The Peter Attia Drive - #366 ‒ Transforming education with AI and an individualized, mastery-based education model | Joe Liemandt

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

View the Show Notes Page for This Episode Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content Sign Up to Receive Peter’s Weekly Newsletter Joe Liemandt is a software entrepreneur turned education reformer who left Stanford in 1989 to found Trilogy, a highly profitable private software company, before pivoting to transforming K-12 learning. In this episode, Joe shares how he transitioned from leading a global software enterprise to becoming principal of Alpha School, where his focus is building a mastery-based, individualized education model that leverages AI as the missing infrastructure for large-scale change. He details the shortcomings of traditional K-12 education, explains how Alpha replaces conventional seat time with focused academics, and outlines the role of AI tutors and human coaches in helping students accelerate through material. Joe also discusses early results, the data-driven systems that track progress, and his ambitious plan to reach a billion children in the next 20 years by combining cutting-edge technology with proven learning science. We discuss: Joe’s early interest in AI and the story of how he quit school to build Trilogy [4:45]; Joe’s first encounter with Alpha School and how it sparked his journey into education innovation [8:15]; America’s declining K-12 performance and the hidden power of mastering fundamentals [13:00]; How traditional time-based grade progression undermines later learning, and how mastery-focused instruction can transform student achievement [20:30]; Motivation as the key to high-level learning: how Alpha School fosters motivation with its “Timeback” model and leverages AI to accelerate learning [28:45]; Core principles of learning: how high standards, mastery-based instruction, and supportive struggle foster both academic excellence and personal growth [35:45]; Breaking down self-imposed limitations with foundational skills, defined time requirements, and a mastery model [41:15]; Using short-term extrinsic rewards to help students overcome limiting beliefs and ignite lasting intrinsic motivation [46:45]; $100 for 100: a simple but powerful incentive system that helps students fill academic gaps and master fundamentals [53:45]; How AI is the pivotal technology that can finally allow proven learning science to scale and unlock unprecedented student potential [57:45]; The emergence of generative AI that catalyzed Joe’s billion-dollar investment in education [1:09:45]; The path and obstacles to integrating Alpha’s AI-powered model into mainstream education [1:12:00]; Reimagining schooling from the ground up across five key dimensions [1:22:30]; The potential of this educational approach to reduce inequality in academic success [1:30:00]; Why the biggest challenge to scaling Alpha’s AI-driven education is cultural adoption and systemic redesign [1:34:00]; Peter’s daughter’s experience at Alpha School [1:38:30]; Alpha School’s expansion plans and need for people and resources for maximum impact [1:42:30]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

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My guest this week is Joe Limar. Joe's a software entrepreneur turned education reformer. As we discussed in the podcast, he dropped out of Stanford in about 1989, started a company called Trilogy that's gone on to become one of the most profitable software companies in the world that you've probably never heard of because it's remained private this entire time. Joe basically left trilogy three years ago to become the principal of Alpha School and his passion today and as he discusses for the next couple of decades of his life is going to be on transforming K through 12 education. Now, of course, this is something that many people have thought about before, but I think what is really remarkable about the way Joe tells the story is that all previous efforts to transform

K through 12 have been missing a critical piece of infrastructure. That infrastructure is indeed AI. Now, you may be asking why we're going to have a discussion about education on the drive, but of course, as I state to Joe at the outset of this podcast, you can't really care about science and medicine if you don't care about education. All of us listening today are one day going to be cared for by people who are in K through 12 today, who are going to have to learn STEM and hopefully be interested enough to choose a career in medicine. So I think we all have a very vested interest in this, not just for the health of our country and our economy, but also on a very deep and personal level. We talk a lot in this episode about what it is that education research has been saying

for the past 40 or 50 years that has been unimplementable because of scale. So we talk, of course, in this episode about his path from software engineer to education, why that pivot. We talk about what's wrong in K through 12 education and the forces behind it. In fact, just as an anecdote today, this morning in the newspaper I was reading something before recording this intro, which I'm recording about a week after the podcast. They just came out with a national assessment of education progress tests, which are tests that are done across the country. We continue to be in a state of decline. So for mathematics, only 55% of 12th graders were able to meet the basic level and only 67% of 12th graders were able to hit that level in reading. Again, these scores represent the

lowest scores we've had in over 20 years. So this downhill trend of basic math and reading skills continues. We talk about the case for mastery-based individual learning that's grounded in learning science. Again, I can't say enough about this. And it's something I don't think I really understood until maybe the past year, based on my very limited insight and interaction on the fronts of education. But again, this is such a core idea that it's essential to this. We talk about how alpha schools actually run day to day, including replacing seat time with roughly two hours of focused academics daily and how kids make up a grade in as little as 20 to 30 hours. We talk about where AI tutors help most and where human coaches are essential. Talk about building core skills and fluency

without killing curiosity. Talk about creating motivation systems, goals, time back, and incentives. Talk about how alpha schools track progress and use data to guide learning. Talk about early outcomes, limitations, and what still needs proving. And of course, the roadmap to scale, the costs, the constraints. And how do you bring this to Joe's ultimate goal, which is at least one billion kids within 20 years? So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation. with Joe LeMond. Joe, thank you so much for making time to come over today. It's nice once in a while to have a guest who is local and doesn't have to travel so far.

It's great. I super appreciate it. People are probably wondering, like, how does this tie into health and medicine? And this is a topic that's a little bit outside of that. But really, it's not. Where we're ultimately going to go is education. And you can't have a great system of health and medicine if you're not educating kids today. the people that are learning today are going to be the ones taking care of us. So I think everybody should have a vested interest in this process. Of course, also, many people listening have kids

across various spectrums of learning. But I think before I get into that, your story is just so interesting. And I know you don't really like telling your story because I know this, because I know you so well. And all you want to do is talk about the work. But I'm going to force you to tell your story a little bit. So where did you grow up? I was born in Minnesota and I moved around every couple years, mostly up and down the East Coast. My dad worked for General Electric and wherever they had a factory, whatever town we'd move there. You obviously did very well in high school, and you wound up at Stanford. So what did you major in? I would have been, I majored in Econ. I did not graduate. I dropped out, but in Econ major, I mostly picked it because it was easy in the Stanford

curriculum. What year were you in when you dropped out? I would have been class of 90, 1990, and I dropped out between junior and senior year. I'm sure my junior year professors were like he's not really engaged and probably misses too many classes. For me and just a little bit on the background was when I was in high school I wrote a paper on AI. The paper was about expert systems and old school AI, not what we know today. There was a part, one paragraph called neural nets, which is sort of today's AI. And it was like, this is decades away. I then went to Stanford and literally I was in a class with Professor Feigenbaum, who's considered one of the fathers of expert systems and old-school AI, and he's just talking about how you can build these incredible systems, and they'd be worth

millions of dollars if you could figure it out. And so some classmates and I, we dropped out, started Trilogy. And the story around that was just, it was the first AI company. We didn't call it AI back then because it had bad rep in the 90s to sell a billion dollars of AI products. And so that's how we got our start and eventually leads to, you know, today's story. I always find it amazing when people are dropping out like with one year to go. Sort of like, why didn't you finish it? But you must have a strong conviction if you're saying, I'm going to forego my Stanford degree to go and start this company that can't wait a year to do this. There's a famous Forbes headline that's like, you're a moron because my dad was very clear what a moron I was being by dropping out.

The issue was I felt there was a time to market issue. It was a race. And I was just like, I'm sitting in Spanish. class. I don't care. My market's going to run away without me, and there's a huge opportunity to go build this company. It's that tension where you thought. Now, with 2020 hindsight, it took us over three years to build the product, and we thought we could do it much quicker. And so there wasn't a time to market issue. And with hindsight, I could have stayed. But back to that pressure, I just felt it. I didn't want to miss it. I had to go do it. Did you guys come

and set up shop in Austin right away? Not right away. So we dropped out and did the whole, we couldn't raise funding. Silicon Valley back in the late 80s was not given money to dropouts like us. But we literally lived in a garage. We had classmates who had like have a house and we're like, can we rent your garage to live in it? But then in 92, we moved down to Austin. Actually, John Lynch, who was one of the co-founders, was like, look, if we're going to be poor, back then Austin was cheap. It's a lot cheaper than Palo Alto, so let's go move down there. And so that's actually what led us down here to Austin. When did this idea of finding your next, is it David Brooks who wrote that book, The Second Mountain? If your first

mountain was trilogy, this incredible business, which really we're not going to say much more about other than the fact that it basically created an unlimited essentially war chest of capital that you were then able to go and deploy to your second mountain, which is this passion around education. Yes, you always had an interest in AI, but when did these two become the next frontier. Back to education, 10 years ago, 11 years ago now, McKinsey Price started Alpha in Austin. Radical idea back then. One of the things I've learned as principal of Alpha is that parents want their kids' education to be however they were educated. And I was the same way. I went to Catholic school. My kids are in Catholic school. You know, and McKinsey's like, look at this great

new school I got. It's going to be awesome. And I was like, that's weird. When she started, it's literally in some guy's garage. I'm like, you know, her co-founder. I'm not going to the weird school. Sorry. It took her two years to actually convince me to move my daughters over. They sampled it one time and literally loved it. They did it after their Catholic school got out before they went to summer camp. And they came back and they're like, Dad, we don't want to go to summer camp. We want to still go to Alpha. And I didn't like school enough. You weren't going to miss summer for school. That's how I'm crazy to me. So anyway, I was like, okay, that's actually really good sign. I should move over. And that was 10 years ago. But my discussion with the

McKinsey always was like, this is awesome, but it's not scalable. What did Alpha look like 11 years ago when you first peered behind the curtain? It was the other co-founder, Brian, and he had this philosophy. He had these rules. So when I moved my kid over to Alpha, I said, Brian, what are the two things I don't believe about education that I need to understand? He's like, first, kids must love school. they must love school. And I'm like, sort of spinach sometimes, dude. Like, no. He's like, you're wrong and you'll figure it out. And I was like, okay. And then his second is, your kids can do so much more than you expect. And I'm like, I sort of have really high expectations. He's like, they're going to blow you away on what they can do. And your expectations are too low. He was setting it up. It really was 20 kids. They weren't in the garage after two years, but it is alternative. They would, would use a set of apps to do academics, but they'd have the teachers would help academically if needed. And then they would have all these life skills, they'd check charts and life skills. So it was some academics and then workshops and life skills.

And the 20 kids that are in there, what grade slash age range? They were probably second grade to fifth grade was probably the range, sixth grade, somewhere around there. And they're clustered sort of like the one room school house. You go in, and it is crazy. He's like, oh, they're doing spelling bees. I'm like, they're walking on their hands, doing handstands across the room. And he's like, yeah, watch how they do it.

And literally they would have to try to walk across the room in handstands, but recite all the words on their spelling viz doing it. Could they make it all across? And the kids were just having a ton of fun. And I was always like, are they really learning and sort of all the academic side? But testing showed they were. And what was the state of technology? You referred to some apps, but what was the state of educational apps 11 years ago? There was things like Dreambox and Khan Academy was out.

Okay. So they were static, static in the sense that they weren't adaptive. The problem with old ones, and actually even a bunch of them today, is now we know with learning science all these much better ways to do it. Their standards of mastery were too low. Their implementation of learning science was too little, if you look at them. But they were good enough that you could get your way through. But back to some of the problems, like when my oldest first took her seventh grade test, standardized test, she failed at all.

Sorry, this is after being in the alpha program. This was she had been in the alpha program with those apps. Got it. And so the apps were janky and not all there. This is before I got involved, except as a parent. And she failed her seventh grade standardized test. And you're like, oh, wow. You can use apps.

People say, how does Alpha get all these results? because there's a lot of people who try to use these apps. And you're like, these apps have gaps in holes. Figuring out how to change that was a lot of how I got involved in what I've been doing the last three years. Your foray into this is obviously then, in this logical way, through the experience of your own kids. I want to just take a step way back and talk more about education in general.

I don't think anybody listening to us now is unfamiliar with the idea, although it's not particularly popular at the moment. We have enough other things that are going on in the world that have people up in arms. But it's sort of cyclic when people look at the data and realize that the United States is not doing well in primary and secondary education. Or I don't know if those are the right terms, but whatever it is up to K to 12. I don't know if secondary is considered college, but we start to do pretty well in college relative to the world. But getting to college, we're not doing well.

And the point is further made when you look at the dollars in to results out. So I think we're spending, what, one trillion dollars on K through 12 education, which is about one-seventh of what the world spends. And of course, we don't have one-seventh of the population. So there's a huge mismatch there, but our ROI is quite low. So it's actually kind of parallels the health care spending thing, where on a per capita basis, we spend more on health care than anybody else, and yet we're actually not producing the best life expectancy.

So let's dwell on that for a moment. Why does the United States spend so much money? on K-12 education, and maybe more importantly, why are we not getting the results, at least if we believe we're measuring the results correctly. If the results are to be determined by these tests that all the OECD nations take, why are we doing so poorly? That's a really complex answer, but it is true. Our academic performance continues to go down across it. As an example, there's this test, NW-EA map test. It's a nationwide test. When I was a kid, I took an Iowa test.

This is equivalent one. Millions of kids take it, and they just updated their 20-25 norm table. The last one they did, it's 2020. You know, every five years, they update the benchmark. America knows less now. So your average eighth grader in 2025 knows less than the average eighth grader in 2020. Which knows less than the average in 2015. Yep.

You can't just blame COVID on that. No, no. Like, this is a continuing trend. It's a continuing trend. It's continuing to go down. There is one actually anomaly, which is from 15 to 20 and 20 to 25, there's one group who actually goes up and that's your 99th percentile. So the top 1% academically in America in K through 12 continues to increase. Those are your Ivy League-bound kids continue to go up.

Now, everybody else is going down. Things are getting easier in tests. The AP tests in high school that you take, they re-normed them in the last couple years, and they norm up against college kids because it's like, okay, if you take an AP test, that's like a college class. And so they say, well, what do college kids know? And they're like, oh, college kids know less. So now our AP test is easier. And so it used to be at Alpha, if you were going to be in the honors track, you had to get a four or five on an AP. Now we're like, oh, you just need a five because the fours are too easy. The standards just keep going down. And I'll give some more data. I just gave the academic talk. We had hundreds of families at Alpha across the country of campus now everywhere, start the last couple weeks.

And so they all come in. They take a placement test. I got up in front of all the parents, and I was like, here's the message. And it's going to worry you. But you should take away that your $40,000 private school, they've been lying to you, which is if your student has an A and you've been getting straight A's on your transcript, that student in our tests is anywhere from one year ahead. That's great. to three years behind. This is an A student who's three years behind. And when we talk about three years behind, they're a seventh grader. That means they're missing a significant number of questions on the fourth grade test. If you're a B student, you are from three years behind to seven years behind. Let's give an example of what this means. I have a great sense of this because you and I have been through this together. But I want the listener to understand tangibly what that means. Let's put that in terms of something mathematical. Let's talk about what that implies for a B student in seventh grade mathematics, what concept could they be possibly

missing? They don't know their multiplication tables or division tables. So one of the things that's happened in K through 12 education is they've decided that memorization is bad. And you don't need to memorize your multiplication tables anymore. You're just going to use a calculator. That's not what learning science says. If you're going to do higher level math, you need fact fluency. And if you think of cognitive load theory, you have a certain number of working memory slots. And the level of complexity of the math problem that you can solve is going to be based on how many slots you have and how you're using them. And one of the few places in brain chemistry is if you have memorized something to fluency, it doesn't use a slot. It doesn't use it. And so you can do higher level math.

But if you have to use your slots to say seven times eight is 56, you're now trying to do higher level math and you're using it up on the wrong things. If you want to do higher level math, memorize your math tables and your division tables to fluency. That's the most simple, obvious thing we could do in this country, is just change that. Just go back to what we used to do. And even this, and this is the most extreme example, we had a student who had a 740 math SAT. Just for listeners who might not be familiar with that, the score is 800. 740 would be a very good score. What percentile is that? Top 10 percent. Okay, yeah, 90th percentile easily. Yeah, 770 is like the top 1%, so maybe in top 5%. Great score. She cannot get above it. We do what we call

game film. You review why you miss the test, why you miss the questions on the test. One of the thing, as an example, that's common in sports. Game film. People don't do this in academics for some reason. She would just go through it and she's like, I know what that is. You decide, was it a careless error? Did you not know the material? She's like, after the test, she could get them all done, given time. What happened was she was overloaded and made careless mistakes. When your working memory slots are overloaded, it reflects actually in careless mistakes. So if your students making careless mistakes, you're like grit and discipline, you're like, you probably don't have a fact fluency somewhere earlier that if you just go fix that,

all of a sudden those careless mistakes go away. So she literally went back to third grade, learned her multiplication and division tables. Back to convincing parents, that's really hard. convincing students and parents, your 740 bath student needs third grade material. She then got a 790 math after she memorized it because she stopped making the careless errors. She knew all the material before. She was overloading her working memory. And the learning science is like, that's her issue.

In our system, we can identify that and fix it. And seemingly crazy that you can go back and memorize your tables and get up there. I remember another story, Joe, that we bonded over a couple of years. ago, which was a student that was really struggling in entry-level chemistry. And I think anybody who's been through chemistry can empathize with that. The first time you're doing, you're going through physical chemistry and you're trying to balance the chemical equations. And this kid is dying. And they think the problem is, it's chemistry. The problem is chemistry. And you came in and said, no, actually, the problem is fractions. You didn't master fractions in third grade or fourth grade or

whatever fractions are introduced, and you're failing chemistry for this exact reason, we're going to go back and fill the gap in fractions, and this will become easy for you. And of course, that's what happened. Math science, knowledge is hierarchical, right? And this is back to mastery, which is why we do poorly. We've given up mastery in this country. Why? We're a time-based system.

At the end of third grade, you're moving to fourth grade. And at the end of fourth grade, you're moving to fifth grade. And we don't hold kids back. We've said, we're just going to move kids through no matter what, because it's time, because there's all these other social issues. Oh, my God, I can't have my kid hold back, the pressure on the school to relax the standards. 80% of kids at Harvard get an A now. Grade inflation. Grades look like this. Learning, these test scores look like that. Yeah. And for whatever reasons, we've done it. But in a time-based system, just even grading. There's this concept that, okay, you got a 70. You can pass. An 80's a B. That's great. My kids would be student 80. The problem is, if you only have 80% knowledge, you're creating all these holes and it all compounds where eventually, and it starts to when you hit algebra or chemistry, that you think it's the current material, but it's your prerex, right?

It's your foundation. It's your foundation. We talk a lot about parents, because a lot of this is we all grew up in this time-based system and just the old system. And so this new way is very different. But the best analogies we always use that parents totally understand is sports. Just like game film. We're like, review your test, figure out what's wrong.

Mastery is the same one. If you're the point guard and you lose the ball 20% of the time going down the court, the coach isn't like, let's work on the advanced stuff. They're like, kid, let's learn how to dribble. We don't need to worry about dunking yet. Correct. No dunking. Let's focus on get up to 99%. Get to mastery that you know how to do the basics.

Everybody in sports is like, if you're not doing well, go back and do the basics. Well, academics is the same way. And if you apply that same logic, but in a time-based system with a teacher in front of a classroom, you can't get every kid to mastery. And that's when we get into like the new solutions and why we get these crazy, you know, kids can learn 10 times faster. It's because we're able to get out of a non-mastery time-based system, a non-mastery time-based system that has a teacher in front of a classroom. Teachers are great, teacher in front of the classroom is bad. That dynamic. And to your point, hierarchical, chemistry is just algebra with advanced word problems.

Physics is literally calculus with advanced word problems. Algebra is basically advanced fraction manipulation. You can give kids a fraction test and predict their algebra score. And then fractions are, how's your division to multiplication tables? Do you memorize them to fluency? It just keeps going down, the whole track all the way down. And so part of what you have to do to fix the system is figure out age grade. Oh, wait, I'm an eighth grader in algebra. And knowledge grade. Wait, I don't know my fractions

are different. A teacher in a front of a classroom, though, it's not their fault. I'm a teacher. I'm an eighth grade teacher. What do you teach? Eighth grade material. And I have kids who don't know some third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh material. What do I do? And this is why so many people hire tutors after school at private schools. It's crazy. We have all these people go to private schools and hire after school tutors because the school doesn't teach them. And the tutor's just like, okay, I'm going to go give you the earlier grade level material. That's it. When we talk about kids, all these hundreds of kids coming in who are three years behind, seven years behind, the second part of what I tell the parents is that's freaking you out because nobody wants

their kid this far behind. But it's so easy to fix. The remediation on this stuff is no time at all. When you use these learning science-based AI tutors and the apps that we have, kids can learn 10 times faster, 10 times faster. So when you actually look at, at material. There's 180 school days, hour a day plus homework, a couple hundred hours. One subject per grade level takes our alpha kids between 20 and 30 hours to finish an entire grade level to mastery. So you can take fourth grade math and be like, you got 26 hours, kid, you do an hour day of homework. You're 26 days away, right? 22 hours is seventh grade and sixth grade, 22 each. for math. The science curriculum, like six, seventh, and eighth grade, first of all, we don't teach a lot.

And Joe, would this work just as a thought experiment if each student had one teacher, the private tutor? If you could put a private tutor in front of a student for 22 hours over the course of whatever, two months or one hour a day for 26 days, are you confident that that individual, and of course we'll talk about why that's not practical, but that individual, if skilled enough, could navigate and weave that child through? So if you give me a few more hours than what I just gave you, because the AI can do a little bit better than most tutors. But yes, fundamentally, the paper that was written when I was in high school about education,

like so learning science has been around for 40 years. They've been writing papers. There's 10,000 papers published by all the schools of education and Stanford and all over the place. That is, we know kids can learn 2, 5, or 10 times faster. We've known it. in Bloom's 2 Sigma is a seminal paper. And he just said, if everybody got a personalized tutor was his first point. And second, they did it to mastery.

They worked to master. So mastery-based, not tenure-based. Correct. Just you have to know the material before you advance. And there's an individual tutor to coach you. You will get 2-Sigma better performance. Your leftmost part of your curve, your worst students are going to be what today is considered the top 10% in a 2-Sigma performance.

You said to me once four or five years ago something, and I'm curious if you still stand by it, which is at least through the end of eighth grade, there is not a single student in the United States that cannot achieve complete mastery in mathematics to score above the 90th or 99th percentile in the national test. Yes. I think I said that to you three years ago, and I would hesitate just for argument's sake, take out the bottom 5% just to stop all the arguments. Okay. All right. You would still say that 95% of all eighth graders in the United States could be what today is considered top 10% performance.

They can get to master. In mathematics. In mathematics. So just let that settle in for a moment. That seems to fly in the face of everything. I want to go back and close the loop on something before we continue this. discussion, which is I still don't have a sense of what's changing because we've always had a time-based system, not a mastery-based system. So what has gone on in the last 25 years? Because that's

not the change. Why are scores? Why are standards? Yes. The fundamental answer is standards are lowering. And part of it is parents. Three years ago, when I became principal, I would sit down with parents and I'm like, we have this cool engine. It's going to teach your kid twice as much in the two-hour block, twice as much. Now, they have to use the apps right and engage with it and your students not using it right so they're not learning 2X. The parents are like, stop, don't pressure my kid to learn 2X. Don't pressure them. I'd be in a parent meeting. It would literally be mom, dad, and Johnny. And I'm like, look, when he misses a question, he doesn't watch the video or he's scrolling and just guessing. If he'd just watch the video, he'd learn twice as much.

And the parents would say, we're not interested in that. Now, the rest of the things. Parents want life skills, community. School is a bundle, of which academics is one piece. And for the most part in America, except for fewer than 10%, less than 10% market share, less than 10% of the parents, fewer than 10% of parents, really care about academics. 90% of parents are like, oh, well, so that was an eye-opener to me. Hundreds of parents of meetings later, we switched our pitch, which was two-hour learning. same engine, you're like, it's two-hour learning. And look, we're trying to get Johnny out of here in two hours so we can do these cool workshops and do what he loves. Parents are like,

Johnny, what's wrong with you? Don't you want to get out of here and do the cool stuff? And so the most important part of education is a motivated student. For us, 2X learning is not a motivating idea except for sort of the top kids. Two-hour learning is motivational for every kid on the planet. If you had to say, my biggest unlock was that realization. The product became code name time back, give the kids their time back. Because that is the most precious for 12 years. We waste kids time. We know that kids sitting in a lecture-based classroom retain maybe 5%. That bad? It's that bad. It's that bad. Being 10 times better, you're like, I need them to remember 50%. It's that bad. We know it's that bad. It's not personalized to them. It's not to a

mastery, all these bad things. And so we're wasting their 12 years. And you wonder why kids don't like academics and they're disengaged and all these things is we're wasting their time. And so for this, it's like, great, they're going to learn in two hours. Now they're still learning two X. That's just not the part we pitch. And so they're learning two X in two hours. And then you free up the rest of the day. And so we get all our kids. Our score is at Alpha School. We're all top one percent academically. Our classes are top one percent in the country. There's no school academically who's as good as Alpha in the country. And the reason is, is using this model, we're just implementing all these concepts have been written these learning science papers for 40 years.

Is there a challenge to the intensity that's required in those two hours? So I'll give you an analogy. So I get asked all the time, hey, Peter, look, I've read that I could just do one set to failure once a week for each body part and get most of the benefits of grinding it out for 10 to 20 sets per body part. And I say, look, it's a little bit of an exaggeration, but there's some truth to this. If you could truly do one to two sets to absolute failure per exercise, size, yeah, you're going to get great results. And they're like, well, Peter, why don't you do that? And I say, look, to be honest with you, it's really freaking hard to bring that level of intensity to every single set of every single workout every time you do it. And there are a bunch of

other reasons that I actually kind of like being in the gym or whatever. But the point is, it's true. You can get great results in much less time. But for many people, the intensity is not something they're willing to rise to. And so I guess the similar question is if for two hours a day, kid can learn what a traditional kid is learning in six to seven hours a day and actually do it better, is there something that they have to be able to bring from an attention span perspective that is very difficult? The answer is it's not difficult, but they have to want to do it. So motivation. If you talk to an educator, there's two things you need. You need a motivated student and you need to put them in lessons of the correct difficulty. Not too easy, not too hard.

Taking this little bit, why doesn't ed tech work? Back to these ads. apps and test scores keep going down, but everybody keeps buying ed tech. And the answer is, ed tech does that second piece, that 10% piece of put them in the right lessons very well. Our AI tutors do it even better. It can figure out very easily what a kid knows and doesn't know and say age grade, eighth grade, knowledge grade, fourth, give them fourth grade lessons. So that part's great. Now, the second part is, to the point of my parent meeting, how do I get them to engage with the app? Because I'm spinning in the chair, I'm not paying attention, I'm talking to my friend, I'm scrolling TikTok, I'm doing anything except focusing on it.

And so what is their motivation is 90% of the solution? And for us, that's why time back is so valuable, which is the kid has to engage with the apps for those two hours or they don't get the rest of the day. They don't get their time back. They'll just sit there wasting their time. I mean, we literally in our app have a waste meter. And it just coaches the kit. We can get into the AIs and stuff.

and chat bots are terrible. ChatGBTGBT rolled out to America students. 90% of kids use it as a cheat bot. It's all cheating. We don't have a chat interface in ours. But one of the things our AI does is it watches the kid's screen and coaches them up. And it's like, look, you're scrolling the article and guessing.

I'm not going to learn that way. You're skipping this. And it's going to coach them of how to learn better. And if you have a motivation for the student to actually learn better and be effective, they're very happy to do that. We have a sports academy that we just opened 10 of them around Texas, and these are middle schools, D1 bound athletes,

kind of thing. They come in and they do the two hours in the apps, and then once they hit it, they go green, where they've done the lessons, they get to do sports all afternoon. And so you can take kids who are like, I hate school, I skip school, absenteeism is huge.

And when they get to do that, all of a sudden they're like, I'm totally motivated. It's only been a couple weeks that we've been open, but you get notes from all the parents who are like, my kid always was sick, never wanted to go, everything. Now he's waking me up and is like, let's not be late. It's because they have the motivation to actually learn.

So that's the most important. You can do that for everybody. And motivation really, really does matter. And alpha is designed around how do we motivate kids. And the biggest motivators time back, we also use a lot of other ones. That's the biggest thing that makes our system work. Then when you talk just, is there also extra juice of the intensity, right? We measure, do kids get through our apps 90 or 95% first time right, where we're not making

the lesson hard enough, where we want to make sure the lesson's not too hard, where you don't have to have too much intensity. What is the sweet spot? Is it 90? Between 90 and 95% is where first time right. Got it. So actually, there's a thing called the zone approximate development, which is what an individual student should be.

And you want to keep a student in 80 to 85% correct. questions, which is different than first time right on getting through the whole lesson. You want to be in the zone of proximal development, which is, if you're at 99%, it's too easy. You're not learning. If you're getting 99% of the questions right, you're just regurgitating what you already know. If you're missing half the time or two-thirds, you're only at 50 or 60, you get disengagement. It's too frustrating. I'm out.

Video game developers are the world's experts on this, on engagement of how do you engage? And they'll tell you, always winning, always learning. That concept, in 80 to 85% is where that is. So we're measuring the way to maximize learning is a unending stream of content, both educational questions, right, and learning content that is at 80 to 85% accuracy. And this gets into stuff that we're building is if you sit in a Stanford lecture, you're going to retain one to five facts, ideas, and concepts per hour. Our current learning engines, depending on what the subject, we're at 20 to 40.

We have stuff that we're working on, and Gen A.I. is the driver of this. We'll get to 100 facts ideas and concepts an hour. Think of an endlessly scrolled TikTok list except engaging and good content instead of the poison that that is. And so the learning science part is we know how to get knowledge into kids' head 10 times better than the current educational system. It takes a whole rebuild and back to kids when they love school, they're going to engage in the app because the whole day is great. Let's go back and talk a little bit about education science. You've alluded to it a couple of times. Tell me what 90% of people would agree with. I was going to say, tell me something that is unambiguously true about education science, but let's soften that a little bit and say, tell me something that 90% of people who study education, study the science of learning, would agree with.

90% would agree that individualized tutoring and a mastery-based standard is the best way to teach kids. It's dramatically more effective than a time-based system. The concepts in learning science, zone of proximal development, spaced repetition, you would get the testing effect that actually asking kids, active learning is better than passive learning. Retention of sitting passively in a classroom is the worst way to teach a kid. All of those things. What else are really well-normed.

Cognitive load theory is a newer area of learning science that's started in the 90s. And this is the, how many working memory slots do you have, and then how many reps does it take to move from working memory slot, short term memory, basically, working memory slot to long term, they're all going to agree. It's so interesting to me that there's any dispute around that when you see the effects in sports. Sports illustrates that, I think, more than anything else. You look at the difference between Tom Brady versus an exceptional quarterback, a very good quarterback. And it's the processing speed. It's not how fast or how much. far he can throw the ball. It's his processing speed that sets him apart. It's the cognitive bandwidth of what he's doing. I mean, it's actually the same in Formula One. If you look at what separates the very best in the world from very good, it's cognitive bandwidth. It's the guy who actually doesn't have to think at all about driving and can still drive at the limit while he can

use all of his cognitive reserve for strategic decision making. So like that fluency stuff, There's nobody in learning science who's like, it's better if they don't memorize their multiplication tables, even though our school system, it's not like, oh, these private schools are bailing on it too. It's not just. But why was that decision made? Parental pressure again? My kid is not happy. So this is another one of the sort of coddling of the... It is to come to an alpha school. Now I have a conversation with parents. I've sort of fry and what he gave you those two things. But I've had a third one to it, which is, first, your kid must love school. Really love school. And we measure literally, measure, would you rather go to school or go on vacation? Super high standard. We should have kids love school for 12 years. They're going to be there your childhood. Why do we not have that standard? The second is your kid can learn in two hours twice as much as sitting in class for six. Your kid can crush academics in just two hours a day. Crush it. That's the second thing you have to believe to come to alpha. And the third, and this is where the controversy parts, but it's true,

is the key to your kid's happiness is high standards. And that's the one that a lot of people do not believe that they think the key to my kids' happiness is low standards. Where did this virus come from? Where did this virus infect us? Well, part of it is the parents want to protect their kids. It comes from parents from a good place, which is, I don't want to see my kids struggle and fail on their road to success. They don't want to see that. I talk about the cycle. As a principle, I can tell you, kids struggle, fail, sometimes cry on their road to success if they're supported by a caring, loving adult. That loop, if you ask any child development expert in the planet, you can type that all in chat to BT, is the key to kids development,

the key to their self-confidence, the key to their resilience, the key to their growth, they go through a cycle of struggle, fail on the road to success. It's the hero's journey. It's woven into everything we've done. And back to your point out sports, 50% of America's like, you know where my kid learns life skills, and when you talk about life skills, teamwork, leadership, grit, hard work. It's in after-school sports. Because that's what the coach does. My kid's going to go through that struggle and I went through it when I was playing sports

and my kid's going to go through that. And that's where you learn it. And they have this view of that's the only place you learn it and it shouldn't happen in school. That's such an interesting point. And the reason it doesn't happen in schools is because in a time-based system, everybody thinks good grades equals high IQ. And so it's fundamentally that IQ is what determinants grades. And so I don't want to pressure my kid because it's not fair. And so I don't want to put that pressure on it.

One of the magic unlocks we have, back to everybody can get to much higher performance, is a mastery-based system. If you take the best kids, you're like, who are the kids who do get in the Ivy League? They're basically the high IQ kids who also have high conscientiousness, big five conscientiousness. They're grinders. They just crank through it naturally. And those are the kids who do well. And so if we're rebuilding education to fix it, we have to take those two constraints away.

A mastery-based system takes away IQ, which is every kid, the conceptual leaps that are required to get through K through 8, actually by the design of Common Core, aren't that big. That does not mean everybody can go be a nuclear physicist at Stanford and design all these things. There is areas where you do need more cognitive. Everybody in math, there's a point they reach. Just, I can't do the processing. But K through 8, it's designed that everybody can do it. Everyone will do it. Everybody can do it.

Just reflect on that for a moment, Joe. Think of all the kids that are in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade who are good students in other domains. They're doing well in English. They're doing well in history. They're conscientious. They work hard. But they've created a narrative that says, I can't do. math. We'll dive into that. We also use our motivation model to undo the conscientiousness

limitation. You have to use more extrinsic motivators to let people who aren't high conscientiousness still perform like somebody who does. So those are our magic unlocks on those two things that we think can fix education. But your math thing, I've got to give these examples. So it's an epidemic of kids who come into middle school. Predominantly girls, I have two daughters, who come in and they're like, I'm not a math science girl. Society's like accepting it. Okay, let's go read all the learning science papers about how middle school girls can't do math science. Okay, there are none. There's none. That doesn't exist. There's no such thing. But it's this total meme that they believe. And so part of our job in middle or when they transfer in high school is to fix that.

There's this concept of, oh, I'm an art girl or I'm an English girl or whatever it is. And it doesn't girl boy, there's no difference. We have some seniors this year. The first one, her big project that She does at Alpha, you do these big AlphaX projects. She is doing the first all-teen, produced, created musical for Broadway. She sourced all the songwriters off TikTok. She can fill a thousand-person venue. She's trying to raise it up so she can do it. So she'd be, you know, I'm an arts theater girl.

790 Math, SAT. We have another girl. These are seniors. She's trying out to be Miss Teen USA. 790 Math, SAT. Third girl, this is my daughter. She has a, I call her TikTok girl. She's got millions of likes on TikTok and tons of followers.

She's building a app to teach teen boys how to ask girls out on dates because teen boys are terrible dad. Top 1% SAT. There's this concept that these people can't learn it. You're like, they all can. Now, what do you have to do when they come into middle school? They do. They don't know the multiplication tables. They don't know the prerex.

They are going to struggle in algebra. So you're like, okay. Let's go back. Let's fill them up. And all of a sudden, once you fill the holes, all of a sudden, they can do it. And then once you know algebra, you're like, oh, I can do chemistry. K through eight science, there's no math, actually. It's all just memorizing facts, igneous rocks and planets and stuff. Once you get to high school, that's where biology is still more memorization, less math. But then chemistry and physics are all math-based, calculus, and algebra. You have to get these kids the prerex. But then all of a sudden, they're like, oh, chemistry is pretty fun. Now that I know calculus, and I can crush CalCBC. All our kids in high school, if you want to be on their honest track, it's five on CalcBC. Totally doable for everybody.

This whole thing, you know, our freshmen coming in, by the end of the freshman year, they're 1410 on the SAT, which 1350s top 10%. These are freshmen. These are freshmen. Like, and most schools don't,

I mean, that's better than most junior seniors. Most don't publish their freshman results. And we can get freshmen there. Once it becomes this mastery-based system, how high you go becomes a decision back to your effort. It's a decision, not an inherent capability. And so when you break that link, Alpha kids are just in a mastery-based system, they're like, oh, it's just more work. It's not, I'm not smart enough. And that is the unlock that we have to have and why we have to move

to a mastery-based system, because you just need kids to be like, oh, if you're in normal alpha high, 1350 is the minimum SAT. You've got to get to it, top 10%. If you want to be in the honors track, it's 1550. 1550. I mean, that's top 1%. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's just a decision.

Do you want to do the work to get to 1550 from 1350? It's just that, look, I'm willing to put in this many more hours this year. Yeah. Back to my youngest daughter, just took the SAT. She's top 1%, but she's not perfect 800. She's asking the AI. She's like, how much time will it take for me to get up to the top, to a perfect 800? And, you know, at that level, it doesn't really matter.

for getting into college. But she's like... Just out of curiosity. Well, no. She's like, Dad, all those STEM boys, they think I'm this dumb TikTok girl. And, you know, if I get an 800, I get to mug on them the rest of their life. And I think it's totally worth it. And so she's literally, but it's just a decision.

She's trying to decide. It'll come back and it'll probably be 20-ish hours probably, I don't know, some manageable number of hours. And she'll just be making a decision. Am I going to put the reps in, the practice in to get there so that I can have this ego boost basically, because you really loves it. Or, no, okay, I'm going to do something else with my time. That's where in these mastery-based models versus teacher in front of a classroom model where you're a time-based system, you're like, I don't know how to get there. There's no path up. And when you

log in to our system, it literally tells you, you know, in two hours a day, you're three years behind. So you first come in, you're like, you're three years behind. You're like, oh, my God, that seems insurmountable. You're 20 to 30 hours per grade level. So you could be. 60 hours behind if you're three years behind. 60 hours, that's it. You're 60 hours away. And you're like, so if I do an hour or homework, two months, I'm there. I'm caught up. Now, back to incentives, there's some kids who are like, do I care that I'm caught up? But it's easy to incentive to want to catch up. You can figure out, okay, what do we have to do? One of the things Alpha is known for, whether infamously or not, is we use extrinsic motivators. Use money. Time back is the most important one.

than money is the Westlake track, honors track where it's six hours a day and eight zillion homework hours, I don't think you can pay a kid enough to, like, love school by going through that versus we're two hours a day for a non-honors track. We're three hours a day for honors back to the 1550. It does take more time. But we will take middle school kids. Like, this is a middle school active program ramp. Kids come in. We will pay them $1,000 to get to top 1%. There's a lot of stories around this where kids view, look, I can't do that. I'm not the smart kid. I'm not the math science girl. I can't, whatever it is. And if you get there and do these lessons and we're just going to keep giving you lessons and you do the work, you're going to

get $1,000. We'll pay kids coming in middle school $1,000 to get to top 1%. The point of this is what's even more important than the academic knowledge, it's their internal view of themselves that changes, that kids come in and say, I'm not a math science girl, I can't be top 1%, I can't do this, whatever limits they have. And a lot of education when you talk about it is holistically, you're trying to take limits in kids and release them, have them understand, you're limitless, you can do all this. And this is the best way academically we've found to do it. And so they come in and the AI is going to say, here's all the lessons you need to do to get to top 1% and just go through them. And that motivation will get all these kids to top 1%. And the number of stories we have, you know, I have

one of my own daughter, but all the alpha families where their student, they come back and they're like, I didn't realize I could be top 1% and my personal self-confidence and view of myself that I had to do hard work. You had to do the work. And then once you take a middle school kid who's top 1%, as they go into high school, they're not going to give it up. And there's this mental view of, oh, I guess I am a smart kid or I'm a capable kid. And that unlock is so valuable. So for us, that's when we think juicing it with money. I mean, we spent 20 grand a kid in this country per student. And you're like, in middle school, give a kid a thousand dollars in order to have them realize there's no limit. Why would most people, I assume,

listening to us, have sort of an uneasy feeling about that? They can't reconcile what you just said, which is, well, wait a minute. On the one hand, I know we're spending $20,000 per year per kid on these kids and we're getting nothing for it. And you're proposing, we give them a couple of those thousands of dollars strategically to incentivize half of the equation, which is them having the motivation to do this. And yet, that's going to make a lot of people feel uneasy. Why? So there's a view that there needs to be an intrinsic love of learning for it to be pure. It has to be intrinsic, not extrinsic. And that if you're buying it, it's sullied and not good.

It's wrong. It's fundamentally wrong. That is a common view. Are there any data that would support one view being favorable to the other? How would that be studied? Yeah, there is a set of papers that have been written that show that if somebody is not intrinsically motivated or is intrinsically motivated and you pay them, they lose intrinsic motivation. Now, that's not the case that we're sitting with.

We have kids who aren't motivated, who aren't intrinsically going through it. They need the boost. And if you actually ask Alpha kids, and maybe we'll do a study someday, no parent who has their kids at Alpha thinks, my kids lost their intrinsic motivation. If anything, it's the opposite because now they think they're capable. And those papers don't talk about is how much of the issue was, I didn't think I was capable. I now realize I am. And I get this crazy, intrinsic boost around it.

My youngest daughter would be this example, which is she came in to middle school. She hit top 10%. This is going into seventh grade. She was top 10% coming in. So she'd been there, but she's like, Dad, I'm not like my older sister. I'm not top 1%. That's just not who I am. I'm TikTok girl.

I was like, you know what I know. You know love more than anything is shopping. I'll bet you $1,000. that you can't get to top 1%. And so she literally would fill her Amazon cart with $1,000 of stuff. And in the morning, she'd then look and look at the lessons she had to go through. And she'd do it, right? She just grind through it.

Now, back to this thing, it's, we had a lot of family discussions around this because my wife, she was like, wait, there's two things. Most parents are like this. There's two things here. One, you're setting 1%, top 1%, and most parents are like, that's too hard. Why are you putting that pressure on the kid? And number two, it doesn't feel right to pay $1,000 to get this. We're all brought up that there's something wrong, but she does it. She has top 1% buys everything.

But then she sits down with my wife and she's like, Mom, I know you didn't like us doing this, but you need to understand what this is done for me, which is I never thought I was as smart as my older sister. And now I realize I can do everything that she can do. and it's totally changed my internal view. And that element, now, back, she's also the one now who's top 1% on the SAT, tried to decide if she wants to do the extra work to get a perfect score. That change in their view of their capability, that unlock is so valuable.

And I believe we should do this for every kid in America. But that's the dynamics of why people don't like it. You then just have to decide if you can use extrinsic motivation, whatever it is. buy them concert tickets, go shopping, screen time, video game time, whatever it takes to get the kid to realize I can go be and learn all this and be top 1% when I previously didn't think that. And I go through that struggle, fail, sometimes cry out of the road to success loop, that then unlocks my human potential.

The point of education beyond academic, you're trying to unlock human potential, and this is just a great, easy way to do it. It's not available in a time-based system. That's the thing. It's not necessarily something that has to happen indefinitely. What I think makes sense here is that it's an unlock that then creates a new state of awareness that therefore becomes self-perpetuating. So in many ways, it's like the kindling that leads to the fire.

You don't need kindling indefinitely, but sometimes you need kindling. I'm going to steal that from you because that's a great way to think about it, which is, I'm not paying her to decide to go get a perfect score on her SAT. It's intrinsic. It's her decision. It's her capability. She just needed that kindling to jumpstart it. Whatever block was in the mind, good coaches, they're like, how do I unblock them? And that's what this does. Since we're on this of paying, I'll give you my second one. The Secretary of Education is coming down next week to meet with McKinsey around Alfa and stuff. And if there's one thing to fix education in America, what's the simplest unlock? It would be this. And it's all around whole filling and paying kids, which is, so when I first started, I wanted kids to go back and whole fill. Call a whole fill. You go back and do your prerex. I'm sitting down with seventh graders. And you know it does not motivate a seventh grader? Do it in fourth grade. No kid wants to do that. No one wants to be going back. And the only people who want it less than the kid are their

parents. Every parent in America has been trained. My kid needs to be at grade level, which once again, the learning science, that is not right. Get your kid to master the basics. And if it's previous material, give it to them. And I tried to convince parents, your kid needs a whole fill if we're going to get this whole thing working and stuff. And I basically ended up giving up on the parents. And so then I went to the seventh graders and I was just like, okay, here we go, guys. You could get a hundred on the Texas Star, you know, our state test. They're like, no way Mr. Lee bought. I'm like, no, no, no. And since I'll give you $100 bill for $100 on the test. They're like, that's still impossible. I'm like, no, no, no, there's a catch any grade level. They're like, I can take

a kindergarten, Texas Star, and you're going to give me a hundred bucks. I was like, well, it starts in the third grade. They're like, I'm in. They take the third grade, Texas Star, they get a hundred, I give him a hundred dollar bill. They're like, a fourth grade. I'm like, absolutely. Same thing. 100, get 100. By fifth grade, they're running into trouble. They got 75 to 85 to 85. Right. They get 75 to 85. There's holes. I'm like, well, do you want the AI tutor to generate the lessons you missed? And they're like, well, let me see how many it is. They're like, I can do that in a week. They're in. Get the 100. On the way, six and then the seventh grade. And for $400, $400.

You brought a kid up to grade level. Up to grade level, but more importantly, they all think and know they can get 100 on the state test, which used to be only the GT kids and smart kids get it. If you survey incoming Alpha parents and say, can your kid get 100 on the Texas Star, fewer than 10% say, yes, they can. After you've been at Alpha a year, 90% of kids are like, I can totally get 100 on Texas Star because they've done it, right? Our building over there gets more hundreds on the Texas Star than a school district of 100,000 kids. And it's just because we have a mastery-based system where our advancement now and is built-in-door system is we'll actually advance a kid if they get over 90. What is our mastery standard? It's in the 90s.

So you have to score on the state test above the 90 to move on to the next grade level material. But we also have 100 for 100. And so the kids are like, okay, well, I guess I'm just going to get the 100 because I want to get the 100. bill. So you have this concept where, and it just changes them where I could advance. That's an interesting experiment in and of itself. It's sort of what we would call a natural experiment because it's not randomized, which is if the kid is motivated basically just to do the bare minimum, they're going to just take the 90. Right. And if you make it 100, there's a little reality of bringing your parents and everybody along with you on this crazy journey we're

on. And so that 100 lets us out of it. When you get to the higher material and you've done 90, Our app's still going to go back and fill those 10%, because it's the best way to learn. But it's just get them advanced, let them go and do that. But the 100, the kids all just do it because they know they can. And it just gets the right mindset going, which is why our kids literally, for the SAT, everybody thinks, oh, you can't get perfect scores. They're like, it's just some extra work. Fives on APs, people are like, that seems impossible.

They're like, oh, how many hours is it? It takes 75 hours to go through AP world history or AP U.S. history. It's 75 hours. And they're like, oh, I got 15 hours left. get a five. So you just change the concept. Now, there's some upper bound where there is conceptual understanding and everybody can't get there. But K through eight curriculum, what would change education in America? We can totally do this. So let's now talk about the AI piece, which we haven't really explicitly talked about. You said something to me once that I think was

actually remarkable. You compared it to medicine. You compared education to medicine in terms of an unlock. So talk a little bit about that. If you go back to the sciences and whether it's biology or medicine, chemistry, physics, all of these had periods in the wilderness, I'm sure doctors bloodletting and things like this, but there was the invention of an instrument in each of those that allowed more precise measurement that unlocked and inflected the science. Medicine had theirs, I don't know which one you thought. I've heard you discuss this. I think it's the light microscope. If you were going to talk about one instrument that took us from what I described as the dark ages of medicine 1.0 into

medicine 2.0, which is where we are today, that inflection point came primarily around. Without the light microscope, it couldn't have happened. Sid Mukherjee wrote very eloquently about this in his most recent book, The Cell. Basically, until we could actually start to see microscopic organisms, we couldn't really handle germ theory. And until we could eradicate germ theory, we couldn't really live past about 40, on average. There were just too many people dying too young. That one piece of technology unleashed an entire change in the way medicine has been practiced, which of course has spread out far beyond infectious diseases. But I think it's impossible for me to imagine a scenario whereby we are alive today in the way we are without that.

When you look at AI, learning science, these papers have been written for 40 years, but they all start with, this doesn't work with a teacher in front of a classroom time-based model. You had the conceptual solution for the last 40 years on how to fix education, but there's been no technology to make it happen. You haven't had your microscope. We haven't had our microscope. And AI is finally that microscope because of a couple of things. The first is before your effect size when you put an experiment into a classroom, you're like, well, is the teacher teaching it correctly? Is it using space repetition correctly? Are the students engaged? Do they have the pre-reacts, you just don't know. And so your environmental variables dominate your

effect size. With AI, you get two things. You get absolutely precise teaching. You know exactly what is being told to the kit. And then second, you have this closed loop measurement. You can measure what do they know and what they don't know. You know all of it. And then you can create, you can do science. You can create this closed loop. So our system, we rolled out our new system time back to all our students this year a couple weeks ago. Our math curriculum, we believe this year is going to be better. Kids will learn more in 20 percent less time. And we know that because we've been measuring it. And we looked on last year's math. And we're able to say, okay, we have this idea. Okay, the kids, what percent learned? Were they 95 percent rate? How long did it take each

kid to go through the lesson? What do we need to change? What learning science concept can we put in the lesson that's going to then allow them to learn better and faster and what's going to change the scheme of their brain, not cramming, but really understanding this. And then, okay, they took the standardized tests. Oh, look, it did work. And you can just create this closed loop system where you're able to do science. Nobody else has that. And that's the problem. We need to create that system. But to do that, you have to give up the most treasured notion in the world, which is the key to good education is a teacher in front of a classroom. One of the things that's true about education, before there was tutors. You had Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Alexander

the Great and all the elite had tutors. And then 200 years ago, we have to educate everybody. The only way cost effectively to do that is teacher in front of a classroom. And that is all any of us know, our parents know, our grandparents know. We've all been in that. And it did great. things because at scale, we have educated people that never would have been educated before. I wouldn't have been one of the tutored ones. Correct. It is. And you can go to the poor school district in India and there's a teacher in front of a classroom, not a very nice building. You can go down to whatever private school that's starting your $50,000, teacher in front of a classroom, in a very nice building. But that model is all we know. And great teachers matter. This is always the part

with our new model on AI tutors. I want to take a second here because people get freaked out. adults, 20 years from now, parents are going to drop their kids off at a building. And in that building are going to be other kids and adults. And those adults, you can call them teachers, guide, coaches, whatever you want. We think the day will be very different. But that concept of a school with teachers and other students, that's not going away. We're not moving to this AI robot Terminator. That's not what's coming. You're going to drop the kids off at a school. If we do our job right, you don't sit in class for six hours a day and have this miserable experience, kids love it and all of those. But back to the science of it, we now with AI can have a

one-on-one relationship. The AI knows what does the kid know? What do they not know? How do I give them this lesson? And if you look and if you want to talk just about where we're headed, the future is even, Gen AI is changing everything. That was the part for me that I saw, which is I can craft personalized lessons for every kid that takes into account what goes into the LLM sort of on the technology side. What are you trying to teach them? What's the curriculum? What is their knowledge graph? What do they know and what do they not know? What is their interest graph? What do they interested it? Because actually, if I know your interest, I can engage it. Oh, you want to learn baseball? You love baseball and you want to learn stats. I'm going to determine

that and kids are going to get engaged. Oh, you're the fashionista. I'm going to teach you fractions. Is the app already able to do what you just described? So where we are today, in 2025, we generate static content with human review because we still have too many hallucinations. We're not there. Now in 2026, we expect we'll be able to do it. Just to make sure I'm putting this in perspective. So my eight-year-old, who is that kid who loves baseball, all he does is talk baseball stats. He is a walking baseball statistic. Do you know so-and-so hit 326 and this many home runs, and do you know he was able to hit 477 feed,

blah, blah, blah, blah. He will be able to get to know his AI tutor. They will figure out in short order that the way to his heart is baseball and anything that you can teach in baseball terms, he's fixated. Exactly. It will be able to give him a lesson to pursue mastery, but under the guise of baseball. Under baseball. And we all know this.

That's what teachers are always trying to do. is how do I get what the kids like and associate with it. But at scale, you don't have 30 kids who like all the same things, et cetera. So here's an example of what you can actually do today. You have hallucinations and you don't want to release those yet. We have a dynamic reading generates called Teach Tales. And the goal of this is to get kids to love to read. So if you take a third grade boy, it's like, I hate books. I hate books. I'm not a book guy. And you're like, what's your favorite movie? The Avengers? Who are your soccer buddies? Okay, the AI generates a choose your own adventure where you're saving the world with your soccer buddies.

You know, they have to keep clicking. You get HB an Avenger. Each be one. And literally, the Lexile level, the difficulty goes up, it knows. So it's keeping you in the zone of proximal development within 10% of what you know, your Lexile level. Kids will sit there and click for an hour, totally engaged. Nonstop reading. Nonstop.

Because we do have a reading problem in this country. People don't read books and all these things. This is the kind of thing where Gen AI is going to be able to suck kids in. Our competition is Fortnite and TikTok. We need to use things like Gen AI to create such compelling content for kids that's related to what they care about that also teaches, okay, I got to teach you for actions, but we're doing this baseball thing, so you're fine. You love that.

There's a whole program that a lot of people in finance where there's actually a program where they have a mother-daughter thing, back to a different way to try to solve it without an AI tutor, where there's all these finance moms who teach their daughter's poker in middle school. And they're like, I'm going to get them into poker to teach all these skills and the math skills and all the things that aren't being taught in my school. But with us, we can get that engagement level where the kids are interested in it. And to give you a couple of examples, and I'll use some of our high school kids. So when you transfer into Alpha High, your knowledge of history is very limited, which is if it's in the musical Hamilton, you know it occurred. And if it didn't

occur. It's not in a song in Hamilton. You don't know it because we don't teach history very much anymore. But all the kids know Hamilton. They all sing songs. Our U.S. history, AP World History, they literally used AI. They did this on their own. It wasn't our stuff. They used AI to generate, here's all the facts. There's nine units in U.S. history. For each unit, they created a song. And they said, give me all the facts that I need to know for this unit. And they pumped it into sumo, which is an available song generator. And they, created their own album of songs. And they all would just sit around and sing the songs and learn the facts that way and do it in a way they all were very interested in. And they all got

fives on their AP because you can do it to mastery. And so Gen AI is going to allow us to create this awesome dynamic content that's relatable and focused on what or applicable to what kids want. The other part is there's a learning science concept also bells a band framework of the fastest way to learn is basically analogy. And so do you have a knowledge graph? This is the A in the ABC. So Dean Schwartz's book, we're going to link to that in the show notes, goes through A to Z everything that learning science has come up with. Exactly. Right. Dean Schwartz from Stanford, School of Education, one of the leaders in the field, has written a book and he's like, here it is. And every letter has a different one. But this one. A is analogies. It's one of the ones I remember. And analogies, that's the

fastest way to learn. So if you know what a kid knows, We have a content team when I talk about those 100 facts, ideas and concepts for hour. What they're using as reference is they're using TikTok memes because kids know TikTok and they know what's on TikTok. Well, let's take what we're trying to teach them and use something they already know. And that's actually the fastest way to have kids learn concepts. And so those are all coming. Then even when you talk even further, the part we don't have in yet, but our team's working

on it is we also take into account, we will be taking into account the cognitive load of their brain, which is we're going to be able to create a lesson where we know how many working memory slots you have. We know what you know to fluency and what you don't. And we're not going to give you a question that's going to overload your working memory. We also know how many reps you need and GT kids need fewer reps. And so we're not going to bore you by giving you too many reps to memorize it. Conversely, we're going to make sure you have enough reps if you need them. And so this personalized learning where you're generating the content dynamically is going to be just this crazy unlock for these kids, five years from now,

he's going to look back and be like, okay, well, obviously, kids can learn 10 times faster. We wake up every day. It's like Neo in the Matrix. That's a physical upload. Ours is, using learning science concepts, kids can learn 10 times faster. And when you think about that, you have 12 years, you have 12 years to fill your kids head with cool stuff, knowledge, because they have to hang out in their brain for the rest of their life. And we've allocated 12 years to fill it up. We just need two hours a day at 10 times faster

and all the kids can have more stuff and more cool stuff about stuff they like in their heads to mastery level levels none of us as parents could ever imagine and still give the kids their time back for the rest of the day to do all other things. So about three years ago, you sort of decided you got to step out of trilogy. It's this incredible company you've built. Any of your co-founder still there? I think it's... No. So three years ago, the transition was when Gen A.I. came out, which was three years ago, neural nets are here. Finally, that was an unlock for me where I had seen McKinsey's great school and seen my kids in there. And there were issues like my daughter failing her seventh grade tests and stuff,

where the apps aren't good enough, all those issues. And I'm like, Gen AI will allow us to take the magic of Alpha, make it better, and scale it to a billion kids. There's lots of good education. things that just don't scale. And so what this was was my realization. This was your light microscope. This was it. Light microscopes here. Okay. I've been doing software. I went to my team who've been there for 25 years. I'm like, guys, for 25 years you've been telling me you're better than me. We'll see. I'm going to go be your principal. And so they run it. I'm now chairman and I am now literally the worst shareholder you've ever seen because I'm like, guys, I need more cash flow. I need more dividends to fund this whole thing. You know, McKinsey needs $300 million to open up all these schools. Where are we

going to get it for? So how much of your money have you spent on this now? Three years ago, I took a billion dollars out of trilogy. It was my first lump sum and said, I'm going to go use this billion dollars to figure out what I can with education and fix as much as I can. Now, what's crazy about that is a billion dollars is not enough to fix education. It's a trillion dollar industry, and we obviously have made incredible headway. But we have to go back to building schools, back to McKinsey. She's opening up 25 alphas around the country. She needs hundreds of millions of dollars for that. We're opening up these sports academies, which needs hundreds of millions. We're opening up 500 gifted, talented schools. The total

cap-ex that's going to be required, the second part is, I'm going to do this the next 20 years, right? I got 20 years in this. My job is to go fix education, get it to a billion kids and give kids their time back. Use the light microscope, use AI to totally change the first 12 years of a billion kids. At what point, Joe, did the two systems have to merge? Because one of the reasons that you're having to deploy such insane amounts of capital is because you're basically rebuilding things that are technically already there. I mean, we have buildings. We have schools. We have guides. They're called teachers. We have all those things. But you're creating a new system of infrastructure. But I assume you don't want to have to build the scale to a

billion. At some point, this way has to merge with the existing way. At what point does that merger take place? My view is, there's a point of if I had perfect randomized controlled trials, back to a billion kids, I don't know. Do I need 10 million kids going through it for everybody to be like, okay, this looks like it works. But the bar is so low. I mean, I guess that's the thing that's amazing to me, right? When I think about places in medicine where massive clinical trials are necessary to change the direction of something, usually when the state of play is so bad, let's talk about an example, which, again, I don't use this example to be offensive to people that are within education. But let's look at HIV in the 80s and early 90s. It was

a death sentence. The bar was pretty darn low when heart therapy, highly active antireptorvial therapy came out in 95 or 96. And that, boom, which changed the protocol. Of course, pharma is easier than education in the sense that it's a simple intervention. But who's pushing back when you say, hey, guys, what if we just prove this out in a million kids? Why do I need 10 million kids to prove this? Especially if they're spread out over a broad enough socioeconomic background. That's sort of our next phase. And why I'm doing my first podcast in 20 years is there's a lot of impediments to it. Let's go back to that discussion of parents don't care about academics. So we'll start there. We'll do that. Second, believability. There's been

ed tech pitches, everybody, every five years, ed tech's going to solve the world. Technology's always going to solve the world and it doesn't solve it. There is good, well-earned natural skepticism of, you know, and there's a lot in the grave here. And let's just go, and let's just take it. Evil billionaire tech guys trying to fix education are. It's a meme. No, it's a mean, like, make a movie. So the skepticism should be super high, and it is. So that's part of what the job is and why it takes a billion dollars. We have to go prove it across everybody and in a broad way.

Completely agree with that. But let's talk about some of the problems with it, which is let's talk about academics right here in Austin. There's been three failing middle schools in Austin. And I look at if I was a superintendent of a school or principal of a public school, I mean, like, I want to be really clear. That's like a hundred times harder job than mine. because I'm a product guy.

People who come to my school are aligned with what I'm building and my offering. You get selection effects. People come to Alfa are like, I know I'm going to have screen time for two hours. Because if you don't, you don't come. But at public school, these three schools are Fs. For five years, they're not educating the kids. And the superintendent, he made his first proposal, whatever, a month ago, he's like, well, why don't we shut these schools and we have these better schools?

The kids just go to the school where the kids are learning. literally the protests that have been from parents, listen to them. It's the mom who's just like, look, I know that seventh grade math teacher. She's probably not teaching math very well. But my older daughter had her. She changed her life. And my kids can walk to school and it's community. And so if they don't learn seventh grade math so much, so what? The superintendent, if you take into account the community feedback, which they're supposed to, all of a sudden, you have parents who are like, I care about other things because school's a bundle. And so that makes this hard. So there's one just, Do they even want it? The second is obviously just skepticism of this doesn't really work and why don't we do randomized control tiles or pharmaceutical caliber stuff with education because there's all these ideas of what work. We have a lot of ideas that we're rolling out like no multiplication tables that somebody should have done randomized control tile to realize that's a really bad idea.

And so all these fads in education because it's not science. The learning science, if you actually ask one of the scariest data points, if you want this, There's three million teachers in the world. They're not taught learning science. They're not taught learning science. These concepts will be new to them. And so back to how do we fix it, we have to go teach all the teachers about learning science. Do you get pushback on that point?

I mean, how much time do you spend talking with the teachers that are in the trenches right now? I'll give you an analogy from my world. I talk about this idea of medicine 3.0. Medicine 2.0 has been amazing. It's an amazing run. You and I wouldn't be alive without it, literally. We would be dead by now. But I would argue it's time to move on.

We've plateaued. We've got to do medicine 3.0. We have to unlock the next thing. But when I say that, I'm not being critical of the doctors who practice medicine 2.0 because I haven't met many of them who wouldn't in a heartbeat say, look, I wish I could do medicine 3.0. But the system I'm in doesn't allow it. I can't get reimbursed to practice medicine 3.0. The entire system of billing and coding and diagnostics and prescribing, it's all predicated on this system.

It's predicated on make the diagnosis for the disease, treat, there's no prevention. I don't get paid to, nor do I have the education to learn about nutrition, exercise, all of these other things that are necessary in medicine 3.0. But if I could wave a magic wand, my bet is 80% of them would be like if there's a way to fix the system and the structure such that I can be balancing my practice between 2.0 and 3.2 in a heartbeat, do you have a sense? Have you got enough reps with teachers to understand if you had that proverbial magic wand how many of the superintendents and the teachers would say, oh my God, I'd love to transition

from being a front of the classroom teacher to an in-the-classroom guide who's helping the student with their personal AI tutor. So the answer is it is at least 80%. Like same example, which is... So you're on the same team? No, no, because we have our guides. They're ex-teachers. We got into this whole naming thing, but do you call them teachers if they're not doing

academics and whatnot? But fundamentally, when they tell their story of what they do all day, and let's just talk about teachers specifically, teachers are great and critical, and teacher in front of the classroom is bad. But to your point, it's the system. It's a very similar analogy. It's the same thing. Teachers, they got into teaching to transform kids' lives. They did not become a teacher to grade the seventh grade science test. And so let the AI do the seventh grade lesson in the science test, and you connect with your kid, your students.

during our two-hour blocks, we do 25-minute Pomodoro's. Our guides, ex-teachers, they're not in front of the class lecturing. They literally take the kids one-on-one and say, hey, don't do your language today. Come sit down and talk to me for 25 minutes. How was your weekend? How'd the softball tournament go? Hey, you don't seem as motivated lately what's going on. And they connect with them. Our guides, they provide motivation and emotional support. They set high standards and high support. They're the ones guiding these kids through the journey. And that's why teachers became teachers. I want to write a lesson plan. Nobody woke up and said, that's why I'm becoming a teacher. They did it because they want to transform kids' lives. And that's what this new model does. And so when they see it,

they love it. So one, we pay more, but also the teachers see our model. And once they really understand it and talk to our existing ones, they're like, this is awesome. I love this. And so there isn't resistance. Now, at the systems level, so I've talked to a lot of superintendents, and they're like, what do you want me to do with this? What am I supposed to do? They're like, what do the kids do the rest of the day? The problem when you talk about it, this is a rebuild around the school day. It's not six hours a day in class with teachers and removing kids between classrooms. Two hours a day of learning in the screen and four hours a day of life skills and sports and all the sorts of other things that are going to be imperative to create well-balanced kids.

Right. And our life skills curriculum is leadership teamwork, storytelling, public speaking, relationship-building socialization, grit and hard work, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, those things, and they're doing workshops in the afternoon. This is if you go to McKinsey's Instagram, kids climbing rock walls in kindergarten, or they're running 5Ks in second grade, or the fifth graders launched a food truck. So there's all these different things. things, running tough mutters, eighth graders, do that stuff. If you're a superintendent, you're like, okay, my system's not set up for this. And right now, there's no demand from the parents because it's not proven. It's too foreign. And even, and let's even get out of public school. Let's go just talk

about super high-end private schools. You can go down the street and try to convince this super high in private school and say, you have all the flexibility you want. There's no vote. There's nothing. You should transform. And they're like, this seems like a bridge too far. And so that's my view of my job. So is that why essentially alpha exists as an independent school at the moment is you just need to get the scale of wholly owned alphas that build this out. And at some point, the others, probably the private schools have an easier time joining the model. And eventually the hope is, of course, the public schools do so as well. Everybody. So I got 20 years and I got to get a billion kids. 80, 90 percent of kids are in public school. You got to get it to public school and provide it to

everybody. What is the current cost, because I'm sure you're hemorrhaging and losing money at the moment, what is the current cost to deliver the education to a child, and does it vary by their grade? So stepping back, so for Alpha, our job is, and that's why we're opening across country, in every city, there's going to be this alpha exemplar, the high end, where you're like, this is what's possible. Now, it's also one where it's money, no object. It's really expensive. And back to the things. Today, my AI, I'm using the latest models, this real-time streaming video to coach kids. It's $10,000 per kid per year in just AI cost. In just in the AI cost. It's too much. Now, I absolutely believe, and our team's going to deliver it where sometime in the next three years,

maybe five, everybody on the planet will have a tablet that's less than $1,000 that will teach them everything they need to know in two hours a day or less. And the compute will be what? It'll be local. It'll be local. So you'll be on device. Like a lot of our stuff right now is vision models where we're looking stuff. There's on device. All the hardware manufacturers are putting their AI chips on device. We'll hit that.

I'm sure there's still be some stuff in the cloud for higher end stuff. But the common core curriculum through eighth grade on device, less than $1,000. That's absolutely coming. Then the second part is part of what alpha is is because it's this high and expensive stuff, you're like, let's re-envision what a school is from the ground up. So we sit around. I'm like, what would make a school 10 times better than old school that we went to? We sort of have five dimensions that we do. And the first is kids must love school. And we literally measure more than vacation. And we get 50-ish percent of kids. It depends on the vacation. Depends on the workshop. It's really good. 50 percent of kids were like, yeah, I want to go to school instead of vacation. My highlight as a principal was in May this year, two-thirds of the high school kids sent me a note. And they're like, can we keep Keep Alpha High open this summer because we don't want to take a summer break because we love what we're doing. The girl doing her Broadway musical, she's like, I want to keep coming to school and doing it.

And so back to my world where I was not into school and I was shirking and my dad, I'm like, make a place where kids love school. And vacation is a good standard. Number two, kids need to learn 10 times faster. We need an engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. And so our AI tutor based on learning science teaches kids 10 times faster between 5 and 10 and we'll get it up. So that's the second part. Then that gives you the chance to give the time back. The third dimension of a school is academics isn't everything to developing kids. Everybody knows that. What are the life skills that every parent says? That is what I wish I knew. And some are traits, behavioral traits. I

hope they are love learning and are a self-driven learner. You want things like that. And I want somebody who uplifts others in his classroom and behavioral and is an independent person. Others are like those ones I talked about where you're like, no, I want entrepreneurship. and financial literacy, or I want storytelling, public speaking, those type skills. And so the third is have that curriculum. The suite of skills. The suite of skills that every parent wants. So we actually have spent the last three years developing life core, the common core curriculum for life skills, because I have four hours a day to fill with all this awesome stuff that kids can do. And it's just amazing what they do. If you take atomic habits, that book of

one percent better, most people don't read that until after college. And then they're like, like, oh, this is a way I can really develop. Last year, our guide, Faith, second grade guide. She sat down and she was working on her workshops, you know, her life skills. She's like, you know what? I want to teach atomic habits to all the second graders because the concepts they all can understand. And she's like, you know how I'm going to do it? She's like, I'm going to have all our second graders run a 5K in under 35 minutes. I'm like, oh, no, okay, the parents are not going to like that. That's too hard. Back to high standards. They don't want struggle, fail. where's that road to success part and what percent are going to make it.

She's like, don't worry, I can do this. She was a UT athlete. And she's like, we totally can do it. She was like a head cheerleader or whatever. She's like, everybody can do this. So she sits down with the second graders first day and is like, who can run a 5K? And they're all like, that's impossible in this faith. The parents all are like, that's impossible to say.

She's like, well, I signed you all up for the jingle 5K, you know, at the domain. So she goes out to the track in the first day, they walk it. And they walk 5K. She's like, okay, so we all have established you're going to finish. the race. And then the next time they ran a quarter lap, walk the rest. Next time, half a lap, walk the rest. And by December, all the kids are running the race. And, you know, when they cross the finish line, just that achieving it, back to the key to your kids' happiness is high standards. That's a really high standard. But they loved it. And they did have to struggle and go through and

learn this. But they also learned that life skill of 1% better. And so the second grader's like, Dad, I can do anything. I can do 50 push-ups. I'll do one today and two tomorrow and build up. And that skill, that life skill, we don't teach kids in school. It's a great life skill to have. And if you have half the day, you can do that. So that's the third element of, like, how do you build a great school?

The fourth element, and this gets to the teachers, what would make a teacher 10 times better than what it is today? And the answer is, well, not grading science tests all day and writing lesson plans, but instead connecting with the kids. here's the questions we ask students and the parents, which is to kids, kindergarten were like, do you love your guide? But, you know, as you get older, it's every adult had one or two teachers who transform their life, right back to that. Is your guide that for you? That is the expectation that they are the ones that the students are like, you are helping me achieve things that I didn't think is possible.

Miss Faith, you taught me how to do the impossible. That level. And actually, then the parent side, this gets into Dr. Yeager has a book 10 to 25, child psychologist, development expert, and it's what matters for kids from 10 years old to 25. His whole theory, mentor mindset, high standards, high support. Most parents are not high standards and high support, which is what really matters to develop kids. They're either low standards, high support. That's what happened to all our expectations, or the inverse, high standards, no support. This would be your classic tiger mom. Good luck, figured out. And the real answer for child development, you need both. High standards, high support. And so that's our guide.

But the question we asked parents in middle and high school, back to having what's a school re-envisioning it, it's like, do you trust your alpha guide to hold high standards for your kid so you as the parent can provide the unconditional love and support, which transforms, for those who've had adolescents, it transforms your relationship. where you don't have to be the naggy parent for the high standards. My oldest daughter, she's writing her college essay, and I'm like, you want to let me read it? And she's like, no, no interest in that. She's got it taken care of. She's got someone else. And for me, I was super relaxed because I was like, I know Chloe, back to our guide, she's a Harvard grad. I know she was totally high standards for my daughter.

And I know it's going to be fine. And I don't have to get in a fight about it or whatever. I'm just like, okay, yeah, I can give my daughter a hug and be like, good luck. that transforms what teachers can be versus I'm delivering those seventh grade lessons. And so the fifth dimension that we talk about is the C's, character, community, classmates, and culture. And these are also the hardest parts to measure, but at the end, they're what parents care about the most, which is, at the end of the day, you don't care. Is, do I have a good kid? Did I raise a good kid?

And is the school helping me raise a good kid? Those elements are what we looked at and said, now that you want to re-envision school from the ground up, here's the dimensions. So Alpha is trying to be the exemplar for all of it. And then the question is, okay, how do we get the price point down? So we have opened a whole set of different schools at half the price of Alpha. So Alpha, depending on its location, is between $40,000 and $75,000. Although there's scholarship programs. Tons.

So we have a huge scholarship. We have a school down in Brown. where it's a second poor school district. In Texas? In the country. Brownsville is a second poor school district in the country. At that school, it's SpaceX is there. It's so Starbase.

So you have a bunch of SpaceX kids. And then we scholarship all the locals to come in. And it's 60, 40, 50, 50, 50 between that makeup. And to be clear, they all learned two X and two hours. Back to testing it out, it works with all kids. So I want to read you something that fits right into this. So this is, I think I read this in the New York Times. Before kindergarten, the children of the affluent are much more likely to be in preschool.

By sixth grade, students in the richest school districts are four grade levels above children in the poorest school districts. That's just by sixth grade. By high school, richer kids' average reading skills are five years ahead of poorer kids. By college, according to a 2017 study by Raj Chetty, children from the richest one, percent of earners are 77 times more likely to go to Ivy League schools than children from families making $30,000 a year or less. The academic gap between the affluent and less affluent is greater today than the achievement gap between white American and black American kids in the final days of Jim Crow. In other words, my read of this is that there is no greater predictor

of academic success and failure than the wealth of your parents. So are you really suggesting that that could be wiped out? There's always relative versus absolute. And I believe we can raise the absolute standard. It's always an arms race. Put it this way.

Instead of the gap being 77X, could that gap be 1.2X? Yeah, 100%. 100%. Back to that issue, because here's what happens. You're in a rich school district. I was up in New York, and these are $75,000 private schools, teacher in front of a classroom.

Every one of those parents also is spending $750 an hour on a tutor after school. Because the school wasn't teaching them back to that problem. But an extra $75,000 tutoring them, $150 grand a year. Yeah, you need the tutor who's going to go back and fill the holes and stuff. And no, if I am in a school district, poor school district got. I don't have the tutor. I don't have the access to that. If you look after COVID, the number one intervention and a lot of government funding was spent this was high dosage tutoring. Everybody knows this. It's not a secret. It's expensive to give individualized tutoring. And there was a study that

came out a few weeks ago or a month ago that was like it was really working. And then sometimes as it expanded out, it did less well. And the difference was when it was really working, it was one-on-one. And then they started to save money. They had six to one. And tutoring six to one is because it's not individualized. It becomes a class because it's just cost driven. That's the issue with if you have 30 kids, you can't generate an unending stream of content at 80 to 85% accuracy based on what the kid learns. It has to be one-on-one.

That is the delta. For each kid, it's personalized learning. A personalized lesson plan is what every kid needs. And I believe that if you get all the learning scientists together and say, yes, AI, is the light microscope. Don't you agree? And can we create a program that's available to everybody? And I think they'd all say, yes, yes, we can. And the software is not insurmountable. I was actually talking to Stanford has their Stanford Accelerator for Learning. And Dean Schwartz runs it. And I was like, you know, we could create an X prize for an open source available to everybody. You also need

better credible people than me. You don't mean me saying this. You need me saying this. You need Dean Schwartz and Stanford and the Ivy League, the people that everybody looks up to in education in America and saying, we know this. We know this learning science. We can run. We can take Stanford CS and AI department with the learning science and put that together and create this project for not that much money that we can then get to every kid, get it into every public school. They have the relationships with all the teachers where they don't need the randomized controlled trial or the skepticism you'd obviously get from talking to me. So this is all very doable. That is this mission. What is the biggest risk right now? Is it the equivalent of what we call market

risk where it's just adoption? It's just the leap of faith that we can somehow abandon the only model any of us know. Or is there still technology risk embedded within the AI? There is still some technology risk, but that's literally like you can ratchet down and you don't have to be 10 times learner, but could we get them three times, five times today with more static versus some of the cool dynamic stuff? Yes, you could. But it's, are you willing to change the motivational model for the kids? Are you willing to tell the kid, use this app, and I'll give you your time back? Are you willing to say you don't have to sit in class for six hours a day? It's the rebuild. That's the problem. If you take our software, our magic AI tutor, whatever it is, and you put it in a standard

classroom, and the kid has to sit there for six hours a day, I can promise you it won't work. It will not work. And so that's the issue is back to what Brian told me a decade ago. Are you really willing to say kids must love school? Are you really willing and then go rebuild your school system around that? Because if they do, they're going to engage in the app. You're going to give them their time back to do stuff they love. Is that all, are you going to make those changes? Because it isn't an ed tech solution. It's not go build this ed tech, drop it and it's going to work. We have that. Those apps do generally work. To get the real revolution, you need to say, are we going to rebuild what we think K through 12, the first 12 years of the kid's lives are. And if that's true,

then the sky is the limit. And what we're obviously doing is trying to say, look at this, look at these examples. Because parents need, I've learned as a principal, they need two things to want to change the school. Remember, I was skeptical for two years. I'm the average parent. They need a reference from an adult they trust. How's it working for your kid? Did it work for your kid. And second, they need to see the kid do something at the school that their kid can't do. And if you have that, that's actually the magic that unlocks a parent saying, okay, I'm going to go move to this new model. What it is that the kid can't, oh, he loves school. Oh, my God, he wakes up in the morning. He's waking me up so he's not late and he used to cry on the way to school. Or, oh,

wow, some parents are like, I love the academic performance or those life skills I really care about. Or he connects with his teacher so much more as guide. Because it is different. Back to the choices, like why we're opening all these different schools. We have a gifted talented school. We have a sports academy school. We have a wilderness school. Fishing and archery and farming, we're going to be opening arts theater music. Parents want different things and kids want different things. And so it's showing these things that is going to be the connection that causes parents to say, I want this. And if you do a good example about motivation, if you put the GT moms, McKinsey has her roundtables, the GT moms with Sports Academy.

M gifted and talented. Gifting and Talented, sorry, that's Gifting and Talented. And then the Sports Academy moms, they just look at each other like the other parent is off the rocker where the Sports Academy mom's like, my kid was just comes home, just sweating, running around all day. And I literally throw them in the shower with their clothes on. And the GT moms are like, okay, they were having a chess tournament in the afternoon and then we came home and continued it.

And it depends on the motivation. Each kid's different. And all your kids are different. And everybody knows that. And when we ask, like I said, down with the guides. We're like, okay, how do we make these all better? So on staff days, because we have all the guides from all the different schools, and I'm like, okay, what's going to make kids really love school? How do we get it from 50 to 60 to 70 on love school? The GT guides are like more,

they want a third power hour of academics and they want math Olympia. And all the other guides are groaning because they're like, no, our students do not want more academics. They want sports or let's do a better workshop or what it's going to be. And so the key on all of this is saying, how do we focus school on making it awesome for kids, making it great, have a culture where it is high standards, high support, where you have this magic unlock of they can learn 10 times faster, which then enables you to give them the time back to do all these other things. But that's a big lift. That's why it's going to take 20 years.

But I do believe that every parent, the most important thing, is raising your kids. It's the same at a societal level. The most important thing a society does is raise this next generation. and everybody cares about it. We spend enough money in this country, or globally, there's enough money to actually rearrange this and build an education system that's great for the kids. 5% of G&P, $7 trillion.

There is recognition at both the societal or parent level that this is where we should spend money and we do. Joe, it's kind of amazing to think back in the spring of 1989, you drop out of college to go start a software company, obviously there's no way you could have imagined both the success you would have in that company, creating a multi-billion dollar company and along with it a fortune for yourself, but then somehow deciding right at your peak that you were going to completely walk away from that, take that fortune and pour it into another endeavor that seems as far from

anything as possible relative to what you started with. Look, I feel really fortunate that you started this in Austin. For the listener, I think I probably should have said this at the outset. My daughter spent two years at Alpha. It was an absolutely exceptional experience for her, really experienced all the things you talk about. So showed up in, what did she show up? She showed up in seventh grade. Shows up in seventh grade with the absolute negative story of, I love reading, I love arts, I love these things, I'm a musician. I just don't do math and science. I know you did, dad. That's not me. I can't do math. I never want to do math. I made the awful mistake of spending the past year trying to help her do math.

That was a disaster that only resulted in tears. But it really, I think what appealed to me when we made that switch was it just seemed so entirely logical that the reason she was struggling was because there were things in third and fourth grade she never mastered. And I really appreciated the compounding nature of that gap. just made sense. It really clicked. And so it wasn't a big leap of faith to say, oh, okay, yeah. And I feel very fortunate that just as you predicted by the end of eighth grade, I mean, she was acing math and that has continued all through high school. She did go back to public high school. I think that's probably

something you do encounter is there are kids that ultimately just want to be back in the big public high school. They want to play sports in the public high school. They want to be, you know, and of course she's at a high school with a billion kids. And she's very happy there. but I don't think there's a chance. I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell she would be doing as well as she is if not for the fact that she had that two-year sabbatical to Alpha where she really got to academically create a solid foundation.

And I will share one last anecdote here, which is at her eighth grade graduation, she was in tears saying goodbye to her guides. To your point, think of what the impact of those guides were on her. life. She loved those people. It's not that she doesn't like her teachers in high school, but she doesn't have that kind of a relationship with them. Right. I came in actually right then, and Andy M, who runs her academics, said she brought her up, wants to give her a call

out because she spent hours with him going through lessons, helping figure out why is this not working or what is it? And one of the things when you're starting these new schools, you need this concept of a founding family. Your family was one of the most important and your support, you got it. But your daughter, Andy wanted to say, thank you to her because she did go above and beyond where our lessons and all this learning science and this closed loop. He's like, I'm way better because of the feedback and the time she spent with us. It is transformative to kids. And to your point of high school, if you want to be the quarterback on the Westlake team and run track, we don't have those in our high school. And so we can get you prepared. We say our middle school prepares kids

for any high school. So all our kids in middle school can get their pick of high school that they want to go. And some want alpha, you know, alpha high, which is that, but some want the traditional play. But we hopefully have equipped them where they know they're a self-driven learning and can do it on their own. Yeah. I'll tell you, maybe the last story I'll share, Joe, which is no surprise to you is it really doesn't matter what corner, and I mean this literally, what corner of this planet I am standing on when education comes up, your name always comes up. And these are people who don't know that I know you. They don't know that we are friends. I will be literally on the opposite side of this planet. And if I'm talking with anybody about education, it's like, what do you know about AI and

education? Have you heard of this guy, Joe Lehman at Alpha? And it comes up so often, which tells me that it is getting out there. This is no longer just that little niche school downtown Austin. I mean, it's hard to believe what has happened in five years. It went from one building, one place, to how many now? We open 12 campuses this. We'll be at 25 alpha campuses. We also have 25 non-alpha campuses where back to lower price points. We have campuses open where it's charter, so it's free for kids.

We have ones where it's $5,000 pay for the parents, $500 a month, some at $20,000. So we're trying to figure out back to innovating. We're like, what are the right price points and everything? But yes, we expect 12 months from now there to be hundreds and hundreds of schools that use this model. The demand for the sports academy is through the roof. And we think that's going to explode for sure. Well, Joe, I appreciate you taking your time to come out today.

But of course, more than anything, I just appreciate what you're doing. And again, I know this is not something that necessarily fits into what we talk about on this podcast. But again, I don't think you can care about medicine, science, health, and not care about the foundation upon which it's built, and it all starts with education. So you're working on such an important problem. And if there's one last thing I can do, since I've said a great career, obviously, before this and three years ago moved to education, if there's other people out there and one of the things, if you're listening to this and you're excited, part of my job is let's go get more talent

into education. And I can tell you, the last three years have been awesome. And my next 20 years is going to be better than my last 20 years. If I can convince you to come on in the water's great. way for, because I guarantee you, there's a million people listening to us, a non-zero number of them are going to want to reach out to you. What's the best way to get a hold of you? Literally, my email, which is joe dot Leemont at alpha.com. Send it to me. I am overloaded right. To your point, the hype has gotten very high about Alpha. What could someone who wants to get your attention put in the subject line? Heard you on the drive podcast or something like that. I heard you on the drive podcast. And we're looking for all sorts of people. One, you want product people. You want

engineers. You want... Everybody wants to come in. We have to go build AI back to expansion. We need entrepreneurs where GT school needs 500 schools. We need entrepreneurs who are going to go expand it like it's a Chipotle chain. We need AI guys going out Silicon Valley where current chat bots aren't good. We have to make the LLMs better. We need educators. People who are like, okay, I want to do this new thing. If you're one of the learning scientists that we don't have on our team, come do it. We're going to need a lot of capital as well to expand this. Philanthropy, right? It's we need to be giving scholarships. We're funding a lot of it, but we need to make this available to everybody. It's your problem. It can't just be for the elite. It's got to be for a billion kids. So education touches

everything. And if you're just in where you're like, that description of what they're building I'm in, then come aboard because it's awesome. Joe.comtelemont at alpha.com. We'll put that in the show notes just so that people can click directly on it. Joe, thanks again. Thank you very much. This is great. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. Head over to peter atiyahmd.com forward slash show notes if you want to dig deeper into this episode. You can also find me on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, all with the handle Peter Atia MD. You can also leave us review on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast player you use. This podcast is for general informational purposes only

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