Arvin Vohra - Founder of Vohra Method and Vohra Unschool

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom pod. We have Arvin Vohra with us today. He's the founder of the Vohra Method and Vohra OnSchool. He's working to transform education to give students a huge advantage over everyone else, which I, I like. Uh, I mean, competition, capitalism, right? Uh, Arvin, welcome to the pod. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you've been up to.

Sure. My path through education has really been one where I've seen the sheer amazing potential that exists among humans and education, and really just how much of that potential is wasted by an incompetent and backwards educational system. So what I try to do is provide a better alternative, and sometimes that's through supplementary programs like SAT programs, and sometimes through programs like the Numeracy, which is really just a standalone pure educational program.

Right. Hey, you can reconnect your mic as well so we can hear you better while you do this on, uh, StreamYard. And while I ask you the next question, um, yeah, I see you started Arvin Vohra Education in 2001, right? So that was, uh, I guess your first founder role. Um, you were an actuary before that. Like, what prompted you to start your own business?

So before Before I was— when I was an actuary, I realized that as much as I liked math, as much as I liked things, what I really cared about was education. And what I wanted to see was just how great you could create something when you weren't held back by kind of backwards rules or policies or just sort of ossified ways of looking at things. So the idea of the Vohr method really was that, was how can we, unencumbered by anything else, really create the best education that could exist?

Okay, um, a lot of people would argue that the current educational system is like, uh, totally counter to that, right? It's like, yeah, uh, universities, uh, to always teach your kids, right? Like, um, I'm thinking of launching my own AI school, making kids entrepreneurs from day one, uh, having much more attention per student, right? Having real people, real high performers teach them, CEOs, founders, 20 of them daily, uh, have them launch their own podcast, their own business, so that they can interview and learn at the same time and follow what truly is for them, right? And not being in a fucking prison and an educational system that puts them there. So I mean, you started a business that fits the current system, which in my opinion is like a deficient— but I understand why you did it as well, because back then, I think the school still had great things, and at the higher education level it makes more sense. But don't you feel we need to reshape the system from ground up? Let's take Alpha School, for example. This is a good example of that. Like, shouldn't we— shouldn't you launch your own private school and start with kids like from scratch and just reward them at this time when they're not like lobotomized by the system?

I, I think you have a good point, and I'm going to tell you a fact. If you want to see what good education is, don't ask teachers what they do for clients, ask them what they do for their own kids. And I'm going to tell you exactly what I'm doing. My daughter is very young, she's 2. But here's what I did. First, I moved out of DC. I moved to the beach, and I'm creating for her just a homeschool program that's really designed to let her grow and explore, build her intelligence, build herself through her own personal drive. And as you mentioned before, really start to get into entrepreneurship at an early age. I think the idea of sequestering people away from the free market is just a bad idea. Because when you do that, education ceases to have its real value. And I do believe education's real value is instrumental, like what can you do with it? And instead becomes this kind of question that every student asks, like, "What do we need this for?" I think if you're asking, "What do we need this for?" It's that you become so separated from any practical use of education or any practical use of anything at all that you're living in a fantasy land. And so, so, so to your question, should we rebuild things from the ground up? Absolutely. I think the only good form of education that exists in the United States right now is purely private education, and that is homeschooling, supplemental education. I think sending your kids to any kind of school, private or public, is just a bad idea, right?

Um, starting from scratch, like, children are in— have an insatiable need for information, always ask questions. They're curious, right? Like, yeah, why the heck do we box them, right? Like, if we go back in, in time, isn't that like, uh, corporations and it's like the, the Harvard cartel, you know? It's a company, it's a, it's a business in the end. And it's just like, oh, we, we will just have a nice front, have a nice PR front just so that you can get in, spend a fortune. That created the student debt crisis as well. Have you investigated these things and thought about what building the systems from scratch would look like?

Absolutely. I mean, higher education, I think, is something that the way it exists right now shouldn't exist at all. Many of my clients, and I work with a lot of students who want to get into Ivy League colleges, and if that's what a student wants, more than happy to help them with that. But a lot of students do ask me this. They said, "If you were a teenager right now," What college would you go to? Knowing what you know, knowing how to get into any college, where would you choose to go? And my answer is the same. I wouldn't. I wouldn't go to any college at all. The great author Ray Bradbury, he chose to put his faith into libraries. And I think if you want an academic education using things like libraries, and if you want to prove that academic education, Using the testing systems that already exist, or we can create new testing systems, is the way to go. I think that college has always been a sort of a bad idea. I think it has become a worse idea because it has now turned into this battlefield of whose propaganda gets to be the thing that you sort of force on students, rather than students actually developing skill and intelligence. So I think that higher education needs to go. I don't think it should be there at all. I think you should have tests and I think you should have libraries.

The caveat here is that both you and I are highly educated and very smart and that the— I mean, for most family and back then, right? Like the educational system was game-changing because most people didn't have a clue how to educate their own kids, right? And what skill they needed. Um, the proof is like my parents were somewhat disappointed by me not pursuing a degree and dropping out and becoming an entrepreneur while literally I was making more money than my teacher at 22 years old, right? He was talking shit about economics while I was looking at these PayPal transactions coming into my account, uh, not listening to him, right? So Um, I think that the caveat here is important. Like, you and I, we receive a solid base as well, even though it was— even though I think I deserved way more than that, and I was mostly boxed by that system, and there's a lot of wasted potential. I think it's still— it's a good base, right? But if you'd have to redo the curriculum, right, like math, uh, uh, language, or whatever you call them, like, uh, English literature, whatever, geography, history, right? Like, uh, what should we teach kids instead, or at least add to the curriculum? I would say like relationships, meditation, right? Mindset for sure. Business, of course, launching your own business, and way more sports in the curriculum. What else would you add to it?

So when it comes to education, whether— and especially for things like curriculum design, I'm very much a minimalist. To me, school, academic schooling should be maybe 2 or 3 hours a day at most. I think athletics should be maybe another couple of hours a day. I think that mental strength and physical strength do go together. I think outside of that, there should be a lot of room to explore, a lot of room to create, room to start your own business, room to be an entrepreneur, room to really engage with with what develops you as who you are. I think that there are parts of education where one size does fit all. No matter who you are, 5 times 8 is always going to be 40, assuming you're using a base 10 numbering system. And I think that there are parts of education where, yeah, everyone needs to learn exactly the same thing. But I think for the vast majority of high-quality education, it's not that. It's individual exploration. It's what you find interesting, what you're passionate about. You know, you mentioned earlier that so many kids, when they're born, they're so curious, they want to explore, and by the time they're finished high school, they have no curiosity left. I mean, it's part of the fact is that we've simply stifled any opportunity to explore that curiosity. What's the point of curiosity if you have 0 seconds free a day to explore it? So, that's the way I look at education, a small core of the essentials. And then the rest should be completely different from one student to another.

Take a retreat I'm doing in 10 days from now with CEOs, founders, investors, right? Like, sure, there's almost no workshops in there. There's no planned time to actually, you know, like talk business, me teaching that. No, it's just we're gonna put activities and magic is gonna happen on the back end. I'm not saying that should be a case for kids because they need a base, like we've talked about, but it's less structured, right? Like, of course, maybe a bit more structure when we start, but, uh, what do you think of the podcast idea to interview founders and CEOs? Because they, they love questions, right? Isn't that genius? It's like, at a very young age, start asking very successful people questions you have for them. You know, like, most kids want to be astronauts, but they don't even fucking talk to an astronaut. I mean, nowadays they want to be influencers, right? But even back then, if you want to be an astronaut, why not have them talk to like 5 astronauts a day? Isn't, isn't that like so weird? Like looking back at it, obviously, again, I'm privileged, I had a huge base, but isn't that what we need to do? They want to be an artist? Well, speak to 10 artists today and practice it and see if, um, you want to make it happen. What do you think about that?

I think that the idea of kids having podcasts or really finding other ways to interact with very successful people, I think it's long established that it's a good idea. It's one of those few ideas that in education that has nearly 100% success rate, whether it's 100 years ago, people writing letters to great leaders or today, students of mine who have podcasts like you're describing where they do interview people are majorly successful in the fields that they're interested in. It always works. It always works well. I mean, that's really, if you think about it, that's the underlying idea of a private school, right? The idea of a private school is that you are connecting with other people who are sort of more successful, but a 10-year-old is never going to be that successful. Even if his family is successful, he might have certain habits that he learns from there, and then maybe you might learn those habits. But really connecting with people who are actually already successful, I think, is fairly well established as a very effective idea. Today we're doing the opposite of that, right? We're kind of sequestering kids a lot of times with people who don't have a passion for teaching, but are doing teaching as kind of either an easy job or a last resort. So we're doing the reverse of that. So should kids be interacting with with people who are very successful. I mean, absolutely, of course. I think that's a, a well-established and very good idea.

And then asking them to start their own thing off the get-go might be a bit challenging, right? So hybrid, they could obviously intern for these very, uh, successful CEOs and founders, right? That's pretty much of a no-brainer. And I don't care if it's, uh, I mean, I don't believe in the hourly model personally, but it's like, hey kid, do, uh, do this and reach this KPI, and you get, uh, $20, $30 every time you do so, right? And go buy some anything you'd like on the weekend. Integrate them to capitalism as soon as possible. I believe capitalism is beautiful. And also teach them to do good at the same time, right? Like, early. Uh, I was rarely taught to do good as a young kid, right? Like, we rarely went out in the community and helped And I think if that is taught early, that'll be like second nature, right? It's like no-brainer, and they'll practice this later on in life. Any thoughts on this?

I think what's important there, you know, what's really important in that thing is when, I think it's a well-established principle in psychology. If a student has that sense of mastery, like they can control their own destiny, they do some of the things, you know, whether they're specifically practicing doing community service or just given an opportunity, there's a natural desire to want to do good, to shape your environment for the better. Every kid in the universe makes pillow forts because they want to create something. Every kid in the universe likes to go out and build sandcastles because they want to create something. And as they get older, a lot of times, almost all the time, kids say, "I wish I could do this better, make this better." But they're lied to and they're told, "Well, you can do all of that, but first you need to go through all these 50,000 academic hoops and get all these degrees." I mean, none of that's even true.. And so giving people that sense of mastery, I think that— I don't think that goodness needs to be taught. I think that goodness happens when you have control over your destiny. I think that if you feel like you have no control, which is where most teenagers are right now, you become resentful, you become angry, you become rebellious, but in a kind of a negative way. You become addicted to things, you become escapist, you check out, you become lazy, you do all those things. Being created by a broken educational system. That's not the natural state of man. The natural state of man is to be productive and to do good. Yeah.

Having momentum, take risk, face adversity, right? And just like Winston Churchill will say, without losing enthusiasm, right? So, no, I mean, the system was never made for me. And I was exactly what you described, like addicted. I was zoning out and I was just like, being, fuck you guys, you know, you— I'm, I'm not for your system. I think it doesn't make sense. Plus, I didn't know any better, right? Like, no one taught me anything better. Um, you have a bunch of books, right, uh, that I'm eyeing here on Amazon. Um, just quick parenthesis, what's, uh, what was the most successful books of them all? Why write books? Uh, Is it like a business side hustle? Is it to get clients? Is it to free your mind? And how does writing actually help you think?

So in terms of what book has sold the most, no question, my first book, The Equation for Excellence. And it's not because it's my best book. It's not. The first one I wrote is probably the worst one, but it is, I would say, the one that kind of plays most friendly with the system, if that makes some sense. It's very in line with what people expect. It's been published in the United States. It was published in China. If you look at some of my other books, like for example, Invitation to the Ivies, this is a book that's designed to show you how you can use principles of myth and storytelling to edge out your competition to get into an Ivy League college. And a lot of people feel that those techniques are brutalistic and minimal and manipulative and all that. I mean, it's not going to be published in China ever. It's not going to be published in like a totalitarian country no matter what. It's popular in the United States among that hypercompetitive group who are trying to get into Ivy League colleges, but it never comes close to something like The Equation for Excellence, which is more inside of the system. I don't think that really matters to me though. To me, my goal with writing books is it is a way to refine my own ideas and it's a way to share my most cutting-edge ideas, my most outside-the-box great ideas with people who, for example, might not really have the resources to afford my tutoring or even my group classes. And so to me, a book is successful not based on how many people buy it, but really based on how often does it really Does it change somebody's mind? Does it transform somebody's experience? Probably the best compliment I've ever gotten from a book, it was my book called Lies Damn Lies in College Admissions, was somebody, you know, he wrote to me and he said that he was planning to go to college. He read this book, realized how much it was just full of nonsense and garbage, and chose not to go to college. And that to me is what makes a book successful. Does it really change one person's life? And the fact that it was able to change one person's life and, you know, maybe a few more for all I know, for, for the better. I think that's why I write, right?

I love that. How did AI change education? Uh, start with 2020, and if you'd have to make a prediction of 2030, what's education going to look like in an AI and agentic world?

So AI has so far had a, you know, negative effect on education. I mean, you have students who are using it to cheat on everything. I mean, most students are not writing any papers anymore, not thinking through problems anymore. We're kind of outsourcing it to AI. And so far, the effect, I think most people would agree, has been entirely negative. One of my recent businesses is called the Turing Police, and it's just a business to show schools and teachers how to get AI out of their classrooms. But AI has also, now that, that, you know, we have these more powerful tools, allowed educators to make education that's much more powerful. Uh, you know, I've, I've been recently working on a new platform for my own online classes. It's, you know, the programming, like, the overall design is mine, but the actual hard programming is all done by AI agents. And it, it allows a level of, of, of quality that, that is— in, in the past, the only, the only people that had the resources to do something would be the sort of risk-averse corporations that would never make good education ever, no matter what. So now you have this kind of equalization where you have these great kind of renegade educators that essentially have the equivalent of an entire IT and programming staff. And so because of that, I think that AI will have a very positive effect on education. Although so far, it's been mostly, the effect has been mostly to turn people in kind of AI-addicted dullards.

Right, because my school, I would have like one AI agent per student, right? They would— and the early version of it would just be a well-prompted Claude Convo, for example, with some restraints, right? Like general restraints, uh, and monitoring. Um, and do you feel that AI, for example, will slash most jobs? Um, Granted that most humans are not taught the right way and are sort of lazy and don't want to work in the end, wouldn't that happen 10, 20 years from now with superintelligence?

I don't think so. I think it creates a different type of job. So right now, it's true that if you have kind of no expertise and you're not in a field that's more, you know, requires your physical body, you know, if you're not working in plumbing or welding or something like that, right now, if you have no skills and you're not working anything physical, then, then yeah, I mean, it's going to be much harder to get a job. But what AI does, if you do have some expertise, and I do think any person can build expertise in areas in which they're passionate, you now essentially have like the equivalent of a staff of agents to kind of do things guided by that, that expertise. Um, I think, you know, in my own experience Right now we're looking at, at not using AI agents to teach because I, I don't think that AI is yet able to teach very well, but it can grade, it can check a student's work, it can see if there's errors. I mean, it can do a lot of things perfectly. And so that's the type of thing where I would never hire an assistant to do that anymore. I'd just have an AI do it. So I think it's going to— we'll see a very different world, and I think we'll see a lot more people working in these areas of high expertise because they will have these tools to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

It's going to be an interesting time for sure. Yeah, let's see what happens the next couple of years. What are your priorities this year? What do you want to accomplish?

So my big priority for this year is to get this platform out that I've been working on and show how AI-driven education— well, not AI-driven, but AI-enhanced education— can actually help make students smarter, not turn them into idiots. And so that's, that's pretty much the, the top goal that I have right now. It's something that is powerful, it's something that's scalable, it's something that can give a level of individualization that is, is, you know, much higher than, than other things in the past have been able to do. So that's, that's, that's the plan for 2026.

I love it. Where can people find out more about you, Arvin?

Sure, my website is voramethod.com. That's V as in Victor, O-H-R-A, followed by the word method.com.

Interesting. So that was Arvin and Tron for another Founder Wisdom podcast.