No Priors Ep. 133 | With Alpha School Principal Joe Liemandt

Hi listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today we're here with Joe Liemandt, the founder of the legendary technology company Trilogy and now the principal of Alpha School. He wants to educate 1 billion kids differently and also recruit a generation of builders to work in education. Joe, thanks so much for doing this with us.

Yeah, good to see you.

Great, thank you. I appreciate this.

You have an amazing story as a technology entrepreneur. Trilogy is a legendary company. Can you talk a little bit about how you went from that to being principal of a school?

Absolutely. Back in high school, I actually wrote a paper on AI. It literally had a paragraph on neural nets that said, “This is decades away.” Back then, it was all expert systems and tallies and all that, and I went to Stanford. I was actually in a class with Ed Feigenbaum, the father of expert systems.

I ended up dropping out to build an AI company—you couldn't call it that back then, because AI was bad back then. It was the first product in the ’90s to sell a billion dollars of AI. So we built a software company and did that for 25 years. That helped with sales configuration.

Configuration and all that.

And so, think of it as just classic SaaS enterprise software, both organic build and acquisitions. But then, 10 years ago, which is sort of how we got to the school, Mackenzie Price—who's a Stanford grad and whom I'd hired into Trilogy back in the ’90s—started a school. She started Alpha, a very different school.

We can talk about how I got there, but for 2 years I was just saying, “I'm not going to go to your weird school.” Eventually, both of my kids went. Then, 3 years ago, when GenAI came out, I was like, “Wow, neural nets are finally here, and now we can scale this.”

The problem with all education is that it's not scalable. There are lots of good education systems. My view was, “Wow, this is finally a technology that can get this to 1 billion kids and take the magic of Alpha,” which was great for Austin kids and my kids, “and get it out to everybody.”

I'm a product guy, and I said, “I guess I have to be principal to go figure this out. What happens when fifth graders get in a fight? What do parents yell at you about? How do you design a product from the ground up?” If you just said, “Let's start with parents. They're going to drop their kids off at a school, at a building, and there are going to be other kids and adults in the building,” what would you do to unleash human potential if you had 12 years to reimagine it?

What was your original thinking about your kids going to Mackenzie's school? What was the resistance, and what was the reason they eventually went?

Lots. Every parent basically wants their kid educated the way they were, right? That's what you've experienced. We've all experienced the same model for a couple hundred years. I went to Catholic school. I didn't even like it, but my kids were going to it, right?

So they're in the local school, and Mackenzie is offering this other weirdness, and I'm just like, “No.”

What was weird about it, or what was it about it?

Well, they were using apps in the morning. It was a mix—it wasn't what we are today, but it was the formation of it. You're like, “A kid's going to learn with an app and no teacher? Are you really serious?” Everybody knows good school equals good teacher, or good teacher equals good school, and you're like, “No, this app—DreamBox back then was the app—and I'm like, “That's better in math?”

You just have that hang-up, and that's true today, right? When we look to open a new location, basically everybody wants to go to an Alpha once there's 100 kids in the school. No one wants to go when you're the first 20. It takes somebody like Mackenzie who's like, “I want to be a founding family,” because part of the bundle that is education, and part of what she loved, was, “I get to go find the other kids that I want to surround my kids with.”

It took her 2 years, but eventually she got me, and our daughters are all now best friends and have been for a decade.

But you're taking an even more radical approach, I think, right? You're basically saying kids really just need 2 hours a day with structured classwork or some interaction with applications, and then the rest of the day can go to other things. Could you elaborate on that a little bit more? I think it's a very interesting structure.

If I just step back, when we were talking about how we reimagined it, there are the pillars of reinvention. If you could reinvent a school and had to make it 10 times better, what would it be?

The first one, and the most important—and this was Mackenzie's co-founder, who was actually the one who told me this 10 years ago—was that kids must love school. I'm like, “Sometimes.” He's like, “Nope. You're going to learn: kids must love school.” And I said, “What's second?” He's like, “When kids love school, your expectations of your kids are too low.”

I'm like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I really expect they should, like, get—there's no chance.” He's like, “Call me back in 100 days.” Both of those turned out to be true.

So 3 years ago, when I was like, “Okay, now with GenAI, what do we do?” our first view was that kids must love school more than vacation. We literally survey our kids. If we say, “Kids, do you love school?” 96% say yes. We get between 40% and 60% of kids, depending on the vacation they have or how their workshops or afternoon workshops went, saying every 8 weeks, “Okay, I love school more than vacation.”

That is a magic that every parent should expect. If we're going to put kids in a place for 12 years, we should just have that expectation, which is not standard. You're like, “Okay, how do I make them love school?”

And so for me, once I took that commitment that Mackenzie had and I was principal, I went to the kids, and this is where your 2 hours are coming in. The new fifth graders came in, and it was my first week. I said, “All right, kids, do you love school?” They were all like, “No.” I asked, “What would make you love school?” “Less school.” “How much less?” “None.” I said, “That seems a little light.”

We were talking about this earlier, where school is kind of a bundle, right? It's academics, physical activity, socialization, and, in some sense, child care for the parents. So there's a variety of things that school is.

Exactly. And so, what specifically are they referring to in that? On this one, they're just like, “The academic part. If you want me to love school and you're just going to put me in class for 6 hours a day, I'm not going to love school.”

So we negotiated. I was like, “2 hours a day in the apps—real engagement—but then you get 4 hours of awesomeness. Is that a fair trade?” And they're like, “Yes.”

Right? Because there's EdTech that's been deployed forever, but EdTech's deployed and test scores keep going down, so it's not working, and the issue is just engagement. You could, if you use DreamBox, even 10 years ago it would work, but there's a lot of studies that between 5 and 10% of people are the people who actually engage with Khan. And there's 5 to 10% of people who are self-motivated, but the other 90% don't. And so what we developed, I went back to my team, and I'm like, “Okay, we got 2 hours. We've got to jam everything into these kids' heads in 2 hours, and it has to be there forever, right? Change the whole schema of their brain.”

The good news was that there had been learning-science papers written for 40 years, dating back to before I went to high school, that talked about how kids could learn 2, 5, or 10 times faster. They just don't work in a teacher-in-front-of-a-classroom model.

We would literally pull papers off—Dan Schwartz at Stanford has a book on it—and we're like, “Okay, let's do chapter K in his book,” and put it in. We built a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. It's all based on the principles of learning science.

Now we can commit to kids: You just need to do 2 hours a day, and you're going to crush your academics. Top 1% performance in only 2 hours a day.

They engage in the app, and then once they finish, it goes green, and they get the 4-hour afternoon to go do life skills and all the set of things that they love, as well as what parents really care about.

When you start saying, “What do I want my kid to learn, especially with AI coming?” it's very confusing. What are we supposed to teach kids for the first 12 years when AI is going to know everything? But you start thinking about leadership, teamwork, grit, hard work, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, storytelling, public speaking, relationship building, and socialization—that bundle. Parents are like, “Oh, okay, I like that.”

What's really great about those is you can build awesome workshops that kids love that drive them through that.

Can you make that easy to picture for parents or builders listening here? If I am a new fifth grader at an Alpha school, what does my day look like?

It looks like this. You come in and do Limitless Launch—think Tony Robbins for kids, right? It's all about growth mindset: You're going to be able to do this, right? Our view is that kids are limitless, they're awesome, and we need to create an environment that helps unleash them.

So you jump into that, and then you literally sit down at your app. You're going to have an AI tutor that's going to be there for 2 hours and give you personalized lessons.

Right, based on your level. Age grade and knowledge grade are two totally different things. The number of people in the average 6th-grade class in this country who actually need 6th-grade content is very small. And so this is why all the test scores keep going down: a 6th-grade teacher's job is to deliver 6th-grade content, but her audience—her students—actually aren't ready for it.

Just to give you an example, we had hundreds of kids join in the last couple of weeks as we started across the country. My message to the parents—my first academic talk to them—was, “I hate to tell you this. It sounds extreme, but your $50,000 private school that you were at for however many years has been lying to you.” Your student, academically, on the standardized tests that we use, is somewhere between 1 grade level ahead—if they had a straight-A transcript transferring into us—to 3 grade levels behind.

And if they're a B?

If they're a B, they're 3 grade levels behind to 7 years behind.

Wow.

I have freshmen who are transferring in who can't write a grammatically correct 3rd-grade sentence. These are coming from high-end private schools, right? And so that's the first part. The second part, though—and this is where the 10-times-faster learning matters—is that I'm like, “Don't worry. We can catch you up.”

This is why we get such great academic performance: the learning science engine. When you talk about 10 times faster, the average grade-level subject combination—4th-grade math, for example—takes between 20 and 30 hours to master. That's it. So you think there's 180 school days, an hour a day, plus homework. You're thinking the average, when I'm behind, is hundreds of hours.

We're like, “You're 20 or 30 hours.” And so these kids who come in, instead of doing our 2 hours a day, can do a 3rd hour. They can do it at school or as homework if they want. And so you're literally like, “Well, you're really only 60 hours behind,” which is 60 days. We'll catch you up to grade level quickly.

These are like 60 pretty hard hours, right? Because I don't know what your memory was like, but in elementary school, I spent a lot of time drooling and doodling on my desk because there wasn't anything going on. How do you get a 2nd or 5th grader to do that?

Yeah. So when you talk about hard, focused work, part of what you're trying to do with your engine is use the zone of proximal development. What you actually want to keep kids at is between 80% and 85%. You can't have 99%, because that means they already know it and you're just giving them content they know. But if you drop down to 66% or below, you get disengagement. Every video game designer knows that, right?

Yes, yeah. I'm in the fun-struggle zone.

You have to be in the 80% to 85% zone. What an AI tutor can do that a teacher in front of a classroom can't is generate an unending stream of content for each kid at 80% to 85%, so I can keep you engaged. I'm not going to make it too hard. If you're struggling with a concept and the leap is too big, I can just create scaffolding.

Then you do the scaffolding lesson, and you're like, “Oh, I get this.” We're able to figure out where the kid is and create content for them that keeps them in that zone of proximal development, so they actually learn. It's not to say it's never hard, but there is a difference between that and being put in over your head.

There's a view that you should throw kids in way over their heads, and the learning science does not support that. The learning science does not say that. There's a concept of desirable difficulties versus productive struggle. It's a whole debate. But if you gave me an MCAT, I would fail it. You can tell me to struggle through it all day long and have grit, but you'd have to roll me back to freshman biology and then build me up. AI tutors can do that for every subject.

The 3rd-grade lesson—when these high school kids can't write—they're going to go through 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade. They're going to just learn it and be able to progress through it. In a matter of weeks, all of a sudden they're going to be writing at what would be AP Lang, getting a 5 on the AP Lang FRQ. You can roll these kids back. You do not want to push them too hard. You just want to deliver them perfect content, which accelerates their learning.

That's the magic of all of this. The way we learned—or thought we learned—by just putting kids in over their heads is actually not the best way to learn.

What's going on the rest of the day?

Then in the afternoons, it's all project-based workshops. You're going to go in and, depending on the grade level and the workshop, it's going to have something that you're going to love, as well as something that teaches a life skill.

Before I get into the workshop, one of the things—this is where our love of school really comes in—is that you have to believe one statement that lots of people do not believe. The 3 things that, if I could wave a magic wand and every parent believed, would fix education are: 1, your kid must love school as much as vacation, which a lot of parents don't think; 2, they can crush their academics in 2 hours a day; and 3, the key to your child's happiness is high standards.

Kids want to do awesome things. They want to do hard things, and they want to accomplish things. If you take that away by setting low standards, then there's no way that they get the love of school.

And that's actually a bunch of human history, right? If you look at apprenticeships of people in different crafts over the centuries, it was very common for children to effectively start working in the context of their parents' environment and apprentice in something, accomplish something, make something, or build something.

You even take a modern-day example. Most parents, when you apply it to academics, don't agree. They don't think their kid is going to get happier if they hold higher standards. But it's actually true, at least at our schools. They all believe it with sports. Everybody wants their kid on the championship team with the coach who's going to be like, “Guys, this is going to be the hardest thing we ever did. We were in last place last year. We're going to be in first next year, but we're going to get there and grind and work and be awesome, and we're going to have teamwork and leadership,” right?

Every parent is like, “Oh, I want my kid to go through that,” which is why they all put them in after-school sports: to get those life skills.

They want to do it even outside of sports. I mean, they want to do it in sports, but they want to do it in everything. You have kindergarteners who climb 40-foot rock walls.

Yeah. The parents, when they first see it, want to protect their kid. Their job is to keep them safe. Parents don't want their kid to struggle or fail. As a principal, I sometimes have kids cry on their road to success, supported by a caring adult. Every child development expert in the world will say you want to run that cycle with kids as much as you can. That's the key to self-confidence, resilience, and growth. For us, it's also the key to loving school.

Our workshops do that. But as a parent, you're naturally like, “This seems too hard. I don't want to see my kid struggle and fail.” Our school setup is that we have guides because we don't have adults teaching 7th-grade science. We hired the best motivational and emotional-support experts.

It changes by age. In kindergarten, it's going to be Mallory and Charity—we're going to wrap your kid in love—versus in high school, where I have ex-NFL athletes and ex-NBA coaches who can take those video-game-playing middle-school boys and be like, “Guys, we're going to go do something.”

Does this radically change how you compensate people? In the context of schooling, people always say teachers are undercompensated, and the salaries are huge. Is this a different salary band?

We pay a minimum of $100,000 at our schools for the guides. That allows us, first, to get the best teachers. There's a whole different question of what's the future of teachers, but teachers became teachers to transform kids' lives. Your best teacher was great because she found you and convinced you that you could do awesome stuff. They didn't become teachers to grade that 7th-grade science quiz, and you didn't think they were great because they marked your paper up really well. It was because of the motivational and emotional support.

So we go hire them and say, “This is what you get to do all day.” During the 2-hour blocks, we do 25-minute Pomodoros of math, science, language, and reading. They take a kid out during the 25 minutes and they're like, “Okay, you don't have to do math today. Come talk to me. Hey, how was your weekend? You won the softball tournament. What's going on?”

If you're having trouble with engagement, they get to know the kids at a level that no teacher can.

I was just up at the San Francisco campus last night. One of the parents—it’s been over 23 days—said, “In 23 days, this guide knows more than the teachers did in years in the prior world.” And I’m like, “Because that’s what they do all day.” They don’t stand in front lecturing. They spend the time getting to know the kids.

So, yes, compensation is different. And if you want to go even edgier, talk to our middle and high schoolers. We’ll go really edgy on the high school side: our high schoolers interview the guides before they get hired, which everybody thinks is terrible because of that whole “rate my teacher” idea that they’re going to have low standards. The difference is, when you have kids who want to be great in this environment, they want adults who are going to help them. So they hold really high standards for the guides that we hire.

The sports analogy is really interesting because I would totally believe that there’s a bunch of motivated high schoolers who are going to pick the coach who will make them most successful. But the instinct is that they won’t do that if it’s academic.

Correct.

Yeah. And there really is this whole thing where we have 2 different ethoses in America about sports versus academics. Steph, who runs K–8 for us, came out of the sports world, and she’s like, “My job is to bring the athletic ethos to academics.”

When you talk about the guides we hire and things like that, that model that parents actually believe in does develop life skills, and kids love it. So, yes, if we could change that, it would be huge.

How universal do you think this is? Let’s say I have a couple of kids. They have different temperaments. Some of them are sports-oriented and have more natural resilience; some are less so. Some people are more motivated about learning, and some are less motivated. How do you handle that at Alpha School for a particular type of kid?

Our job is to get this to a billion kids, so we’re working to make it available to everybody, both in terms of price point and personality type.

A lot of it is that when we talk about love of school, it helps you design your product. I get all the guides together, and we’ve opened, besides Alpha, different branded schools for different passions. I have a sports academy where you play sports all afternoon. I have a gifted-and-talented school where, in the afternoon, you do academic enrichment, robotics, Math Olympiad, or write a book.

A lot of it is when we ask the guides, “We only had 40% of the kids love school instead of vacation. How do we juice that to 75%?” The GT guides are like, “More academics. They want a third power hour.” That’s what fires them up.

My oldest daughter is like that. She read calculus books in high school, and she’s a double major at Stanford now. She literally is like, “These STEM boys can’t write.” So she wrote an English writing class that’s equation-based writing to help teach them.

If she can do academics all day, she loves it. My younger daughter, who’s still in high school, wakes up every day and, while she does great academically and just took the SAT—hopefully she has scores as good as her sister—is like, “Is this the last academics I have to do? Am I done? Is Calc BC the last math I have to do, or am I done?”

She has millions of followers on TikTok. She built an online AI dating app for high school boys, and she wakes up and says, “I just want to be social all day. Build relationships.”

It’s that continuum, and it’s finding what your kid’s passion is. Then you say, “Okay, we’re going to put you in an environment where you get more of that.” That then drives your academic performance in the morning.

If you’re going to give the kid the time back, our product name is Time Back. Give the kid the time back. That’s the single biggest motivator. The biggest motivator for kids is, “Don’t waste my life. Don’t waste my 12 years,” because that’s what you’re doing.

We all know you sit in traffic, where 95% of the time is wasted, and all that. So we’re like, “Great, 2 hours, and then we’re going to make sure your afternoon’s awesome.”

Can you elaborate on that a bit more, actually? Your focus on incentives—I think you’ve been very forward-thinking in terms of just giving them any incentive, as long as it motivates them to do the things you want them to do. Can you extrapolate on that a little bit?

Sure. We obviously do controversial things, but motivation is one of the biggest ones. We wake up every day and say, “How do we motivate these students and do it in a way where they’re going to love school, have great results, and maintain high standards?”

Our guides literally create all these different motivational programs. There’s an Astral Codex article that one of our GT parents wrote, and his summary was “Alpha Bucks.” He said bucks are the number-one motivator, which isn’t actually true. We’ll talk about when money matters, but Time Back, by far, is the biggest motivator for kids.

If you took our Westlake High School in Austin, where they do 6 hours a day in class and 4 hours a day of homework if you’re on the AP Ivy League track, you can’t pay those kids enough money to be happy. They are just grinding it, and if they love academics, great, but for everybody else, it’s a grind and they hate it.

But if you tell those same kids, “Look, it’s 2 to 3 hours a day. You can still get a 1550-plus on your SAT and 5s on your APs, but then you get 4 years of afternoons in high school to do awesome stuff you love,” that’s true across all of them.

When do we use other motivations? Every guide wakes up every day and says, “I have to make this kid love school and set high standards. High support, high standards. What’s going to motivate the student to do it?”

Sometimes it’s a sticker. Every kid has different motivations. For some, it’s competition, so we have leaderboards. We have people who are like, “I’m going to win just because I want to be first.”

Is there a differential compensation system for the guides based on how well their students do? Is there some other incentive system?

The guides have to deliver all 3 commitments to their guide group, and they are accountable for it. If you are not delivering all 3 commitments—love school, 2x learning, and life skills—to all your kids, you won’t be at Alpha long. So it’s not a tenure system.

Tenure system. It is: you are here to deliver that. Second, we survey the students and say, “Every adult had 1 or 2 teachers who transformed their life. Is your guide that for you?” That’s the standard they have to live up to.

At kindergarten, it’s like, “Do you love your guide?” But as you get older, there’s a second one if you’re going to be our middle- or high-school guide. One of the things we tell parents is that the key is high standards, high support.

High standards are hard with an adolescent. So the question we ask parents is, “Do you trust your Alpha guide to hold the high standards so you, as the parent, can provide the unconditional love and support?” That totally transforms your relationship with your teen if you trust them.

My oldest daughter is like, “No, Dad, I’m not going to let you read my Stanford application.” And I’m like, “You know?” She’s like, “No,” because she doesn’t want me to. Teens don’t want that.

But for me, Chloe, who’s her guide and a Harvard grad, wants to help. Chloe’s like, “Don’t worry. I got it, and it’s going to be fine.” That’s what you want—the same way you outsource to a coach in sports.

Every parent is like, “Yeah, he’s going to make this super hard for my kid. They’re going to win state. They’re going to be great at it.” We don’t expect teachers to have that kind of relationship. That’s how we define teachers being 10x better.

And, yes, you can make more. There are different bands, and there’s the lead guide role and all of that.

One of the things that was most controversial to me when we were first speaking is that schooling is mixed up with a lot of parenting philosophy, which makes it complicated. I think there’s a popular view that if you give kids a bunch of extrinsic motivators—it could be stickers, it could be Time Back—you’re hurting the development of intrinsic motivation. They should just want to do it. How do you react to that?

No. The answer is just very clearly: that’s not true.

Okay, but explain yourself.

I know everybody believes it, and I was trying to—I paused because I was like, “Should I go through the research that goes into this?” But—

—you want your kid, when they’re 30, to be a self-actualized person, you know?

Here’s what you’re paying them. Let’s talk about paying them. Paying is the most controversial side, so let’s just hit it.

We start in kindergarten. You can earn an Alpha Buck. We have an economy based on this where kids learn how to earn: “Okay, I did work; I earned it.” They learn how to save, they learn how to spend. We have an emporium, and they have to decide where they’re going to spend their money. They learn how to donate.

So we learn how to save, invest, and donate as an ecosystem, and it’s important that the kids are earning it, not being given it.

As you go up, when you talk about our middle school, parents are like, “We have a system where, if you’re not in the top 1% coming into our middle school, we will pay you $1,000 when you hit the top 1% in your subject.” It’s a lot of money for a middle schooler. Parents are like, “Okay, I hate that.” I’m like, “Wait.” But then that money goes and feeds their Robinhood for Kids account, which means they now have real money to invest, which really matters.

Some of the 7th graders are going to YOLO it and lose it. I have parents who are like, “How’d you let them lose all that money?” And you’re like, “This is the best time for them to learn not to do that, and actually learn good investing behavior, not gambling.” If it’s not real money, and it’s just a shadow account or a fake account, it actually teaches dysfunctional behavior because it teaches you to YOLO when there’s no downside. This is actually their money, and it teaches them good habits.

You mentioned you could also apply that, I think, to projects or other things as well. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

And then the second part is they use it for their passion project. We had a girl who was building the first all-teen-produced Broadway musical. She got up to a 790 on the math SAT and funded it, and it allowed her to get the money to fly to New York, meet the producers, and figure all of that out.

Parents on either end of those are like, “Okay, those seem like good examples, right?” You get the motivation on the academics, it unlocks what they can do, and then it funds things that parents are like, “Okay, this is all good.” That is kind of how achievement in adults works as well.

100%. It’s 100%.

But getting back to the core, about your worry about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, part of helping kids realize they’re limitless and there are no blocks is recognizing that kids all have inherent blocks on what they can do: “I’m not smart enough. I’m not a top 1% kid. I’m not there. I don’t have the daily habits.” If you can use money to create the daily habits, every parent should, because the daily habits are going to help them more than the downside. The second part is, if you can break a block that’s in their head, you should pay for it.

Here’s my example. My oldest daughter was self-motivated in academics, so it didn’t matter. But my youngest daughter, when she got to middle school, was like, “Yeah, I’m top 10%, Dad, but that’s good enough. I’m not like my older sister, who’s the smart one, and I’m not top 1%.” I was like, “You know, the one thing I know about you is you love to shop.” And I was like, “I bet you $1,000 you can’t get to the top 1%. This is how $1,000 works.”

She literally folded it up—it was a gift card—with all these things, and every day she’d look at it. Then she would go into the apps. This caused controversy. My wife and I had a lot of family discussions about this, because the two things are: first, you’re paying kids, and second, are you setting high standards too high?

After she hit the top 1% and got the $1,000, she bought everything she wanted. She sat down with my wife, and she’s like, “Mom, look, I know you didn’t like this, but here’s what you have to understand: I never thought I could do this. I never thought I was top 1%, and I now realize I’m actually as smart as my older sister. I can do anything she can do if I just put in the work.”

That change in how she saw herself—every parent would pay $1,000 for that, right? We spend $20,000 a year just in America. We spend $1,000 to get every kid to believe, “I can do anything,” and that there aren’t these inherent blocks.

I’ll give you one other one. We had the Secretary of Education down at Alpha last week, and I was like, “Here’s the number-one thing I would fix if I were in charge of education—and it uses money: the reason kids can’t learn, and why education in America starts to slow down in middle school.” By the time you get to high school, kids basically aren’t learning. The median high school student in America goes up 1 point on a 300-point scale in 4 years. Your top 99% go up about 6 points a year, so they’re still crushing it. But the median person literally doesn’t learn anything in high school, and it slows down in middle school.

The reason is that we have a time-based system, not a mastery-based system, and every learning science paper says that you just get Swiss-cheese holes. If you haven’t mastered fractions, algebra’s going to be really hard. And if you haven’t mastered algebra, chemistry’s going to be really hard. It’s all hierarchical.

What we do when we get these middle schoolers who are behind is come in and develop a system that goes back to motivation really mattering. I sat down with the 7th graders—this was 3 years ago—and I’m like, “Look, guys, you need to go back and fill a 4th-grade hole.” I learned immediately that 7th graders do not want to do that. There’s no world where they want to go backward, and the only people who want that less are their parents.

I was yelled at. I mean, “My kid needs to be in 8th grade.” I’m like, “That is not what the learning science says. He needs to go back and fix this.” Anyway, I eventually had to give up on the parents—I could never convince them—so I just went to the kids. I’m like, “Guys, you could get a 100 on the Texas STAAR, the standardized test.” They’re like, “No, I can’t, Mr. Liemandt.” I’m like, “No, no, no. I’ll give you a $100 bill for a 100. A hundred for a hundred.”

They’re like, “It’s still impossible, Mr. Liemandt.” I’m like, “No, no, no, there’s a catch: any grade level.” They’re like, “I can take a kindergarten test and you’re going to give me $100?” I’m like, “Well, Texas STAAR starts in 3rd grade.” They’re like, “Done.” They took the 3rd-grade test and got a 100. They took the 4th-grade test—“Can I do 4th grade?”—and got a 100. They go to 5th grade and don’t get a 100. They get an 85 or 75.

The AI—this is why the personalized tutor matters—generates all the lessons. I’m like, “Do you want it to generate all the lessons to get you to a 100 that you missed and that you need?” They’re like, “Let me see how many.” They’re like, “I can do that in a week.” They do it, and you move them up. We need to do that for everybody in America, because it does 2 things.

First, it fills all their holes, which will stop them from slowing down in learning. It’ll keep it linear. Second, their perception: there’s a view that the only people who get a 100 on a state test, on a standardized test, are the smart GT kids. Everybody can. Everybody can get a 100. You separate that: it’s IQ versus effort.

I feel the reason the athletic ethos doesn’t come to academics is that, because of the time-based system we have—and the system we do have in most schools—it is based on IQ. If you’re good in normal school, you are both IQ-coded and Big Five conscientiousness-coded, right? All the data says that. Our system literally separates that, where it’s just like, “We’re going to give you personalized lessons at 80–85%, and if you just put the time in, you can master every subject through 8th grade.”

How do you think about this broader societal context right now? There’s the sort of debate around The Coddling of the American Mind and things being too easy, a lack of resilience, et cetera. There’s a separate thing, which is the way mental health has gone through schools. If you look at things like autism spectrum disorder, it went from 1 in a few thousand to 3% of the population in terms of diagnoses.

You have massive ADHD diagnoses and a lot of kids on Ritalin, which is effectively a certain type of drug. You have a very strong perception of a mental health crisis among teenage girls, and a lot of them end up on SSRIs. You have a mix of medication, diagnoses, and all these other things that are really the milieu, or the context, for schooling. How do you all think about that in the context of Alpha?

Yeah, all those things are true, and I believe part of it is because we have this terrible 12-year system that we subject kids to. If you literally sat down and said, from first principles, “What do we expect if we set low expectations, waste 95% of kids’ lives, and put endless pressure on them?” What happens after 12 years? You’re like, “Not good things.”

Fundamentally, what an IEP is trying to do is give your kid a personalized education. Everybody knows an individual tutor is better than 1 teacher in front of 30 kids. All these IEPs—it’s a plan in a public school that gives you, basically, an individualized plan for each kid. You want a diagnosis because then you get one, right? Dyslexia, dysgraphia, whatever, ADHD, whatever it is.

When parents come to our school, you just talk to our parents who had all these diagnoses and now they’re at Alpha. Once you go to Alpha, you’re like, “Well, your kid’s not going to sit in class for 6 hours and be bored. You have this: ‘Oh, he’s disruptive in the class. He’s a problem child, right?’” And all these things that mean, “I need to med him up to solve it.” No, you don’t. You just need him to engage for 2 hours on the app and then have the rest of the afternoon not that.

Right? And it completely transforms the kid. And, back to just the overdiagnosing, I don't know if it's overdiagnosing given the system as it is, but in the Alpha system, it's completely different. I would say the second part, about mental health issues, comes back to these low standards. Let's focus on middle school.

In middle school, you get girls who are like, “I'm not a math-and-science girl” on the academic side, and, second, “I scroll TikTok all day.” And you're like, “Where is this going?” It's not going to be good. At our school, first of all, we have to make the kid love school. We have all day; we have half the day to do awesome stuff.

In our workshops, one of the things we do is a values chart: Who do you want to be? A vision board. These kids have awesome things they want to do. Then you say, “We do Japanese ikigai,” for all those who know: What are you good at? What's your passion? What does the world need? Then we do a 168-hour project: What do you spend every hour of your week?

This girl came in and said, “Well, Mr. Liemandt, I guess I'm going to be the best TikTok scroller.” It's the exact opposite of what her vision chart was, but it was the realization of that discrepancy. Our job is to use her afternoons to have her become a creator, as we say. Our middle school will basically take consumers and turn them into creators.

What parents need to understand is that every kid actually wants to be awesome and wants to be a creator. They don't wake up saying, “I just want to be a video game player or TikTok scroller.” They don't want to be, but our schools don't give them an out. That's where this environment can totally unleash them, because you're like, “Well, they don't have to do that.”

This sounds like a very awesome experience for the kids and very ambitious. It also sounds very expensive. So, you said the goal is a billion kids. How do you pay for a billion kids to have this type of experience?

Sure. We're talking about Alpha, so just back to the things we're building: At Alpha, it's a high-end branded school. In 100 cities, there's going to be an Alpha model. It's going to be expensive. When it was designed, we literally said, “Pretend price is no object,” and set it there. But now we're building out other schools at half the price and lower. We actually have schools down to $15,000, which is lower than your average public school spends today.

That changes what your product is. A sports academy is for kids who love sports; you don't need all these expensive workshops. You just need a field and a coach, and you can have a 25-to-1 ratio. Schools are driven by how much you pay the teachers and what the student-teacher ratio is.

The crazy part about the student-teacher ratio is that in a normal school, because you're trying to replicate individualized learning, smaller class size is better in a lot of cases. But in our schools, it doesn't matter. If you ask our high school guides—and I did—I said, “Okay, I can double the pay for a guide, but you're going to have twice as big a class size. What do you guys want?” They all vote for twice as big a class size. They want a more awesome person to help coach them. So you can fix your economics and drive that.

GT School is also very cheap. The GT kids are like, “I want to do Math Olympiad and robotics,” and all the relatively inexpensive workshops. Those are, right now, $20,000 to $25,000. We're opening a Montessori one at that price point—sort of next-gen Montessori.

We expect we'll have hundreds of schools in Texas, this Texas Sports Academy, next year. A billion dollars of vouchers are coming. You get $10,000-ish to $11,000 at $15,000, so it's $400 or $500 a month in parent pay. We can make this available to everybody.

Running this as a for-profit, is that correct?

Yes. We run it as a for-profit. We also have a scholarship fund.

And what sort of people are you trying to attract? One conversation we were all having earlier was how people often wonder, can you make money in education? You're really focused on building something incredibly impactful and useful that also makes money. Are there specific types of people that you want to have join you on this effort?

Yeah, no, that's—my best goal out of this would be for education to be seen as something that doesn't have to be nonprofit, doesn't have to be funded by donations, and where you can make any money. Anything that makes money, or if you bring capitalism to education, you're bringing evil into the world. There are examples, so there are reasons why people think that historically. But that's not necessarily true.

That's what we're trying to show: You can build great businesses that are for-profit, but that have both mission and money as a purpose. I'm trying to attract builders who, if we're going to reinvent education—if every kid is going to learn everything they need to know in 2 hours a day, and there's going to be a tablet for less than $1,000 for everybody in the world—that's coming.

A thousand dollars for everybody in the world in 2 hours a day of what we spent all day in class for—every family and society has to say, “Well, now how are we going to educate our kids? What are our values, and what do we want to allow?” Part of what I'm trying to do is get a bunch of builders to build awesome products. Let's go build the world's best sports academy.

Are you mostly looking for engineers? Are you looking for operations people to run these schools at scale? Are you looking for—

All of them. We're releasing TimeBack, which is going to be a platform that you can build schools on. Literally, you don't have to know all the learning science. It's all packaged, and then you basically do the afternoon. That's what this Texas Sports Academy is. It's literally coaches in 1,000 school districts around Texas, so there's that aspect.

There are coders and builders. Once you start, most of edtech does not use learning science, which is one of the biggest issues. Once you say, “I'm going to build an app from the ground up based on learning science,” you can all of a sudden say kids can learn in 20 hours.

Math Academy is like the best math app that's out there. That's a great team, and if you want to learn about it, just go research all their stuff. But we need that for every subject. We need builders, and parents will pay.

One aspect on top of TimeBack that's being done is that there's a triple-A video game team building a video game on top of it. This video game is going to be free to learn for everybody on the planet, but they also believe it'll be the most profitable video game ever built. In America alone, there are easily 10 million moms who'll pay $100 a month to have their kid be in the top 1% or 5%.

As you think about getting it down to scale, there is a software element that's going to be available for software builders. But it's even bigger: We need sort of the full stack. You're going to have buildings and real estate and guides and teachers, but I think there's going to be just an explosion of different opportunities.

I think for our audience, there are a lot of tech and business people who'd be like, “Oh, Joe's a software guy, seems like a pretty confident executive, and he's about to run into the wall of the slowness of the education system and regulation, and the fact that most kids go to public school. There are a bunch of restrictions around what you can do, and you can't get that time back.” How do you think about this parallel system, how quickly you can make that transition, or how everyone should think about it?

No, this is great, because in my first year, part of when I got into this, I'm like, “How do I make a business out of this?” I put in the first billion and just said, “Okay, this is my seed fund—seed fund to be able to go figure this out.” A lot of it is, I have to get this to product-market fit. Government funding to rebuild education is going to take hundreds of billions of dollars. There are 10,000 buildings that need to be built. It's a huge endeavor.

Every country is going to want its own LLM, because when you talk about sovereign AI, the number-one use case of sovereign AI is either military or education. Obviously, education is the one everyone wants to talk about. The investment here is going to be enormous. So how do you build profitable models?

One of the things about education is, as you're doing your whatever mental model of what your beachhead is, the private-school market is huge. The private-school market in the U.S. is already over $50 billion. If you want to go build a multibillion-dollar company, it's easy, because these guys haven't innovated in 100 years. You don't have to fix public education on day 1. You can just fix private education. Back to scale, there's 1 million kids in America who could afford $50,000 tuition.

So, if you want to go high-end, there's also, as you move down, an enormous amount of private-school vouchers and funding that's opened up. When you think about the scale, Texas spends $100 billion a year on education. They just released $1 billion in vouchers that are going to be available next year. You can go build a great billion-dollar business, and those are only going to increase over time.

If you look at the Big Beautiful Bill—the federal bill that just passed—if you actually do all the math, I think Bloomberg just did it. They're like, “There's like $200 billion of vouchers that are going to be available to parents to use on private-school education.” And so there's an enormous amount that's either already out there that parents pay for, or that's coming. If you can build low-cost school models or these good, protected, awesome products for whatever your vision and niche are—whether it's arts, theater, music school, et cetera—you can build something substantial.

Given how much is available from a market perspective or revenue perspective, why has there been so little innovation?

A lot of it is that everybody only knows their own education. Here's the big breakthrough you have to have to believe this: If you think the only way to educate a kid is with a teacher in front of a classroom, you can't do this. This model does not work, right? You have to be willing to break that, and 99.9% of parents are not willing to think that way.

Because even if I go build it, how do I convince parents to come to my school? It took McKinsey 2 years, right? That's a really long sales cycle for 1 family. And so that's part of what we're trying to do: get out there and be the exemplar for everybody. You have to be willing to break the teacher-in-front-of-a-classroom model. Once you do, you're like, “Okay, now everything can change and I can rebuild.”

If you could convince every relevant policymaker or lawmaker who has to do with education of something, what would you say? Because I'd say, “Well, one thing is to make the default something that is TimeBack-powered or follows this model more.”

School is a hard bundle. And this is the problem: We've got to get it to public school eventually. I believe it's going to be a long lift. I think it's going to be a decade to get it to public school.

Part of what we're doing is showing—we've got to get the data, right? There are all these fads in education and edtech: “One more—oh my God, it's not going to work,” and all that. I'm like, “What data in particular? Academic-performance data? You have it?” Well, not at my end; it's not big enough, right? Let's go get 1,000,000 kids, and why don't we do pharmaceutical-grade randomized controlled trials for education?

We don't do that at all. Every latest fad is like, “Oh, this is what we're doing in schools these days,” right? And I'm like, “No, let's actually sit here and have the government do studies where we're going to be able to say, ‘This works.’” The learning science is there. You could build products, run them through a test, and then be able to say, “We should adopt this whole thing.” There have been a lot of things adopted in the last 25 years that are terrible.

Yeah. Right?

You're just like, “Oh my God, I can't.”

What's an example?

There's a new wave coming back, which is the science of reading. But how we taught most kids to read 20 years ago is why they can't read, right?

Well, I'll take modern ones. Let's just take modern ones.

Sure. Okay, we're not going to have kids memorize their multiplication tables. That's bad. And I'm like, that is the worst thing you could do to a kid. All the cognitive load theory tells you that you have working-memory slots, and then you have to do enough repetitions to store things in long-term memory. If you're using your working-memory slots, you can't do advanced math problems.

If you're in the middle of an advanced math problem and you're doing 7 × 8, and 7 × 8 to you is still a calculation, you're doomed. There's just no way around it. You'll start making careless errors. I have plenty of stories around this. All the kids who transferred to our school from public and private schools do not know their multiplication and division tables from memory.

It's considered bad now. I was in the wrong.

And so you're like, let's go back to this. There's a bigger wave coming, which is that the current school system does not know what's about to hit it. ChatGPT, first of all, I won't even get into the technology.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. ChatGPT is literally the worst thing in the world. If you give kids ChatGPT in school and academics, 90% will use it for cheating. It is a cheat bot. It is not a chat bot. It is terrible.

Yeah. And so it's terrible. Kids are knowing less and less, and the current system is not set up to stop that. Writing is prompting. Kids write 1 prompt and they think, “I'm a writer.” But writing is thinking, right? The best way to rewire—to learn something long-term and deeply and restructure your schema—is to write it. No kids are doing that anymore.

There's also a whole set who are like, “Well, we don't need to know anything, right? We don't need facts in our brains because ChatGPT...” There was a wave with Google years ago. They're just like, “We don't need to know that.” But here's the problem: The next sentence out of the same parents' mouths is, “But I want my kid to critically think.”

Yeah, yeah.

Right? And that concept—there's no learning science that will support it. None. If you have LLMs that try to reason with no facts, we call it hallucination. That is basically what kids are doing. If you don't give them a fact base, they're just making stuff up with their opinions. You have to reason over a fact base, so you have to put facts in.

Now, with AI in these learning things, we can put those facts in super fast. It's like Neo uploading the Matrix, right? We can have AI take away because it could cause cheating, but it also giveth, where you're like, “Okay, we can get facts into kids' brains 10 times faster.” They don't have to spend 6 hours.

But that concept, with all these things—when you talk about policy and stuff, don't deploy ChatGPT. Sorry, guys. In its current form, go rebuild everything around learning-science concepts. You need the LLM to basically have the concepts of learning science, which inform it.

And then, if I was running a school, the problem with schools is that school is a bundle.

Mhm.

I talk to principals and superintendents in public schools, and their jobs are 100 times harder than mine. Theirs is harder because, as a product guy, you have a customer base; they don't have a customer base. They have to serve everybody.

Mhm.

So there are 3 schools in Austin that have been failing—Fs—for years. Kids aren't learning. And the superintendent is like, “Okay, I'm going to shut it down, and we're going to move the kids to the good school academically.”

The parents are protesting around the school, and they're like, “I don't care that the 7th-grade math teacher is not teaching math because my older daughter had that teacher, and she transformed her life. I'm willing to give up 7th-grade math academics in order to get that other benefit.”

As a superintendent or principal, you're like, “What are you doing?” It's a hard problem for these schools to transform because the parents and the community base want very different things in that bundle that they think is best for their kid.

Mhm. And so some version of it is going to be allowed, you know, with funding for different versions of the bundle.

Yeah, I do. I believe if you want to sit and say, “What is the bundle?” school choice is one way to do it, and that brings the private market in. But how do you support and buttress the public-school system?

I believe there are a set of academic things we can do. We do have some pilots with a few thousand public-school students where MTSS Tier 3—if you know what that is, that's your bottom 10% of kids—is where schools have the most flexibility.

For example, we were doing one over in Fremont. And the hardest part of it isn't, “Okay, does the app work?” It's like motivation is 90% of the answer. How are you going to motivate the kid who still has to sit in class for 6 hours a day to actually engage with the app? The kids are like, “I'm not going to do it.”

You can't take our edtech and put it in his classroom; it's not going to work. Edtech doesn't matter. You put our edtech in his classroom, and it's not going to work. It's the motivation model.

And so we got the school, because they're at MTSS Tier 3, and they're like, “We can use gift cards.”

Mhm.

And you're like, “Okay, kid, do the lesson and you get a gift card,” right? Or, “Oh, wait, let's build a video game that they'll play,” or whatever it is. If you don't solve motivation, all this edtech doesn't matter. Whether it's an AI tutor—none of it matters.

The reason kids use AI to cheat is because they're just trying to get through the system, not trying to learn. Everybody's like, “Oh, I just hope they're self-driven learners who just have a love of learning.” And you're like, “There is 5% to 10% of the market. You should give them ChatGPT and Socratic Tutor, and they'll love it.”

The other 90% are like, “How do I get through this?” If you talk to most kids and say, “What’s the highlight of your day?” 90% of kids are like, “Lunch, talking to my friends, recess.” And I’m like, we waste 12 years of kids’ lives, right? We’re just like, how do we stop it?

Before we’re out of time, can we talk a little bit about where ed tech does matter, or whether you’ve even considered ed tech? Where are you with the product today, and what ambition do you have for it to be better for engineers and researchers, whoever else could go work for you?

The problem with ed tech today—and why it’s failed and nobody wants to invest in it—is that you’re trying to sell to a school system that actually doesn’t care about academic outcomes, back to the bundle. You can’t change the metrics that matter, and so you can’t get any money for it. There’s no ARPU, and then there are endlessly long sales cycles.

Second, your product’s actually not that good. Sorry, ed tech guys. It’s just not that good. Go rebuild a product based on the concepts of learning science and build an awesome product, right? Have a much higher standard for what your product has to do, and that, I believe, can change things.

Take Math Academy. How many math apps are there? A zillion of them. The results that you get with Math Academy are just step-function different from everybody else. It only takes 28 hours for fourth grade, 26 hours for fifth grade, and 22 for sixth and seventh grade to master the material. All the other math apps don’t do that, right? But he has a 500-page book on the learning science behind Math Academy.

That concept means you have to go back and rebuild your product based on these fundamentals that ed tech never adopted.

The second one I would do, in the meantime, is—because selling straight to schools is a failed model—recognize that parent willingness and propensity to pay for education that their kids love is enormous. This is back to the other side of the market. It doesn’t matter what your income is. Parents will pay 10% of AGI, of their income, on their kids’ education. Society pays 5%. It’s a $7 trillion industry. We spend a ton of money in this country.

If you have a solution that kids love to engage in, that delivers awesome academic outcomes, parents will pay for that. We need builders who wake up and say, “That’s what my job is,” not running the bureaucracy at the school boards and all that stuff.

So there’s more flexibility with kids who are struggling in the public school system. If you’re going to be more aggressive than that, what else would you do?

The number one thing that I would do is the 100 for 100 program that we do, which allows kids to go back and master all their basics, right? No matter what, their age grade and knowledge grade are different. That program that we run, we need to run that for everybody in America.

And for a $400, maybe $500, incentive—remember, in education, we spend up to $20,000 a kid. With $500, we can totally fix and change the trajectory, and all these bad test scores and all of that, by making sure we’re motivating the kid to go back and do this.

Why is this your mission? You have kids who have successfully gotten through the old system, the new system, or are almost through, in the case of your younger daughter. You’re financially independent, and you’ve built a company before. Why go all the way back into this mess of a very hard space?

Yeah, because it’s awesome. I obviously had a good career beforehand. In my last 3 years as principal—and this would be my last message to the builders out there—I did fine before. It was good. There was nothing to complain about.

The last 3 years have been so awesome, right? There is nothing more important for a society than raising its next generation, right? It is the definition of whether it continues. And kids are awesome, right? When you sit and say, “We can transform what their decades are going to be like, or their first 12 years, or even beyond it,” the rewards you get out of this are just 10x, right?

We didn’t even get into the student stories coming out of the parent stories. You transform lives. And so, if you say, “My kids now are gone,” right? I spent 20 years with them. And then now it’s like, “What am I going to do with my next 20 years?” This is going to be the best 20 years of my life. It’s going to be awesome.

I believe what we do is societally important, and we need to go get builders like this to say, “We’re going to bring new insights, new ways, even business and capitalism, to education.” I couldn’t look forward to it more than I do.

This is incredibly inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

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