如何通过“AI 学校”加速学习

Are you willing to redesign your school day so kids love it more than vacation? With cognitive science and learning science, plus the advent of LLMs, you can build a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster.

The shift that I think you’ve been able to make is the believability of it. Pretty soon, people are going to ask, “Why would we ever do it any other way?”

I want this next generation to be the ones who are optimistically capable with AI and saying, “We’re going to build an awesome future.” That’s what our job as educators is: to go build that world.

What would you say to the parent who’s saying, “I’m sending my kid to an Ivy League school. I know it’s not perfect, but this is a new institution. Why should I take a risk?”

Joe, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much.

We’ve had the luxury of spending some time together this year and touring the schools. What you’ve built with Alpha is incredible, and it’s inspired us at AHA. We’re grateful to have your involvement. For people who are unfamiliar, why don’t you briefly describe what you think of as the central innovations, or what you’ve really brought to the space with Alpha?

Sure. We’re reinventing what K-12 school is: the school day, and how kids spend the 6 or 7 hours they’re in class or in a school building. What is that like? The first part you have to understand and buy into is that instructional design and delivery haven’t changed in 100 years.

Yeah.

You throw a teacher in front of the classroom, and ask, “What’s the right way to do this?” But if you look at the last couple of decades, with cognitive science and learning science, plus the advent of LLMs, you can build a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. As soon as you have that ability, where kids can learn 10 times faster than they could with the teacher-in-front-of-a-classroom model, the question is: What do you do with it?

That’s what we’re doing at Alpha: How do you reinvent the school day? In our model, we make 3 commitments to the kids. The first is that they love school. I just got the surveys back last week. 90-some percent of our kids say, “I love school.”

Wow.

50 percent of the kids at the school said, “I would rather go to school than go on vacation.” I actually have one campus where it’s 65 percent of the kids who say, “I’d rather go to school than go on vacation.” Build a school where kids love it if they’re going to be there for 12 years.

The second part is that, with this engine, the kids learn twice as much in 2 hours a day as they would sitting in class for 6 hours and doing homework. They do 2 hours a day of academics, and they learn more. If you’re compounding and learning twice as much as you would at your other school, you’re going to get to the top 1%, no matter where you start, given time. The kids crush it. On standardized tests, we’re the best-performing school academically.

And then the third commitment is: What would you do with the rest of the day? That’s a whole part of what we’re talking about now. I believe every school, whether K-12 or university, has to ask: If the traditional way and the traditional curriculum are now 10 times faster, what do you do with the rest of the day?

Yeah.

As a principal, I can definitely tell you the one thing parents would hate is if I sent the kids home after 2 hours. You’ve got them all day, 6 or 7 hours a day, and the kids want to be there. They love it.

What we do is ask: What are all the life skills we consider critical to thriving in the world that’s coming? The world’s changing. What do we do? We have 5 categories of life skills: leadership and teamwork; entrepreneurship and financial literacy; socialization and relationship building; storytelling and public speaking; and grit and hard work.

The kids do projects in groups with all their friends, with an adult running them. That’s how they spend the rest of the day. We started Alpha in Austin. Then we added 12 campuses last year, and we’re up to 50. Demand is insane. People want this new thing.

We’re sort of first, but everybody’s going to have to look at this. Today, no one believes that a 2-hour school day works, and we have to get scale and more proof points. But once you realize kids can learn everything they need to in 2 hours, every family, every head of school, every education minister around the world is going to say, “How do we rebuild the school day for the next 100 years? Because we don’t need to do it like we did the last 100.”

Yeah. I remember visiting Alpha 6 years ago. This was before you were full-time on it, and I immediately got it because I’ve been in learning science and education for 15 to 20 years. But I will say that the shift you’ve been able to make is the believability of it. You’ve done a great job of figuring out how to show that not only does this work, but pretty soon people are going to ask, “Why would we ever do it any other way?” That’s the brilliance of what you’ve accomplished from a business standpoint over the last 5 years, I think.

Yeah. I became principal 4 years ago. My background is in product and entrepreneurship, and this just needed product packaging. How do you productize this into something understandable and scalable? That’s the other part: It’s really hard to scale schools. How do you scale them at quality?

For my first 3 years, it was about how to do that. That’s actually one of the big benefits of bringing in AI: It helps you scale at high quality. Our phrase is, “We get better as we get bigger.”

Yeah.

If you look at anything over the last 4 years—our test scores, customer satisfaction, student happiness, the quality of the workshops—all of those get better every year because the system gets better as it gets bigger.

Yeah. We have a number of teammates, colleagues, and friends who send their kids to Alpha, and you see the kids love it. What is it? I remember hating my K-12 experience. Is it this 2-hour arrangement? What is it that you find contributes most to kids loving it that other schools should adopt?

Similarly, we were also talking off camera about how motivation is underrated, or maybe one of the biggest factors separating outcomes for kids. How are you tackling that as well?

Yeah. I think the biggest thing is that edtech historically hasn’t done well in schools. It hasn’t had the impact people wanted. If you look at this learning engine and say, “Oh, this is like edtech, and I’m just going to put it into a normal school day,” it’ll fail. It’ll be just like everything else.

When I talk to somebody who hears about Alpha and the learning engine, one question gets to the core of everything: Are you willing to redesign your school day so kids love it more than vacation? If you have a head of school who says that, then you’re all set. But that’s the leap.

Yeah.

That motivation falls under that, obviously. If you’re waking up and saying, “How am I going to make kids love this?” that is the core of what allows us to do everything else.

Yeah.

People worry when they hear that: “Oh, it’s Disneyland, and they’re just running around, and they’re not learning, or it’s not rigorous.”

Video games or TV.

Yeah, and all these things. It’s literally just the opposite. One of the things we talk about is that the key to your child’s happiness is high standards. Kids want to go do hard things.

Yeah.

They love to do hard things, and they love to do hard things with their friends. If it was just playing video games all day, they could go do that at home. To say, “I want to do this instead of vacation,” means they’re doing challenging things with their friends that they love.

Yeah.

It’s not hard. An easy example is teamwork and uplifting your classmates as a team. Traditional schools don’t teach this. After-school sports in America absolutely teach teamwork and leadership, but schools don’t. Most team projects in school are terrible: one person does it, and everybody else just sits around. You always remember those projects. They were terrible.

Yeah.

You learn the opposite of teamwork—the anti-pattern. At our school, a good example is the Wharton MBA Challenge, which has a simulation where you climb Mount Everest. Fifty percent of MBAs fail the teamwork portion because they were never taught teamwork throughout their time in school.

We take every third grader, put a mic on them, and send them into an escape room. They all work through the escape room. At the end, we have AI analyze the transcript: what percentage of their language was team-oriented and helpful? I can give you the answer: less than 20% of the language is uplifting. It’s fighting and pushing and “my idea,” all these different things.

We have an eight-week workshop for this. The kids go through it and keep working on teamwork. To graduate—to pass the class—they have to get up to 85% team behavior.

Yeah.

We also show them that they finish the escape room three times faster when they work as a team. It’s a great, fun way to learn, and kids love it.

Yeah.

It’s a life skill that every parent says, “That’s the stuff I want my kids to learn.”

Yeah.

Because they don’t have to sit in class all day, they can do that. In fourth and fifth grade, our life skills curriculum is as rigorous as our—

Yeah.

—core curriculum. Passing a physics test or a math test is just as important as passing the escape room test. In fourth and fifth grade, we actually make them pass the Wharton MBA Challenge that 50% of MBAs can’t pass. You take a fourth or fifth grader, and they pass it.

Yeah.

That goes back to being proud and excited and wanting to do it. You can engage kids and teach them these skills much younger. I believe that, as we look at the world, we haven’t had the capability to teach kids all this at a much younger age because they’re sitting in class all day. But now that we can—

Yeah.

—of course, we must.

Yeah. So the reason they’re enjoying it is that they can feel themselves learning faster, growing faster, building deeper relationships, and, overall, that’s something you can’t get on vacation.

Yeah. Well, it’s like that escape room.

Yeah.

It’s a high bar for your parents.

Yeah.

The second point is about what else kids like. Kids don’t like school. Let’s talk academics versus life skills. They’re sort of two different things. On the academic side, kids don’t like doing things they fail at.

Yeah.

That’s true in academics and in anything. It’s why in America we hold kids back in sports: you want them to be bigger. Then all of a sudden, they’re playing better, they win, and they get the accolades. You get them on that path.

In academics in America, because we’re a time-based system, once you fall behind—

Yeah. They’re stuck.

—then it’s torture for the rest of the time.

Mm-hmm.

Wherever you fall behind, it’s just… In our system, our learning engine gives you a personalized lesson.

Yeah.

It doesn’t matter what your age or grade is. You can be in eighth grade, and if you need a fifth-grade lesson because you missed something before you came to Alpha, it’s going to give you that fifth-grade lesson.

Yeah.

You’re going to be able to do it, pass it, and move forward. We engineer wins for kids in academics. If you had to name the core value of what the engine does, it’s this: you want kids in the 80% to 85% correct zone. When you’re engaging with something, how often is it too easy or too hard? If you’re 100% correct, it’s too easy. You’re not learning anything; you’re just regurgitating what you know.

Any video game developer will tell you that if you drop below two-thirds, and you’re failing more than two-thirds of the time, you’re going to disengage. One thing a learning engine can do that a teacher in front of a classroom of 30 people can’t is give a kid an unending stream of lessons and questions they get 80% to 85% correct. We can just do it. If it gets too hard, we can give them scaffolding lessons to catch up; if it’s too easy, we progress them faster through the material.

If you keep kids engaged by giving them work they can do, they like it. When kids do well and you hold them to high standards, they get excited. They see themselves crushing their academics instead of struggling with them. When they’re doing well, they love that.

Yeah.

Gagan, I’m curious how you think about this conversation and what Alpha’s doing in K–12, and how that informs what we’re doing with AHA.

I’m incredibly inspired. I’ve been inspired by Alpha School since I first visited, and I think it proves the thesis we have at the Horowitz and Dreesen Academy: if you redesign the system for the modern era with modern tools, you can get all the outcomes you want. You can have more network. A lot of people say you go to school for the network. We’re going to take your network and make it 10 times better.

Everyone says you go to school to become a better person. The Horowitz and Dreesen Academy absolutely wants you to become a better person. We’re going to engineer the system so you’re more likely to become a positive-sum human. You want to have high agency and do hard things. Alpha has given me a lot of inspiration for how to ensure students get that.

I think the one difference is that at every age range, you have to do something very different. If you listen to Joe talk, K–8 and high school are very different. When you go from high school to the college era, that’s very different, too. You have to make the right changes. You can’t just copy everything over.

Ultimately, if you have a student-centric mindset, if you told the leaders of any major university in the country that their number one job—and no other job—was to make sure the students were succeeding, I’m sure there would be many great schools in the United States. Unfortunately, there aren’t many, because most university leaders are required to spend 90% of their time focused on all the adults around them and not enough on the students. One of the things you see with Joe is that he’s always talking about the kids.

Yeah. Joe, I’m curious. You’ve very generously gotten involved with AHA as an investor and an advisor. What excited you about what we’re up to, and how have you thought about the differences between college and high school?

Yeah.

I’m super excited because I absolutely believe that university needs to be reinvented, just like we’ve done in K–12. I’m focused on K–12, but I’m very excited that you guys jumped in and said, “Let’s do this.” I want to do anything I can to help. First, I need places for Alpha kids to go.

Yeah.

There’s going to be a whole set of kids who are like—

Can’t wait.

—“I want to go there.” What have we done, and what have we thought about? To your point, it’s completely different. Our high school is very different from our K–8, and I believe university needs to be different, too.

I don’t believe the whole concept that everybody is just going to come out of high school and not go to university anymore. I actually don’t think that’s true. I believe there’s a huge opportunity to reinvent university and make it awesome. No one wants to go to a bad school where it’s terrible and it’s not getting the kids ready.

As an example, we had over 70 kids from MIT, Stanford, and UT come to Alpha this summer as interns. Part of what we were saying was, “Tell us about university. How’s it going? What do you think?” I asked, “How many of you expect that the university you’re going to is getting you ready for the world when you graduate?” One kid raised his hand. I was like, “Seriously? None of you?” And they were like—

Thank God.

“We’re terrified. We don’t feel like we’re being prepared. We worked really hard for 12 years to get into these great universities, and now we’re terrified that when it comes time to graduate, there aren’t going to be the jobs you used to get coming out of them. Those first 1- and 2-year jobs aren’t there, and AI is going to be doing them. So what do we do?”

They spent a lot of time this summer as interns coming up with what they thought would be a reinvention of university and what they would want. And, back to kids wanting to do hard things: they were interns, and they came in and said, “We’re going to build this educational LLM so we can make it free for everybody in the world, because every sovereign is going to need its own educational LLM—a small language model that sits on a device.”

Mm-hmm.

Those kids worked 80 hours a week, doing research and figuring out the concepts of learning. They’re going to be published. At the end of it, they said, “This is what we’d love the university to be: we’re all working together on this super-hard thing that has meaningful impact on the world and could really help change the world. I wish these could be classes at MIT, Stanford, and UT.”

Yeah.

But they’re not. And that’s when I think about what you guys are doing—reinventing it and letting kids really build. It’s not just about the classes. It’s about getting ready for the real world and all the skills you need. I believe those are different at university, but I’m very excited about what you’re building around that.

Yeah. I think it’s really important to understand that an ambitious student going to university needs to get their hands dirty. They’re entering the real world in 3 to 4 years, and it’s critical that they build things, understand what it’s like, make mistakes, and deal with the challenges.

I love that you said they were studying as part of those 80 hours. They’re in Austin for an 80-hour-a-week internship, and you mentioned studying. I’m guessing you didn’t assign any textbooks.

No. They had to do all the research to build an LLM. They were researching learning science. We have this data structure called the Brainlift, and they were working hard on what would be considered the classical stuff you need to do at a university. But it wasn’t just the studying part; it was about how to apply it and be a builder. I think your point about getting ready is that it’s both.

Well, you talk about learning as being 90% motivation.

Yeah.

When you’re 18 years old, you’re motivated by building things people will use. You’re motivated by revenue and getting a job. So why not make the entire learning experience driven by that motivation and use it to actually go and learn things?

My concern with college is that I know Erik and I had this experience, and we’ve talked about it. I didn’t learn very much because I didn’t like the format. To be honest, now I go to Stanford’s campus or someone else’s campus, and no one seems to like the format. Twenty years ago, I was a little bit in the minority. Maybe 20% of students agreed with me. Our classes were about half full, I would say, in attendance. I hear they’re now way under 10% full. Students aren’t finding the format works. You need to reinvent the format to create motivation so they actually learn things.

Yeah.

And that’s one of the main focuses of the academy.

Another example is our first graduating class from Alpha High was 3 years ago. At Christmas, after they’d all been at university, I got them together and asked, “How’s it going? How are you doing in the real world?” They said, “Okay, we love it.” They all had 4.0s. They were crushing it. But they said, “These 100-level lecture classes are a complete waste of time.”

Five of them had written editorials to their school paper about how it’s just a charade: kids come in scrolling TikTok or looking at their computers, not paying attention or not showing up, while the teachers are teaching. They said, “Those don’t need to exist anymore.” I asked, “Well, what do you like?” They said, “There are all these great small-group seminars we’re working on—”

Clubs.

“—clubs and all the activities around it.”

Yeah.

A university is a bundle of products. They liked the bundle, but they said the academic part—the big lecture classes and stuff—needs to go away.

Yeah. What’s crazy is that the academic part you’re talking about is the only thing the university formally provides. The rest of the bundle is student-driven, and the academic stuff takes up about 50% of the time, right?

Well, I dropped out of Stanford. I was the kind of kid who didn’t spend 50% of my time on it because I skipped classes.

Fair. I probably didn’t, either.

But if you go to the classes, it takes 50%.

Yeah.

My experience there, for the couple of years I was there, was great because of all the other things: the people I met. Steve Jobs came down and gave a talk, and one of my friends went to work at NeXT. Bill Joy and Scott McNealy would come and talk, and you’d spend time with them afterward or have lunch. Those experiences—who you met, seeing the real world, and building stuff with my friends that eventually became our company—were what was great about the product to me. Sitting in those lecture classes was the opposite of that.

Yeah.

One thing we’ve talked about is how to make the students love it. But even more important, because the decision about where kids go to school is their parents, talk about how the conversations you’re having with parents are evolving, whether it relates to early education or higher education, and some of the advice you give them.

I talk to tens of thousands of parents now, in the K–12 range, and I’ve been shocked at the shift. There are still some families who are like, “I’m a kindergarten parent, and I want to see the direct path right into the Ivy League.” But an equal number, maybe even more, of parents who went to Stanford or Harvard are like, “No, I know I don’t want my kid on that path. How are you going to get them ready for a world that’s not that?”

Yeah.

They absolutely want to see this alternative path, because when they look ahead—even in kindergarten—they’re looking 12 years from now and asking, “What am I going to do? How are you preparing my kid for the world?” Their vision of the world is, “Yes, I went to the Ivy League, but that’s not going to be for my kid.”

Yeah.

“I don’t think that’s going to get him ready. And if you’re telling me that, I don’t want your K–12 school.”

Yeah.

That’s happening a lot now. They’re looking for what’s next, because I think there’s recognition now, versus maybe the last 30 or 40 years, that the world is really changing.

Yeah.

If you’re an 11th or 12th grader and I’m talking to you, the parents are sort of done.

They’re like, “Just get my kid into college,” right? Or they’re sort of like, “I’ve been on this route, and I’m at the five-yard line.”

Yeah.

“I’m not throwing all the cards up in the air.” But when you look younger, those parents are like, “There’s just no way the current path is going to be the right one.”

Yeah.

And so, when I think of this, I would expect massive demand from all the kids, right? They’re going to be like, “Okay, I have to go do this. It’s so obvious.”

Yeah. Yeah.

“This is awesome.” And then you’ll have to have a separate sales job with the parents to show them, “Look, while it wasn’t the way you did it, this is the way.” There’s a historical precedent for this that might be useful for you, if you want to go through it. In 1910, 90% of America had an eighth-grade education.

Hmm.

There were basically no high schools, and over 30% of America’s workforce were farmers. Everybody was on the farm. Eighth grade was enough; you worked in the fields. Then, in 1910, the Case tractor rolled up on the American farm. You can go look at the ads—it literally looks like an Anthropic ad. “It does the work of 50 programmers. It does the work of 50 farmhands.” Everybody in America realized 30% of the jobs were going away. My kids and grandkids—we’ve been doing this for generations. It’s gone. That path is gone, and we have to get our kids ready for this new future.

Yeah.

It was that same recognition that I think parents have today. The traditional path is those jobs. The kids coming in this summer are saying, “I’m going to get out of Stanford or MIT, and I’m not going to have a job.” But what America did back then was this: 130,000 towns voted to raise their taxes—and this is the key part—to fund an education they’d never experienced. They’d never seen a high school curriculum. They’d never been to high school.

Hmm.

They had an eighth-grade education, but they knew they had to do something different from their background. They had to see the world differently to get their kids ready and get them good jobs. That school system became the industrial system we’ve had for the last 100 years. It served us really well, but now it’s time for the next change. You’re going to have to convince families to be like those rural farmers in 1910 who realized, “While I haven’t experienced it and it’s different from what I did, this is what my kid needs to thrive in the future.”

Yeah. And what would you say to the parent who’s saying, “Hey, I’m sending my kid to an Ivy League school”?

Mm-hmm.

“I know it’s not perfect—”

Yeah.

“—but this is a new institution. Why should I take a risk? Why would you consider taking a risk on the academy?”

Yeah. I’ve been living this at the K–12 level now for four years. The lucky part is you don’t need everybody.

Yeah.

There’s going to be that set of families. When I talk to families, it’s an adoption curve, just like any other. There’s a set of families who absolutely realize the current system isn’t there, or people who say, “I feel it, but I just need to be moved over.”

Mm-hmm.

Both my daughters were told they weren’t going to get into college if they went to Alpha and then had to go to a traditional school. There was just no chance that would happen. There is that dichotomy, but if you look across the families who went to Alpha four years ago and those who didn’t, there are a lot more families who say, “I totally should have sent my kid to Alpha. I went the traditional path. I thought it was the safe path, and it totally wasn’t.”

Yeah.

They look at how those Alpha kids are thriving. They thought those families were crazy and taking a risk, but now, looking at what happened with their own kid versus those kids, they regret it. You have to get through the first year because you don’t have any data, but one year in, people are going to see that the students are thriving. Once you see that, then you have the comparison.

Yeah.

I’ll even go back to my own experience. I’m talking very positively and optimistically, but I didn’t start Alpha 12 years ago. McKinsey Price and Brian did. I went to Catholic school, and my kids were in Catholic school. I didn’t like it, but parents want their kids educated the way they were. That’s the legacy. That’s the problem.

Yeah.

That’s what you have to overcome. My kids were in Catholic school, and then McKinsey said, “Come to my new school.” I dropped out of college and started a startup in a garage, but I thought, “Schools shouldn’t be in a garage. That’s so weird. You have a janky, weird school, McKinsey.” I was totally that way.

Right.

It took two years for me. I was the slow one.

Yeah.

It took me two years to move over. That was 10 years ago, and obviously it turned out great for our family. My kids still yell at me for being slow those two years. They’re like, “You should’ve started earlier, Dad.”

Yeah.

But that concept of finding those families is important. We travel all around the country; we’ve opened 50 campuses. You get 1,000 people in an information session, and you ask, “Who wants to be the first 10? Who wants to be the first 25 or 50?” A year ago, when we were opening 12 campuses, we’d have more than 1,000 people in information sessions, and we couldn’t get 25. We’d get 10. We opened New York City with 10 or 12.

Mm-hmm.

Now the campus is full: 150 people total.

Yeah.

They had to see the first ones prove that it works, and then it’s there. The first class is always those people who say, “I know it’s bad. I want to jump in.” What you’ll see immediately, and what we’re seeing in the demand, is that people just need someone to go first. Once you get that first group and it works, the demand skyrockets.

Yeah.

And the benefits of being first are high. What I see in colleagues and friends who are sending their kids to Alpha, or even friends who’ve done something like the Thiel Fellowship, which also had small application numbers in the beginning, is that those people who are applying early have the courage of their convictions. It’s positive self-selection. You’re around some of the most brilliant and courageous people, both at the kid level and the parent level. It’s really just a phenomenal experience.

Totally. And that goes back to advice: you absolutely want families who are all in on both sides, because there will be hiccups. Hiccups happen.

For sure.

Yeah.

It’s part of starting something. Someone who’s super skeptical and on the late-adopter side is just not going to be able to handle it. It’s going to destroy them. The people who really want the product—that’s what we call magnet marketing. You want to attract the right people and repel the wrong ones.

Yeah.

People who want to be laggards and say, “I don’t like AI or screen time”—there are people in the information session who say that. I tell them, “You shouldn’t come.” If you can’t balance what this offering is, then it’s not for you. Being clear on your product definition is something I don’t think most schools do. If you’re clear on your product definition—“This is what we are; this is what we’re not”—it helps you find the right group, exactly as you said. When the right group is together, part of it is the community you’re building: all the kids who are there, and the parent community matters when you’re doing a startup.

Our founding families are one of our biggest assets now.

Yeah.

At our school, and I believe it’ll be the same for what you’re doing.

Yeah. I think that makes me think of 2 things. One is, I think we’re going to be pretty strict about who gets in and less about class size. You’ve told me this. I’ve heard this. I think that’s a very important lesson. The second lesson is that this is the type of thing where you don’t want most people to want it. You want the people who really want it to do it.

Actually, I’ll add one more thing, which is we did make it 1 year, and it’s not no tuition the first year. So it is also a little bit less risky than, you know, missing eighth grade.

Yeah.

And you can’t repeat. You don’t want to miss eighth grade. But if you take a 1-year detour from college, you can always go back. It’s really no different. So I do think that’s one of the benefits we have. It’s interesting to see the nuances of a college experience versus a high school experience, because the stakes are different in different directions.

I believe that’s going to be one of your assets with the parents: with the 1 year, there’s no downside, right? There’s no downside to trying it, and you can always defer at some other college or reapply.

Yeah.

And so you’re not shutting down other options. And just to the parent stuff, what you’ll see is, when your kid loves it—back to schools being 90% motivation—

Yeah.

If I was talking to the parents here, whose kid really wants to go, I’d just give you advice for all of this: let them go do it, right?

Yeah.

Let’s even just say it doesn’t work out for them, right?

Yeah.

And whatever, it’ll be the best learning experience of their life.

Yeah.

And they’ll be ready to do the other thing. Fighting it the other way—

Yeah.

—it just is—

That’s riskier in a sense.

No, it’s much riskier.

The resentment they’re building up.

And I can tell a lot of stories about that at our high school level.

Well, I think that’s actually—if you think about the 3 of us, and the many people we all know who are like us, who didn’t love school at some point—

Yeah.

What is the thing we dislike the most?

Yeah.

For me, it was that I was being forced to do things I wasn’t bought into. My agency had started to grow. I was 13, 14, 15 years old, and I started to see the emperor had no clothes. I started to believe, “Wait a second, my teacher doesn’t actually know how to teach math. This might not be the best way to teach math. Oh, shoot, so I have to take this stupid test now?” I think one of the pedagogical philosophies of the Academy and of Alpha is that you design it around the student to decrease the chance that you get that rebellion.

Yeah.

Instead, if you have buy-in, they’re much more likely to thrive and do things.

Totally.

So, you know—

No, and I’ll tell the personal story on this. During my K–12, I was always in trouble. I was skipping school all the time. I did the minimum to get into Stanford, and then I dropped out. When I dropped out, my dad had a famous quote that was in Forbes or whatever: “My son’s a moron.” And he was not happy.

But the part that didn’t get in the article was a couple of years later. I dropped out, then I started my company, and it was awesome. All of a sudden, I’m working 100-hour weeks, we’re sleeping under the desks, and it’s crazy. Two years later, he’s like, “You know, I’ve got to change my mind. This was the greatest thing ever, that you dropped out.” He’s like, “I have to admit, I was really worried you were going to be a lazy little shit,” because that was your academic career. “As a dad, I was just terrified that I had done poorly.”

He’s like, “Now I see that, now that you’re doing what you love and you’re fully engaged, God, I should’ve gotten this done earlier.” I think it’s the same thing when you have a student. When we talk about building a school your kid loves more than vacation—

Yeah.

—you’re engaging them around stuff they love. When you do that, that’s what causes all the parents to say, “My kid changed in a month.”

Yeah.

It’s because we have them doing hard things that they want to do.

Yeah.

All of a sudden, it does change, and it’s that quick.

Yeah.

Having a school where your kid wants to go because they’re going to be doing hard things is a great thing. I believe that’s one of the reasons this is going to be a home run, because you’re going to get all these kids—

Yeah.

—who are like, “I know it’s hard. I want to go do this. I can coast through normal school, and I’m not going to pick that path.”

Mm-hmm.

“Instead, I’m going to pick this.” And this is going to be harder than all the other schools, right?

Yeah.

In what you’re doing, in all of those. And that’s part of it. Kids love it. In our high school, we have a World School where they spend a year in Africa, a year of service, and they have to sign a contract that says, “I realize this will be the hardest year of my life.”

Yeah.

They all sign it, they all love it, and they’re super excited to go. I believe this is sort of the equivalent of that.

By the way, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Africa. I would send some kids to India or Sri Lanka. It’s going to be much harder.

Yeah. Okay, well, that’ll be on the list. It’s called World School, so they’re going to be going—

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I’m just kidding.

But I love that.

I think Africa—that’s such an amazing thing you’re doing. One of our wishes that we’ve talked about: we have a stipend. We don’t talk about this too much, but we’ve already allocated $5,000 per student for a travel budget.

Right.

They get to decide how they use the travel budget.

Yeah.

I’m not going to force anything on anyone. But my personal goal is that a lot of them go solo to countries with less than $20,000 GDP per capita.

That’s a great idea.

You know?

Yeah, I love that.

Just get a perspective.

No, I totally love it. I think that is super valuable.

Yeah. You learn so much about yourself and about life, and I think it’ll also provide perspective that will help in business, of course.

Yeah, definitely.

You know, it’s so funny, going back to this idea of kids who are—the story you mentioned about your parents reminds me of kids like us when we were younger, and others who are, quote-unquote, “lazy” in school. They don’t get a 4.0 because they’re just not bought in, but when they find the thing, they’re willing to put in 100-hour weeks.

There are so many people like that. Conversely, there are people on the other side who get straight As, but once you take away the structure, they haven’t really cultivated this inner desire or ability to find what they love. When they get to the working world, where the skills are remarkably different, they can’t operate in the same way.

It strikes me that we’re going to create the space—and you’re creating the space from a much earlier age—where people really get in touch with what they care about and become much more self-driven. It’s just really powerful.

Yeah. No, that’s correct.

Yeah.

Those are all the life skills. That’s when we talk about a holistic person.

Yeah.

It’s not just what their GPA was. You can max out your score on just your grades, but that doesn’t mean you do well.

Yeah.

…in the real world. And I think parents actually realize that.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

That you need to be more well-rounded. They just don’t have a path of—

Yeah.

…of doing it, and I believe that one of the things, back to reinventing university, is you’re gonna show them, “Here are all these things that should be part of the university curriculum, not a club after school—”

Yeah.

…that the kids optionally do.

Yeah.

And so I think that’s gonna be a great thing. I think employers obviously will—

Yeah.

…realize the same thing.

Yeah. The employers seem very bought in, honestly.

Yeah. That part of the whole thing is—there’s no problem on that pitch—

No.

…which is, the number of employers are like, “These kids coming out don’t have the skills and capability to do it.” If you had just taken me before I actually started my company and looked at me—

Yeah.

…and said, “Are you ready for a job?” I wasn’t. But then, 2 years later, after I was doing this—

Yeah.

…outside project—

Yeah.

…right? This non-academic project. Then I’m like, “Oh, I’m probably a pretty good employee to hire.”

Yeah.

It’s—

Yeah. It’s funny, actually, because the issue that most employers have is not a skills gap in, “Do you know how to code, build products, or design?” What we hear more than anything is people skills, maturity, and systems thinking.

Yeah.

Those are the actual skills. The only way to learn those things is to interact with lots of people and build complex systems—

Yeah.

…and force yourself to deal with the reality of rejection, and the maturation process of not having things structured for you, but having to structure them yourself.

Yeah. Back to AI commoditizing intelligence and scoring on this: when you can ask it, “What are the human traits you want?” It’s leadership, being able to work in a team. It’s agency, ownership, and receiving feedback, as you say. All of those skills that you can get from doing projects—

Yeah.

…but you don’t get from sitting in class.

Yeah. There are a lot of questions around what AI is doing to coding, to math, and to physics. If you were 18 years old today, knowing what you know now and with your interests, how would you think about it? If you had the flexibility at something like HAA to design your own education, what would you be motivated to learn, based on where you see the world going and your own interests?

Yeah. I have this framework of cognitive onload. AI allows you to fill your head with knowledge 10 times faster.

Yeah.

These kids can become domain experts in their field faster than ever.

Yeah.

I have kids in my high school who are rebuilding the TimeBack software stack that I wrote. They’re becoming experts in learning science and in being able to do this, which wasn’t possible before in high school.

Yeah.

The cognitive onload part is 10 times faster, so you can do it and it doesn’t take that long.

Yeah.

I can get the equivalent of a master’s degree in a year and do that part. But the second part is that AI gives you a chance to be a builder. It gives you superpowers to build like no one else. I believe the kids at your university are gonna realize, “I wanna build something, and I’m gonna learn whatever prerequisite I need faster than I ever have.”

Yeah.

Just like the interns this summer were doing it. They were doing research, learning all this stuff, but they were doing it to build. If you talk to our high school kids at Alpha High, they’re definitely not doomers about AI in the future. They’re like, “You adults are cooked. We’re coming for you.”

Yeah.

“And we have superpowers.”

Yeah.

Right?

Totally.

And they do.

They do.

These kids—

They really do.

No, these kids who are building apps—I’m like, 2 years from now, I absolutely expect most learning software is gonna be written by students. Most students are gonna learn from learning software written by their peers, because it’ll embed all the learning science concepts and make it much more engaging.

Yeah.

We have plenty of data around that already. Shout out to Austin, who built our AP curriculum. All our kids who took it got a 5 on their AP exams. He built a world history one, too. He built it because he made this geo-guessing game where he took all these world history events and did an S-tier ranking with a snarky AI. Anyway, I’m throwing those words out because I don’t actually know what they really mean.

Yeah.

Every kid was engaged, loved it, and did it.

Yeah.

I’m like, “Me and the old adult team are never gonna be able to build that, ever.”

Yeah.

I think that’s what these kids are gonna be able to do: they’re gonna go build the future.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

AI gives them the capability to build the future and start freshman year of college.

Yeah.

Just to take a stab at your question, Erik, I think the question of what field I should study so that I can be sure I’m resilient to the future is not the right question. The question is, “What field am I interested in?” I have enough faith that if you’re AI-native in any field, it does not matter. A lot of people are concerned about coding or math. There’s gonna be a whole new type of coding and math that happens with AI-native mathematicians. The old-school ones who are still doing chalkboard, pen, and paper are cooked. But the new students who love math are gonna do just fine. In fact, they’re gonna do things none of us ever thought possible, and there’s gonna be a whole new era of mathematicians who are successful.

That’s something we’re trying to screen for a lot at HAA. We don’t want someone who’s like, “I wanna make sure I’m resilient to the future.” It’s a very defensive way of approaching the world, and we want you to be on offense. We want you to say, “What are you interested in? I’m gonna go figure it out.” As an example, I work in education. Education has not been the most lucrative founder field of the last 15 or 20 years. It just so happens that I built one of, like, four wins in education in the last 15 years.

Right. Yeah.

Literally.

It is a terrible market.

Yeah. It’s been historically a terrible market. We’re gonna change that.

We absolutely are gonna change it.

I’m still super happy and proud that this is what I work on. I still feel like I know how to operate at the level and quality of someone who’s doing something in AI or SaaS or whatever. I’ve chosen a field. I love it. I have a very healthy and fulfilling life. I’m not a billionaire, but I’m doing well. Anyone who gets to that level in any field, if they’re in the top 1% of their field, is gonna be fine.

Yeah. And I love what you said. I actually believe very much what we have to do, back to raising kids and building high-character kids for the future, is your point: they’re not passive.

Yeah.

This isn’t, “What is gonna happen to the world, and it’s gonna be imposed on me?” It’s, “No, we’re gonna go make the world.” These kids are the ones who are creating it. You can have the passive view of what happens, right?

Yeah.

And, “Oops, it’s gonna be bad.” Or you can be the other, which is, “No, I’m building it,” right? We need to create a generation of builders who look at this optimistically. All our kids read The Rational Optimist, right?

Yeah.

And they sit there and say, “Yes, I’m in control of it,” right? We need to build our future. We need to raise the next generation and have our kids coming out of university as the ones who are optimistically capable with AI and saying, “We’re gonna build an awesome future.”

Yeah.

Right? That’s what our job as educators is: to go build that world.

Yeah.

And make sure that our universities do that.

Joe, this was an amazing conversation. I think the last thing I’m thinking about is that you’re actually building an entrepreneurial school for high school students called Founders School. Can you tell us a little bit about why you built it, how it works, and why you think it’s a good model for us to be inspired by?

Sure. Back to skills: one of our life skill stacks is entrepreneurship and financial literacy. We have a very strong point of view when we look at the jobs of the future. Big Fortune 500 companies are gonna be smaller because of AI, but I believe it’s gonna lead to an explosion of entrepreneurship. AI gives entrepreneurs this great opportunity, and it’s something we just don’t teach. We just don’t teach kids this, so we teach it.

We have a stack starting in kindergarten. We literally teach every kindergartner how to earn and save, spend, invest, and donate. Get that foundation going. We have a currency called Alphas to start teaching them this. Entrepreneurship isn’t a bolt of lightning that just happens; it’s a set of skills that you can teach people. So we teach them.

By the time you get to high school, we have Founders School, which is sort of our peak specialized school for that. This is for kids who wanna spend their high school years building businesses.

Yeah.

The part parents don’t believe is that we guarantee you’ll start a business that will earn a million dollars of profit while you’re in high school, or we give you all your tuition back.

Huh.

We absolutely believe these are skills that can be taught repeatably and reliably, and that I can actually build a business on that. It opened in August. We have Alpha High kids who’ve been able to build businesses over the last 4 years, so we have data points. But this is now a specialized school for that.

It’s scaffolded. They come in, and they have to earn $100. There’s a set of skills they have to learn. Then it’s $1,000, then $10,000, $100,000, and a million dollars. We’re only a couple of months into the process, and kids are speed-running it. We’re like, “Okay, they’re gonna earn a million dollars in the first year.” I’m out of curriculum—

Oh my God.

—in their freshman year, right? And I’m like, “Okay, well…” The kids are like, “Okay, well, I’m obviously gonna do a bigger one after that.” But that concept—can they do this? Can you build it? I believe a lot of it is just a set of skills around it.

There are also the relationships and networking. I think that’s one of the things you guys are bringing at the university level that we’re trying to bring even down to the high school level: networking and relationship building. On the networking side, I always thought a lot of the magic of Stanford was that you had all these luminaries come, and then you’d meet them and be like, “Oh, this is a normal human.” They’re obviously really impressive, but they’re just like a normal human, and it makes it accessible to you to be able to say, “Well, I can do that, too.”

Yes.

Especially when you’re young and dumb and super arrogant. You’re like, “Oh, I could do that.” And that is part of it. We’re doing the same thing here at the high school level, where they’re able to build up relationships. One of the stories is that one of our 14-year-olds cold-called Jensen. He was doing a cold-call thing, and he literally called him. Jensen returned the call and realized it was a kid. He gave him 90 seconds for his pitch, and then, in the end, gave him really good feedback.

Right.

Which, if I had to summarize, was: “All these qualification questions you’re asking me? You could’ve done research or asked other people in my organization about it, and you just used your bullet with me. You should’ve done your prep work, and it would’ve been much better, instead of wasting it by calling me. So, kudos for aggressiveness, but you get an F on call prep.”

Yeah.

That kid is tweeting about it. Everybody in the school thinks it’s the best learning lesson in that kid’s life. Successful adults are willing to invest in the next generation. I believe the kind of networking and relationship building they’re gonna get at HAA is just gonna be awesome, and more valuable than what normal, traditional universities do.

Yeah. It’s something that Erik is a true expert at, if I may say so myself. You’ve helped us galvanize this really large network of amazing people from all disciplines to come and help the HAA students succeed. I think it’s really cool what you’re doing with Founders School as well. I know a bunch of people who are speakers and are coming in and investing time at Founders School, and it’s completely invaluable for a student in high school or college to have the opportunity to get access to that.

Yeah. No, that is, back to it, for me, that’s always the most valuable thing. You guys are putting it intentionally at the center of what you do, and that’s really important.

Yeah. Max Levchin was in this chair a few weeks ago, and he was talking about how he was inspired to think so big and so ambitiously because he worked with Elon, Reid Hoffman, and David Sacks, and saw that they sort of went through the ups and downs. They were just like him. Hopefully, having Jensen, Sam Altman, Satya, and all these legends come and share war stories with the kids, share their ups and downs, will also elevate their ambitions.

Yeah.

It does. And the point he also made is that your ambition is set when you’re a kid. Somebody has to… I think it was Tyler Cowen who said, “The number one thing a teacher can do is raise a student’s ambition for themselves.” We try to live that at Alpha all day.

Absolutely.

And I believe that’s very much what you’re doing here. It’s intentionally in your design—the people you’re getting and the culture you’re building—that you’re gonna be raising their ambition for what they can do in life.

Yeah.

Well, the last thing I’ll say from my end: we’ve been talking about some major differences between K–12 and college, but one similarity is that you mentioned 1910. In the last hundred years, there hasn’t been a ton of disruption in the model. There haven’t been a ton of major new entrants, certainly on the college side. What you guys are doing in K–12 and college, and what we’re all doing, is elevating the ambition of what’s possible in education. You guys are pioneers in the work you’ve been doing over the last few years and decade-plus. I’m inspired to be part of your respective journeys, and, yeah, thank you.

Well, kids are awesome.

Yeah.

They can do way more than all of us expect. I believe coming out of yours, you’re gonna just raise that to the next level.

Proud to do this with y’all.

Yeah, it’s great to attend, though. Thank you.