This $40M AI Company Is Using AI Tutors to Teach 2 Hours/Day | #233

If we're going to recreate school and get our kids ready for the AI age going forward, from first principles, what would you do? The first and most important—and the most radical thing we say—is that U.S. high schoolers are at historic lows in reading, math, and science. Americans today have perceived college as far less important. Today, college graduates are the longest being unemployed. That's not sustainable.

We've known for 40 years how kids could learn 2, 5, or 10 times faster. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in a teacher-in-front-of-a-classroom model. We've really figured out how to use technology to deliver these incredible learning results and do it in a fraction of the time.

Is everything perfect? What do you guys worry about? I love what you're doing. I just don't understand what's the flip side of the equation here.

Now, that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. Today, we're going to be speaking about the future of education and the role of AI in education. This is not just for K–12 and university; it's also for reskilling, which is something that this rapid pace of AI is going to require every major company to start doing soon enough.

This is a topic that we've been very outspoken about here on Moonshots, specifically how secondary and post-secondary education is failing us. It's failing our kids. It's not preparing them for the near-term, let alone the medium-term, horizon.

We're going to be diving into a new education model called Alpha Schools. I'm a fan; it's gotten rave reviews, and we'll discuss the pros and cons of AI-driven education.

Today, we're joined by the leadership of Alpha Schools, McKenzie Price and Joe Liemandt. McKenzie is the co-founder and CEO of Alpha Schools, a K–12 program built around a 2-hour learning model that she helped pioneer.

Prior to Alpha Schools, Price spent 17 years in the lending business and also worked at Trilogy. A Stanford graduate with a degree in psychology, she began questioning traditional schooling when she saw her own child begin to lose enthusiasm for learning. I'm also proud that McKenzie is an Abundance 360 member.

Joe Liemandt is the founder and CEO of ESW Capital and Trilogy, a billionaire entrepreneur who's actively playing a central role in funding and scaling Alpha Schools and serving as the principal, which I find incredible. He's built his fortune by buying and systematizing software companies, a playbook he's now applying to education.

First off, welcome, McKenzie. Welcome, Joe. Good to have you guys.

Thanks for having us, Peter. We love talking education and are excited to be here.

Of course, I've got my much smarter, much more brilliant Moonshot mates, Salim Ismail and DB2. Guys, good evening.

Welcome.

Welcome to the party here.

Let me start by saying thank you for your service, because you don't see a lot of highly, highly successful people turning back to work on K–12 education. There's no real big money in it, and it's purely a work of good in the world. So, thank you so much for working on it.

I'd like to kick off by sharing a few slides that show the state of education in America today, and it's not that great. Let me share these here. So, here we go.

This is unfortunate and very shocking. U.S. high schoolers are at historic lows in reading, math, and science. Only 35% of seniors in high school—12th graders—are at or above the reading proficiency level. This is down from 40% in 1992.

Only 22% of seniors are math proficient, and only 31% are proficient in science. This is going into a world where math, science, and reading are so fundamentally critical for us.

On the flip side of secondary education going toward college, here are some other numbers that are seriously troubling, and these blow me away, but they're very real. Americans today perceive college as far less important. Back in 2010, 75% of Americans thought that college was important for their kids. That has dropped from 75% to 35%.

As a result of this, we're beginning to see colleges go bankrupt. At the same time, tuition has grown 893% since 1983. As we're demonetizing and democratizing everything else, the cost of going to college is going up.

Then here's the killer: today, college graduates are the group that are out of jobs the longest. They're unemployed for the longest period of time. For me, that just cannot—that's not sustainable.

McKenzie and Joe, do you want to lean into those challenges right now?

I don't know where to even start, other than to say it is a very disappointing picture. Half of seniors in high school today graduate knowing as much math as a 99th-percentile third grader, and that's a pretty troubling statistic.

I think it really points to the fact that schools aren't preparing people for the near future, as you mentioned, and more importantly, for what this world is going to look like with AI. It's even more critical that, in addition to making sure that young people have academic knowledge in their brains to be successful and be great critical thinkers, we have to instill all of the other life skills that are going to be needed so that they can be adaptable in this new world and be able to keep up—not just keep up, but stay on the frontier of what human knowledge is required.

We see this with parents all the time. Parents are coming to us with their little children saying, “What in the world should school look like in this day and age? What is it supposed to be delivering 10 or 15 years from now?” That's the challenge that Joe and I are excited every day to take on.

The data shows that at Alpha School, you're able to deliver a full academic program with only 2 hours a day of academic education. I'll talk about the life-skills portion in a moment. You're educating your students, I think, 2½ to 3 times faster and still scoring in the top 1% or top 2% of the country.

I looked at some numbers here, and it shows that, on average, SAT scores for Alpha School graduates are 1,410, compared to the national average of 1,024—roughly 400 points lower. That puts Alpha School graduates in the 94th percentile.

Actually, I'll correct you on that. 1,410 is the average for our entire high school student body, freshman through seniors. Our average SAT score for our seniors is 1,535.

The reason I think that's important to say isn't just to brag on how awesome our students are, but really to show and highlight how easy it is to excel when students get a mastery-based tutoring experience, which is what has been made possible in this model of education.

We believe any student is capable of being in the 99th percentile when it comes to reading, writing, math, and science, and of being able to crush their APs. The beautiful part, of course, is that it doesn't take all day chained to a desk plus hours of homework at night in order to get those results.

We've really figured out how to use technology to deliver these incredible learning results and do it in a fraction of the time.

Yeah, so, back to scores and academics, and the 2 hours a day: as the principal, I just did the meeting this week where the freshmen were taking some practice tests. The freshmen's goal this year is to have a minimum SAT score of 1,410 as freshmen.

We have some who are already over 1,500 as freshmen, which makes you think about how much time that opens up for the rest of what they want to do during high school.

Aside from that, how do we do it? We've known for 40 years how kids could learn 2, 5, or 10 times faster. There's a whole field of learning science that very few people know about, but it's been around for 40 years.

The graduate schools of education at Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard have been studying how kids learn and develop. When I was in high school, Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem was a seminal paper. It talked about how all kids could learn and get to the top 2%.

You're seeing that data in Alpha roughly 40 years later. What we've done—and the reason it hasn't been implemented—is that, if you read the papers, and there are probably 10,000 of them that have been published over the last 40 years, they all say kids can learn this fast. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in a teacher-in-front-of-a-classroom model.

That's incredible. That's because that's the assumption.

Yeah. It's what every parent wants. One of the things I've realized after I became principal 3 years ago was that every parent wants their kid educated the way they were. We don't know any different.

When I sit in the room with some of these learning scientists, they say, “We've known for 40 years that a teacher in front of the classroom is the worst way to teach kids.” And I'm like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. The people in this room—and every parent in America—think a teacher in front of the classroom is the best way to teach kids.”

It's that dynamic, fundamentally, that we have to educate parents on and show them that this new way, grounded in learning science, works. We've known how this works. We know everything from the best ways to teach to the chemistry of the mind to be able to do this.

And for the parents, it's what they knew. It's how they grew up, right? So, you get this cascading generational effect. Joe, I've heard you talk about what you call the 5 dimensions that make a school 10 times better than at least the schools that we all went to. If you could recount that, because I found number 1—the idea of being able to make something 10 times better—is something you typically don't think about in terms of schools.

Yeah.

Yeah, please.

So, back to when McKenzie and I were working on this, you sit down and you say, "The school's been the same for over 100 years. If we're going to recreate school that's going to get our kids ready for the AI age going forward, first principles, what would you do? Just ground up, what are the core things you'd really want to do?"

The first and most important, which is the most radical thing we say, is kids must love school. Right? If we're going to put our kids in it for a decade plus, kids should love school.

We actually measure it, where over 90% of our kids love school. We measure it every week; we ask them. And over the last year, we actually upped it where we say, "Would you rather go to school or go on vacation?" Forty percent to 60% of our students say they'd rather go to school than go on vacation. A lot of it depends on what the vacation is; it depends on what workshop they're doing.

The highlight of my 10 years as principal was this: before summer, 6 months ago, two-thirds of the Alpha High students sent an email and said, "We don't want to take summer break. Can you keep the school open?" And, back to what we all know, I didn't like it. You'd never catch me in high school asking if I could go to summer school.

That principle—and just talking about love of school—is one where, when you think about it, when we all build businesses, just from the business world, you want to build an organization that people love to come to work for. Right? Yet those same people, when they sit and look at their kids and say what school is supposed to be like, you're not supposed to love school; it's supposed to suck. Right? School's spinach. It's not supposed to be that.

We have this mental model that for everything else in our life, we're like, "Yeah, you totally should build an organization that people love." With school, we just have this backward way of looking at it. So, that's the first principle at the core, and the reason we work is because of that core principle.

When we talk to other schools about adopting this, they all ask about the edtech. "Oh, you have this engine that teaches kids so much faster." And we stand up and say, "Look, if you're not willing to rebuild your school around the concept that kids must love school more than vacation, this isn't going to work." And that core principle really, really matters. Everything that we do is downstream of that.

Mhm. That's an incredible achievement, by the way. Congratulations. Yeah, the statistics are mind-blowing.

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Actually, when you think about it, if you step back, we spend an enormous amount of money on educating kids. You talked about how people don't go into business, but we spend over $1 trillion for K–12. Right? I mean, we're spending $20,000-plus per kid; some cities spend over $40,000 per student. And if you think about it, you're like, "Okay, I got a 10-year-old, and you're going to give me $20,000, and I have to educate them and make them love it every day?" That's actually not the hardest problem in the world, right? That's a lot of money, where you can actually build a day to have them both love it and learn.

So, loving school is the first dimension. What else follows that?

The second one is kids should learn 10 times faster. So, back to this whole concept, and this is where I got in: we sat down and built this engine over the last 3 years. We basically took all the learning science and we took AI tutors, not chatbots. We can get into why chatbots are cheap bots and why ChatGPT in schools is terrible, but if you take generative AI and you take learning science and you generate personalized lesson plans for every kid at whatever level they are, those kids can learn 10 times faster.

Did you build or buy that tech? I'm curious.

We started by using off-the-shelf apps and then building around them, sort of this AI wrapper around everything. We can talk about how to do it. We now, for the most part, have both the foundation—this platform called TimeBack—and some third-party apps that are best in class.

For any of you listening, Math Academy is the best app; you can just go download it. It's awesome. If you actually care about learning science, The Math Academy Way is 500 action-packed pages of all the concepts from these 40 years of learning science that you should read. They're a great team. We love to partner with them on it.

We built a bunch of our own apps—AlphaWrite, AlphaRead, et cetera—that sit on the platform as well. We put over $10 million into this platform, so it's a big lift.

Amazing.

But what we have today is a learning engine that teaches kids, basically, K through 12, 10 times faster than if they sat in class.

Okay, you've got to love it. It's 10 times faster. What do you hit for number 3?

And then the second part is, you come into school for 2 hours. Because we learn over 2X in 2 hours, what matters is, what do you do the rest of the day? Parents don't want you to send the kids home right after 2 hours. They've got to be there all day.

So, what do you do with the rest of the day? You teach them all these valuable life skills that we all think are important for the future, because academics aren't enough to get your kid ready. We have our Alpha life skills curriculum, which is leadership and teamwork; storytelling and public speaking; entrepreneurship and financial literacy; socialization and relationship building; and grit and hard work.

In the afternoon, you're getting all these killer workshops—team-based, super-fun workshops run by adults in this environment—that are teaching them all of those life skills to get them ready for the real world. And that's where, if you see all the excitement and why we get so much hype, besides the academics, you see what these kids do.

We have fifth graders running food trucks and running Airbnbs for their entrepreneur workshop, and all these crazy TED Talks. We have an Alpha High student who actually today submitted her research to Nature, where no high school student in history has actually been published in Nature. Just crazy, great accomplishments because they have these awesome afternoons to work on.

McKenzie, can you dive a layer deeper for moms and dads and kids watching this? You arrive at the school, and what's the experience like? Can you sort of paint the picture for us?

It's such a great question because people just don't understand what a school looks like where kids actually cry at the end of the week, saying, "Why do we have to have breaks on the weekend? Why can't we go to school 7 days a week?" They just don't understand, and I think people often think, "Okay, this is some AI school. It's like Robo-Terminator, dystopian, antisocialized children," and nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, what's happened is the model of the day is one where kids get so much more time to interact with each other and to interact with the adults that are in the school building because of how we've set it. You walk into the school and, first of all, it feels more like a WeWork space than a traditional classroom.

One of the things Joe and I both bonded over was our mutual dislike and disdain for traditional school. We think school should be a fun, exciting place to come into.

Yeah. The part that you didn't like about traditional schools was what? The teacher in the front and everybody at their desk?

For me, and I think Joe and I were similar, I was always wondering, "How is whatever I'm learning going to relate to something I'm actually interested in doing? Where am I going to make use of this in my life? What am I going to do?" And it was just so boring. I found it incredibly boring.

I also think traditional school is fundamentally a place where they are teaching kids to sit still, raise their hand, don't talk unless called upon, and ask permission to go to the bathroom. It really hasn't changed that much. What we're wanting to do at our schools is teach kids all these awesome life skills, and that starts with—you walk in at the beginning of the day, and our kids all come together and they do what we call a Limitless Launch.

Think Tony Robbins for kids. This is a chance when they get together and do something challenging, often incorporating growth mindset strategies and practices that they take into the rest of the day.

Then they go into their 2-hour core learning block. This is the academic period of the day, and this is when kids are on computers. The key difference from what people think of as COVID Zoom classroom time is that kids are getting one-to-one interaction on the computer that meets them at the level and pace where they’re challenged.

They’re in what we call the zone of proximal development, where the lessons they’re getting aren’t so hard that they turn off or so easy that they’re bored and disengaged. Throughout that time, they take breaks every 30 minutes and get time to stretch and play and be a little bit more flexible with what their best learning environment is.

By lunchtime, they’re finished with their academics, and the rest of the school day is these super-fun workshops. That’s everything from 5-year-olds learning how to climb a 40-foot rock wall or swim in the deep end of the pool to high school students building real businesses and doing big things.

There’s just so much energy there, and that’s what we found is so cool about this opportunity that kids have to get more socialization and time with each other. One of the things Joe mentioned in those first 3 pillars of what we believe makes a school 10 times better—the fourth pillar is actually what enables us to deliver all of that, which is that we have transformed the role of the adult in the classroom.

Instead of having to spend their time creating lesson plans, delivering lectures, and grading papers and homework—which we don’t even have homework, by the way—our teachers, whom we call guides, have their entire job focused on motivational and emotional support.

Basically, they hold kids to really high standards, saying, “Hey, you are capable. You can do big, impossible things,” and provide the support, mentorship, and coaching that these kids need to do great things. That human element has been put really front and center.

That’s what helps us make sure that kids are loving school, learning twice as fast in 2 hours, and developing life skills. That leads to the fifth pillar, which I think we all, as parents, can relate to. Ultimately, what we really care about is our kids growing up to be good human beings. Do they have character and integrity?

For us, that fifth pillar is character, culture, and classmates. Who are these kids being raised to be, and who are they surrounded by? That ties into everything that makes the culture at Alpha so attractive to so many families around the country.

When you can combine phenomenal, kick-ass academics with developing these life skills and do it in a nurturing, caring environment where things like socialization are actually practiced and coached, as opposed to just saying, “Hey, we hope you survive the mean-girl cafeteria world and eventually get through,” I think that’s what we’ve done with those 5 pillars.

Every day, everybody in our organization wakes up saying, “How can we make sure that Alpha is a 10-times-better experience and really redefines what parents should expect out of their kids’ school?” Dave, I see you itching for a question here.

I’m really—I want to visualize even better this idea of a WeWork-looking school because it immediately jumps out at me. You see all the little chairs lined up with the little folding desks and the lecture in the front, and you’ve got rows and rows and rows of these rooms in any middle school or high school. It’s all wasted space.

Now you’re saying, “No, no, no, get rid of all that. Make it feel much more like a work environment.” But imagine it’s not like our office, right? It’s probably somewhere in between because it’s got to be more school-like. What does it look like?

I think you should picture it as a really comfortable environment. In fact, I was in our kindergarten and first-grade classroom at one of our schools this morning, and you’ve got some kids who are standing at a stand-up desk because those are some of the kids who realize they like being able to move their feet as they’re doing their work.

You’ve got another group of kids who are sitting at a table, and there’s a guide sitting right next to them and working together. My favorite—and I always see this when I walk into one of those classrooms—you’ll see some kid who’s lying on a beanbag with his feet up against the wall, and he’s got his computer on his lap.

You might look at it and go, “What’s that kid doing?” I’ll tell you what he’s doing: He knows that he can get his work done, he can hit his goals, and he’s earned the privilege of being able to relax. That’s another thing: Motivation is such a huge part of our culture at Alpha, and we’ve built in all these different motivation models to help kids be successful.

That can be everything from earning the privilege of doing your core work in a little tent fort or a cubby thing with stuffed animals surrounding you. It’s just kind of fun. I think it’s really the kind of school environment that, again, when we say we get to reimagine what education looks like and what school looks like, lets us build a school from the ground up that is just a place where kids want to be.

If we’re asking kids to spend a dozen years of their life in a place, most of the time, it should be something that feels nurturing and caring and inspires curiosity and exploration. Not one of these—I honestly think so many schools are just depressing, right?

Mhm. So from the outside, does it look like any other school with fields, a field house, locker rooms, and all that, and then you don’t notice the difference until you get through the door?

No, I would say we’re still a little different on that. We’ve opened schools all over the country, and the way we started this—because Alpha is such a foreign idea and concept to so many families—is that they need to see what it is.

We’ve opened schools throughout the country and started them small. We’ll have schools with 25 or 50 kids. You get a playground because kids need to be outside. In fact, our students get an hour and a half of unstructured outdoor playtime every day because that’s something really important to have.

It’s not quite the traditional thing, and the same is true with the way we do our workshops. For example, I was at our middle school this week, and they’re doing an incredible band music class. They’re creating a rock band, and as part of that, they’re also learning about marketing and branding and mixing music, in addition to playing instruments.

You’re not really going to walk into one of our schools and see kids all playing the recorder as part of their traditional music class.

I see a lot of that when they reach college because I teach at MIT and a little bit at Harvard and Stanford. The kids who go to school in England arrive a full year ahead of the U.S.-educated kids.

They can use that to take basically either a year of tuition back in college by getting advanced credits, or they can start a company while taking a semester or two, or the extra time is worth its weight in gold. So if you start talking about 10-times the rate of learning, I imagine having a 1,400 SAT score as a freshman.

When you think about that time, for sure. Two points. One about your England comment: We have what we consider the world’s best team of learning scientists working for us.

What’s very amazing is that most of them come from England rather than the U.S. In England, the academics have actually been going like this, versus the U.S. going like that. A lot of it is because these people from this team have spent 15 years making sure those concepts were put into the curriculum, which is why they’re ahead.

We’re now putting it into our platform so everybody can get it. But that concept of just having lots of extra time—in our high school, they spend 4 years working on a passion project.

Our high school is a little different in that you spend 4 years working on a passion project. If you’re going to come to Alpha, it’s not because you want to be quarterback of the Westlake football team. You’ll go to Westlake if you’re going to do that. You’re going to come because you have something you want to work on, something that you really love.

Now, they change their minds—they’re kids, right? These ideas change. But can you imagine if you said, “I had 4 years to work on something I really loved and get really good at it”?

One of our seniors is putting on a Broadway musical, and it’s going to be the first all-teen, all-produced musical. She’s spent 4 years on everything from sourcing the singers off TikTok to securing music rights, figuring out how to fill a whole venue, and handling all the sales and marketing.

She took all of those things and said, “Okay, I love—I’m an arts theater girl,” right? And now she has had years to actually work on what she loves. Can I dive into a little bit about the guides? You don’t call them teachers; you call them guides. I’m curious how you source them.

I’m super excited that Alpha is going to be opening a school in my hometown in Santa Monica. How do you go about sourcing your guides? What’s their background? Talk a little more about their mission. Are they just nontraditional teachers? Were they the top teachers somewhere else? Help me get a handle on that.

I’ll give you the business aspect, and then McKenzie can talk on the other side. The biggest issue, going back to scaling schools, is that schools don’t scale because you’re limited by teachers. That’s always the critical aspect.

When I first looked at the teacher problem—how are you going to be able to scale this?—the 5 things required for a great teacher in a traditional school, not us, are: You have to be a domain expert. “I’m great in seventh-grade science.” You have to be good at actually teaching kids, not just being a researcher. The third dimension is that you have to connect with and motivate students. The fourth is that you have to be good with parents, and the fifth, depending on the organization, is administration.

It’s a complicated specification.

Those are different skills. It’s hard to have all 5 skills in 1 person. That’s a hard specification. In education, what we’ve decided—the way we solve that problem—is to underpay them. Then we’re like, “Oh my God, no one applies for this job.” It’s the hardest specification in the world, and we’re going to underpay them.

With a fresh set of eyes coming in here, if we’re going to rebuild this, every HR person is like, “Simplify the specification, pay more, or both.” At Alpha, that’s what we’ve done very much in our model. Those first 2 items—seventh-grade science expertise and how to teach it to kids—are handled by the 10,000 papers in learning science about the best way to instruct kids. We don’t need that expertise because the AI tutor, our software, does that for them.

The third dimension is that you have to connect with and motivate kids. You have to be the world’s best at that. We push it to the max. There’s a great book—I don’t know if you’ve read Dr. Yeager’s 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. That’s what he says.

It’s psychological motivation, right?

Correct. He has this concept of the mentor mindset: Teens need high standards and high support. He has actually developed our training program for our guides. How do we have guides who are able to hold high standards for kids but also provide the high support to get them there?

About half of our guides come from a traditional teaching background. These are generally people who were phenomenal and loved the idea of working with kids but realized that the traditional system is just built to fail them. We have a guide who was the Principal of the Year in the state of Florida in 2020. After 14 years working as a principal, she was attracted to come back to Alpha because her desire was to get back in the classroom and impact and interact with kids.

In addition to that, the majority of our guides come from different backgrounds. They wouldn’t have been interested in the traditional teaching world, but they were experts in motivation. They come from professional and college-level coaching in athletics, because think about how much motivation and life-skill development is taught through sports. In fact, that’s the way most of us got a lot of our life-skill development growing up. They come from corporate and executive backgrounds.

What they all have in common is this idea: “I want to be able to positively impact, motivate, and connect with kids and serve as a mentor.” To Joe’s point, we’ve taken the opposite strategy from traditional education. We believe that anybody who is going to put their blood, sweat, and tears into working with this next generation deserves to be paid well.

Our guides start at 6-figure salaries, and that’s part of what has enabled us to attract incredibly talented people. I will say that the process for applying to be a guide at one of our schools is very challenging. We have a high bar for who we want impacting, mentoring, and coaching our kids.

It’s fundamental, though. If you look at any given high school or middle school, you’re going to have a math teacher, an English teacher, and a history teacher. Their personal branding is tied to this very narrow topic. By throwing all that out, of course you’re going to get a much better standard in terms of the other baselines—the motivational skills and everything else.

Is there any concept of a specialist across the guides at all, or is everybody purely—

To put some numbers behind it, we had 80,000 people apply for our teaching roles.

How many guides per school?

At the kindergarten level, we actually have a 5:1-to-6:1 student-to-teacher ratio at Alpha. The reason for that is that it’s the 1 place where our apps aren’t fully developed: bootstrapping kids into reading. We’re still not there.

When you talk about specialists, we still have reading specialists to make sure kids get bootstrapped. Once you can read, I can teach you math, and I can teach you all the other subjects. Basically, the instruction of a 4-year-old—the AIs aren’t good enough yet. We think we need another 18 months before AIs can do that.

That’ll come, too. That’s interesting.

It will. It will. But even then, you’ll still have a 5:1-to-6:1 ratio.

Oh, good. Yeah.

Let me add a mom’s perspective here. In addition to reading, think about it—you guys all went through this with your kids. In kindergarten, we want our kids to feel loved and welcomed. We want kids who come into school curious and excited to maintain that.

We believe that having these awesome adults supporting these kids and helping them do big things is essential. Our kindergarteners learn how to ride a bike and do a 5-mile bike race as a team. I was just talking to one of our guides about a kid who was really feeling challenged by riding a bike. The guide knows that he loves animals, so she has a stuffed kangaroo and runs alongside him, saying, “Can you go faster than the kangaroo?” By the way, our guides have to get their exercise points in, too.

[laughter]

That’s the other thing that’s so critical. What is the point of school, in addition to education, socialization, and relationship building? We need these adults who are mentoring.

One other thing I’ll bring up, Dave, when you were talking about specialists: The other fundamental skill that we have to teach young people is the ability to learn how to learn something. When you talk about kids who are going off and building businesses in fourth grade—jewelry-making businesses, mountain-bike parks, Broadway plays, or mental-health apps—how in the world would you find a specialist who’s an expert in that to serve as a teacher?

Instead, our guides also have the skill of saying, “You know what? We’re going to come alongside each other, and we’re going to learn how to become an expert in that field. We’re going to learn how to connect you with experts in the field.” Today, I spent time with 2 of our high school students who are meeting with a really successful Hollywood producer. The school connected them so he could give the kids some mentorship around movie production and marketing.

That’s one of the skills our guides are really good at: saying, “Okay, I can connect with a kid, see what they’re interested in, and then help them figure out how to become an expert and jump into that field.” So be careful, because we’ll probably be reaching out to all 3 of you now.

For mentorship and connections with our students. I’m not sure I’m qualified. Saleem, you had a question, buddy.

The other part of our model, though, is that as you get older, we increase the ratio. You guys have 14-year-olds, you said. By the time you’re an adolescent, you’re like, “Whoa, there are too many adults around here. Give me some space.”

On the business-model side, we take that money out of the guides and put it into these workshops—these crazy afternoon workshops where they can go do everything. But if you also think about motivation and these alternatives, we have ex-athletes. I have former NBA assistant coaches.

Jermaine O’Neal is teaching a middle and high school program, right? And, I mean, those kids will do anything because motivation is so important. They’ll do anything with these ex-Olympians, coaches, and athletes who are able to connect with these kids and provide the motivational and emotional support that you really want.

That’s a lot of the magic that makes this work: making sure you hire those people, which is why we pay more, why we built our business model around doing it, and why we source 80,000 of them to find the right ones.

Well, that gives you a real head start on what’s coming, too, because the whole college curriculum at MIT moved online years ago. It got off to a fast start, but then it completely fizzled. The reason it fizzled is because it’s so insanely boring to learn on your own through a browser.

What’s coming next is the interactive AI version of that, and it’s going to have exactly your favorite personality on the other side. Right now, when you talk to your high school math teacher, the person is who they are. They’re not your perfect soulmate to talk to.

The AI version of it can be any voice, any personality. It could be your—it could be Shaquille O’Neal, reincarnated as a math teacher, whatever. It’s going to be so incredibly engaging, and it’s not quite ready yet. It’ll be there within a year, but you’re going to have such a head start having seen how these guides interact with the kids, who are just the most naturally engaging people on the planet, and seeing the motivation that creates.

So, that’ll match the AI version that comes onto those 2 hours a day when they’re in front of the screen.

Yeah, we have one where our middle schoolers are allowed to pick their avatars. For history, or in AP World History, they’re all like, “Okay, Genghis Khan is going to be my avatar.” And it yells at them if they’re not studying. The kids are like, “Okay, we love this.” They pick it.

Yeah, I actually met with a couple of MIT juniors or sophomores today who were saying that the Taylor series is now taught by Taylor Swift.

[laughter]

They got a real kick out of that. It’s like, yeah, okay, that’s kind of cute that her avatar can now suddenly know how to do calculus.

I have a thousand questions here, but let me kick off a couple. One is, when you hire a teacher from the traditional side, there’s obviously a transition period to operating in this new modality. How long, on average, does that take?

Well, one thing that’s interesting is that the last step in our hiring process, when they’ve gone through a series of interviews and tests—everything from cognitive aptitude tests to case studies and having to design workshops—is that they spend time in one of our schools shadowing and basically working.

What’s really interesting about that is that once they get to that point, the most common reason for falling out and not getting hired is actually traditional teachers. The reason is that they’re not willing to jump in and engage with the kids, get at their level, because traditional teachers are so used to standing forward or standing back and sort of pointing: “Do this, do that,” and being here.

For those traditional teachers who do make it through our process and come into our school, we’ve got some really great training that they’re able to jump into, but they also have to be willing to jump in. That’s everything from designing the Limitless Launch activities that we do in the workshops.

The other big thing is helping them remember that their job is no longer to teach academics. If you walk into one of our schools, you’re not going to see one of our guides sitting down and showing a kid how to carry the 1 or what to do.

Instead, they’re going to be helping kids develop that skill of learning how to learn. They might say, “Hey, did you check your resources? Were you able to find a video? Were you reading the explanation?” They’re really working to coach on that.

Now, they’re also focused on motivation. An example of that: today, in that kindergarten classroom, I was watching a couple of kids. When they would hit one of their academic goals, they would give a secret signal that the guides are watching—touch your nose—and that would signal, “I hit one of my academic goals.”

Then that starts, get ready for it, a silent dance party. That is a 5-second dance party where the guides would do this and the kid would do it. That was enough to get that kid psyched up and ready to say, “Okay, let me go hit my next goal.” It’s just those little things that they can do.

And then the other part of it, Peter, that you mentioned about how much more engaging, personalized, truly personalized learning with AI can be, I just want to take it also to what it looks like when you walk into a classroom.

You can walk into a classroom and have two 7-year-old boys sitting right next to each other, but each of them is working on something that’s exactly at their pace. For example, you can have one 7-year-old kid who’s doing algebra, while the kid right next to him, his friend, is working on his multiplication tables.

That’s the beauty of personalized learning. It’s not isolating. It’s not making that kid have to march up 2 grades to go sit with older kids, or even worse, being told by the school, “You just need to chill out a little bit. You’re too advanced.”

They can keep going and yet be right next to each other doing that, and then have that collaborative environment. I also have to say, the roller coaster that the kids incorporate when a kid hits a big goal—the whole class does a roller-coaster ride—which again looks a little like this.

Those who are not listening on video are missing the magic of this movement.

[laughter]

They just dance around. But that’s the thing these guides are so good at doing: figuring out what that motivation is. That’s everything from the silent dance parties to the fact that we pay our students alpha currency and teach financial literacy concepts for hitting goals. All of that is really about developing self-driven learners.

Yeah. So then, what’s the impact of that on peer pressure? Everything I see in schools is that you either care about your grades or you don’t, and there’s no room in between.

If you’re near the top of the class, you get into this group of people who are really competitive about their GPA. These are the ones that end up going to MIT and Harvard, and then you’re like, “Oh, I can’t compete on that. So I’m competing on the basketball team. I’m going to put all my energy into that.”

It’s really sad, actually, because most of these kids would be great at both. But the basketball coach cuts them from the team, so you’re not allowed to excel over there. Then the math teacher only cares about the top 5 students every year, so you don’t make the mindshare of the math teacher.

Everybody ends up bucketed in very irrational ways, and that peer pressure is just pathetic. It must be completely different in your school.

Yeah, on the academic side, this is the difference between a time-based system and a mastery-based system. All our kids master their grade-level material, so they get 100s on their standardized tests for each level.

This is back to this dichotomy: as adults, because of our system, we see the world so differently. If you ask Alpha parents, “Can you get a 100 on the, in our case, the Texas STAAR, the state standardized test?” fewer than 10% of the parents are like, “Yeah, of course you can get a 100 on the Texas STAAR. Only GT kids,” that kind of thing.

If you ask the Alpha students, 95% say you can get a 100 because they have. In a mastery-based system, you don’t move up to the next grade level until you master what you’re on, and the tutor is going to sit there; the system is going to give you the personalized lessons so you can master it.

All our students know they can crush their academics in 2 hours. It’s also a function of having classes that are all top 1% at every grade level and in every subject. All the students are like, “Oh, I can absolutely do well academically.”

Back to the competition, in a time-based system, the 2 things that determine academic success in the standard school are IQ-coded and Big Five conscientiousness-coded. Are you a grinder? Those are the people who do naturally well, and that’s 10% of the market. Ninety percent of kids don’t.

In a mastery-based system, everybody can do well. If you ask your average Alpha student, it’s not about IQ; it’s about effort. That’s why we call our software TimeBack, where it literally tells the kid, “You’re 17 hours away. You’re 5 hours away.”

It moves everything from “I’m not smart enough” or “I’m not capable,” which is so debilitating—that’s such a bad model that we just inflict on these kids—to “Oh, okay, well, I’m 5 hours away from mastering it and getting a 100.”

That’s just a huge unlock around self-confidence and resilience and all that. Once again, you can’t do it with a teacher in front of a classroom.

I love this. I just want to say this for everybody listening here: the traditional school models are that you start school at a 100% score, and every time you get something wrong, your score goes down.

In the traditional video game models, you start at a zero score, and every time you learn something, your score goes up. It’s a completely different motivational system. If you can tap into that, as well as what you said earlier, the best video game designers know how to come in at the perfect level of challenge and frustration.

Yeah, that’s great.

If you think about learning and you think about this engine, it’s—everybody says, “These AI tutors are terrible.” You can imagine generating personal lessons for every kid based on what you’re trying to teach them, what their knowledge graph is, what they know and don’t know, and what their interest graph is. This goes back to your Taylor Swift interest graph, or Genghis Khan, or whatever it is.

You can also take into account cognitive load theory, which is actually the chemistry of your brain: how many working-memory slots you have, how many repetitions you require to store something in long-term memory, and how to change your schema. The AI can generate a personal lesson for you that makes sure you’re at 80% to 85% accuracy—not too easy, not too hard. At 99%, you’re not learning; you already know it. Every game designer will tell you that if you drop below 66%, kids disengage because it’s too hard.

You can imagine this unending stream of personalized content for every kid, right in their zone. This is why you can learn 10 times faster.

What do you do with kids when some are auditory listeners and some are visual learners? How do you navigate between the different learning styles that different kids have?

Fundamentally, in learning science, there’s dual coding, which means it’s better to get it both visually and auditorily at the same time. Even though internally you think, “I’m a visual learner” or “I’m an auditory learner,” the actual science shows it’s better to give them both at once. Even though you have a preference, you need the reinforcement of both channels at once.

Let me ask some of the difficult questions that you’re probably asked. You’re asking parents to trust more screens in the classroom at the same time that there’s a backlash going on against screens for kids. What do you tell parents who don’t want their kids on computers all the time? And are you able to enforce distraction-free use of their laptops so their kids aren’t going off to play Minecraft or some other video game?

Those are super-valid concerns: screen time and bad screen time, even AI and bad AI. These are all legitimate concerns for parents. Here’s how we look at it, and how parents who come in look at it: we believe there’s good screen time and bad screen time.

If you can learn 10 times faster, then it frees up the rest of the day to do all these great workshops and life skills, so it’s worth that trade-off. Even if you don’t like screens, there are parents at Alpha who would say, “I’m a no-screen-time household.” But they’re like, “If my kid can actually learn the academics in 2 hours instead of 6 and get the afternoons to do all these great things, that trade-off is worth it.” That would be dimension A.

Dimension B is the point about AI. If you give kids ChatGPT in a school, 90% of them use it to cheat. Chatbots are cheatbots. Unmanaged AI is bad. We don’t have chat functionality enabled in our mornings. Even in our world, we’ve tried it, and even our best kids all use it to cheat.

When we talk about chat functionality, what we tell the kids is, “If you’re using chat in the morning, you’re probably cheating. But if you’re not using it in the afternoon, in these life-skills workshops, you’re probably failing.” The student who’s trying to do a musical needs help. There’s that dual sense that you have to have.

For putting facts, ideas, and concepts into kids’ brains, ChatGPT steals that away from them. We want to fill kids with ideas. Our AI use basically has 2 dimensions. One is generating the personalized lesson, so it’s the generative part of AI: it generates a dynamic lesson for the kid.

The second part is the vision models. The AI is watching the screen and coaching you. It’s actually the more expensive part. We’ll stream the screen to a soda model, and we spend around $10,000 per kid right now in AI tokens because the AI is watching the screen and saying, “Look, kid, you’re scrolling, you’re guessing the answers, or when you miss the question, you’re not listening to the explanation. You’re just trying to drive to the next question without listening.” It’s coaching them into good, self-driven learning habits.

The core of this is why EdTech isn’t the solution by itself. We talk about EdTech as 10% of the answer.

Everybody says that to educate a kid, you need a motivated student, and you need to put them in lessons of the correct difficulty—not too easy, not too hard. EdTech does the second part really well. But how do you do the motivated-student part?

For us, it’s giving the kids their time back. You say, “Look, engage in it. Once you finish the lessons, you get to do the workshops.” If you’re not using the apps correctly—if you’re skipping or guessing or doing any of these antipatterns—you’re not going to finish in 2 hours.

We literally have a waste meter in the corner. It’s like, “Dude, you’re wasting 50% of your time.”

That’s mind-blowing. Those vision models only came into existence maybe a year ago. You’ve already got them deployed. That’s incredible. $10,000 a kid is a lot of token usage, though. That’ll come down by a factor of 10.

We’re going to get it down to on-device. To be honest, 3 years ago, when we started—when I became principal—we literally had humans reviewing the video at night and annotating it.

Mhm.

They’d say, “Oh wow, these kids aren’t learning.” You have to train a model. It’s just like Tesla Autopilot.

Yeah, of course.

You have to train this model up: “Okay, this is good learning; this is bad learning. What are these kids doing? Oh wait, they’re switching to another screen to ask ChatGPT. Oh wait, they’re playing Minecraft.” We’re monitoring all of those things.

Our unit of measure is XP. 1 XP equals 1 minute of focused learning. The kids know the AI is deciding, “Was this a minute of focused learning? Okay, you get credit for it.”

To make an analogy for the audience, if you’ve ever coached soccer, football, or tennis, imagine you could look at every single kid and study every footstep they take and say, “Oh, wait, that step to the right should have been a step to the left.” But you’re in their AirPods, telling them one-on-one and coaching them through every single move. That team will just take off.

The vision technology to actually do that through AI, with the AI looking at every single motion, is brand-new in the world. It would work in coaching just as well at work as it works in screen monitoring for teaching. I can completely see how every single action in the learning experience is now a measurable piece of data that can be personally analyzed. It’s brilliant to me that you actually had human beings trying to do that at night. That must have been the most laborious thing in the history of the world, but that’s how you get a head start on knowing how you’re going to deploy it with AI very soon thereafter.

It’d be awesome to take your system and put it into a traditional school and see how much time is being wasted there.

Yeah, 90% is being wasted. I can tell you, in any school, 90% is wasted.

For sure. That’s for sure. But going back to that last part that you were talking about—the data—

It’s reinforcement learning for kids.

It is. Our learning science team comes up with an idea, and they’re like, “Okay, let’s implement this new idea and see.” They put it in, generate the lessons, the kids do the lessons, and you measure the learning. Was this a better way to teach this particular kid? Then they can see the scores based on standardized test results and adapt the learning.

To give you a concrete example, in August I stood in front of all the parents and said, “We’ve got a new math curriculum, K–12. Kids are going to learn more in 20% less time. We made improvements. It’s going to be 20% better.”

Eight weeks later, at the end of the first session, I got up and said, “Okay, good news and bad news. Fourth through 12th, we’re crushing it. We’re above our thresholds. We’re beating the 20% metric. K–3, we’re not. The kids are getting lost in the path. We gave them too much freedom; freedom of choice got to be too much. So we’re going to change that for the next 8 weeks.” I can tell you now, we’re back on track on that one.

That kind of science—it’s learning science. It’s little science. How do you learn? Peter and I went to OneX Robotics to interview Brent Bornick, and he had the exact same thing for the robots that are in the home. They gather every single motion. All the data comes back and gets transmitted into a nightly learning process that retrains the model. So you’ve got the exact same thing in education, with probably much more data.

Robots?

Well, you know, Peter, when we podcasted Eric Schmidt, he said you get these loops. Google is a big loop. This is a perfect example of one of Eric Schmidt’s learning loops, where the model will improve with that data.

Mackenzie and Dave, you were talking about sports. Think about how much time is spent studying game film to see how you can improve, and that’s never been done when it comes to learning in academics. It’s like, again, hopefully you’re good at school or you’re not good at school, and that’s where we’ll be.

We actually give kids the coaching where they learn, “You know what? The best way to go forward is actually to slow down, read the explanation, watch the video, and then take your time to look at the question before you go answer it.” That’s part of what really puts learning in the kids’ hands and gives them a sense of ownership over it. They start seeing, “You know what? I can get better. I can do better. I have the agency and the ability to improve if I put in the work and the good practices.” Again, that completely changes the way that a kid sees themself, and that’s really the magic.

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I want to hit on the psycho-emotional side. Some kids, and in particular male teenagers, probably need more scaffolding than others, right? How do you think about that? The other side of the equation I want to ask is, how do you deal—do you measure levels of stress and the psychology of the kids to provide feedback and safety? So, scaffolding first, and then the psychological side of the equation next.

Yeah, it’s interesting from a scaffolding perspective. The earlier that we have kids come into our system, the better we can build on those habits, right? But if you take, as you mentioned, a teenager, you get a kid who comes to us in middle school or high school, and they’ve had years of conditioning in the traditional model: be passive, sit back, wait for someone to give information to you, and then move along whether you know it or not.

Which is the worst place to be in life, right?

It is absolutely the worst place.

Yeah, yeah.

And so there are some bad habits that kids have picked up. But here’s the good news: you can pretty quickly put kids into a situation where they’re suddenly in a culture where they feel a sense of ownership, and where they’ve got adults who are practicing this mentor mindset with these kids, saying, “Hey, you are capable of doing big things. You may have thought in the past that you weren’t a math kid, right? You weren’t good at science. You’re dyslexic, and therefore reading will never be your thing.” That’s not true.

Let’s put in some growth mindset. Let’s give you some training around receiving feedback, around being able to connect and do that. They get that help, and then they’re also met with the right level and pace.

Here’s a pretty scary statistic that I think makes most parents’ blood turn. We brought hundreds of students from all over the country into our Alpha School at the beginning of this school year. As part of their onboarding, they do assessments so we can figure out where they are. Joe stood in front of our parents at the back-to-school academic night and said, “Guys, I’ve got some bad news for you. This will be a little hard to take, but basically, we looked at where students are and compared them to their transcripts from their previous schools. Here’s what we found: if they were an A student on their transcript, in math class, for example, they were anywhere between 1 year ahead and 3 years behind in their academics. If they were a B student, they were between 3 and 7 years behind. Three to 7 years.”

Here’s the other part. Joe’s a pretty forward principal. He said, “Your schools have been lying to you.” Gone are the days of teachers giving out C’s and D’s because, you know what, parents don’t pay $40,000 a year to send their kids to schools where they get C’s and D’s, right?

They don’t get grades at all. They get sort of a written evaluation, and then they’re like, “Okay, I need some objective measurement. Is my kid doing well or not?”

And they don’t give that out. Now, here’s the next part that Joe said: “Here’s the good news. It’s not going to take years to catch up. We’re going to fill in some holes and give some personalized lessons that get you caught up, and you can do that pretty quickly.”

Going through that exercise sometimes takes a little bit of motivation and modeling to get these kids excited about going back and revisiting fourth grade, fifth grade, or sixth grade to catch up. But they do, and that kind of changes things.

On top of it, when you think about the mental and emotional stuff, all of our students get a one-on-one, 30-minute meeting with their guides every week. Every single week, they’re getting that connection. Do you know the average amount of one-to-one time in a traditional school between a teacher and a student? Twenty-two seconds a day. That’s it. When do they ever get those 30-minute times? It’s that stuff.

Here’s another thing that’s really interesting. We have an emporium in our school where kids can take the alpha currency that they earn for hitting their goals and buy stuff. It might be a LEGO set, stickers, snacks—you name it. The number-one most popular item in the emporium is a special lunch with their guide. Kids love that connection and that mentorship.

The other part of coming in as a middle school or high school student is that we’re really serious about creating a culture where we help students understand that they can be creators and contributors, not consumers. When you think about what society does, it naturally pushes kids into consumer mode: scroll TikTok all day, watch YouTube, play video games endlessly—passive in life.

We spend time helping our kids see, first, what their values are, what their talents are, and what they’re interested in. They go through an Ikigai values workshop. They also do a workshop where they spend 168 hours of their week tracking how they spend that time and what they’re actually doing with it.

Pretty soon, our guides are working with kids to realize, “You know what? Instead of playing a video game, why don’t you go learn to vibe-code and build a video game, and then host your own tournament? Instead of scrolling TikTok, build an audience that’s promoting a message with a great app that you’ve built.”

We find young people want to step into that role. We just need to help make that possible. As a result, purpose first.

Purpose first.

Yeah, we see that when you have that sense of purpose and that culture, with students who are uplifting each other, we’ve really found that that’s been a pretty good cocktail for healthy lives.

Well, one of the things we see a lot is that when you try anything disruptive in a legacy environment, the immune system attacks you. Are you getting attacked by the legacy system?

Well, this is one of the things I’ve been trying to figure out: can you convert an existing school, or do you have to be a new school like Alpha? The answer is, I’ve talked to the heads of some of the top 10 private schools in the country, and I’m like, “Here’s the difference. If you hear this pitch and you like it, you come to the Alpha info session,” which is why there were 1,000 people at New York’s Alpha info session.

Because people want this new thing. All the people who don't like this message stay at your school. And so, there is for sure a set of people who are like, “I don't want that.” And it's twofold. There's a set of people who are like, “I want it, but somebody else has to be first.”

Mhm.

Everybody wants to come to an Alpha, and as we open up all these new cities, one of the things you realize is, once Alpha has 100 people, everybody wants to come. Let's talk—

Nobody wants to be the first 20. Let's talk about that. That's fine. That's the key. Let's talk about how you get your schools opened. So, you're opening one in Santa Monica. You've just opened one in Santa Barbara. Typically, you go out and find a real estate location. You're finding someplace that has enough interest that you've assessed, so you have a density. And then, MacKenzie, you're looking at an opening class of what, 25 to 40 typically?

Yeah, in general, we're calling these kind of micro schools, with about 25 students as the start.

Mhm. And then, one of the things you mentioned to me is that one of the advantages, if you're a founding family—and I love this idea—is that you can actually help create the opening class, right? You can get your kids' best friends in there, and you can select. I think half of education is who you go through the educational process with, right? Are they people holding you up or pulling you down?

And I think this is a good one. I'll tell them, MacKenzie, this is the MacKenzie story: when she was co-founding Alpha, she woke up and said, “I want to go find the 20 people who are going to surround my kids.” And I was actually, unfortunately, a laggard. It took MacKenzie 2 years to convince me to come to Alpha, because I was like all the other parents. My kids—I went to Catholic school, didn't really like it, almost got expelled because I skipped school all the time, dropped out of college—but my kids are going to Catholic school.

Pretty—you've done pretty well, Joe. Sure, sure.

But my kids were going to Catholic school, and I was like, “This is such a weird school. So weird,” right? And she woke up as what we would now call a founding family, right? She founded Alpha. But in every city, you need the same thing, because just because Austin's going well doesn't mean Santa Monica or Santa Barbara or San Francisco or New York wants to be like this one. And so, the core of growth is going to a city and finding those first set of families who are like, “Yes, I'm in,” and are actually going to recruit the other families.

Because it is one where parents want to see, “Okay, it's working for your kid. Okay, I trust it,” right? I always say the 2 things parents need to move a kid from their school are a reference from an adult—a parent they trust in their city—and they need to see a kid at the school do something their kid can't do, whether it's love of school, academics, life skills, whatever they care about. They have to see those 2 things, and when they have the 2 things, then they'll move.

Do you use a franchise model, or do you own all your own schools?

For Alpha, it's 100% us. We run it. There's no franchise. We're 100% in charge of the quality control. But the second part of it is, Alpha's the high-end private school. We designed this when we said, “What are we doing? Price is no object,” right? It's expensive. It's the high-end private school. How would you rebuild education?

Now, with this time-back platform that we're building, we're building a whole set of other schools based on it, which will be different models. So, we've launched Texas Sports Academy, where the afternoon is all sports. We've launched a gifted and talented school, which is for the kids who love academics. When you say, “What would make you love school more?” they're like, “More academics.” And so, those kids are learning like 5× faster. They'll be at 1,500 on the SAT by eighth grade.

We have a wilderness school. We have a Montessori school. So, you can imagine all these different models that, as soon as you have this magic of 2-hour learning, you can start to say, “What should we do in the afternoon?” Next year, in 2026, you're going to see all these other models beyond just Alpha roll out based on this time-back software.

And what has been the reaction of the authorities and government departments of education, and that whole legacy side?

As for public schools, I'm going to be doing this for 20 years. McKenzie's in for 20 years. The public school side, I think, is going to be the second decade, not the first decade, which is that we're doing a lot privately, right? It's with vouchers. There's a whole set of schools. The Texas Sports Academy is using the Texas vouchers, the billion dollars they just allocated, where it's $300 a month in parent pay. So, bringing the price way down from Alpha.

Right now, this is a private model. And we've tried on the public side. McKenzie applied for 10 charters in 10 states for in-person charters. Zero. Rejected 10 times.

One. We got Arizona.

One virtual, but you got one in Arizona—you got a virtual, not a physical school, which isn't a physical school. You know, the school boards literally say things like, “I was put on this earth to stop people like you.”

Wow.

You know, and so, that's what I talk about when I say the immune system. The legacy likes—

Yeah, for sure.

And so, for us, back to the thing: the private school market's a $50 billion market, right? It's a big market. For those parents who want to opt in, it is radical, so they can. We'd love to move into public as soon as they want to invite us, but on charters, we just said, “We know we're not wanted here, so whenever you want us, call us.” Otherwise, we're done applying for charters.

And I think what we see is we've got a lot of interest from the public education sector. The Secretary of Education came and spent the day at Alpha in Texas in September. We get people who are inspired, but it's really the idea of, can you change the whole model of the day? If academics only takes 2 hours, what do you do with the rest of the school day? And are you willing to change that role of teachers and all that?

I think right now, part of the reason we get a lot of attention—we are probably the most talked-about school in the world—is because we are serving as inspirational ideas for what's possible. And I actually love that part of it. I'm getting parents who reach out to me who have implemented a lot of what we do in their homeschool environments, or taken pieces of that.

Eventually, it'll get there, but right now, our plan is to build the private distribution model at varying levels and price points, still delivering the academic excellence through the time-back platform and the life-skills development. That can be done in different ways.

At Alpha, our students will learn adaptability and teamwork by doing a sailing workshop, where they eventually sail from Florida to the Bahamas over 5 days. But what else can you do? You can get incredible life-skills development by letting kids get out on the sports field, starting at noon instead of at 4:00, and giving them time back to do things. So, there's lots of it.

Perfect. What do you guys worry about? What keeps you up at night? What are the problems that you're having? I don't want to be an—listen, I love what you're doing. I just don't understand what's the flip side of the equation here.

The flip side is that your average parent, when hearing this, thinks, “This is totally wacky and must not be true.” Educating parents that this new model is not fake, false, a hoax, or any of that is a huge lift. Our marketing department is—our schools educate kids. We have to go educate parents, because every parent literally thinks the opposite.

The part I, as principal, worry about is how I scale while keeping quality. Every time we open a new location, every time we have a new guide, how are we making sure that you're getting that same level of love of school, academic performance, and life skills?

We spend a lot of time—when you talk about life skills, we teach grit. What does that mean? You can't just read a book and answer this book and be like, “Oh, my kid has grit,” right? We have to be able to say our third graders in Santa Monica, Austin, and New York have grit. What does that mean? What's the test to pass? What is our Alpha cert that we have?

We spend a lot of time making sure that we're building this for scale and making sure that every third grader can do a Rubik's Cube. We're like, “That's a good proxy for grit.” The scaling part is critical.

The other is our cost, right? I'm spending—I'm burning 10 grand on the AI. I've got to drive that down. So, tomorrow, if somebody flipped a switch and said, “Okay, finally, every parent wants it tomorrow,” we couldn't fulfill it. We've got to drive that curve down to make that work.

And then the biggest challenge to hitting scale is that building schools and rebuilding from scratch takes time. I have 20 years, so we're going to build 10,000 schools, and that's going to be great. I love it. But how do I get to 1 billion kids? How do we drive this out to 1 billion kids?

If motivation is your number-one issue, this engine part is easy in the scheme of things. How do you motivate kids when you don't own the school day? The biggest motivator for a kid is giving their time back. So if I have 6 and I give you 4 hours back, I have the most important motivation.

But for the 1 billion kids whose school day I don't control, they're not going to give it back to me. They're not going to restructure their school. We still have to get to those kids, and we have to motivate them to do it. You're going to see that we're partnering with some of the best motivators in the world to figure out how to package both the motivational component and the learning component.

We have some of the world's best video game designers, and that's going to be released in 2026. We work with some of the biggest influencers, and we're packaging all this up as a bundle: motivation plus learning. That is hard. There's a big lift there, so that's a big deal.

Have you talked to other governments? There are certainly countries around the world that are much more open to the future of education in a modern way than we are here.

Yes, we do. We have demand everywhere. With governments, what we find is that it's almost the same thing everywhere: if countries have a private model, you absolutely can get a take rate on the private side. The issue is that ministers of education, secretaries, and departments of education are pretty much globally going to wait and see until there's dramatically more proof, which I'm not against.

Peter Attia's daughter went to the school, and I was comparing medical-grade testing versus education. In education, we roll things out to 55 million kids, and there's no randomized controlled trial. There's no million-user trial asking, “Does this really work?”

I would love for us, as we get all this data out there and get this time back at scale, to do a 1-million-student randomized controlled trial—a pharmaceutical-grade trial—so everybody can say, “This isn't a hoax. This actually works.” We need some of that proof because there's a lot of bad learning science in education that we need to undo. I believe proof and pharmaceutical-grade trials might be the way around that.

Incredible. As we close this episode, I have one final question, but Dave and Saleem, I want to give you a chance to ask yours.

I would love to know how you deal with the rate of change in technology and what your process is. If you think about starting with a batch of 6-, 7-, or 8-year-olds and planning for them to end up as 18-year-olds, in the intervening 12 years, half the kids will have Neuralinks and the other half won't. They'll be doing something in the back of their mind that you can't even see. How are you going to deal with this constant rate of change during that timeline?

We're humble enough to know that we don't have all the answers. We talked to McKinsey, and I talked to thousands of kindergarten parents. The kindergarten parents are the ones who want the biggest change because they're looking out 12 years from now, and they all know that the current school system isn't going to work. We need something different.

They're motivated to change, whereas if you're a senior in high school, you're thinking, “Let me just get him to college or get him out of here.” But if you have to look forward and project 12 years, you're going to want something new.

All we say at Alpha is that we wake up every day feeling that we're the leading school asking, “How do we adapt to changes in technology?” If you look at our high school kids, we have a concept called a Brainlift, which is the data structure for human knowledge. It literally divides things into, “This is the stuff LLMs are going to be good at, or are good at and will be,” and, “This is the part that humans are good at.”

We're teaching them, as of today and with what we can project into the future, “This is as good as we can get, kids, and this is how we're preparing you for that world.” Maybe Grok 7 will be like, “Okay, well, it does everything the Brainlift thought it would,” and we'll have to move on.

I think this is an important point about our culture. McKinsey's best line is, “This is the best time in history to be a 5-year-old.” AI is going to impact adults very differently. We're in Austin: Ubers, Waymos, robo-taxis. It's not a good time to be an Uber driver.

But AI is going to give our kids superpowers. It's going to transform their childhood and let them do things that our generation never even dreamed of. Putting your kid in that kind of environment is going to be awesome for them.

I have a dozen high school kids in my guide group—the Sparta group. Shout-out. They wake up every day, and when you talk to them, they're like, “Yeah, you adults, it's a wrap for you guys. AI is going to give us superpowers, and we're going to take over the world.”

Well, infinite longevity, too.

Exactly. They couldn't be more optimistic about the future. I think that's the kind of thing that—

By the way, they better get moving before we adults screw it up completely. Let me hit on that.

Don't worry, they are. One of the reasons we moved schools for one of our kids at one point was that you have to assess the level of optimism of the teachers teaching your kids. If your teachers are pessimistic about the future, what do you expect your kids to be?

I couldn't agree more. Matt Ridley, right? All our kids read The Rational Optimist, and they have to read Abundance as well.

He came to the school, and he was sort of an AI doomer when it came to education. I couldn't have been more proud as our students sat there and used his arguments from his books, along with examples from what their day is like, to explain why he needs to see the world differently. This is going to be awesome.

I think that's an important part of the culture we need for our kids. A very large education philanthropy foundation came and visited our schools, and at the end of the visit, the head of the foundation said to my guides and me, “You guys are so happy.”

I thought, “What?” They said, “We go and visit schools and talk to educators, and they're all so encumbered and depressed. They're like, ‘It's so hard.’” I was so happy to hear my guides say, “What do you mean? This is the greatest time in the world to be an educator because we finally are unleashed to do what we got into this world to do, which is positively impact kids.” You can do those things.

The other thing I love and appreciate—and I think Joe is obviously a really great partner to have in this education endeavor—is that if you come to one of our schools at the beginning of the school year, we're not going to dust off the same old presentation that says, “Here's what the school year looks like. This is the day for field day. This is the day for back-to-school night.”

We're more like the Apple iPhone: we update every 6 weeks. We're constantly iterating, growing, and learning. We're seeing what works and what doesn't.

Families in our model have to flex their adaptability muscle as well because we're always having kids do cool things and adjusting things as they work. I think that's why we're able to see such rapid innovation. As part of that, we're at the forefront of it, so it's a fun and wild ride. Hopefully, Peter, you guys will get to be a part of it in Santa Monica and see what that's like.

Amazing. Hopefully, your AI works better than the Apple iPhone AI. All right, Saleem, why don't you wrap us up here, buddy?

I think what's great is that there's such a clear watershed between everything you're doing in a growth mindset and everything old in a fixed mindset. I think you're probably pushing people over that line wonderfully.

You launched, I think, in 2016, if I remember right?

We started the very first school in 2014, when my kids were in 3rd and 1st grade, and Joe's daughters, who were the same age as my girls, came in a couple of years later. We now have sophomores in college and seniors in high school.

This is Joe's and my last year as Alpha parents, and then he'll be principal and guide leader. I'll do whatever I do.

Going back to your founding, what would you have done differently that would have accelerated or changed things? What have you learned now that you wish you knew then?

Oh boy.

To partner with Joe at the very beginning, I guess, right?

Well, part of it is—back to the story of 3 years ago, why I got involved was, I put my kids in 10 years ago, but I was like, “McKinsey, just like all that education, this isn’t scalable.” This is great for our students and great for our families. It wasn’t until generative AI came out that I said, “This is the technology that can let us scale to a billion kids.”

So, it really was that moment that made me say, “Okay, now I should get involved, because we can get it out to everybody.” That’s what I bring to the party. So, that would have been it.

If you rolled me back 3 years, what would I have done differently? The understanding—the educating of parents. I wake up every day, and if you said, “If I could wave a magic wand to fix education,” it’s actually not the students. The students are awesome, right? The issue is that parents are the blocker.

The blocker to education reform is what’s in parents’ heads. For 3 years, I didn’t do a podcast, right? Now I realize the importance of educating parents.

MacKenzie, you’ve been out there. We have to get out there, because the single biggest impediment to making education great for our kids is what our parents believe. Amen. MacKenzie, where can we point people to learn more about Alpha School? Where do they go?

We’ve got Alpha Schools launching coast to coast. We had 13 new schools this year, and we’ll be continuing to announce more, so you can go to alpha.school and learn more about our model.

And then Future of Education on social media, on Instagram. I’ve got a podcast called Future of Education, and we spend a lot of time on those channels just giving parents a little bit of a taste of what’s possible in school when you free kids’ time up to go do awesome things and develop.

And Joe, any particular targets you want to point folks at?

Oh, he’s becoming an X star.

Good. You can—

Joe Liemandt is where I post. You’ll see life as a principal. You’ll see some stuff about the business of education, as well as what Alpha kids are doing and our view around this.

And if a family wants to go and visit an Alpha School to see if it’s right for them, is that a possibility?

It absolutely is. In fact, that’s kind of the key. Students will come and do a shadow day to see if the school is a fit. The one thing we warn parents is, don’t send your kid to a shadow day unless you’re convinced that you want to move, or your kids will rebel. They’ll be like, “I’m not going back to my old school. I want to go to this new school.”

That’s one of the things we’re doing. We’re hosting info sessions at all of these schools and getting kids in to experience this. Again, that whole idea of love of school is so magical, because when kids love school, it allows us to help them unlock their potential and do big things.

Amazing. Well, I’ve got to say, I came into this podcast saying, “Well, I always learn something, but how big a deal can it be?” And I’m coming out of it saying, “This is so inevitable and so huge.” This has been great.

Yeah, it’s critical—critical for America, critical for the world. The speed of change is so extraordinarily fast that if we are still using the old methodologies, we’re hitting brick walls. We need not just Alpha School, but hopefully many different mechanisms that are going to enable us to have our kids, our college kids, and even—we didn’t talk about it—reskill using this technology to reskill our employees. That’s going to be fundamentally critical.

Mhm, yeah. Well, thank you, Joe. Thank you, guys. We really appreciate that.

Thank you, Salim, too.

Salim, a pleasure as always. I want to attend the school.

Absolutely. Yeah, reskill yourself.

All right, guys. Have a beautiful day. Thank you.

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