How AI at Alpha School Makes Kids Learn 10x Faster (with Joe Liemandt)

0:00This AI world is coming, and we're all terrified of what it means.

0:08Why does education seem fundamentally broken today when it didn't 30 years ago? The biggest picture, I think, if you talk to parents of like why there's agitation for change, is this AI world is coming, and we're all terrified of what it means. But what we do know, and we don't know exactly what it means, but what we do know is the education system that we all went through isn't going to prepare the kids for that world, right? And I feel that as a catalyst for people to say the old system wasn't working or the old system needs to change.

0:46That's just a huge driver. Like if, you know, I talk to lots of kindergarten parents, you know, and they're just looking and saying, in a dozen years, you know, if I put my kid in standard school that I went through, is that going to prepare them for this AI world? And they're like, no, that's not. So there's a drive that we need something different. But even 10 years ago, it was different. Like your daughter, right before AI even hit the scene, I felt it. You felt it. Like something is not working with the school system.

1:17Yeah, well, and schools are failing, you know, that if you look at, you know, just pure academic results, just take academic results independent of AI. You're right. Test scores keep going down every year. How is that possible? We keep spending more and more money. It's, you know, you know, there's a lot of reasons around it. A school is a complicated bundle and academic performance is only one element. And it's one fundamentally that schools have basically say it doesn't matter that much anymore.

1:51And so everybody's willing to let everybody involved in the ecosystem has been willing to let the standards drop. And I believe part of it is because the way our system is built today, you know, there's basically a couple truisms about, you know, the standard school system. The first is the way it's structured as a time-based system where you move up every year and you have a teacher in front of a classroom. There's basically you have two attributes for people who do well in that system. One, it's IQ coded, which is higher IQ better is better.

2:22And second, it's big five conscientiousness coded. Are you a natural grinder? You know, sort of. And if you have those two attributes, you do really well in our existing school system. But if you don't, you don't do well. Right. And so in the system doesn't adapt for anybody who doesn't do well in those two, those two elements. And so you have that as sort of one dimension of why the system's not working because it's if you're not one of those two. And then the second dimension over here is fundamentally about resources and factually independent of any, you know, political or anything is just factually, you know, one of the strongest determinations of whether you learn.

3:04Your educational outcome and how much, you know, is based on your family's income and the whole system is just geared that way. Sort of just look at the results. And so you sort of have these just two systems like this. And that's why they're like, OK, we'll spend more money and all these things. But fundamentally, it's just broken because those those elements. Right. Aren't being changed. Right. If you have a time based system that's based on IQ and conscientious, you can pour all the money you want into it. And it doesn't change those. Right. It doesn't make kids more.

3:34I give them higher IQ, give more conscientiousness. And so it doesn't fix the problem. And and so that's that's a lot of the the issues that you have. Do we admit as a society that there is a problem or is it just sort of like? Yeah, this is this is I think where it gets complicated. At least in and you have U.S. versus globe is a little different, which is as a society, everybody in America is like, wow, our schools suck. Yeah, it's just there's every article. Right. Just constant stream of and there's an unending stream of look at how bad all these school scores and grades go down and everything.

4:07And then COVID was even worse. But, you know, just everything's bad. 80 percent of the grade inflation. Everybody knows, you know, 80 percent of people at Harvard get A's now. It's like, oh, just give A's out to everybody. And so we all know that the standards have been dropped. But the thing in the U.S. that's different, especially if you look globally, is in the U.S. It's there's a big disconnect between educational outcomes and your earning potential, which is they're not as tightly correlated as they are in the rest of the world.

4:37Right. They're very tightly correlated in the rest of the world and not in the U.S. And so there's a big thing among parents who are just like. The academics don't matter that much. There's all these other things, the life skills and all these other skills that matter more than the academics. And so I don't really care as much. And I guess a good story about this was when, you know, I became principal three years ago and, you know, our first product, the way I positioned it, you know, was 2x learning. Your kid will learn twice as much.

5:10And fundamentally, I got incredible pushback from parents about that, like surprising amounts of pushback. And I was so surprised. I mean, I was doing hundreds of parent-teacher meetings, right, with, you know, and explaining it. And I'd be in a meeting, you know, and I'd be like, you know, mom, dad and Johnny. And I'd just be like, look, Johnny's not learning 2x because, you know, when he misses the question, the video that comes up that explains why he missed it and how he can do the next one right, he skips it. He just skips it, you know. And but he could learn 2x twice as much if he just watched the video.

5:43And then they're probably like, why are you pressuring him? Why are you pressuring Johnny to learn 2x? And I'm like, well, okay, got it. And it took me hundreds of meetings to realize the parents don't value it. Now, 10% of the market does. 10% of the market totally cares about great academics, right? And so those guys, they demand it. Like they don't like two-hour learning because it's not enough learning. But we switched. So that was my – our big product market fit. If you had to say the biggest pivot, you know, from a marketing point of view that unlocked, you know, sort of all the stuff around Alpha was – and I was slow, but hundreds of meetings in, I'm like, I'm going to change this message.

6:22And I'd have mom, dad, same Johnny, same mom and dad. Look, I'm trying to get Johnny out of here in two hours so we can do all the cool stuff the rest of the day. I'm trying to get him out of here. And, you know, he skips the videos. And if you just watch him, he'd be done in two hours. And then mom's like, Johnny, what's wrong with you? Don't you want to get out of here? Right? People want to get out of the learning, right? They want to get out of the academics. And when it's only two hours, then everybody's a board. And now we still teach 2X in two hours, right? We just emphasize the two-hour part.

6:52It's just how you position it. No, we literally took – it was 2X in two hours. And I'm like, let's just drop it and call it two-hour learning where you learn 2X in parentheses. Well, let's talk about Alpha School. What is Alpha School? So Alpha School is a high-end private school expanding nationwide. We'll have 25 campuses around the country this year. And the way to think about Alpha School is if you could revisit and just say, we need to build an educational system that's going to be ready for when AI comes, you know, when this – whatever world's going to be here in a decade, right?

7:26What would you do? Just ground up, rewrite. Ignore everything you and I went through, right? Six hours a day in class and homework and all that. And just rewrite it of what are the skills the kids need? How should they spend the day? How do you do that? What would it be? And so that's what we're doing at Alpha School. The other part we do is we also say we definitely took off budget constraints. It's a high-end private school. We're like, if money is no object, which gives us a sort of our high-end design. Now, we're going to get the cost down and drive it down. But for the first version, this Alpha School, it's the high-end.

7:58And so we have built a school that is totally different than every other school out there. And the principles that we – that underlie it. You know, first, you know, we said, look, if you're going to redo school and we're going to put our kids in this for a decade, the number one rule is kids must love school. They must love school, right? And, you know, that is our core principle, and it's what makes everything happen. And when I talk about, you know, to principals and superintendents and other heads of school, I'm just like, if you don't believe that, all this other stuff you hear about, you know, to our learning, it's not going to work.

8:37You have to believe that core value that kids must love school. And we got our ranking, like, I think it was like 96 the last – we survey our kids every eight weeks. It was, you know, 96 percent of our kids said yes. But we actually raised – it got too high. It's not a good metric when everybody says yes. So we added a second question, which was, do you love school more than vacation, right? And we get about 40 to 60 percent of our kids, 40 to 60 percent of our kids who say they'd rather go to school than vacation. Which is – that's the metric now that we wake up every day is we're like, we have to build a school where the kids want to go instead of vacation.

9:12The highlight of my time as principal, three years ago, was when I started. In May of this year, two-thirds of our high school kids sent me a note, and they're like, Mr. Limont, can we keep the school open this summer because we don't want a summer break? And I hated high school. Like, the school plan. I would never have asked ever in the – A million years. And I was just like, OK, we are – and there's a lot to unpack why they wanted it and all that stuff. But that's the core. If we're going to put our kids in for a decade, 12 years of this stuff, we as parents, right, should just say they should love it.

9:49Like, you know – and there's this view that, no, it's spinach, you know. And that – I had that view, you know, that – you know, I wasn't the founder of Alpha, but I was talking – McKenzie and Brian started it. And I was talking to Brian when I first put my kids in it. And I was like, what are the things I don't know about education that I should know? He's like, kids must love school. Like, love school. And I'm like, mm, it's spinach. He's like, you don't get it. Your kids are going to come here and you're going to figure it out. And now I'm like total religion, right, that they absolutely have to and it makes all the magic happen.

10:23And what's interesting is when I talk to other business executives, you know, about this, no, it should be spinach, I'm like, is that what you think for your employees? Do you, like, wake up and say, man, you know what? This job just sucks and it should suck. And no, I'm not going to try to make them like this job. Just suck it up. But literally they turn around to their kids and say the same thing. Like, dude, suck it up. Yeah. Right? No, it's ridiculous that you should like school. That's just insane because we didn't like it and we went through the system. But if we're rebuilding it, we just need to totally undo that thought process we have that, you know, kids should hate school.

10:59They should love it. I think that was the moment where I started to question the school system, which was just about pre-COVID. And, you know, I was made to feel like my kids were the problem. And I was like, I don't, like, they're not a problem at home. Why are they all of a sudden a problem at school? Like, what's going on in the classroom? And then when it shut down and we all get to peer inside what's going on in the classroom, I'm like, oh, my God, like, 100% agree with my kids. You know, this is crazy. Is this what you're doing all day? Like, is this what they're learning and how they're learning?

11:30But before we get to all of what you're doing different, like, what are the results? Yeah. So let's talk about the results. So the Alpha School, you know, one, our kids love school. It's just they're phenomenal results. When you talk about academically, we're the best academic performing school in the country. Just bar none. So you can measure us on – we are big believers in standardized tests because no one, when you hear about the whole how Alpha works, nobody believes it'll work. And so even, you know, a lot of parents don't believe in standardized tests when they come in.

12:01And I'm like, okay, your kid's only doing two hours a day. And they're like, well, how do I know they're learning? I'm like, trust me. They're like, no, I don't trust you. And so when they score, you know, top 790 and 800 math SAT, they're like, oh, okay, it's working. Or on – and a map test is the one we use, NWEA, you know, when they're top 1%. Every single class, every single subject is top 1%. Every single year. Every single class. Yes. Every grade, every subject, top 1%. And we publish them, right, back to – we publish all these results.

12:35We also – our kids fundamentally in the two hours are learning twice as fast as if they sat in school for six and did homework. And so, like, for example, on the map test, you know, it's a 300-point scale. And so if you have, like, a 220 and you're a fifth grader at, you know, 75th percentile, you know, coming into alpha, you know, it's going to say you're going to go up five points. You know, if you're a normal kid, you're going to go up five points this year. Okay. At alpha, you're going to go up 10 points. Okay. And so it's just quantifiable so the parents can log in and be like, wow, right?

13:07My kid learned twice as much and they only had to spend two hours a day doing it. And so, you know, and so the part that is just amazing about alpha is, you know, there are a lot of private schools that just select for good students, right? Which is one way to do it. The other way is to make them, develop them. And so ours is all about growth. We'll take kids, right, and get them from bottom half to top half to top 1%. That the growth rate of alpha is what the just unbelievable parts are. Like, if you can go download off our website, like our results, and you can put it in the chat GPT and you're like, analyze the growth rate of alpha versus any other school in the country.

13:46And it's like four standard deviations off the track because nobody does this because we take people who are behind and catch them up. But we take the top 1% and we move them years ahead because it's the same thing. There's, you know, even a GT program at normal school where you get one year ahead. You know, I have third and fourth graders who outscore 50% of the high school graduates of this country. That's amazing. You know, and our product's gotten better over time. My oldest daughter was in the school and she's now at Stanford and she was back and she was beating some of the third and fourth graders and she was looking at some of their scores.

14:23And she's like, they are getting the scores I got in seventh and eighth grade. Oh, wow. Right? And she's like, so we're even improving the product. Like, we're not done. Like, when we get into learning science, if you want to talk about that and stuff. Like, it's human potential is unlimited and we are tapped in and have that improvement cycle going. So the amount kids can learn in a great environment that they love is just, it's going to explode. Like, what our generation thought was knowing a lot.

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16:55Imagine the pushback. I mentioned to somebody I was talking to you today. And this is probably common pushback. But they were like, oh yeah, they're self-selecting. It's a bunch of rich kids in Austin.

17:06And so their parents care. They have tutors. They have all these resources. And I don't have that. So have you, like what's the pushback on that argument? No. So here's, selection effects are a great discussion. Which is, I'll answer that second part of, okay, what if you're not rich? After it. But before, you know, in most education, there's a view. And this maybe gets my background because I'm not and I'm a product guy. You know, when I came into education, there's a view that you must serve everybody all at once or you will serve nobody.

17:42Right? That's just sort of the view around everything. You have to serve everybody all at once. And that selection effects are bad. I am like, as a product guy, I'm like, you must use selection effects to build your product. Yeah. Which is, you have to select for the right person who you're designing your product for. Yeah. Right? And so, yes, there's no school that doesn't have selection effects. And yes, at Alpha, we select for those. And we absolutely have, you know, an easier cohort than there's other cohorts that we'll talk about that are harder than the ones we get.

18:16But compare us to every other high-end private school in the country. Right? Right. I agree. Don't compare us to really hard situations. Have us go compare us to the best. Go take other 99% kids and see why ours are learning three times faster than those kids. Right? You can get the score that says, we benchmark our 99 percentile kids not against the average kid. We benchmark them against the top 1% kid. Right. And our top 1% kids kill everybody else's top 1% kids. So, so I, and design, you know, so selection effects matter.

18:50So, for example, we have another school that's not Alpha. So, we have to get this down to everybody. You know, Mike, I'm going to spend 20 years on this. I've got to get it to a billion kids. So, I've got to solve all the different, right, demographics and issues. So, we have a school rolling out. We have a dozen that we've opened so far. Texas Sports Academy. Right? And so, on this one, back to selection effects, our tuition is going to be $15,000 for this school. It is $15,000 for this school. And with the vouchers, it's in Texas. And Texas has a new voucher program that they announced billion dollars of vouchers.

19:24So, it will be $12,000 vouchers. So, any family who's income eligible for it, rich people can't get it. But if you're income eligible for it, you get a $12,000 check. So, it will be a $300 a month parent pay to go to this school. So, we're going to have, generally, people who come in the bottom half academically. Yeah. Right?

19:46But, they're all people who love sports. Right? And it's a middle school for D1 aspirational athletes. Right? People who wake up and they're like, I love sports. Because back to us, I have to build a school they love more than vacation. Yeah. So, I need to know what, like, lights them up. What drives them. And what drives them. And so, I'm like, great. So, we can do that. So, we already have, you know, and we'll have a, you know, we'll publish all the results. But, these kids coming in, they go in to the same app set that you get at Alpha.

20:16Right? They do the same two hours. Right? So, now, we have a wider funnel of kids coming in from a academic background. Different academic backgrounds. And you're going to be able to see, and we'll be able to publish those results, that those kids can learn too. Right? Back to the thing is, you know, we talked about why. Kids are learning machines. It's almost like we get in the way of it as adults. And the problem with the kids learning isn't the kid. It's the system. Like, we talked about that at the beginning, where the system's coded in high-acute conscientiousness and how do you unlock those.

20:48We've built a system that breaks those two things. Which is, if you have a mastery-based AI tutor, right, that only allows you to advance after you've mastered the material. Right. Right? Master the basics. Right? Which everybody in sports understands. Right? If it, that's what our system does. That makes it independent of IQ. That makes it effort-based, not IQ-based. And we have a ton of results, which is, we run a program. And we have a school, you know, back to the schools.

21:20Every kid can get 100% on their state-standardized test. And we run this program called 100 for 100 to teach these kids. So we'll have middle schoolers coming into our sports academy. Yeah. And they'll go into the system and we'll be like, well, we'll pay $100 if you get 100% on the test. And they're a seventh or eighth grader. They're like, I can't get 100% on the test. And we're like, no, no, no. Pick your grade level. They're like, you're going to let me do a third grade test and get 100?

21:51And we're like, absolutely. And so they go take the third grade test and they do get 100 on the third grade test. And they're like, can I do fourth grade? And then you do fourth grade. Then on fifth grade, they only get a 75 because they have holes. They didn't learn all that material in fifth grade. And then the AI tutor, they're like, do you want the AI tutor to generate the lessons you're missing? And they're like, let me see how many. And they're like, I can do that like in a week or so. And you're like, another $100.

22:22And so we get more hundreds on state standardized tests in a building of 200 people than a school district of 100,000. And back to this concept that you have to change with parents. If you interview alpha parents or any parents and say, can your kid get 100 on the state standardized test? Fewer than 10% of parents say yes. Because in our generation, like only the GT kids did that, right? None of us got that, right? And if you ask alpha kids, they're all like, of course you can.

22:53I got one, right? Because it's effort-based, not IQ-based, right? There's nothing like – and if you – back to that whole correlation. It's just – there's no concept in U.S. Common Core through the eighth grade that everybody can't understand, right? It's built that way. So it's just a matter of – and if you're having trouble, it's usually because you don't have the prereqs, right? And that's all – and that's the difference between a time-based teacher in front of a classroom model and a mastery-based AI tutor. Well, it's interesting because as you're saying that, it strikes me that part of the problem is for a teacher in a normal classroom who's standing at the front of the room and teaching, let's say, grade sevens.

23:32You have grade sevens who are effectively in the 1% of each. You have the 99th percentile and you have the 1 percentile. And you have teach – not only do you have to teach to that classroom and try to keep everybody's attention, which sounds impossible. I have a ton of empathy for teachers. On the flip side, you're supposed to be teaching grade seven. But the student that we – you just said this. Well, they passed grade three, but grade four or five, they only got 70. So they have gaps in their knowledge that you're not – and everything is so – especially with math and reading and –

24:07All knowledge. It's cumulative. Like so if you can't do that, you're going to fail in high school. You're going to hate math by the time you get to high school, but it's because you didn't learn something in fifth grade. That's 100 percent of the problem, which is you have holes in your knowledge and knowledge is cumulative. And so when you start slowing down, it's because of your prereqs. And the system is set up. The teacher – it's not their – teachers are awesome. The teacher in front of the classroom is terrible, right? You have to separate those two concepts. And that's one of the things parents – we all sort of put them together.

24:39But they're two separate things. And that's why everybody's trying to get small class sizes because you basically want a teacher to give your kid individualized lessons. I mean for the rich families who hire tutors after school, all the tutor does is give them the fourth and fifth grade lessons. That's all they're doing is they're just going back and saying, oh, you don't know fourth and fifth grade. Let's do it. But you're a sixth grade teacher. You have to hand out sixth grade material. Like we were working with a school with bottom 10 percent kids, right? And, you know, back to me being new, I go my first day to see the sixth grade teacher teach.

25:13I was a sixth grade teacher. And bottom 10 percent in America means you can't read. You don't know seven times eight, right? And, you know, I go into the classroom and she's handing out sixth grade material. Well, I'm like – You know that's going to be ineffective. Yeah, it's just they can't read. And that kid needs a first grade phonics lesson, right? And that guy needs a second grade math question, right? And you can't – but the teacher, they can't sit here and every kid give them – right? It's just – that's not. They're a sixth grade teacher. There's actually laws in various states that you must teach at grade level.

25:45Like it's illegal for a teacher not to teach at grade level, right, which is just totally insane, right? And so you have all these problems that are systemically designed in the system. And it's one now that parents – because they're – you know, and if you talk to people, we've known this back to learning science. For 40 years, there have been papers written about how kids could learn 2, 5, 10 times faster. But they don't work in a teacher in front of a classroom model. Bloom's Two Sigma, which is a famous one and everybody fights about it. But it's a good paper, which is, you know, in – this is when I was in high school.

26:20It's like if you do an AI – not an AI tutor, a human tutor with mastery-based, you get Two Sigma better performance, right? Just crazy better performance. But, you know, the problem with that paper is you can't give everybody a human tutor, right? And then second, you also have to enforce mastery, which is hard in a lot of ways when we get to the motivation. What does mastery mean? Mastery means do you know the material cult? Like think of – whenever I talk about mastery, think about sports. Just move to sports, which is if you're a point guard and you're going down the court,

26:54what percent of the time is the coach going to let you lose the ball, right? And whatever that number is, is mastery, right? Because it's not very often, right? Versus in academics, kid gets an 80%. You're like, oh, he seems to know it got a B, you know, in this thing. Sometimes an A now, you know? So – and if a point guard was losing the ball 20% of the time going down the court, the coach would be like, master the basics. We're not working on dunks, right? We're not working on new stuff, right? We're going to master the basics and you're going to get up to 99 point whatever.

27:29And so do you know it cold? And there's a view, though, in a time-based system that you're like, look, it's time to move on. And we all grew up in a non-mastery-based system, which is then as you don't have mastery, you know, the holes compound. And then all of a sudden, the reason – like if you look at the learning curves in the U.S., they start to slow down in middle school and basically flatline in high school. The average kid in the U.S., like on this map score, this NWA map, there's a 300-point scale.

27:59If you take – I can't remember the exact number, but if you take an eighth grader, they will go up one point by senior year. How is that even possible? That's the median. One point. Like they learn nothing in high school. That's four years. Yeah, four years of learning nothing. Now, your top 1% – back to this inequality kind of thing – the top 1% probably go up six points a year, right? So your top 1% kids are still learning like this. But your median person in the U.S. is not learning in high school. It's just – there's no academic learning going on.

28:30And that's why there's a paper – I'm trying to think. I think UC San Diego, one of the top schools, universities in our country, right, just published a paper that like 50% of their freshmen can't answer fifth-grade questions. Like back to holes and all this kind of stuff. Like back to how bad it is. It's like the learning and the holes that are in this system. Because once – in the part of what happened with COVID, everybody is waiting for the bounce back on COVID. There's going to be no bounce back on COVID because what happened to your point was the span –

29:04it used to be years ago, okay, I'm a teacher and I'm a sixth-grade teacher. I got this GT kid who needs some seventh-grade material and I got someone who's a little behind, needs some fifth-grade material. Post-COVID, you're like, now it's a seven-year span, right? You have people in middle school who can't read. It's crazy. I mean, you can't – if you can't read, you can't – it's just a – going to school is a waste of time, right? Unless, you know, if you're not – if you're in middle school and can't read, all that matters is that somebody is teaching you to read.

29:34And everybody got socially passed too, right? So it's like, oh, you're another year older. Therefore, instead of addressing the actual issue, we're going to kick the can to somebody else and we're going to start fresh with this different group. Well, and that's – and the pressure, I totally feel. If I was a – I could not do the public school job. I could not be a principal at a public school because it is really hard because the product you have is this bundle, right? And it's political. And there's political and all – just it's totally impossible. And, you know, and you do. You have – so there used to be rules that you couldn't pass third grade if you couldn't read, right?

30:07And the problem is social promotion where people are just like, okay, you are going to psychologically damage my kid if you hold him back, right? And so then you just promote him to fourth grade for all these other reasons. Which is more damaging. With the concept of – with this concept of, oh, okay, someone is going to teach him, right? Yeah. But the problem is the fourth grade teacher is not set up to teach third grade reading. They stop teaching reading in grade three. Right. Because K through three is learn to read. Yeah. And then fourth through twelfth is read to learn, right?

30:38That's the flip point where you're like, okay, I'm learning – I'm bootstrapping to learn how to read. And then in fourth grade, you're like, okay, we all know you read now. So now you're going to learn science and social studies and, you know, you're going to get word problems on your math test because you can read. And if you can't, if you miss that bar, then all of a sudden you're all of a sudden in all this material and it's just – you know, it could be like me handing out Greek to you. And then it's like a negative flywheel, right? Like every year it gets worse and worse. And then you probably feel like I want to give up. There's nothing I can do.

31:09So like why bother? Why try? And then I'm disruptive to the class. I start skipping class. It's – you know, my life takes a very different path. Exactly. Exactly. And with a mastery-based AI tutor, you can go to those kids, right, and just say, I'll make sure you get the third grade phonic. So explain the mastery-based AI tutor. It's basically like, okay, we're going to start – everybody's going to start in sixth grade. We're going to figure out what you're strong at, what you're weak at. And then we're going to go teach you the things you don't know. And we're going to maybe not get you ahead in the things that you do until we've caught up in the things that you don't know.

31:44Yeah. So you should think – But you don't know we're teaching you a third grade level. So there's like no social stigma to it either. Yeah. Correct. So you just think about – you know, back to learning science. There's 10,000 papers written about learning science about how kids can learn better. The zone of proximal development. Like give them questions where they're getting them 80% to 85% correct. Where if it's like 99, they're not learning because they already know it. If you get down to 50, like they disengage because it's too hard. Yeah. So you want this crate zone. Every video game developer knows this.

32:15Keep the kid engaged. And so what you really want in a perfect world, you know, and sort of what – is imagine an AI tutor, an app, whatever you want to call it, giving your kid an unending stream of questions at 80% to 85% accuracy. Right? Where if it gets harder, they're going to tune it up, down. And it's going to be – and think of the knowledge graph of everything they need to know. Here's the third grade curriculum. You can ask – AI tutors are good at figuring out what you know and don't know. Yeah. Right? Assessments or tests.

32:46Right? And so you can just have the kid take a test and be like, oh, you don't know this stuff over here. Let's give you these lessons until you know it. Yeah. Right? And then you can – then once you know it, we'll move you on to the next grade. Same thing at the next grade. And just keep progressing you up at whatever rate you go at. And this is the – but here's the part that's just crazy town.

33:07Kids can learn 10 times faster. So if you take – like just here's a metric for you. Our subjects – like take seventh grade science. In a normal standard school, you have 180 school days. Yeah. So an hour a day. Maybe some homework. A couple hundred hours. Right? The average kid in our system with time back, which is our app, learns it in 22 hours to mastery, to mastery.

33:41Math, science, right? Between 20 and 30 hours. If you're thinking K through 8. Yeah. You should think between 20 and 30 hours per grade level per subject. That means you can basically be done in school in September, like based on the current model. If you were going to – now, part of the problem is if you put kids in it for six hours a day, they're going to disengage. And we'll talk about why we designed the two hours and how we came up with that. But the material is just not that much. And that's why our kids can do 2X, right?

34:12Because everybody is like, that's just too much to know. And you're like, it's really not that much. And when you get it, right? You know, for parents, anybody who's looking, you should go – there's a great math app out there called Math Academy. They wrote a 500-page book that you can download, Justin who wrote it, that goes through all the learning science. They also publish how many hours it takes. Their app, I think, starts in fourth grade. You know, but from how long? Fourth grade math, fifth grade math, sixth grade math, right? And it's – I mean, it literally is. It's like 28 hours and 22 hours and just not many hours to master material at these subject levels.

34:49And so that, when you talk about the unlock, it's just – you know, when you say, why do kids – and we – you know, think of your kid, you know, where he's bored out of his mind in school. We waste 90 percent of their time. Like we know that teacher in front of the classroom is the least effective way to teach. You know, you can argue whether it's 5 percent retention. But literally, we're wasting 90 percent of the kid's time because we're teaching them in a very ineffective manner. Now, back to the thing. We didn't have a better way for the last 40 years.

35:19You're like – you know, if you're head of – you're like, you know, school, you got to have a teacher in front of a classroom because I can't give everybody a tutor, right? And so there was nothing better. So let's not just tell everybody, like, you could learn 10 times faster, but sorry. Now, now there's no excuse for it. We can get everybody learning that fast. And I guess the hitch is like, oh, we've always done it this way, so there's an inversion. And then starting something from scratch, you're like, well, I have no sunk costs in the way that teaching should be, so I can experiment with something different and, hey, these results are off the charts.

35:52And we're crushing everybody else. Look here. We should all be doing this. So why aren't more public schools reaching into this and going, like, we should be experimenting with this even in one subject if we don't do it for everything? Maybe math class looks like synthesis or math academy or something like that where you're using an AI-based learning system instead of a teacher. Why don't they do that? Um, it's really hard to change the system, right? Which is the first off, first off, nobody believes, right?

36:23So the first thing you do when you look at alpha, right, and see our results is you're like selection effects. It's only rich kids and that's it. Um, and so you, you sort of reject it and don't seriously consider it. Um, but even in places that do, there's a lot of high-end private schools who their largest donors are like, I want my kid to have this two-hour learning. Go take a meeting, right? So I spend my time like there. I definitely do. I've met a lot of boards and heads of school of the top schools in this country, private schools who charge, you know, $50,000, $75,000.

36:57And they really struggle to sort of believe that this works because fundamentally learning science, this concept, learning science, they're not trained in it. They haven't read the 10,000 papers. They haven't built and seen it. They don't know the world. They don't have a team like we do of seven of the 10 best learning scientists in the country working on it, right, who have all these unlocks. And they definitely don't have the data loop that we have. Like we know, because we measure every single thing, how long the kid took to do it and what the scores are and what are the results and, you know, that whole closed loop.

37:33And so there's just massive skepticism, you know, around it. And there, you know, it's a classic disruptive problem of. I wonder if I'm less skeptical by default because my kids grew up playing Prodigy. And I watched how much of an impact that had on their math skills and actually more importantly, their love of math. Like they loved playing that game and you had to answer questions to like cast spells and stuff. And there's a group of people and those are our early adopters, right, who comes to an alpha.

38:04It's going to be, you know, families like yours. We call them founding families, you know, because they're like, I think I've seen enough homeschool families. Like if you ask the average homeschool family, they know two hours is all you need, right? There's actually that's all they've ever done. That's all they've ever done. There's two groups actually. When you talk about who believes the two hours versus not traditional school, just doesn't believe they just they just don't believe it. But the people who do homeschool people, absolutely, whatever, their view is why is alpha so expensive because I do homeschool. Yeah, I do the same thing.

38:35Yeah. And so and absolutely. The other group actually is athletes, which is IMG, which is our head of high school actually came. He used to run academics at IMG because for big time athletes like at IMG, you do the academics in the morning, you play sports all after. Right. And that's why our sports academy is all is being designed. It's just they know it, too, because that's how they catch up, right, because they got all this time already used. And so so there is a small set of group of people. There's others. You know, if you, you know, there's a couple, you know, real experts of learning science.

39:09You know, Dean Schwartz, who runs Stanford School of Education, he's published a book on learning science. What do we know like about learning that so AI customized? I want to get into like how, you know, kids are doing effective behaviors versus ineffective behaviors. But like, what do we know about teaching them through AI? Like what makes like I'm not just giving you a same math lesson that I would give somebody else. Yeah. Yeah. So it's well, it's important that more important than the AI is the learning science.

39:39Like if I had to pick the two, but it's the combination of the two that really unlocks it. So how do they end? But let's let me be clear. Let's let's dive into what I don't mean by AI. Chatbots is I am not talking. Our school does not teach people by giving them ChatGPT. Chatbots are cheat bots. Ninety percent of kids who are using chatbots for academics are cheating and not learning. And, you know, in our schools, you know, we do the academics in the morning and then we do all these great life skills in the afternoon.

40:10And, you know, for that world, we say if you're using a chatbot in the morning, you're probably cheating. And if you're not using it in the afternoon for your life skills and all that stuff, you're probably failing. So AI needs to be chatbots have a use, just not on the academic side. Now, how we use AI in the morning to teach is what AI, it's the generative AI part, not the chat part. It's we generate personalized lessons for every kid. Right.

40:40That's the part. And so imagine if you had an LLM and you fed it the following. You fed it the curriculum you're trying to teach. Right. You fed it the kid's knowledge graph. What do they know and what do they not know? You also feed it the kid's interest graph. What do they like? Oh, they like baseball. Because then, right, one of the fastest ways to learn is analogies, right? Back to engagement. If I'm teaching you in something you love and that you're good at, you learn both faster and more engaged. It's sort of a combo effect. And then there's a fourth one, which is we're adding.

41:12It's not in our current one, but it will be in 26, which is cognitive load theory, which is a whole set of learning science of how your brain works. And you should think your brain is like a chip, a register, where you have these working memory slots, and everybody has a different number. And so you have four working memory slots. And then every person needs a different number of reps to take something from short-term memory and put it into long-term memory. Think of how many times do you have to look at a flash card. It's an easy way. But each person is different. But you could imagine an LLM that sits on top of all that data and generates the perfect next lesson for you, right?

41:49And so that's where we use the generative AI, not to have kids do a Socratic tutoring thing because they're just – you're instead saying, I'm going to generate a perfect lesson. And those lessons are all based on learning science. So I'm going to make sure that they're engaging and not passive, right? It's going to be a worked example in math because that's actually the best way to teach kids. You know, I'm going to be measuring if it's too hard. If it's – you know, and you get it wrong, I'm going to go back. You know, and I can tell from the other questions.

42:20You know, even if it's multi-choice, the AI is going to make them so that if I'm unsure if you really know it, I'm going to put some questions in there. That will tell me whether you know that prior knowledge or you don't, right? All of those things are all baked into what we're generating and creating as a lesson. You know, we can do it as a video, right, with text and audio overlay, right? Make sure it's short so it's not, you know, passive engagement. So we can do all that as generating those lessons. And that's the key to the unlock.

42:52And you might be getting that second grade lesson and I'm getting the first grade lesson, you know, because we're in the same class because the AI is just giving us whatever we need. Or maybe you probably need the 12th grade lesson and I need the first grade lesson. But, you know, it's generating that. Now, the second – so that's one element. And then there's a second element, and this is actually the most expensive part of our AI. And one of our limitations right now is we burn a lot of AI, $10,000 a kit right now. And we'll get it down to less than $1,000 and then $100,000.

43:24We're driving it down. But think of basically streaming the screen to a SOTA model, to one of the best ones. And having – and then we have set things up to prompt the kid how to learn. It coaches. It's a coach. So it's like, look, kid, you're skipping those videos. You keep skipping the videos, right? You're not learning as effectively as you could. And so literally in the bottom of the corner, there's a little waste meter where it tells the kid, you're wasting time.

44:01And so this is back to the whole product design you have to do where, you know, when we – our product name is Time Back. The most important part to educate a kid is motivating. So to educate a kid, every educator will tell you, you need a motivated student and you need to put them in lessons of the correct difficulty. Now, AI does that second part well. It knows what you know and don't know and I'll give you second grade or fourth grade. It will put them in your life, the right difficulty. But how do you solve motivation? Right? How do you solve motivation? So on my first week as principal, you know, I have to make the kids love school.

44:35And so I went up to the fifth graders and they were brand new to school too. And I was like, do you love school? They're like, no. And I was like, what would make you love school? And they're like, less school. I'm like, how much less? And they're like, none. I'm like, okay, that's right. And we basically negotiated two hours. I was like, look, if I – would you engage in the apps? Because I need you to engage in the app. If you don't engage and you're spinning your chair, you're not going to learn. Would you engage for two hours if I gave you the four hours back to go do awesome stuff?

45:07And they're like, okay, that seems pretty fair. And I went to my team. I'm like, great, we got two hours. Let's get every learning science paper. Let's read the crap out of them. Let's figure out exactly what we need to do so they can learn all the material in two hours. And so that's sort of the design of how we got the engine. And the waste meter – so if you're a student and when you first come in, you're sort of screwing around and you're not really as engaged. And so all of a sudden, your two-hour learning is three-hour learning. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought this was two-hour learning.

45:37And you're like, your waste meter is at 50%. You're wasting 50% of your time, dude. Right. And then all of a sudden, it's like, well, go change these behaviors and you'll get out of here in two hours. So the unlock is like at the sports academy, right? It's a little meter. And they have to be in the lessons until it goes green. Yeah. And then they get to go play basketball or soccer or whatever, you know, whatever the sport is. Then you can go do the other thing. Yeah, and their coach – their coach is like, guys, stop screwing around. Like, get it done so we can all go play. Yeah. And their friends are playing. And so all of a sudden, you have motivation where they want to go do what they want to do.

46:11They just have to – and it's not hard because we keep them at 80% to 85%. They just can't screw around. Stop – just use effective techniques. Every kid, like, they scroll – you know, if they have a lesson, they're trying to read. Yeah. They scroll to the bottom, look for some questions, search. You know, they try to skip reading the article. And you're like, look, you actually have to read the article if you want to learn how to read. Yeah. You know, and, you know, we also now can generate the article so they're interested back to engagement, interest levels. You can take that second, third grade boy who's like, I hate books.

46:43And then you're like, no, no, no. What's your favorite movie? The Avengers? Who are your buddies? And all of a sudden, you're doing a choose-your-own-adventure where you and your buddies are saving the world. And that kid will click page by page for an hour. Yeah. And you keep the Lexile level, right, within 10% of his difficulty level so he doesn't get – it's not too hard. You can funnel new vocabulary words to him, right? All these kind of things where you can – these AI tutors, when you solve the motivation problem, can fill these kids' head with awesome knowledge, right? And, you know, one of our design principles is we're given 12 years, right?

47:16Parents give us 12 years to fill their kids' head with awesome knowledge because we think we should make kids' heads an interesting place to hang out in because they have to hang out there for the rest of their life. Right. Right? And that's – we've reserved as societies, right, this amount of time. And it is great to fill it up. And the kids actually are engaged. And if it is interesting and applicable, right, they do like it. And then there's also just a learning science concept that the more you know, the faster you learn.

47:48So acceleration curves, like where the average American in a time-based system, right, or it's not even American, global, slows down. Yeah. Ours accelerate. Like if you actually took our high school kids. Yeah. Right? And measured them on how fast they're learning versus 2x. One, because the denominator is going way down because the other kids aren't learning. But also how much our kids learn, right? We'd be like – we'd be at 5 to 10x like at high school because it's sort of you have this effect going, right?

48:19And that's why you can see some tweets I did where I have all these kids like 790, 790, 790 math, 800 math, SAT. You know, and it's all very doable. And it's just you and I in our world are like this all sounds like magic and hocus pocus and all that stuff. And that's what sort of my job now is and why we're getting it out and opening the alphas and getting this everywhere is we have to educate everybody that this is possible. Like, you know, if I – if I was – if you have a parent in your audience and there's three things that I could put in their brain, right, that they don't believe today.

48:56Like, if they have a kid in school, I need them to think A, not B, right? A is your kid can love school, must love school, like more than vacation. That should be the standard you hold, right? Second, they can crush, crush their academics in just two hours a day. This six hours a day in homework, it's not necessary, right? We have the highest test scores in the freaking country, two hours a day, right? If you're going to go more than that, it's because you have to really catch up because you're behind, right?

49:28And, whoa, okay, you got to do three to catch up, you know, two hours a day, crush it. And then third is the key to your child's happiness is high standards, right? And that is one that, you know, it's a hard one because I struggle with it as a parent too. I have two daughters, right? And, you know, you want to hold high standards. But when they're struggling, it's hard, right? But that high standards is why our kids love school so much. Talk to me more about the high standards part of it. Yeah, so generally, you know, if you're trying to build a school around that they love, there's this view of, oh, just let them play all day, right?

50:08But that's actually not going to make them want to come during the summer, right? They have to be working on things that are ambitious, right, and significant to be able to do that. If they're just scrolling TikTok or playing Fortnite, they're not going to come, right? They can do that at home, right? Kids want to do awesome stuff. They do, right? Kids are awesome and they want to do awesome stuff. And we need to give them an environment. And we start in kindergarten. Like our kindergartners, like here's the, you know, the thing that freaks everybody out, right? And we do this like on a shadow day because we're like, come test it, right?

50:39No one's going to just drop their kid in this weird thing. Come test it. And so we do a shadow day. And one of the things we do is like we have a 40-foot rock wall for kindergartners. And parents are like, oh, my kid is not doing that, right? That seems scary. I'm kindergarten. It's all safe. I mean, they're all right in. Harnessed in. Harnessed in and stuff. But, you know, we teach the kids growth mindset, right? And then you mic them up, you know, they're climbing up and they're like halfway out and they start to struggle. And you can see the parents. But our guides, right? Our guides and coaches who this is what they do all day, right?

51:11Our guides and coaches, their whole job. When you say, what's the different role of the teacher? Because we don't sit in front of the classroom. Think of a mentor who's going to guide and coach you. And their job is to hold high standards, but give you high support, right? To help coach you through it, just like a great coach. And then they'll see the kid get to the top. And when that kid gets down, they're beaming. They're beaming because they accomplished something hard, right? And every child development expert in the world will say the struggle, the cycle of you need

51:43to struggle and fail. I add in as a principal, sometimes cry on your road to success supported by a caring adult. That loop is what child development is, right? And it builds self-confidence. It builds resilience, right? It's what, why people, 50% of America puts their kids in afterschool sports because everybody expects that cycle to be run in sports. But in schools, it's just not run, right? And we're like, every kid needs this, right? It shouldn't just be in sports.

52:14We should just, they want to go do hard things. And so like, we start in kindergarten, but we'll talk middle school is like when we talk about middle school. You know, we have a middle school epidemic of scrollers, what we call consumers, right? They've been caught in the dopamine TikTok or the Fortnite playing, right? Loops. And they're just not engaged, right? And so when you come, when you move into an alpha middle school, we run a program, right? Which is, well, what are you interested in, right?

52:44How are we going to engage or how are we going to get you out of that? And, you know, as a society, we create a world where all those kids sort of get stuck in it. So we do a values chart, a Japanese ikigai, right? Think of a vision board, you know, fifth or sixth grade, where you're just like, who do you want to be? And if you ask all these kids, they want to do awesome stuff. Yeah. They want to do awesome stuff and they diagram it out, right? And it's just like, I want to be this. And it's awesome, right? And then you say, okay, we make them do 168 hour project, track every hour of your week.

53:16And then they're like, oh, and then, because you are what you do. Yeah. You are what you do. And so literally they then come in and they're like, oh, I guess I'm going to be the world's best TikTok scroller. And they're just so disappointed because they realize this is who they want to be, but this is what they're doing. This is how I'm spending my time. Yeah. And I'm just like, well, that's our job as a school, right? Our guys and coaches, this is what, because you're not spending all your day in academics, we have afternoon workshops where they're able to go figure out their passion project, where they can get out of it, you know, and I, why the world has to change and why everybody

53:49wants to change education is because we have too many people. There was a kid who came in and he was talking to our high school because he went through our program, but he was talking to the next set. And he's just like, you know, if you had told me, like when I first started, you know, the whole program and said, I'll pay you a hundred dollars an hour for the rest of your life to play video games and just till you're dead. And like, literally just like plug into the matrix. He's like, I would have sold my soul for that. And he's like, and then I went through the program and he's like, now I don't even have

54:21time to play video games. Right. And he's like, cause he's engaged on stuff of who he wants to go be. Right. And that's, what's happening to a lot of our kids, right. In society. And then you totally can break them out. Right. But that's what we have to do as a school and back to high standards. The kids want to do it. Cause it's hard. That guy, kids has never worked harder right on that project that he's doing. That's transformed him to pull him out of the video game, you know, loop and the kids want to do it. We have, you know, our second graders, you know, our, our afternoons are all these great

54:53project-based workshops that teach life skills, right. And our life skills are leadership and teamwork, storytelling and public speaking, grit and hard work, entrepreneurship and financial literacy and socialization and relationship building. So there's five categories of those. And, you know, our, our second, uh, uh, second grade teacher, right. Faith, this was a year ago. She's like, all my second graders can run a 5k. And I was like, Oh, I don't, that she's like, kids are limitless.

55:27I'm like, Oh, cause parents, right back to the standards. You don't want to see your kid fail. Parents naturally it's right. Protective. You don't want to see them struggle and fail. I'm like, Oh, the parents are going to really not like this. She's like, don't worry. And I'm like, how are you going to get me to run 5k? First of all, she's like, we're going to teach atomic habits. And, you know, most of us as adults read it, what, 25 or whatever, you know, after college. But she's like, second graders understand 1% better every day they do. And so she gets all the kids, you know, we teach growth mindset, right?

55:58And so she's like, how many of you think it's impossible? And all the kids are like, Oh, it's impossible. It's faith. You know, can't do it. And she's like, well, I signed you up for the jingle 5k at Christmas. This is in August. Signed you guys all up. We got to go run it. And she brings them out to the track and they're all, Oh, this is impossible. And she walks the track the first day with them all. And every single one finishes. And she's like, okay, so we've all established we're all going to finish the race, right? And then she comes out the next time and they run a quarter of the lap, walk the rest. And half a lap, walk the rest. Every time. And by December, they're all running 35-minute 5ks.

56:30And when they cross the finish line, you know, at the jingle 5k to their parents, they're just like, oh, look. So proud. They're like, Dad, I can do anything. Yeah. Because I can just 1% better every day. I can do 50 push-ups. I'll do one today and two tomorrow, right? And they just learn these life skills that we don't learn until late because school doesn't teach them. But when you have all day, when you're not sitting in class, you can teach these things. And you teach it via hard things that the kids love, right? That they're engaged in doing things that they think are impossible and learning how to do the impossible.

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