisticated topics. And then there's some level of connection that kids are able to get in the afternoons when they're doing things like creating food truck businesses. And the number of kids that we had who said, oh, my gosh, now I'm connecting some of these math skills that I'm learning in the morning to how we're calculating what our profit margins are going to be on our breakfast food foods, right? And, you know, how much does our permit cost and how much are we paying people? You know, those types of things. And this is the kind of thing that I think really cements for kids what I would consider practical learning along with that kind of academic knowledge. And not only that, but how about this just on a more fundamental level, giving kids time to just have fun, play, be outside, do physical things get brain breaks? Those are things that are missing in our schools. I'll give you a little test here. Do you know what the average time for recess is in the United states right now?

[Mike Rowe]

45 minutes.

[MacKenzie Price]

22 minutes. 22 minutes. There are. Oh, here's another one.

[Mike Rowe]

I was 100% off.

[MacKenzie Price]

Let me give you another one. That's absolutely crazy. Did you know that a lot of. Not a lot of schools, but schools have started implementing silent lunches?

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, no.

[MacKenzie Price]

During lunch in the cafeteria.

[Mike Rowe]

No talking.

[MacKenzie Price]

No talking. And you know what they'll do then? Based on who's been the quietest? They will release tables based on, like, the most quiet table. You get to go out first for the rest of your recess or whatever. And I will tell you for the life of me, I've heard Parents and kids tell me that their school has silent lunches. I've never gotten to meet one of these administrators because I'd love to know what in the world are you thinking that this is the right, right answer to do? It's. It's crazy. But this is something we got to do, is give kids that time to go try things, play to get that we've got a school.

[Mike Rowe]

Wait a minute, Wait a minute.

[MacKenzie Price]

Wait a minute. Yes, I'm ready.

[Mike Rowe]

That fire hose I was talking about, you gotta. There's so much. There's just so much. There's so much coming at me. I can't. Okay, like, what's the argument for sending a kid to the fifth grade who has clearly demonstrated he hasn't mastered anything in the fourth? Yeah, what's the argument?

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, the argument is, what are they going to do with these kids? You've got to move them through this conveyor belt system in the traditional world. Because our schools aren't built to have 17 year olds who are sitting back in fourth grade. Right. And actually there's policy decisions that were made years ago, no Child left behind type things that say you've got to do it. Which now has resulted. The great inflation is insane. Mike, that you talked about, like, oh, getting a C or something like that. That doesn't really happen anymore.

[Mike Rowe]

It's the worst example of everybody getting a trophy I can think of.

[MacKenzie Price]

Participation, trophy, award. And let's move. In fact, we have a really good public school district in my hometown in Austin, and they have just rolled out in basically K through 8. They've gotten rid of grades. Here's what they're doing instead. A's and M's.

[Mike Rowe]

M's.

[MacKenzie Price]

M's are mastered as, which you know, sound really good to parents when they're looking at a report card, is approaching mastery. Approaching mastery. Now that could mean.

[Mike Rowe]

I thought it was asshole.

[MacKenzie Price]

That might be the people making up these ideas. But 1%, if you fail a test, you're approaching mastery. You're not there yet, but don't worry. This is like you're getting closer to being a fully actualized person. You're almost mastered here.

[Mike Rowe]

We.

[MacKenzie Price]

What are we doing? And that it's like the whole world has decided to just dig its head in the sand and just say like, we're gonna pretend. Lalala. Now, again, I understand why they were doing it because they didn't have a better solution. But we finally do. And that's why one of the things I will say, I take it as a compliment a lot of people when they spend time with me, they're like, you're so optimistic and you're so happy.

[Mike Rowe]

And I'm like, yeah, you are an upbeat lady.

[MacKenzie Price]

Man, this is freaking awesome. What we have enabled kids to do. And we see this when we've got 96% of our students say they love school. And when we've got, you know, 100% of our kids and little things, I won't say that high. Let's say I think I looked at the last survey. It's like, you know, in the 90s of my guide is changing my life, right? I love my guide. It's a fun place to be. And when you can take that kid who's been struggling and comes in so far behind, and then they can literally go up three grade levels in a matter of months, that's fun. And you can take that kid who's like, I could be doing so much more. And you're like, great, here you go. Go for it.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, what do you do if. I mean, do you even deal with kids who aren't motivated or is there a.

[MacKenzie Price]

Absolutely. Now, here's the challenge. This is what our guides get paid the big bucks for. And when I say big bucks, we do believe they should be paid well. So they all start at a minimum of $100,000 a year. Because anyone who is going to devote their time and their career to working in a child's classroom, they should be paid well. So that is the guide's job, is to go, okay, how do I take a kid who really struggles with motivation? They're not having any of it themselves. How do I get them connected? And that can be everything from, like I said, paying kids to, you know, we have a kindergarten classroom where I walked into recently, and this little girl taps her nose and that's her secret sign with her guide that she's hit one of her academic goals on her computer. And that signals a 15 second silent dance party. And that's enough to get that little girl excited.

[Mike Rowe]

Why does it have to be silent?

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, sometimes they actually, I was in another classroom once where they went and did a 15 second Taylor Swift dance party in the corner. But here's why. Because they're sitting here, all these kids are focused and locked in, and it's just, it's not disruptive.

[Mike Rowe]

So it's not like a lunch where

[MacKenzie Price]

you should be talking 15 seconds just like, hey, I see you and I see that you're crushing it. Good job. And that gets them super so excited, you know, to do that to that squishy that's been, you know, curated into the emporium to do that. Or how about things like when kids hit their goals, it earns them the ability to go work in the tent, in the classroom, like, or go have the tent. Yeah, we've got cool tents. We've got, you know, beanbags, we've got couches, we've got comfortable chairs. You know, all these things, we give kids a lot more autonomy. And here's what we. A criticism we get, Mike, is, oh, you're so reliant on, like, extrinsic motivation. What about that? You know, intrinsic motivation. And here's what I say, you know what? It'd be amazing if everybody was just intrinsically motivated all the time. But I can tell you, every person in this room, they're showing up because they're getting a paycheck. They may love their job as well, but they're also getting that. He'll talk to you about that later. And so, first of all, it's not reality. And then the other thing is. Great. So are you going to just say, sorry if you're not intrinsically motivated? Back to that earlier point. If you. It's your fault. And our answer is, we got to do this.

[Mike Rowe]

What do you do for the douchey kid? I mean, is there a dunch cap? Is there the clapping of erasers?

[MacKenzie Price]

No, let me give you. So let me give you some examples of things like that. No, that's. We're not quite in that. That day and age anymore. That's probably one that's been left. Left better in the past. Although, you know, my old school, like, back when I was a little kid, they did do some of the paddles.

[Mike Rowe]

Sure.

[MacKenzie Price]

It's crazy. And I, you know, I was like, I was born in 1976. That's not that long ago. It's insane.

[Mike Rowe]

But I was born in 1976. I'm very young. No, no, I get it.

[MacKenzie Price]

And so, yeah, so there's things. So first of all, there's a few things that we've incorporated in order to create behavior standards so that kids can realize, okay, number one, it is a work hard culture. It is a meritocracy culture. So, for example, if you don't hit the goals that you have for a workshop, if you don't pass a workshop, you may not go on the snowboarding trip to Utah because you didn't hit your goals. And that's something that sometimes parents go, wait, what? We're gonna miss this? But again, we believe that kids learn so much when they try something hard, when they fail and they're surrounded by support and coaching to help get them better. We also have something called town hall. This is our basically student governance system where kids are able to come within their grade level basically and say, all right, here's an idea or a proposal I have for the community, or here's a problem we're seeing in this community and here's what we want to work through and here's what we find is that when kids have a sense of ownership in their community and culture, they raise themselves and each other to a higher standard than when it's this top down authoritative. You will do as I say. You will sit where I say on that. And one of the most beautiful things I see is when new students come into our culture and they might try to do the things that were cool in their old school, like goof around or heckle or kind of not pay attention. And pretty quickly it's like, oh, no, actually, you know, what's cool to do here is to try something and to, you know, achieve your goals and to connect with something you're interested in and that its own. Almost like they're able to take off this cloak of trying to fit in and instead truly embrace who they are and what they want to be. And it gets back to another point of socialization. I think almost every parent I talk to would say probably the most important thing about their school is that kids get socialized, they get to be with their friends. But think about again, traditional education, the way we socialize. Kids just throw them in, hope they figure it out. Good luck to you. Hope you find your place in the pecking order. We believe that kids can get coaching and development around relationship building, around connecting with others, around being interesting and interested in other people. And so we help create so much space and time and work that kids get to do. Here's an example of a project our kids do. Have you ever done an escape room?

[Mike Rowe]

Every day.

[MacKenzie Price]

Every day. Well, next time.

[Mike Rowe]

What do you think this place is?

[MacKenzie Price]

Oh, wow, this is going to be really fun. I've got a flight this afternoon. So we have kids do escape rooms. And what we're really doing is we're teaching communication and basically upholding community standards. And so we will mic these kids up. After they've gone through a lot of our coaching and work they've done over a period of six or seven weeks, they'll go into an escape room. And we're micing them up and we are measuring how much of their Behavior. Their language is considered uplifting. They have to get basically a positivity score above 80%. And I will tell you, even you take a bunch of fifth graders and put them in an escape room without that coaching versus after you see significant differences because kids are starting to be thoughtful about, oh, what is the best way to be a leader? What is the best way to be a team player? Those are things that we want everyone to be able to develop. I will tell you there's probably some adults that could use a little AI coaching when it comes to how they communicate with other people on their teams. And these are just some of the skills, in addition, grit and hard work. You know, our kids are doing firefighter challenges. They're running spartan races as a team. We've got kindergarteners who are learning how to climb a 40 foot rock wall or ride five miles. As a team, we're teaching, you know, leadership and teamwork. We're teaching financial literacy and entrepreneurship. Think how many great lessons come out of trying a business, right? And then public speaking and storytelling. Being able to communicate well with others and get your point across. Those are the skills that we're going to need to have kids be ready to go do.

[Mike Rowe]

But does that teaching occur in the time you freed up, like in the

[MacKenzie Price]

afternoon, in the afternoons?

[Mike Rowe]

Because I get a little confused going back and forth between what, what I'll just call extracurricular kinetic. Yeah, tactile teaching. But take me back to those first two hours, right? And because I'm not quite clear, like what happens in the second grade, the fifth grade, the eighth grade grade seniors, are you still teaching a rigorous kind of curricula? At what point do you let the student go, look, I'm curious about this. I want my guide and my AI proctor to take me in a deeper dive, maybe toward a humanities. Yeah, right. I mean, how do you like.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah, we're not really doing that. What we're doing is we're saying our. All right, let's get all of the core content that you need. So if that's whatever, kindergarten and first grade, that's learning how to read and math, numbers. And then in high school that's things like A.P. u.S. History and A.P. english literature and biology and chemistry and calculus, all of the same kind of classes. Advanced Placement, which is something that basically it's kind of an honor student track. They can give you college credit, earn college credit. And so our students are taking the same kind of curriculum that students in a traditional class are taking. They're just able to ingest it more efficiently and more effectively. And then in the afternoons, they can take whatever their interests are. So I'll give you an example. We have a fourth grade girl who loves physics. She's very fascinated by physics. She certainly loves science. When she's doing science in the morning, she does her academics and she has decided she wants to create a podcast that teaches quantum physics principles to other kids in a way that's relatable. And so her podcast is called Quantemplations. And in the afternoons, she's spending the time learning how to be a podcast host. And that's doing everything from figuring out what's my subject material, who am I going to interview, how am I going to communicate this message around quantum, quantum physics to an audience for ages 10 to 15. That's an example of a kid taking an interest that she has. Here's another example.

[Mike Rowe]

And applying it to something, to something practical.

[MacKenzie Price]

And maybe not practical, but yes, no, it's practical. Yeah, it's practical. Not to say it's not practical, but yes, taking something and go, oh, I have this interest. And I'm going to go, I'm going to create a podcast.

[Mike Rowe]

Ten years ago, there were 10,000 podcasts. Today they're 4 million. I mean, that I would think is, you know, to be able to see that whole ecosystem evolve and explode right in front of me. Of course they're going to be interested in that. And, you know, back when I was in high school, I couldn't even contemplate such a thing. Yeah, we just never had anything, I don't think, blow up quite that quickly.

[MacKenzie Price]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

Which is back to the tech. I mean, this is where. And back to drinking from some sort of metaphorical fire hose.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

There's just so much crap. I wanted to ask you about apps and how they differ.

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, you were mentioning, like, what does this two hours look like? And here's what it is. I'm going to walk you just through a very quick day at one of our schools. 8:45am, kids all come in and we do a 15 minute limitless launch. Think Tony Robbins for kids. This is a time where kids come together, they do some sort of, usually a challenge. Sometimes there's a physical component. It's like, figure out as a team how you're going to build a tower out of these things that, you know, goes the highest. What we're doing during that time is, first of all, we're getting the kids just kind of pumped up and excited. And then our guides are usually incorporating some sort of growth mindset technique. Or strategy that these kids can then take into the rest of their day and their life. Then at 9 o', clock, it's time for our students to go into that two hour core learning block. This is when they're doing the math, reading, the writing, the, you know, language, the history, the science, chemistry, whatever it is, Chemistry depends on it, whatever it is. And by the way, whatever they need to do. So for example, I mean, we had a kindergartener who's doing seventh grade reading now. Whole other thing that apps allow, she can be reading seventh grade. Hardness of reading. That's not the content that might not be appropriate for us. A six year old, right? And that's another example of the benefits of personalized adaptive technology. But they spend basically 25 minutes in what we call a Pomodoro session, right? 25 minutes of focus time working on their computers, all hanging out together. Guides are nearby and they're working with them. Then they take a break, they get outside and they play. They go do recess, they come back, they do the next thing. They do that basically for 120 minutes. You know, they, they have 120 minutes of focus time. Then it's lunchtime, get outside, play, have some lunch, and then they jump into their workshops in the afternoon. And so these are workshops like, you know, learning how to code self driving go karts, where you also learn how to build a go kart. I mean, how cool is that, right? In fact, one of the really fun events we did at the end of that session was we had a contest between the parents and the kids where they had to do. It was like called pit stop. And they had to go and do a full, you know, change the tires, do everything within a certain amount of time. Spoiler alert. The kids beat the parents at it. You know, it's things like that. They're getting to go out and build. They're doing, you know, physical activities. They are learning some sort of life skill in some sort of way that is exciting. We did an adaptability and teamwork life skills workshop where the kids were learning to sail. And, and at the end of this event, these kids final test to pass was they sailed from Florida to the Bahamas manning a boat. Right? These are things they do. These were fifth, sixth, seventh grade kids. Here's another one that got a guide

[Mike Rowe]

on the boat with them.

[MacKenzie Price]

We had guides kind of around in there. I mean, we were making sure it's safe, but these kids were doing everything. You know, they're working through that. Here's another one that was really fun. It happened in Orange county and in Palm beach this year. This was a Navy SEAL training. And so the test to pass for these kids, and I'm talking second, third, fourth grade level kids, these kids had to be able to swim two laps dragging a body with them, in some cases an adult or a baby. Then they had to perform CPR life saving measures on them. They had to dive to the bottom of a 13 foot pool and bring up a lock box and use, actually do a math logic puzzle to open this lock box and do this. They're learning, they're having, first of all, they're learning to swim, they're learning cpr, they're learning life saving techniques, but they're also learning how to work under pressure. They're learning grit. You know, they're doing all that kind of thing. There's so many ways you can teach kids these life skills that are super fun.

[Mike Rowe]

That's called the Boy Scouts.

[MacKenzie Price]

Exactly.

[Mike Rowe]

That's called merit badges. At least when I grow up.

[MacKenzie Price]

Exactly. We have a school in Texas that's a wilderness and outdoor school. And so kids are learning everything from fishing to building lodging to growing, actually we do this at all our schools. Growing, growing food, selling it at a farmer's market, donating profits to a local food bank. There's so many cool things that kids can do and get out, work hard. And you know, for me, that is something. I grew up kind of a country girl. I worked at hog farms every summer. My mom had a very strong belief that I should spend part of my summer doing hard work and she equated that to manual labor, which I think there's so much that comes out of knowing how to get dirty as you might. Yeah, it's that and, and so it's like things like that when you give kids a chance to go. In fact, this past session, one of the themes we were focusing on is that the key to happiness is contributing to your community. So when kids are out there building, you know, homeless packs and working with kids or building tiny housing for, you know, one of our communities for formerly homeless people. Like, there are so many awesome skills that kids can learn. And again, all of this can be done between the hours of 8:45 and 3:30. They don't have to be saved for weekend activity. Or I hope you figure out time when you're at home to, you know, get, get out to do this. Give kids their time back to then spend their evenings just hanging out with their friends and their family and getting sleep.

[Mike Rowe]

What's the data say?

[MacKenzie Price]

The data so far is very positive. But it's small, right? We are, we're private schools that are just spreading around the country and what we're seeing is that our test results are crushing. And one of the common criticisms we'll get is, well, you're a private school and an Alpha school, which is what we're most known for, is a super high end private school, right? Tuition between 40 and $75,000. You know, less than 1% of the population is even considering going to this. But here's what I would say to that is great. Just compare our results to other high end private schools. How are we doing compared to Harvard, Westlake?

[Mike Rowe]

That's what I'm asking.

[MacKenzie Price]

How are we doing compared to Spence?

[Mike Rowe]

How are you doing?

[MacKenzie Price]

We're crushing them. You know, this is what I think works. Now add to that the other factor, which is if you're really going to change education, which I truly believe we are, you have to get it out to the world. Right. You can't just serve the top 1%. That is not going to do anything, right?

[Mike Rowe]

No, actually it will do something.

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, it does help, but it's not going to get to a billion kids. And so here's what is though. When we're doing things like we're taking our Texas Sports Academy schools in Texas. Texas is a state that recently passed school choice, so families are able to apply for education savings accounts. And this first year that it's doing all of the applications, basically the ESAs are going to go to families that make less than $65,000 a year or have kids with special needs. Texas Sports Academy will be the largest recipient of those applications for kids. And so we're going to be able to serve families who are getting the exact same academic model that our Alpha students are getting for free. And that's the kind of thing and go get to play sports in the afternoon. I'll tell you what's going to make a lot of people excited when they realize, wait, my kid can get out on the field or the court starting at noon. That's amazing. We've got a guy, Jermaine o'. Neill. Do you know him?

[Mike Rowe]

Jermaine o'. Neal.

[MacKenzie Price]

You know him? Okay, great. He owes me money, I have to say. Well, great. You're joking with me. He is a what how many time NBA all star. Basketball. Basketball all star. He's super great. He runs one of one of the schools called Dynamic Prep outside of Dallas, Texas and his kids are doing our academics in the morning. In the afternoon, they're out on that court. And I'll tell you what Jermaine o' Neal knows how to do. He knows how to coach, he knows how to get kids motivated, and he knows how to teach kids to have high standards and work hard.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, let me tell you about Jermaine o'.

[MacKenzie Price]

Neill.

[Mike Rowe]

It's like a boy named sue, somebody names you Jermaine, you got to step up. You got to be great. You do, because you're going to take a lot of crap.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Well, I think. I don't think he took a lot of crap because he's like 6, 7. I. The first time I met him, I was like, okay, this is pretty cool.

[Mike Rowe]

But it's very powerful for a kid to get essentially a lesson from an undeniable expert in his field.

[MacKenzie Price]

Sure. But you know what? You don't even need to have that. That's a unique situation. How about this? How about having a caring adult who you know is in your corner come alongside of you and say, okay, this is something you're interested in pursuing. Let's go figure it out together. And that's why our guides and that role doesn't require them to be a subject matter expert in, you know, science or 8th grade math or whatever it is. Instead, they're gonna say, all right, I'm gonna get to know you. I'm gonna understand what it is that you're interested in developing or pursuing, and we're gonna work through this together. And that brings back that skill of, again, learning how to become an expert in anything that you do, which we have to have in this day and age when these kids, you know, the jobs that they're going to do haven't even been created yet.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, it's. I mean, for sure we need experts, but I think we really need generalists. I mean, isn't that what the humanities are like? A broad based understanding of a lot of different disciplines that might not have any real practical use for me day in and day out, but nevertheless, look, I spend a lot of time defending my foundation because in a soundbite world, a lot of what I say gets translated as anti college or, you know, anti four year degree. It's not true. My liberal arts education, I think, served me pretty well, but in 1984, the whole thing cost 13 grand, right?

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

So, like, I'm gonna get back to the money, too, in a second. But this just has to do with the idea that I don't. I think skills based training is certainly at the heart of what my foundation is all about. But I never meant to suggest or imply that a person ought to enter the world with no appreciation for a liberal arts degree or no understanding for the humanities. Because to your point, if we want people who can think critically, you know, they have to pick up Kierkegaard, they have to read the Stoics, they have to at least be able to hold up their end of the conversation around the Aristotelian definition of a tragedy. Right?

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, you know, Ed Hirsch has this concept, 5,000 core knowledge, basically 5,000 facts, ideas, concepts that an educated person needs to know. And that's one of the things we're able to start incorporating into these learnings. So when kids are learning reading comprehension, right, they're able to get exposure to Shakespeare, to Kierkegaard, to those types of things, and give people that exposure. Here's what I fundamentally am trying to do with the kids that come through our system when they graduate high school, I want them to be prepared to go do whatever it is they want to do. And if that means they want to go to a four year degree at an Ivy League school, or they want to go to their big state college, or they want to go straight into the working world, they have the skills and the abilities to go do that, whatever that is.

[Mike Rowe]

Can you teach virtue? Can you teach, like, you know, nature and nurture and all of that stuff?

[MacKenzie Price]

So that's one of our kind of five pillars. We've got five pillars that we focus on at our school. You know, again, love, school, learning, our guide, relationship, life, skills and character, classmates and culture. And I actually think as a parent, at the end of the day, what I really care about with my kids is that they're good people. I want them to be virtuous, I want them to be kind, I want them to be thoughtful. And I think there are a lot of things that you can teach. And it's everything from, you know, our kids give 360 feedback to each other, right? And there is nothing, which I didn't have this growing up, but the power that has when you can read, okay, this is how my classmates see me. Am I uplifting to the community? Am I contributing? We ask kindergartners, would you trust Mike to take care of your favorite stuffed animal? You know what? And if it's like, no, I wouldn't. It's like, okay, well, what can we do to earn that trust? How can we show that we are respectful of other people's things or of our things? Right? It's everything from learning how to Play a game fairly and not cry. I had a parent come up to me the other night and said, alpha has been so transformative for my kid. And here's one reason why. Game nights with my 7 year old used to be kind of brutal, because he'd throw a fit if he didn't win or he'd want to change the rules or whatever. And we're having a game night the other night and he loses and he high fives his brother and he says, failure is fuel. We'll get him next time, you know. And those are the kind of things that I think do start reaching towards virtue, the idea of looking outward and contributing to your community. I was at one of our schools where the kids were doing a workshop where they were connected with senior citizens from a senior center. The goal at the end of the seven weeks was they surprised their senior citizen grand pals with a graphic novel book that they used AI to create that had the stories that the grandpals had been telling them. So these kids are learning interview skills. They're learning to connect with someone from

[Mike Rowe]

a different generation and they're making something that's wholly unique.

[MacKenzie Price]

No, totally unique. And they, they painted, they'd done painting together. So we're doing art stuff and we're doing that. And then to have that kind of connection and for kids to walk out and say, well, that was really special. And you know what? Sometimes it's great to sit down and talk to somebody that I wouldn't think. We have a great video on my future of education where this old guy's telling him about how he used to keep a chipmunk in his pocket, you know, and take him around there. And this kid's like, huh, okay. And those are skills, by the way, that I think have almost become lost arts. You know, the idea of learning from a different generation and connecting with people that aren't just, you know, in your immediate family.

[Mike Rowe]

Sure.

[MacKenzie Price]

Getting feedback. Here's another one. Rejection training. How many times have you had someone say no? You know, when you're, well, you're better off than I do. I have not figured it out. People say no. I was lucky. I got my husband to say yes to me. Right.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm in the entertainment business. The entire rubric is based on.

[MacKenzie Price]

And here's the thing, we have to make sure that kids are willing to go put it out there. So one of the things that we have our kids do, and this is this true for fourth, fifth graders. They have to go become an expert in something that they're interested in and then they have to reach out to 50 experts in their field. So we had a boy who's interested in ornithology, birds, loves birds. And so he's learning all about birds. And then he goes and he's researching, identifying who are all the experts in ornithology. And then he has to learn how to create a professional, well written email that reaches out that doesn't just say, hi, professor so and so, can you please tell me about birds? Actually have an intelligent question. I was reading the paper you wrote on this and I was curious, how did you collect that research, whatever. And guess What? Out of 50 emails, he got probably six responses. So you're starting to learn that you know what, you just keep trying. You just keep going. You don't take no for an answer, right? And you can do this.

[Mike Rowe]

So Chuck takes it real personal. You know, we might have guests we want to come on and we reach out and sometimes he doesn't hear back from their people. And you would think somebody just like took his blankie and kicked him in the throat.

[MacKenzie Price]

Come spend a week at Alpha and we'll teach you that. You know, this is another thing. One of the checks we have for our kids, for our kindergarteners, is that you can receive feedback without crying. And I'll tell you what, we have high school students who come into our school who cannot pass that kindergarten check. They're like, I get feedback and I cry. And you know what? We believe feedback is fuel. Feedback is great. How are you going to get better if you don't have feedback? You know, how do you get better if you're not building whatever it is you're working on in public so that you can find out what do they want, what are they needing to make your product better? We have our students in middle school go through an exercise. It's called Dream Launcher. And here's what they do. First thing they do is they do an ikigai values chart. What do I love? What am I good at? What does the world need? Right? And they look at those things. Then we have them do something called 168 Hours, where they track the 168 hours of their week and they see how do I spend my time? And then what's really amazing about that, when they have their ikigai values chart and then they actually see how they spend their time, there's a realization that can happen there. And we'll have kids go, wow, I got bad news. I guess I'm going to be the world's best TikTok. Scroller. Because I spend a lot of time doing that. And they start seeing, wait a second, who I want to be is not matching up with how I spend my time, and what can I change on that? And then we have them go through and say, all right, let's take this interest you think you've identified and go spend two weeks going down a rabbit hole and learning as much as you can about that. And you know what? Sometimes at the end of that two weeks, kids are like, oh, yeah, it turns out I'm not interested in that. Or, wow, I really am interested. We had a kid this fall and who had said to us, you know, he goes, if you told me that you'd pay me $100 an hour for the rest of my life to play video games, I'd be like, sign me up. And months later, he's like, I am so busy learning how to code and build and create video games, I don't even have time to play video games anymore. Boy, I'm glad I can move this mic around because I'm about to eat from the fire hose, I guess.

[Mike Rowe]

Imagine being me.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah. And so this is what. I just think that, you know, these are the kind of opportunities we want people to have. And I think. I think adults should spend some time going through that dream launcher exercise.

[Mike Rowe]

Heck, yeah. What's that called? The Japanese word?

[MacKenzie Price]

Ikigai values workshops. Ikigai values charts.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, I've heard of that with Masagi. Are you familiar with that?

[MacKenzie Price]

I don't. I need to become more of an expert on that.

[Mike Rowe]

It's the. It's the deliberate attempt to do something that has a high likelihood of failure.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah, right.

[Mike Rowe]

And it's this idea that it's failure is so important, that the only way to truly challenge yourself in a meaningful way is to get the stakes high along with the failure rate. So you've really got real skin in the game. You know Fred King, this teacher that I. I mentioned earlier, he would do this thing. I mean, this. These are high school kids. And he would say, okay, this year for the big concert, we're going to do the Hodie by Ralph Vaughan Williams, which is a mother. I mean, it is 10, 10, 10 beauty, 10 difficulty. No high school has any business. Same thing. Box, mass and B minor.

[MacKenzie Price]

By the way, I heard you were an opera singer.

[Mike Rowe]

Ah, yeah. I mean, it was a. I did

[MacKenzie Price]

a little of my own research too, so. Cool.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, I sang in the opera.

[MacKenzie Price]

That's. That sounds like an opera singer to me.

[Mike Rowe]

Not really. You know what I Did once, too. I went down a hill on skis. But nobody says, here comes Mike Rowe, the skier.

[MacKenzie Price]

I disagree. I think that we.

[Mike Rowe]

I went golfing once, too.

[MacKenzie Price]

We work through your identity, which, by the way, that is a huge thing, too. Just one to go back to your story. But when kids start doing hard things and they start having success, it builds competence and confidence, and it changes the way they see themselves.

[Mike Rowe]

But it's like the Russian judge, you know, who sits there like, God, he's so strict. You know, it's like my old Mrs. Backscheider. A minus. Never give anybody more than an A. Doesn't matter what you do. There's something. It's all connected in some weird way. The feedback, the fuel, the failure that you're talking about. Those things are so important. But if. If we grade on a curve, who are we helping? If we pass that kid to the fifth grade who still doesn't know, when two vals go walking, the first one does the talking. What are we doing?

[MacKenzie Price]

No, well, it's lowering the standard. And actually, Chuck, if you want me to give you a connection for a great podcast guest, There's a guy, his name's Dr. David Yeager. He is, like, the rock star of the psychology community. Professor at University of Texas, and he wrote a book called 10 to 25 the Science of Motivating Young People. And basically, it's looking at how do you motivate this age group? Which, again, 10 to 25. But you can take this all the way across, which is. He has found that the secret to motivation is holding people to high standards and also providing that high support to help them be great. Now, the other opposite thing is you can have low standards and high support. Oh, honey, everything's perfect. You're perfect no matter what. Or you can have high standards and no support, and then you're just like a military drill sergeant.

[Mike Rowe]

But you mentioned. You mentioned the SEALs, Bud's training. That's a great example of a thing that only matters because the majority wash out.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

I mean, how awesome is that? I talk a lot about the different ways the military will recruit. It's really telling when you think about what the Navy is offered. It's an adventure. And the army is like, hey, be all you can be, and when you come out, you'll be that much smarter and you'll kill it. In the civilian world, the Coast Guard has their thing, so forth, you know, the Marines, probably not for you.

[MacKenzie Price]

And you know what, though? They have their backs. You know, they have each other's backs.

[Mike Rowe]

Too.

[MacKenzie Price]

That's the other thing that you're creating when you get back to that whole classmates and culture and virtue. Right. And sometimes doing hard things together. Right. That's the thing that gets kids excited when they know they're part of, part of a bigger team. And we put our kids in situations like this all the time at our schools where they know like, hey, I gotta show up and do my best because my team's counting on me. And isn't that what we want?

[Mike Rowe]

Well, look, if failure is the fuel and you also said feedback, I guess everything's fuel over there.

[MacKenzie Price]

I think a lot of things are fuel.

[Mike Rowe]

Okay, well, I just, it just seems like such a fundamental point to make. But so many parents are afraid that when their kids fail, the cost will be nothing less than their self esteem. So many others believe if their kids don't fail, the cost will be nothing less than their self esteem. Somebody is not just wrong, they're really wrong. I mean profoundly wrong. And it goes back to the beginning of our conversation. Something is profound, profoundly wrong with our knee jerk desire to make sure we don't wind up with, you know, a 16 year old in the fourth grade. I get it, that's bad. That won't work for a bunch of social reasons. But the solution can't be no Child left Behind because that just is another way of saying no, no idiot doesn't get a diploma.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah. And I think that's something that hopefully we are an example of a new way of thinking around that. And you know, we come back to sports. You know, no coach has kids work on their dunks if they can't dribble the ball down the court. Right. And mastery learning is such a big part of sports development of music development. I'm sorry to interrupt your amazing opera story we were going through.

[Mike Rowe]

I didn't bring it up really. That was your story.

[MacKenzie Price]

But it's like these are the things we've got to bring them back in academics. Here's another thing thing we do. Our kids actually go back and they review kind of their game film from their academics. Like, okay, today I didn't hit my goals and here's why I was struggling with focus on here. I had an extra hard concept that it took me a little while to like go back and find. And when they have that attitude where they're like reviewing game film, you know, think about in sports how often the coach has you go back and say, let's go look at what happened in this game and where we could go better for some Reason in academics, that's not a thing we do. And I'll never forget, I was in a classroom, in our kindergarten classroom. And at the end of the day, as part of the payouts, when they're paying the kids their alpha bucks, our guide gives each kid, here's how much you earned. And this little boy stands up and he says, you know, okay, today I hit only one of my four math goals and two of my four reading goals. And the reason was I've struggled with being focused. And so tomorrow, I'm not going to sit next to Gus. This kid's five years old. Five years old. And not only was he able to articulate, here were my goals, and here's how I landed in comparison with my goals. Here's where I struggled, and here's what I'm going to do differently. And I think that kind of lesson is just critical. You can bring that into so many other places. And we have to get academics in a place where kids feel that sense of ownership.

[Mike Rowe]

Sure.

[MacKenzie Price]

Where they're actively.

[Mike Rowe]

No, I'll buy that. On the other hand, it does sound like Gus took it in the neck there. I mean, what the hell did Gus do wrong? Gus is just trying to.

[MacKenzie Price]

Gus was poking, poking him. They're playing. And you know what?

[Mike Rowe]

Back to my.

[MacKenzie Price]

Sit next to your friends when you're in. You know, I've learned this. I. I'll tell you what, if I ever go to an opera or classical music thing, I know to not sit to my. Next to my best friend from college, Zenobia, because she and I, we crack each other up. And once we get started, it doesn't end. So I like. We go to things. I'm like, you're sitting over there. I sit here.

[Mike Rowe]

Hey, I was Gus, man, I get it. I was that kid. I want to be respectful of your time. I know we've been at it for a bit, but I got to come back to the quasi douchey thing again. Oh, yeah.

[MacKenzie Price]

I've been waiting all this time.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, you brought it up. It's money. I love what you're doing, and I don't want the audience to think, you know something. This is way too precious. It's way too bespoke. It's way too pie in the sky. But if you're going to pay your guides 100 grand, and if you're going to charge. Would you say 40 to $75,000 a

[MacKenzie Price]

year for one of our particular schools?

[Mike Rowe]

Okay, but in general, like, what. How does the tuition sort of net out at this Point.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah. Well, we'll have. Actually, starting this fall, we will have about three times as many students that will be paying no tuition for our school model as we currently have. That is thanks to education savings accounts that have been made possible. We are also starting to see some interest from some public districts. And you know, one of the things that's kind of crazy when you think about how much money school districts are spending per student. They have a lot of fancy ways where they'll kind of take the math and say, well, we take our administrative budget out, we take, you know, our building budget out, or whatever, but it's basically between about 18 and $36,000 a year that goes towards an individual student in our country. Again, results questionable. And so we've got the results on academics in our country.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, you're saying questionable as dubious school.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah, there are.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm saying. No, they're not questionable.

[MacKenzie Price]

No, no, no, they're terrible. Yeah, they're crystal clear. Yeah, you've got. I mean, there are schools in Illinois, $36,000 a year per student. It's like less than 8% or something, are doing math or reading at grade or. Actually, there were things. No one was proficient. Right. And so there is money to go out there. It's got to be allocated differently. And so we've got school models that are, as, you know, as low for tuition base as $10,000 a year. And we've also got some interest from the public sector. Now, here's the thing. The public sector is going to need time. They're going to want to see data. I actually applied for charter status in 10 states and I got brutally rebuffed. I got major rejection training in that. Nine of the 10 declined to use this. And so it was a way, okay, we're not going to go in this path. What I'm trying to do is just build a distribution model, make it as open to as many people as possible. And we're kind of starting with that Tesla business model, which is, you know, we've started at this high end. I think we're getting a lot of attention, a lot of traction because a lot of people in the United States, you heard about it from, you know, stand together from all these things that are hearing about this. And what's going to happen is we'll build more and more models that are going to spread and be able to do this. And I had the Secretary of Education at my school this past fall, and I got to tell her something, man. Yeah, McMahon. And I got to tell her something. That I'd said many times before. But I said, you know, if you put me in charge and of, you know, education in our country, here's what I do. And then I got to say, Secretary McMahon, here's what I do. So everything I just talked to you about, motivation, connecting with kids. You can take kids, put them on this academic plan and at noon instead of maybe I mentioned that, you know, we had kids sailing to the Bahamas, we've got rock climbing trips to Italy, we're doing all these crazy things. You could also put kids out on the sports field, in the debate team, in the performing arts thing, in the music class. The things that public schools are doing with kids starting at 4 o', clock, they could start doing at 12. And guess what else they already have. They've already got coaches and teachers who are playing in that field around motivation, connecting. It's going to require a transformation of, you know, how they spend their time. They're not going to be teaching science, but they're going to be focused on, hey, let's go do the robotics workshop, know, or the lab in the afternoon that kids are really excited for. I believe that so much is already baked into the system that could be a way for kids to go find that thing they get motivated about and enjoy learning. If they're willing to say, hey, school doesn't need to last all day from an academic perspective, we could fit it in this way and we're willing to let AI and technology do the academic teaching instead of assuming a teacher has to be be the one disseminating information.

[Mike Rowe]

Are we going to live to see the public schools saved by AI?

[MacKenzie Price]

I very much hopeful and I am waking up every day to work, to do that in the best way I can. Now it's a big battle. There is a system that does not want to die. I think there are so many great, devoted people that want to see change. And really what I hope is that we can be that example that helps people say like, wow, this works. And I'll tell you, Mike, there's never been a more exciting time to be a five year old. There's never been a more exciting time to be a teacher if you're willing to say, wow, there is potential for change. And just like every other industry that we're seeing change. You know, five years ago if you've, you'd have told me that I was going to have some computer do a scan of my body to test for, you know, moles and skin cancer instead of a doctor look with her magnifying Glass say, this one looks good, this one looks sketchy, whatever. I would have been like, what are you talking about? There are so many other places we're now accepting that AI can do a better job. And I think education is that mountain that we need to get through. And so what we are continuing to do is just be transparent, show our results. We've got more. A big result thing will come at the end of the school year. In June, we'll publish our results. And we believe that as we continue to learn more and more about how kids learn, how we can develop the best systems, we're attracting incredible talent. We've got the best learning science team in the world assembled and they want to work with us. Not just because we're this one little school doing something, but because we've got the ability to go make a big difference. And fundamentally, what we're seeing is we're igniting an interest in families who are going, oh my gosh, school doesn't have to be spinach. I don't have to send my kid to a place that he. He's like, I don't want to go. Why is the week so long? You know, instead of. Instead it can be this place that kids are excited about and that they're learning these useful skills that will take them through. And that's going to be a fundamentally important question that we ask, you know, as we're, as we're going to this next stage of our society.

[Mike Rowe]

Why do you give a damn? Why do you care so much about this?

[MacKenzie Price]

Well, I started because I am a mom of two girls and I love these kids ferociously. And I couldn't watch them go through the system that, you know, that exists. So when I far. When I farted, whoops. Oh, can we cut that?

[Mike Rowe]

Cut it. We're gonna, we're gonna cut it into the open.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah. When I.

[Mike Rowe]

Up next, it's Mackenzie Bryce working through some issues.

[MacKenzie Price]

When I started the first school, when my girls were in first and third grade, you know, I just knew I wanted to see them lit up and excited. Excited. And the first day of school, they get in the car at the end of the day and we had had them do a boys vs girls lemonade business war. And they were like, oh my gosh. They're like, the boys made more money now. Here's what they did. It was a five day challenge. The boys started on the first day and they were selling a lot more volume. Cause they were able to make a lot more lemonade. Cause they were using hose water, whereas the girls were like making pictures and running back out and doing this. What happened? So they were mad because they're like, the boys sold so much more, we didn't have enough. But then their repeat customer business was way better for the girls because it turns out hose water lemonade, which you and I probably grew up on, not great. And so that was an exciting thing. Now you know, it's been 14 years. I've got a 20 year old daughter and an 18 year old who's going to graduate from Alpha this year. And what's been so cool is to see these thousands of other kids around the country who are having the experience that I saw my girls have and have that I just want to say like that fire in their belly and that glint in their eye that's like, I am excited, I'm engaged, I'm passionate about something, I know how I want to use my talents and make a difference in this world. And could we ask for anything more than to wake up and feel like you're living what you're supposed to be doing, your purpose and so it's a fun place to be.

[Mike Rowe]

What happens to the universities as a result?

[MacKenzie Price]

Ah, that's a really exciting thing. We're actually doing something pretty cool. We, we're going to bring down about 100 Stanford and MIT freshmen and sophomores to Austin, Texas this summer and they're going to run through a program that we have that's basically going to help make them AI first. We believe that in that 10 week program they'll develop skills that will be more valuable than a four year computer science degree from Stanford or mit. I think the higher ed system is going to be ripe for change. And I've actually talked to university presidents from around the country, are starting to reach out and realize like, huh, we got to do something different. And so the very quick version is that imagine if you could use an AI tutor similar to what we're doing to teach all of your base level, you know, classes and get kids up to a certain level. And then you could have students spend time with their professors who don't really want to be teaching those basic classes, doing the discussion seminars and the research and the development and building businesses and working on startups. That is something that I think will become a lot more valuable. And by the way, the gauntlet program that our college kids are going to go through this summer, that's something we started originally for adults and it's free. And companies at the end hire these people and they pay that recruiting fee and I Think that changes again. How are we going to upskill, you know, our people? And it shouldn't be with a bunch of debt that they walk out with and no job prospect.

[Mike Rowe]

Amen. Final thought, back to the money for a sec, because I suspect there are a lot of people listening or watching who are just like, look awesome. But the bottom line is, I don't have ten grand. I need a free solution. I want my kids properly educated in accordance with the social contract that we all signed on for. I want my public schools to be better. I want the free option to have this. And I imagine some of those people, you know, probably feel left out of the conversation. And I would just say, you. You hit it. But you glossed over it. The Tesla model, right? I mean, so people really understand. The first microwave was $68,000 that Raytheon accidentally built. You know, it took a long time to get a microwave in the homes of the very people I'm talking to now. I did a story 10 years ago with a woman, a French chef, kind of famous. Ariane Dogan was her name. She had this chicken. What was it called? Taylor, what kind of chicken was it? Like Green Ranch. Circle Ranch. Yeah. Green Circle Chicken. Now, these are all organic, free range chickens living their best poultry lives, right? And everything. They were just all just wonderfully cared for. And then by the time you eat them, you know, it's literally like a $70 chicken, okay? Like, first serve, like on a menu, it's 70 bucks, okay? And people were like, what's the fricking point, man? It's chicken. Why are we, you know, why are you showing me something that I can get for free over here?

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

And it was the same basic answer. Like, all good ideas come in the way you're coming into the market. It's not cheap. And to get it to scale, to get it in every classroom, to get it in every kitchen, you know, that's the trick. That first Starlink was pricey, and now

[MacKenzie Price]

you see people walking around with them in their backpacks.

[Mike Rowe]

Precisely.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

So the final question is, and I won't hold you to it, but when will there be a guide in every public school instead of a teacher? And when are. When is the average kid going to have access to this?

[MacKenzie Price]

I don't think there's ever going to be one model that fits all. So I don't think that, you know, the traditional school model will ever die. But what I think will happen is more and more options will become available that families can then decide what is right for them. So, for example, we are starting to move into the public school system, which, again, will be free. Families will have the ability to decide if they want to go into that system. It's got to be an opt in type of thing.

[Mike Rowe]

I mean, school choice, it's a thing. Some people don't have the choice.

[MacKenzie Price]

No, this is different. School choice gives money to go towards private education. We're going to be going into public education. So these are public schools where in these situations where superintendents and the boards have said, we like this idea and let's try it, let's give options to families in the district who want to be a part of this. And I think that's going to be an important thing to do. And, you know, I think more and more people will start to see this. But one of the things we've got, futureofeducation.org is a resource website that we've created that gives free resources for not only things that families can do outside of school to help their kids learn, whether it's adaptive apps or AI tools and training, but, but also the ability to reach out to their leadership, to their, their politicians, to their school board to say, hey, we want to see this type of education come in. And as we start to just get people more and more comfortable with knowing that we're not going to replace teachers, we're not going to take humans out of, you know, the equation, there's a lot we don't know about what the world's going to be like. But here's what I can tell you, Mike. In 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, parents are still going to want to drop their children off in a building surrounded by other kids and loving, caring

[Mike Rowe]

adults, and then pick them up six hours later, smarter.

[MacKenzie Price]

Now, what they do during that day may not look the same. You know, like, what they're doing at Alpha does not look the same as what you're doing at a school right down the street, you know, a traditional school. But I think when people realize, okay, and we have teachers, you know, come to work for us and they're just like, it's like the most wonderful ability to finally empower them to do the things they've cared about doing in terms of impacting kids. And I think as we start to share that, you know, the teachers union, I'm sure hates us, right, they're not there. But as teachers start to realize, no, no, this system is going to allow me to do a better job at my job, it's just going to look a little bit different and I think more and more families are going to see this. We need to have a bottom up approach. You've started that, right? A bottom up idea. When parents come together and say, hey, we want this. And that's part of what we're seeing at our schools around the country is we're having parents who are leading the charge to say, hey, we'll help you guys find a building. We'll bring the people together. We'll, you know, we'll bring the community in. And we are going to start to see that at different models and in the public sector. And then I will say, Mike, you might want to have me on in a year or so because we've got some other pretty fun, exciting things up our sleeve that are.

[Mike Rowe]

This Jaeger guy, Chuck him. You booked him yet? Yeah, yeah, he's going to be here tomorrow. Excellent. Is that the website where you want people to.

[MacKenzie Price]

There's a lot of ways. I've got Future of Education. I think I'm another one of those 4 million podcasts along with Quantum Plations and, and the way I heard it, Future of Education podcasts, Instagram and is Future of Education as well. I'm on X under Mackenzie Price and I've got a substack called Future of Education. And then of course, Alpha School. And I think we're the most talked about school in the world right now. And it's because kids are doing cool stuff. And by the way, there's a lot of things that families can say, you know what? I can incorporate this idea of a workshop into what we're doing at home and acting that way.

[Mike Rowe]

Is that true? Because if it is, that'll be the title of this episode. The most talked about school in the World.

[MacKenzie Price]

I believe it is. You should do a Google search to make sure I'm not lying on.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, I mean, gosh, if the AI says it's.

[MacKenzie Price]

I'll tell you what, we have a lot of that.

[Mike Rowe]

I'll check with my guide.

[MacKenzie Price]

It's very highly talked about. And again, it's because, you know, I think when you're willing to just say, hey, let's bring some optimism and some results and allow kids to be limitless and unlock their potential and that's what a school's supposed to do. And I'm really honored to get to be a part of doing that and want to do it for more people.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm glad you're on the case. Thanks for changing the world. What did I just call it? The most talked about school in the world.

[MacKenzie Price]

I think it was the douchey part.

[Mike Rowe]

No, no, that's not going to be our title. No.

[MacKenzie Price]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

You said the most talked about school. The most talked about school in the world. I love it. But it's also the futureofeducation.org thefutureofeducation.org yes,

[MacKenzie Price]

you can also go to the futureofeducation.org and we've got all these free resources for families to be able to learn about ways they can incorporate adaptive apps and AI tools and they can reach out to their politicians and their school board to say, hey, we want to see this in our schools.

[Mike Rowe]

You're on the verge of being late for your next appointment. You know that Jay's dying to get you out of here. He's chomping at the bed.

[MacKenzie Price]

Looks like it. He's pretty excited.

[Mike Rowe]

Thank you for your time. I mean, it's really, it's consequential, important, and I'm rooting for you.

[MacKenzie Price]

Thank you, Mike. Appreciate you.

[Mike Rowe]

Open the whiskey like it's not already. When you leave a review, which we hope that you'll do, tell us who you are. Tell us. And before you go, Won't you leave. Five star. Five lousy little star.