#102 Billionaire’s Advice to Young People | Joe Liemandt

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When you look at education today, do you think we can actually re educate the entire? Let's even just say the US using the technology have 100%. What about for people who are really scared to have AI teach their kid?

You should be terrified they are being brainwashed by TikTok today. AI could be good or bad and we need to have a huge effort to make sure that we use it for good.

Founder of 3 Logic Software and ESW.

Capital, Joe is now the principal of Alpha School.

Today we're here with Joe Lamont. I saw a tweet from you. Three girls in my Alpha High group were described by their parents as not math science girls. They've been focused on other pursuits, but their math SAT scores 790, 790, 790.

People read that and say that's crazy. In our school, that's normal. If we spend 10 years and educate kids the way we've been educating for 100 years, those kids are going to go into an AI world and have no skills that matter. AI gives these kids superpowers.

You all believe if we educate kids like this they will be more successful and thus we will have all these beneficial repercussions. What does the data say?

We are the best performing academic school in the country. Every single class we have is top 1%. No school can say that. Here's why though. Here's what you should actually do if you're a parent.

So you've been described in so many news articles as private, reclusive, mysterious and a billionaire. But now you're back in the spotlight in this room on camera. Why?

I believe two things I guess back I was big in the 90s and then in 2005 I got married and shut everything down. My last podcast sort of prior to this was in 2005 and so I was quiet for 20 years. My youngest is now a senior in high school and she's going to be leaving and so my next 20 years is all about transforming education. And I think we can transform it for a billion kids. And to do that, we have to. I have to get out there and explain why it can be awesome for kids around the world. Like the co founder of Alpha McKinsey, she says this is the best time in history to be a five year old. And we totally believe that. And we need to go out and build that and make that happen.

Was there just no point to be in public beforehand? Like, too much hate on the Internet, not fun. You just like working with computers?

Well, two, and I'm definitely naturally an introvert. And if I have a choice of just sitting inside, I definitely would do that. The other was just for family. I didn't want my family to grow up in that environment. And it was. I wanted to make it as normal as I could for my kids. It's not quite normal, but not being in the press all the time makes it a lot easier. The other thing I got, that happened in 2005, I got Forbes to take me off the list. So I was on the list in all the 90s, the rich list. And I got him take me off. And so, well, there was a dot com turndown and so they were all like, oh, and if I don't give them data right, Then all of a sudden they're like, okay, you must have lost all your money. I'm like, yeah, totally. And so then they found out later and put me back on it and I had to sit down with my two daughters and I'm like, kids, I hate to tell you this, but I've been. We've, I've been lying to you. We actually have more money than we think. And it's gonna get, it's gonna go out next week and you're gonna see that we have more money. Because I had basically been trying to have them grow up in a world where it wasn't surrounded by, you know, billionaire kind of stuff.

Yeah, smart. I was just with another friend of mine, Jenny, who is also, you know, a Billy. But she, she was saying last night, she was like, we purposefully never put out how much we were worth. Which I think for young people, they're like, why not? Where are the raris? Where's the plains? But I think that's also, like, often an indicator of perhaps not everything's very great if you're having to demonstrate that as your indication of wealth. So do you think for, for young people or if somebody's listening to this, should you try to look poor? Is it a Negative signal to actually focus on projecting wealth.

You know, when I look at kids motivation, you know, in a student's motivation, right. We're all, all our schools are about what motivates students. And parents, like it or not, one of you know what motivates kids. Kids want to be influencers, they want to be famous. Right. They want to be athletes, they want to be star athletes. Right. They also want to be rich. Right. Those are all dimensions that drive kids motivation. And you know, you have one where when you get wealth, you're often like, oh, honey, or you know, sun. That's not really that good. And it's hard, right, for the kid to be like, no, I want to go prove myself, I want to go do this. And so I believe it's just an intrinsic motivation in a lot of kids and that you need to teach them the right way. Right. There's all these great character building and life skills you can teach under that to get the habits you're looking for. Right. In. In our schools, we start teaching about money in kindergarten. Right. And so we have a whole financial literacy program that starts in kindergarten all the way up through 12th grade to teach all the good habits that people need to have.

Yeah, well, I think it's good you're talking about it again because what I found is once people get money, then to your point, they're like, oh, well, that's not important for us to talk about anymore because it seems gauche. And so then, you know. But then how are you supposed to get it if all the people who have it will never tell you the real path to it?

Correct.

And so I think it's actually pretty liberating now that some people on the Internet are saying, hey, okay, this is what it took, this is what it looks like. If you have this much, it's hard to even conceptualize some of it. And so I think it's good.

Yeah, no, I would, I think teaching how to make money and capitalism, I believe there's a view of, you know, if you, you know, if you're in the TikTok world, right. There is a view that socialism is much better than capitalism and we don't teach why capitalism is good. And it's a force of good. Right. And it can be very productive, it can be bad, but you can also teach kids. This is how it can be additive to society. And that's not out there. And I believe it should be for sure.

What do you think are some of the ways you can teach kids or how do you teach kids about Money or to get money.

We want to teach kids how to earn money, right? How to save money, how to spend money effectively, how to invest and how to donate. Right? And it's all of those things. And for kids, right? It needs to be real money. It's why kids often got allowances and things like this, which is you're having to teach them how to be responsible about it, that yes, you have to earn this and when it's your money, you're going to spend it differently than if it's not your money, right? And you are going to learn how to invest. So like in, you know, in our middle school for when they earn money, they can run and you know, basically Robin Hood for kids, right? They can invest and you know, there's, there's just so many great lessons. One of the things we allow the kids to do after they've earned it, they can invest in anything they want. And some seventh graders yolo that money on some crazy thing and lose it. All, right? And their parents are like, wait, what's going on? Why, Why'd you let them lose it? And the answer is the best time to have that happen to you is when you're in seventh grade, not when you're 27. Right. Or if you're going to have debt and a credit card, right? The time to learn it. We, we let the kids borrow, you know, around it and then they have to pay it back with interest. And our kids know what 25% credit card debt is, you know, when they're in fifth grade because they're having to earn back, you know, whatever they borrowed to buy. And so all these life skills that you want to teach are totally teachable and actually need to be taught. Right? If you say, if you ask most parents, you're like, what are the life skills I really want my kid to know? Financial literacy, entrepreneurship. Right. They want that as a, as a course. And in standard school historically, you haven't been able to sort of. In our new model, you can absolutely spend plenty of time teaching kids these skills.

That's so smart. Yeah. I mean we always say the best business school is being in business. Like I find business school to be kind of a funny misnomer. I think it's maybe okay for the network, but actually I think a better network would probably be building things with other builders.

100 I couldn't agree more.

What do you think? Should people go to MBAs?

No, that's an easy one for me is no, we there it is a great two year period to build up a set of great relationships. But no, there's nothing on the business knowledge that you're going to come out of there. That is a fraction of what you would get from building your own thing for that two years. Like just not even, not even close.

And putting the 100k on the line for a startup instead of just getting debt that you can't ever escape.

Correct for business. No, it's just. And back to the skills. These skills are all of how to start a business. You have to do it. So we're our, you know, in our high school, we have a set of students who want to create a new curriculum for next year. And the curriculum they want to start is how to make a million dollars in high school, Right? And they want to. Because all our afternoons are. They get to work on their passion project for four years. They're like, we can totally teach kids, right, how to be able to. What are the skills to build a business starting in high school, right? And that is really effective. And it's not going to be a traditional MBA curriculum.

You know, people have said lots of things about Alpha school and hey, billionaires are teaching our kids and how can we do this with AI? And it's completely free form and oh my God, you give them debit cards. But then if you pause for a second and you think about what school is like for us, you know, at least I'll say for me, you know, really hard wooden chairs with tiny little desks that you have to sit in for eight hours a day, where you have to ask to use bodily functions and be taught from somebody that's never actually done the thing that they're teaching you about. It's actually, it's wild. And so, you know, if we were taught, you go to school, you get good grades, you go to college, you get a good job, then you make money, and that's how you get rich and happy. What do you think the reality processes?

Well, I think, I think the way to think about it or the way we think about it is, you know, if you focus On K through 12, you know, it's been a hundred years. We educate everybody on the planet the same way, right? It's put them in a classroom, six hours a day, teacher in front of the classroom. And that was actually 100 years ago, the best way to educate the population, right? And it, it is the most equal thing on earth. You can be in the poorest school district in any country in the world. There's a teacher in front of a classroom, the building's not very nice. You can go to really expensive private school and there's a teacher in front of the classroom in a nice building. But it's the same mechanism and, you know, sort of where Alpha came from was if you stepped back and said, okay, AI is coming. The world's going to be different in 10 years. And you have a kindergartener and you're like, am I preparing them, you know, for a dozen years from now? Right? What would that be? And you rethought this from the ground up. How would it be different? And so that's what we did, is we just sat there and the first thing back to the experience, the first thing that we said was, if you're going to send kids in this for a decade plus, it, they must love school, right? That is just a design goal, right? I'm a product guy, right? And so I just look at this as a product manager where I'm like, how would you design a product? And so the first thing you'd say is, they should love school. And we literally measure it on. We ask kids every eight weeks, do you love school?

We have like an NPS score.

Absolutely. 90 plus percent, 96% in the last one said they love school. We actually had to ask a new question because it got so high, it was sort of useless to ask. That is, we say, do you love school more than vacation? Right? And 40 to 60% of our kids each eight weeks depends on the workshops and where they're really cool or what their vacation choice is. But we sit in our. We want to strive to build an environment that if we're going to send your kid there for a decade, decade plus, like, they should love it more than vacation, right? You know, my highlight, I've been principal for three years was a few months ago, in the spring, 2/3 of the high school students sent me a note and said, can we keep the school open this summer? We don't want summer break, right? And I did not like school. And what I went through was not that I got in trouble for skipping school all the time in high school and dropped out of Stanford, and I dropped out of college for the same reason. And, you know, so I. But that is crazy. But that is what our design goal should be, right? If you're going to rebuild school and your kids, right? It. It should be that.

And so don't people even push back on that? On you, on that? Like, I know my. My parents were like, you're not supposed to like it. You're supposed to go. You're supposed to listen. It teaches you discipline. So do you get pushback? Like, should we actually love school?

So I didn't start Alpha. It started a decade ago plus, and Brian and McKenzie started it. And there's a long story on getting my own kids in it, but when I sat down with Brian, you know, when my kids went in a decade ago, I said, what are the things I don't know as a parent that I'm wrong about, you know, about education? And he's like, the first thing is kids must love school. And I was like, you know, it's spinach. Yeah, it's spinach. And he's like, you are so wrong, Joe. And you will figure that out. And I can now tell you, now that I'm principal, if you want to build a great school, they do have to love it. And if you ask back to learning grit and hard work, one of the life skills we learn is grit and hard work. Right. And our kids, you know, all our eighth graders three weeks ago, finished a tough mudder. Right. And cross the finish line at the same time. It was a teamwork grit combo life skill workshop. Right. And so kids will do hard things. Right. But you want to do it in a framework where they love it.

Yeah. And hard doesn't always mean monotonous either.

Those are two totally different things. They're exactly the opposite. If you want a kid to love school, it can't be monotonous. It is literally the opposite. And so that design goal of, you know, you have to learn, you have to build a school that kids love, that is what unlocks kids potential. Right. Is they're doing it because they love it. The kids don't come in in the summer because they're working on some monotonous. It's that they believe they're changing the world. Right. The reason that that team who's working on it is they're working on a project where they're building an app. And their goal is to teach a hundred million teens the key to their happiness is contributing to their community. Right. And they're building that app and they're like, we are going to change the world with this app. It's going to be the greatest. They have all these influencers who are helping them.

Mine was like, get an A minus and no more because what would be of that?

Right? And so, so this whole point, right. Of exactly. I was the same way of, you know, what's the minimum academics I could do to still get through the system?

Yeah.

This is. You want to engage kids on their Passion, right? Starting in middle school, we start passion projects.

Well, let's back up though, because I think people could listen to that and they might think, well, that sounds really nice. And they won't know your background and that you're incredibly data driven and the success that you guys have had. So, like, it's not just. You're like, that sounds good. I'm Joe. I. I'm a touchy feely hippie guy. That's not you. You're the opposite of that fact. Like many times I think people had said, or you had said, I would be the last person to be building this kind of company. So, like, what does the data say? You have a particular way we're going to talk about on this podcast that you all believe if we educate kids like this, they will be more successful and thus we will have all these beneficial repercussions. But your success has been pretty wild. So tell us, like, why we should listen to you on this.

First of all, we use on the academic side, there's multiple parts, but one element is, are they actually learning academics in our schools? And we are the best performing academic school in the country on any. Every single class we have is top 1%. And so in every grade, every subject, no school can say that. And the way. Here's why, though, here's what you should actually do if you're a parent. We have known for 40 years that kids could learn 2, 5, 10 times faster. There's a whole field called learning science that has been studied for decades. Papers came out when I was in high school, right, about how we could radically transform education and allow kids to learn 10 times faster. But they all started with, this will not work with the standard teacher in front of a classroom model. And so there was no way to solve it, right? Because economically, you couldn't give everybody an individualized tutor, you couldn't go master, you couldn't implement some of these learning science concepts. And you know, one of the things that has changed, right? And our second, when we talk about if we're going to redo education for the next decade, our second principle is kids need to learn 10 times faster, right? We need to allow them to learn ten times faster, because sitting in class for six hours a day and homework is not going to prepare them for the world that's coming. And so that was part of why I got involved three years ago, was I had to go build a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. And, you know, all these learning science papers, every parent can go read them and understand it's possible. We took AI Gen AI combined with Learning science to build this engine. So if you come to our schools, you sit down at this learning science based AI tutor that's not like ChatGPT. It's, it's different that you have to experience it to understand it, but it's going to teach the kids 10 times faster. So in two hours a day, they sit down for two hours, they learn more than twice as much as if they sat in class. And so they're learning so fast, it doesn't matter where they come in, they can come in, you know, top 25%, bottom 25%, they are going to get to top 1% the longer they're in the system, right? Because they just keep learning twice as fast as anybody else and doing it in only two hours a day. On the academic side, kids can crush it. Like, if I could wave a magic wand to fix things, if parents could understand a couple of things. One, your kids should love school. There's. You can't say you should have a crappy 12 years. No employer would say, come work for me and it's going to suck for 12 years. Like, when we talk about love of school, it's just so obvious. In every other part of our life, we would be like, that's ridiculous. And yet, you know, one employer, like, it's going to be terrible. But that same parent who's running a company with, you know, thousands of employees, when they look at kids are like, yeah, you should toil a decade. You know, it's terrible. You should hate it, right? It's good for you. And that's why all these kids are unhappy, right? And that's why they're not engaged. And that's why middle school and all these mental health issues, it's because we've designed a system that bores the crap out of them. We hope they hate it. And then we're like, let's put stress on them. And you do all that stuff. You're like, God, that doesn't work out that well, right? I mean, it really is insane. Like the system that we've designed. And so going back, you're like, yes, you should love it. So parents need to understand that that's critical. And who at the end of the day wants to look at their kid and be like, I want you to hate this. The second is, though, you can crush your academics in two hours a day. That's it. That's all you need. So all of us who went through, because all we know, six hours a day at homework. You want to do better, you have to. You know, all this crazy amount of time that's not required. Two hours a day. You'll crush it.

And what's. How many students have you taken through this over the last three years? You have a lot of data to back this idea.

No. So we. We publish our data so you can go to the website and it'll download, right? Map. We are huge believers in standardized testing. You know, and lots of parents don't like standardized testing. When they come to Alpha, they actually love it because they don't believe me that the kids are learning in two hours. And so all these parents are like, no, I don't like standardized testing. I'm like, great. Just trust me. Don't worry. They're learning. They're like, no, okay, wait, wait. You know, and then until they get the standardized test back, that shows their kids crushing it. They are very skeptical.

Yeah, I saw a tweet from you on it. And the tweet was, three girls in my Alpha high group were described by their parents as not math science girls. That. This happened to me, too. They've been focused on other pursuits. Launching a Broadway musical, competing for Miss Teen usa, building millions of TikTok followers, and became nationally recognized as a teen dating expert. But their math SAT scores, 790, 790, 790, which is wild.

People read that and say, that's crazy. In our school, that's normal. Which is, you know, there's a view. There's a meme in the world. You know, in our middle school, a lot of girls come in and they're like, I'm not math science. It's just. It's a TikTok meme out there. And so they all say it. And one of the exercises we make them do is we're like, oh, really? Well, go find the learning science paper that's been written, because there's 10,000 of them written that shows that middle school girls can't learn math science, right? And there's obviously none. They all can. And so that's where you get into the motivational part. A lot of what you're trying to do with kids, right, when you're raising them is what are the limits they have in their head, right? What do they think they can't do? And how do I break through those? Right? And that is the part like. Because that is what our guides do, right? We have guides and coaches whose entire job is to sit there and say, instill a growth mindset, kids. You can do anything. And how do I motivate you to put in the effort to show yourself to do it right? And so if you want the most controversial thing we do about paying kids and all these kind of things, so we will take any middle schooler, girls or boys, and we will pay them a thousand dollars if they get to top 1%. Because lots of kids come in and say, I'm not top 1%. Right? I can't do that. Only GT kids can do that. Everybody else, I couldn't be a 790 SAT. And we're like, well, thousand dollars. And we show them because of how these AI tutor works, it's not about iq, it's literally about effort.

Wow.

And we show them if you, if with this tutor put in the right way in the, in the system, they all can do it and it literally will calculate for them. It's this many hours of time for you to get to top 1%. And they're just like, okay, well that's many hours. Okay, I'm willing to put in the work. And then when they hit 1%, it changes how they see themselves, right? A lot of what you're trying to do when you're breaking through these blocks is they're like, I'm this kind of person. I'm not a math science girl. And you're like, no, that's just not a true statement. And then when they get top 1% in science, they're like, oh, I guess I am. And then once, kids, you have to pay the 1000 once to sort of get the breakthrough. But once they hit it, none of those girls needed any incentive to stay. That's actually not true. There's one, one of them needed some more incentive to get 790. And we'll talk about that. But they didn't need any incentive to get to 790, right? Because they saw themselves as, oh, I am a top 1% math science girl now. Even though I'm still trying out for Miss Team USA and all of those. The Broadway musical is another one because we can talk about that. Another controversial part is for her, she is trying to first all teen produced Broadway musical, right? She sourced all the singers off TikTok, right? They had a million streams. Like the first weekend she needed to go to New York to meet a producer, right? I think she's run three or four shows off Broadway already, but she needed to get to that producer meeting. And I was like, well, and she wasn't at 790 math. And I was like, you can totally do it. And there was an incentive and it would pay for her to fly up to New York to meet the producer. And she's like, okay, I'll go do that work, right? And then fly up and get it done. And so we will. You know, back to earning, you're like, maybe you didn't want to do it and it was a little extra work to get to that 790, but you earned money that then you could spend on your passion project. Right. That you could do. And when parents hear that story, okay, do you want to have a framework, right. To earn and save and spend? If your kids earning money on some of the academics that's breaking through some of, you know, their inherent limitations, and it's being spent on learning how to invest or investing in their business or passion project they're doing. Generally, parents are like, okay, that's really a great idea. Like, I heard the headline of Alpha and I was like, this is stupid and I don't like it. And then sort of when they dive down, they're like, okay, wow, that's great. I wish my kid would go through that.

Yeah, Well, I think the headline's actually pretty fantastic. It's like where students learn 2x in two hours, test in the 99th percentile, and then give students the rest of their childhood back. That is good. You got some. That's a good marketing slogan. And the best part is always when your slogans are true. Buying a business or launching your own venture can feel impossible if you're stuck figuring out the website, logo, email marketing all at once. But here's the good news. GoDaddy Arrow is here to help. So just a few prompts. It builds a professional website, a logo, an email, even social content, all tailored to your business. It's like having a whole launch team in your laptop. Instead of months of grinding, you can go from idea to launch ready business in minutes. No more waiting, no more guessing. Just a real online presence that you can grow with day one, suddenly the thing that was just a tiny idea in a notebook is online, polished and ready to scale. So if you're ready to take your idea to Life, head to GoDaddy.com Cody Sanchez and try GoDaddy Arrow today. What about for like the rest of us? So people who are listening, who don't have kids who would have loved to go through this, but maybe feel like they've hit their levels, they can't get further. This sounds great for these malleable brains, but for them it's not possible. Are they just out of luck? Like, can you learn how to change your brain and become a top 1 percenter past high school.

Yes, you can. It's not the market we're focused on, but all these learning science concepts. You know, there are some elements at age, but fundamentally you can apply them for your entire life. And you know, k through 12 or intake higher ed, if you take higher ed. Higher ed and down education market is a global 7 trillion dollar market. And so we're, we're focused on the K through 12 for now. But there's a huge opportunity in education to take all these same concepts for adults.

What's the TAM of the larger side?

I mean, near infinite in this world. Here's the issue you have just right when you look at the world today, AI is going to change everything. There's going to be massive reskilling that needs to occur. And we're focused on, okay, how do we prepare the world for the. From kindergarten up, right. But there's a whole nother set of, okay, all these jobs are going to be obsolete. It. Right. And how are we going to retrain all those adults? And I believe that's a huge market and that somebody needs to go in there and I believe entrepreneurs need to go in. We can't just count on the old educational system that we're all we all have been doing for a hundred years. We need new entrepreneurs to go in and take these concepts and say, how are we going to reskill all the people who need it?

You're on obviously the very cutting edge of AI. And you have been forever from. I don't know if you would have called, you know, some of what you were doing back at Trilogy and esw. Did you call it, did you say you were AI focused?

Well, it technically was AI. So the AI, my AI world was in high school. I wrote a paper on AI and one of the segments back then. This is in the 80s. Yeah, this is in the 80s. So this would have been like 1985 was neural nets, was a new aerial. And I was like, they're decades away. Back then what AI was was like expert systems and ontologies. And so I went to Stanford and I was literally in with Professor Feigenbaum, who's the father of expert systems, which was AI. Now the problem was AI was in its downturn phase. It had boomed sort of early 80s. There was a bunch of failed AI companies. So you could never call it AI. So when we started our company, when I dropped out of Stanford and started the company, we didn't call it AI at all because of the negative connotations. But it was the first AI product to sell a billion dollars. And so that was sort of our claim to fame in the 90s of what built Trilogy. The software company was AI. We just didn't call it that because we didn't want the connotations.

That's fascinating. And now obviously the company's huge and you've bought all these companies and you know, you're sort of a behemoth in tech, but God, I was reading some old stories on you and I'm sure sometimes it's even hard to like reimagine. But I loved this one line about how like by the fall of 1991, you guys are like at this point, I think still in your garage, sort of like a couple got five guys, no money, and you'd been three months away from product for two years and you did the thing of working 20 hour days and sleeping under your desks. But the part that's interesting is how people were talking about how your former classmates, they were going to work for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and how some of the other friends of yours began kind of telling you like, what the hell are you doing? What are you doing? Like you're a smart guy. You dropped out of Samford. You're going to build this thing. You've been three months away for two years. This is going to fail. Stop being even. Maybe what your dad said to you when you graduated Stanford was that Gregory was your dad.

It was my dad when I dropped out. I didn't graduate. So yes.

Ah, yeah. And he did he call you a moron for dropping out?

It was a big title in the magazine, like Forbes, I think that they're like the title was you're a moron. Because that was his quote.

Does that still feel weird or does it not register for you anymore?

Well, no, but back to that is I believe, you know, the back to. And we were talking about the NBA before. Here's my difference of an MBA and an entrepreneur, right? Entrepreneurs believe they're going to change the world no matter what everybody else thinks, right? That they just sit there. And I remember back to one of the, you know, we were building this engine, this, you know, configuration engine, and we're in it and we were just like, we're totally going to do it. And of course we know how to do it and we'll get there. It just needs more time every three months, right? We kept doing that. And I remember the parent of one of the founders, right? Of the co founders is just like this, you're. And he had dropped out. And so the parents, like, mad at me because the kids dropping out and doing this futile task, and it was all dumb and stupid and my dad's calling me a. All those kind of things. And I was like, no, no, you don't understand. Bell Labs had a hundred PhDs working on this and they failed. Right? I mean, isn't that awesome? And to me, I was like, because we're going to solve it and nobody else has been able to figure this out.

This is not awesome.

And literally, they're like, that literally is an example that convinces me you're never going to succeed. Right. And it's just. It's that blind belief that you are. Right, right. And that is what entrepreneurs do. You know, back to the mba, I used to give talks at Harvard Business School and stuff back in the 90s. And I would just sit there, I say, here's your problem as an mba. You're going to look at the spreadsheet and you're going to say, that cell doesn't work. So the spreadsheet doesn't foot. Right? It doesn't work. So I'm not going to do this idea. Right? Because you're just looking at it and analyzing it. I'm like an entrepreneur looks at that cell and says, I will change that cell. I will make that work. Right. And that's sort of the difference between the two. If you're going to be a builder and an entrepreneur, you're going to go change reality. Like when we started back, you know, three years ago, when I became principal, I'm like, I have to build an engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. Right. I'm like, no, we got the learning science, this Gen AI. It's totally going to be doable. Right? And yes, you can do that. But if you analyzed it, it wasn't obvious. I think today people still don't really believe it, but that is what you do. You go out there and you say, I'm going to go build a school that people love, that, you know, all those crazy things that you read about entrepreneurs go make that a reality. And that's what's awesome. And I believe just, you know, are they made or formed? You know? You know, we believe in our high school that you can teach kids this skill. And if they're following their passion, they all have ideas where they think they can, you know, dent. Put a dent in the universe. And we just need to help them do that and give them the skills to do that.

Why do you think Your brain worked that way. Why was your neural network wired to the fact that you looked at something almost impossible and thought, yeah, we're gonna do that?

I think humans naturally are like that. And I believe the standard school system sort of beats that out of them. And you know, if you talk. So starting in middle school, a lot of people come into our schools, right? We had a few hundred people join. You know, we have schools now all over the country and they joined, you know, in the last 10 weeks ago when school started, you know. And they come into middle school and they're consumers, what we call consumers, right? They scroll TikTok, they play fortnite all day, right? They've been caught in that dopamine evil screen hook. And we run everybody through an exercise where we say, what are your values, right? Go do a values exercise. Do a Japanese IK guy if you know what those are. What do you love? What are you good at? What does the world need, right? What do you get paid for? And do a vision board if you think is as a way to think about it. These kids vision board is not I want to scroll tik tok all day or be a consumer. They want to go change the world. They believe they can, right? They want to, they just don't have the skills. And then the after they create all this vision board of who they want to be, it's always awesome. Kids want to be awesome. They want to do great things. And then we make them do 168 hour project where they track every hour of the week and you are what you do. And that's when they have this realization, you know, this middle school girl comes up and she's like, I guess I'm going to be the world's best TikTok scroller, right? But the disappointment in her voice when she was like, I just did my vision board of who I want to be. And I realize, right, I've been caught in this consumer mindset and I'm trapped. And that is what our job in middle and high school is to teach kids the skills to go be a builder, to go be a creator. Because they all want to do that. It's not that this generation, right, it's like, oh, there's no ambition. They don't want to do, they want to. Our school system just doesn't give them the skills to make that transition.

So have you found that you can take your brain back from being hijacked by this attention economy? We're in 100%.

So I'll another example, this one came this was probably a month ago where a student came up to me where. This was one of somebody who worked super hard. This is the other part about hard work. Ten weeks, he came up to me. He's like, ten weeks ago, if you had said, sign a contract, I'll pay you a hundred dollars an hour for the rest of your life, and you will just play video games. That's it for until you die. He's like, I would have signed. I would have sold my soul and signed that contract, right? This is. And just. That was it. He was caught and he was sort of happy. It's like literally, he was signing up to live in the Matrix, right? And he was totally willing to do it. And he's. And he's like, today. And he was presenting to the other high school kids at Alpha, and he's like, today, I don't even have time to play video games, right? Because he is building, right? And so you. Absolutely. All these kids. But what they need to work on, if you put them in school for six hours a day in homework, you. You've made an environment where they're like, okay, my escape is to scroll TikTok and play video games. Because I'm not building, I'm not engaged, I'm not doing hard things. Like, the third thing that I need parents to really believe that a lot of parents don't believe you gotta love school, right? You gotta learn, you know, crush academics in two hours a day. The third is, the key to your child's happiness is high standards. And high standards are when they engage, they want to engage in hard things. They don't. They want to go build an app that's 100 million kids are going to use, that's going to. Right? They want to go build that. And that's hard. And they know it's hard, right? But they will, right? And that's why they'll come in and put the effort in, right? If you think about athletics, I don't know if you have an athletic background, but athletics, the athletic ethos in America, we actually believe all these things we just don't believe. When you apply to academics, it just. We think it the opposite. So Westlake, right? Parents in Austin are like, I want my kid on the Westlake football team because they're gonna be state champions. It's gonna be the hardest thing my son ever does, right? They're gonna work. They do go in the summer for practice, right? They do. They're in the weight room at night, right? They are doing the hardest thing. They've ever done to be on the Westlake football team. Right. But they'll remember it the rest of their life. But if you said that same thing right and said that's academics, right? Or what the school day should be like, they're like, no, no, no, definitely not. I'm not going to have my kid do that. It's only an after school athletics where we believe that it's so good.

I mean, I hope you guys expand past even high schoolers at some point. It's your point that somebody listening right now hears this and somebody who has built billion dollar businesses is getting so fired up about changing people's mentality and in education. And what I'll say is like it's the same thing I see with a lot of employees in our company is there's actually some sort of disease or virus where we want to get by. We kind of want to get by. We do have the vision board maybe of a really cool life. But this idea of hard things as the key to loving life is something that we subscribe to here. Our first line at contrarian think it's creed is those who say it's impossible should get out of the way of those of us who are doing it. And so we believe that deeply. But people don't last here very long if they don't believe that. And I like kind of proactively will say to the team, if you ever say like we can't do that or that's not my job, like you're fired and like you're welcome too because hopefully it snaps you out of it and you go somewhere else. Do you find this brought like not even in the kids, but in the talent, in the, in the guides that you're hiring, in the employees in your companies. Like it. Am I jaded in that? I'm saying there does appear to be. There's like these two worlds. One world where there's builders in Austin, like our mutual friend Brendan and you know Dino, who I think you know from Saronic2 and they're just animals. And there's this one and then there's this other side where there's so many people that I just want to shake them and be like, you have so much potential. What the fuck's going on? You're in your own way.

That world I completely agree with, but. And we believe every kid, right, can be a creator. The reason the issue is they haven't found what their passion is. So when they come here and they're, they're not engaged, it's because they. This isn't the hook, right? I. We talk about every kid has a passion for learning, it's just not always academics. So back to my story of my dad. You know, I was a shirker in school. I was the slacker who. I wasn't trying to do impossible things, right? I'm. I'm the one who was disengaged all the way through school, right? And then I drop out. My dad's like, you're. But then there's a follow on to that which is 18 months later he sits down with me and he's like, I'm so glad you dropped out. Right? I'm so glad you dropped out. Because we'd been working 100 hour weeks living under the desk, right? And he's like, you know, you, you have found what you love. And he's like, you know, before this I was worried that you were a lazy little shit, right? And a parent's terrified of having that, right? And that's in school. That's what I was. Right. But then once I found what I wanted, right? And you just take off and we look at every student that we have, that's our job is to find what is it that lights them up, right? And that's what school. Why you have to say kids must love school more than vacation because, you know, you found it. Anything else? It's a parent pushing their values on the kid, not what the kid wants to do. And so instead you're like, oh, you want to be, you want to build video games? We're going to let you build video games. Video games. You want to write sports. Like so we are starting, right, a sports academy where if you love sports, right, you get to start sports in the afternoon, right? And you still have to do the rigor of the academics in the morning, in the two hours, right? But those kids are going to be the best academic performing athletes in this country. But they're also going to engage in what, you know, be a D1 bound middle schooler or D1 aspirational middle schooler. And it's always tying things in to what the kids passions are that unlock it. Like one of our life skills that we teach in the afternoon, teamwork and leadership, entrepreneurship and financial literacy, socialization and relationship building, storytelling, public speaking and grit and hard work, right? Those are the things when we say, you know, in the AI world, you know, those are the life skills that kids really need. And so take public speaking, okay? You go to a 10 year old and you're like, public speaking, they're going to be like, okay, right? They're not going to engage. You're like, what's wrong with you? Why don't you. It's such a valuable life skill. Oh my God, look what you can do. You know, and the parents are lecturing and it's, it's terrible. You say, wait, post game press conference, right? You want to be able to go crush your post game press conference. So at our sports academy, literally, we don't call public speaking. We actually teach them how to do a post game press conference. And they are like. And they become really good, right? They become great public speakers on that, right? Because that is their hook that engages them. Them. If you talk about, oh, you have to learn all this math and financial literacy, like, roll your eyes. You're like, we're negotiating your Nike contract, right? And all of a sudden all the skills they need to learn, right? Let's take on the entrepreneurship side, gross margin. Okay? What could be more boring to a fifth grader? Our fifth graders launch a food truck, right? And my, you know, this was a day, this was last year. I go up to him and I'm like, why did you launch, why did you pick breakfast food, you know, as your product for your food truck? And they're like, have you seen the gross margins on breakfast food? And I was just like, okay, this is so awesome. Right? And they couldn't have been more excited about the business, right?

Yeah.

And they are just sitting there and they are loving and they're talking about. And they're thrilled and they're having to learn teamwork.

How old is this kid?

So these are fifth and sixth graders. So two years ago, you're like 15.

No.

Yeah. You're. Yeah. You're like 11, 12.

I don't have kids. Does it show?

Sorry, no. Yeah. So, yeah, so you're. Excuse me. So, yes, here's 11 year olds who are out there and back to teamwork, right? And so they would go to like car dealerships and set up the food truck, right? It's all breakfast food. You know, they'd make a thousand dollars. But they were dealing with real world business things where one of the kids, the, the kid who's on the grill doesn't show up and they're like, oh my gosh, how are we going to be able to do this? And all these kind of things. So all these kind of things you can do in the afternoon where you ignite kids passion, right? That's the key. And I believe as we look, these skills that we talk about where you do the values chart in your 168 hours. Kids will use that for the rest of their life. Those are the life skills. Because they will somewhere in their career. Me, three years ago, right? I'm like, oh, I guess I'm doing a big pivot from software to education. I'm gonna go be a principal, right? And how do I go get the skills and engage in it and all those. And so I think the skills we're teaching today are what adults will need going forward for sure. When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season, and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst.

The Subaru Share the Love event is on from November 20th to January 2nd. During this event, Subaru donates to charities like the National park foundation, helping protect over 400 national parks. When you purchase or lease it to new vehicle. During the 2025 Subaru Share the Love event, Subaru and its retailers will make a minimum $300 donation to charity. Visit subaru.comshare to learn more. Yeah, because it seems like you need both, or you can use either as a lever and maybe explain it to me differently. But yes, kids need to love school or they need to love. Or you need to love what you're doing. But isn't it also that, like, you need to learn to love the game or like, you find what you love inside of it? Because it also seems like you have, like, yeah, pure whatever you call that intrinsic love for X activity. And then you have, like, extrinsic love for an incentive such as dollars or outcome or reputation or whatever. And so do you need to play both of those, so.

Absolutely. Which is you like what you're good at.

Yeah.

And so one of the things like why people in athletics, why they hold kids back, is they're gonna be a little bigger, right? And then they're gonna be better. And then because they're better, they like it. Cause they're getting accolades. And then they get more playtime and you get that positive cycle loop.

Pavlovs dog.

Yeah. And you just start getting into it. And people wanna do things they're great at. You know, in middle school, these girls would have said, no, I'm never gonna do that. But now they're like, yeah, I can totally do that. And they wanna stay because we showed them they can Be good at it, right? People don't want to do things they're bad at. So if you're bad at something, right, it's how do you bootstrap them to get better, right? And that's why the old academic system doesn't work, is once you get behind or you, you are labeled bad, right? If you're a C student in third grade, there's like a 90% chance you'll be a C student for the rest of your life, right? It's just. And that's not. There's no inherent brain chemistry around that. That's just a systems issue issue, right? The way we design school. But we can take those same C students and make them top 1% and show them. No, you could actually be really good at this. And we think that's true for all the life skills as well, right?

What?

The Tough Mudder one, there were a set, some. There's some new, you know, three of these middle school girls, right? So they're, you know, 12 year olds. And you know, I asked them, they were new to the school and it was the week before the end of the session. And I was like, you know, hey, breaks coming up. Are you really excited? And they're like, no. And inside, because they didn't want to go on break. And I was like, inside, I was happy, right? I did cheer because they wanted to keep going to school and not go on break. And I said, well, if you could wave a magic wand and fix anything about the school, what would you do? They're like, you wouldn't. We wouldn't have to run the adult course for the Tough Mudder, right? They're like, that's so hard, right? But their guide, who's motivating and showing them they can do it, I was like, go talk to some of the high schoolers who did it, right? And all the high schoolers have a picture of, you know, all their whole team, right? Their whole classmate. They're all covered in mud, right? And they're all, you know, miserable, right? But they're all there as a team and it's a team picture. And they all still have it on their wall, right? Because they did something they didn't think they could do, right? And that kind of thing. You have to bootstrap these kids. That's what school is, right? You're bootstrapping them to shoot, show them they can be capable here. And so a lot of these things and when you talk about getting people into the right roles and what they should do, it is this Japanese Ik guy of you're trying to figure out what are you good at and what do you love. And sometimes you're like, I really love this but I'm not good at it. And on some things you can bootstrap them into it, right? Like, okay, let's get you good enough so you can do it. And then once you hit that right, then all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm capable.

So does intelligence have a big predictor on success?

That's a good question. So in K through 12 today, the best students, there's actually two. It's all coded on two things, IQ and big five conscientiousness. School today, in a time based system with a teacher in front of a classroom, you basically need to be high IQ and a conscient grinder, right? You have to be a natural grinder. And our view is I have to get this out to a billion kids, right. So I can't have those two limitations. So on the product side we're like, how do we break those two things? So back to learning science. A mastery based, individualized, personalized lesson plan solves the IQ issue to, to an extent, which is we can't make everybody, you know, I'm going to do quantum computing and figure it out. But for sure in, you know, K through 8, the K through 8 curriculum, you know, if you take 95% of America, they could all be top 1%, that there's just nothing intellectually challenging enough if done with a mastery based education with an individual tutor that they couldn't get to top 1%. Right. I'm never going to be a nuclear physicist at Stanford, right. I just, I don't have that iq, right. So there are some upper bounds where it really matters. But for fundamentally of just teaching our kids, that's not true. But in a time based educational system it is because you know when you're in sixth grade and there's a hole where you miss some knowledge, you basically need more IQ to make, to bridge the gaps. But if you have an individualized tutor, it's going to go fill those gaps for you. The second on big five conscientiousness, you know, if you're a natural grinder, you're all set, right? We use our motivation model to compensate, which is how do I motivate this kid to grind, right. And get through it and do, do the hard work. And so in our and motivations lots of different things.

Is there a formula for motivation?

So we spend, you know, when we look at educating a kid. There's two parts to educating a kid. The first is, and 90% of it is having a motivated student. And so we spend. Our schools are designed 90% of my design work. And our emphasis is on motivating 10%, which is the second thing you need is you need to put them in lessons of the correct difficulty, right? Which AI tutors do great, right? They'll figure out what you know and don't know and say, look, I know your age grade is sixth grade, but you need fourth grade math. And I'm just gonna give you fourth grade math. Fill it up. But now I have to get you to want to do the fourth grade math. 90%. That's motivation. So the number one motivator, like, we have a huge motivation framework on our schools. The number one motivator and the name of our product is Time Back. Give kids their time back. There is nothing more than money. More than anything, Time Back is the biggest motivator. And, you know, and so that. That's why we're two hours. If you want six hours a day in homework, right? If you take the Westlake Honors track, right. You can't pay those kids enough to be happy. But if you go to those same kids, like in our high school and say it's two hours a day, if you want, like, 1550 plus on the SAT, it's three hours in high school, but that's it. And then you get all your afternoons for four years to work on your passion project that motivates students, right? If you go to our sports academy, and you're like, okay, I'm going to give you the whole afternoon, right, to play basketball, but you have to engage in the app for two hours. The kids are like, that's a fair trade. And just as a product manager, the story, my first week as principal, you know, McKenzie and Brian had started. They're like, okay, we'll let you be principal. But you got to live up to the commitments they have to love school. And so I go to the fifth graders my first week, and I'm like, like, you guys love school. And they're like, they're brand new. They're like, no. Like, okay, what would make you love school? They're like, less school. And I'm like, how much less? They're like, none. You know? And I'm like, okay, that seems a little light, you know, And. And we literally negotiated it, right? I was like, so two hours a day. If I had, would you engage in these apps if I give you an app for 2 hours? A day, if then 4 hours a day was awesome, fun stuff you loved. And they're like, okay, that seems fair, right? That's a fair trade. And so that's literally how we got two hours. No people were like, how do we get two hours? And they want some sophisticated analysis. I was like, okay, we got two hours. And these kids say, it's okay. Then I went to my learning science team and I said, can we, you know, fill their brain with all the awesome knowledge they need in two hours? And they're like, absolutely, we totally can do it. And so that was sort of the beginning of it. And why. And that's why it was code name Time back, but we actually made it. The real name is give kids their time back. Then once you give kids their time back, there's tons of other motivations, right? So our teachers, right, when you. We call them guides and coaches, they don't teach seventh grade science because the AI tutor does that better, right? So instead they are hired for motivational and emotional support. And their job is to say, how do I motivate this kid to greatness? How do I get them to do hard things, right? And what are the things? And sometimes, you know, in kindergarten it's like, like, here's a sticker, right? And the kids like, oh my God, it's a sticker, right? I'm couldn't be happier, right? Eighth graders, a little harder stickers don't work as well, right? But you're like, oh, the time on your passion project, right? Oh, you want to do a Broadway music. Wait, you want to write a book. Oh, wait, you want to go become an equestrian, right? And we'll let you out in the afternoon off time to go do that, right? Whatever the motivation is that will get them. You have a whole range. Everything from time to there is money, financials and incentive privileges, right? So like Mobile Squad. Yeah. And the Broadway privileges is also just freedoms in the school, right? If you crush all your academics and hit some goals, you get Mobile Squad, you know, at the end of the session. And mobile squad gets to go on some trip somewhere, right? Or you get the privilege of learning in a beanbag, right? Like the younger kids where you're like, okay, you know how to learn on your own. You've become a self driven learner. You don't require a teacher, an adult to, you know, babysit you. You learn on your own. You have the freedom. Like our middle schoolers get to go to the second floor where there's, you know, less, less restriction and less rules. And they can sit in a beanbag and sit on their computer and learn or do whatever. So there's all these different things around motivation that allows kids to learn, you know, oh, off campus lunch, right? Everybody. Younger kids, the number one motivator to the younger kids is lunch with their guide. Right? They love their guides, right? We, how we measure our guides and teachers at the younger, like a kindergarten. You're like, do you love your guide as you get older? The question we ask kids is every adult had one or two teachers who transformed their lives. Is your guide that for you?

Whoa.

Right? These are. And that is the standard. And that's what our guides do is their job is to say, right, I'm gonna help you achieve your goals. Right. Your dreams. That's what I do all day. Because I don't have to sit in front of the class lecturing or grade quizzes or whatever. I get to connect with the kids, right? And people talk about, okay, this is like, AI is gonna change the role and teachers are gonna change in our world. Right? But teachers did not become teachers to grade seventh grade science quizzes. They became teachers to transform kids lives and in our world. And why everybody wants to be an alpha guide. We have 80,000 people apply for our jobs. They want to be an alpha guide because they get to spend their entire day connecting with kids and helping them transform their lives into who they want to be.

Do you. Did you. You seem to have pretty high eq. Would your wife disagree?

Yeah, my kids would too. Like, both my daughters. I have two daughters.

Well, I found in tech, it's not always a huge correlation between the two. But now you like, are you the same person you were when you were building Trilogy and these other companies now?

No, I if 90s Joe, right?

Yeah.

And I versus family man Joe. Right. Is totally different, right? And it was. I could not have, I could not be the principal if I did not spend 20 years like raising my daughters and being a family member getting married.

What were you like back then?

Then I would have. I was absolutely your consummate tech 90s tech bro guy.

And what does that mean? You're just intense and focused.

Intense and focus and relationship. And the EQ part, like a zero. Like, I just. What are you talking about? Just if it was a pure mathematical equation. Well, obviously, logically, this is the answer. Do this. Right? And it was, it was very much there. And this concept that relationship building. Right. And building out your network. Right. Is so valuable, right? I mean, right? Socialization, relationship building is one of our key Life skills we teach the kids. I had zero of that right back in the 90s. And I'm like, why would you do that? I'm just going to build a better product or whatever. And the human component was, you know, so far down on the list. Yeah. And so. And versus today where right. When we think of the skills we need to equip our kids for for the future, those are the skills that matter. Right.

So a guy who's built multi billion dollar software companies who was really happy doing this. I'm a little bit happier doing this too. I need to get over it. I'm working on it. But now you think that relationship building and human connection is more important.

I'll give you an example. And it's my own daughter as an example. My oldest daughter was. Is an introvert like me. Naturally introvert and great student. So she got 1600 SAT. She's a math English double major, Stanford. Right. So. And she's one of these. I love ac. She was the opposite of me on this. She loved academics for academic sake. You know, in high school she like read calculus books for fun. You know. When she got to Stanford she's like, wow, these STEM boys can't write. So she created a writing program called equation based writing. Because she's like. Because in freshman English you have to grade. She's like, God, he's so bad. Let me help them out. So she's like loves academics. But in high school back her guide, I was like, look, what really matters for her is relationship building. Because she'll naturally just spend all her day doing academics. But in our school we're like the afternoons have to be about life skills development. So she started her own substack, right. And writing online because she loved to write but to promote it, right. She's like, okay, I have to go on Twitter and like build an audience.

Place is dark.

And I mean her guy would sit there and it took her guide six months of motivating her and convincing her and working her through till she'd send her first dm, right? And she finally sent a DM to Saheel Bloom, right? About buddies with him, right? Because. And Sahil was like, had written something that she's like, oh, this is so applicable to high school kids. And literally wrote the article, right?

What's your daughter's name?

Or do you not say that publicly on substack. She's Austin scholar.

I think I have engaged with her on Twitter or met her.

You, you may have. She has now 20,000 put it together. So she has 20,000 moms, basically, who listen to her about what it's like to have a, you know, no teachers for 10 years and go to Stanford. And what is uni? Her thing is university needs to change too. So she, you know her and does.

She not get invited back to Stanford then? Both not. Or is Stanford open to it?

She's thriving at Stanford. But what's interesting is a school, you know, schools are bundles of things of which academics is only a piece, right? And true. And so she hates her 100 series lecture classes. She's like, okay, my math class is a complete waste of time because the apps I use, right, are way better. I learn way faster. She's like, but everything else at Stanford, her dorm mates, her classmates, right? She's in a sorority, right? Her after school activities, the environment of Stanford, she's thriving. Even though she's like, okay, this math class for an hour is a total waste of time. And everybody knows that, right? Back to these same things. Harvard has published an article that says AI tutors are better than Harvard teachers, right? So it's not like we don't know this, it's just, how are we going to change as this goes forward? But back to the relationship building and all that, this key life skill she needed, she didn't need more academics, she didn't need physics. Two apart, you know, in high school, she needed to spend her time supported by this guide, right? Because one of the other things you get into adolescents, you don't have kids yet is they stop listening to their parents, right? In middle and high school, right? It's just, it is their job is to, right, get accepted by society so they start caring about their peers more than their parents, right? Which is always a transition for a parent to realize that, right? And so like when she was applying, you know, it was Chloe she trusted, right, who was her guide, who is like Chloe when she said, look, relationship building is important, okay? It's like, okay, but it was really hard for. And she needed that coaching, right? And support. It's, it's high standards, but high support. It's not just drop them in the deep end, it's coach her through it. And then eventually she got it and now she has this great network, right? But it's, and so those kind of skills, you know, if you have a relationship person, you're also to my, the arts, theater, girls, right? You're like, okay, guys, you're gonna do math, right? You are gonna do math. We're gonna show you, you have all these skills and if you're the, you know, the academic. We're in teacher relationship building or entrepreneurship or whatever else over there. If you are the EQ girl already, right? We have girls who have millions of tick tock followers and we're like yeah, you're gonna get 790 math, right? You're gonna be. We're about. One of our kids is about to do something that in science that like nobody in American history and science has ever done this in high school, right? And so. And if you had asked as a middle schooler would they do it? The answer was no.

When you look at at education today and where we're at, like do you think we can actually re educate the entire. Let's even just say the US using the 100 100. How long will it take?

Well, this is why I want to be what I want to communicate. My goal in this is we need entrepreneurs and builders to come in. If we keep on the status quo, not going to happen, right? It's a hundred year old system. It's not changing.

And what happens if we don't change?

What's like it's really bad.

Like, like paint a picture as somebody who deeply understands AI and education well.

The skills you're going to need. Like back to just if, if we graduate, if we spend 10 years and educate kids the way we've been educating for 100 years, those kids are going to go into an AI world and have no skills that match better, right? And people are going to say why would I just wasted their whole childhood, right. And I made it miserable and they hate it these things and they don't have the skills that need. Right. Like when we look at the world, right? If you're an Uber driver in Austin, right. Robo taxis, right. Waymos all this stuff. That's not a good place to be as an adult. There's massive transition on the adult and somebody entrepreneurs need to go fix that. But I'm focused on the K through 12 which is there is no better time to be a 5 year old because AI gives kids superpowers, right? If you look at they can learn 10 times faster in the mornings, right? Not give them chat cpt. That's really bad. They'll all use a cheat, right? Chatbots are cheap bots. If you're a parent, if you're wondering if your kids using chat on academics 90% of the time they're cheating. But in the afternoons when they're doing life skills workshops and launching a food truck, right. 11 year olds don't know how to Launch a food truck. And there's not a teacher who can teach them, but AI is going to help them figure out how to do it. You can't. High schoolers can't watch Broadway musicals, right? Except AI gives these kids superpowers and we need to show them. Right? It unlocks their potential, right? And they love it and it's exciting and right. We can totally transform too. And so that if you're a parent, you're just like, this could be the best 12 years of your kid's life. Right? And we need to go change it. And now to change it though, we need way more entrepreneurs than just me.

Because it can't be cheap too, like going to Alpha School. What does it cost?

So Alpha School is expensive. So our tuition is 40 to $75,000. And so when we back to design goal though, when I designed it, I was like, pretend price is no object. What can you do? Now we are building a whole nother set of schools, right? At half the price. At $20,000 we spend in America. $20,000 a kid to educate them. So that's sort of my price target we're launching, right? And we've launched 10 of them so far. We hope to open hundreds next year of these Texas sports academies. They're $15,000 tuition, Mike Middle School, right. They're micro schools. They're 25 kids. Middle school D1 bound athletes, think 25 really good basketball players right. In middle school who do academics in the morning, you know, basketball in the afternoon. And so think of hundreds of these schools around Texas at 15,000, which the voucher program just was announced, which is like 12 grand. So parent pay will be like 300, $400 a month. Right. So dramatically more accessible than Alpha. And so we're building a whole set of schools like this. I need lots of entrepreneurs to go build this, right? We need a school for gifted and talented kids. Right? Those kind of things. Sports, arts, theater, music.

Because if you don't, you could have a world in which you basically have massive discrepancy. Those who are taught at Alpha School use AI, you know, are unlocked and everybody else.

Correct. Oh, you absolutely. Like I have my job on this whole thing is, you know, Alpha is the first product we're building. It is the high end one. Just branding wise, you have to own the high end in education, right? You can't. You, you want to start at the high end. You want to be the Ivy League, right?

Yeah. And then be the discount degree.

Correct. Parents don't know about education. So brand really matters. They trust brand. And so you have to go establish the brand, which we've done. Right. We're the most talked about school in the world by 10x. Right. And so that's what Alpha's doing. But now we're bringing it down. And so we're building the software platform where it will be available. And you know, to solve the U.S. i have to get to 20,000, but to get to a billion kids, I got to get down to a thousand. Right? I have to get it down to where, you know, in five years, everybody on the planet, billion kids have to be able to access a tablet that's less than a thousand dollars that will teach them everything they need to know in two hours. Right. And so that's, that's what our design goal is, is getting it down so that everybody can have it. Because we have to. Because in this world of AI, we have to prepare the kids differently than we have the last hundred years.

Does that daunt you? Are you like, we're gonna do that?

Oh, we're totally gonna do it. That's a, that's a. The learning sign. That's, I mean, it's a lot of work. Work, obviously, right? There's a ton of work. You know, back to the billionaire side. Like I put in a billion dollars.

As to start this just to Alpha.

Yeah, well, the software platform and stuff, so we're doing in the sports academy. So I'm funding a set of different things, but to change education. So education's a 7 trillion dollar market. Like a billion's a drop in the bucket. Right. Texas alone spends a hundred billion dollars a year on education. Right. So societies and parents spend a lot of money on education. Like if you do surveys of parents, they will spend up to 10% of their income on educating their kid. So it is actually a really good market. Societies generally spend 5% of GNP. So it is this great market. It's just we've always had the Same system for 100 years and now what's different is, okay, can we go get entrepreneurs and builders to come in and build these awesome products, right, that will transform what the 12 years is like.

We, you know, it's interesting you say that because we have an education business. It's called contrarian thinking. And we teach people two things. One, we teach them how to buy businesses like normal. My theory was, you know, I was in private equity, I did acquisitions and I thought, this is not that different. Like what, what the PE guys do at the highest level, leverage buyouts, is not that different materially from what you do with an SBA loan or with seller financing of a very small business. You've bought a, a ton of businesses. And so it's not easy. It's actually hard and awful and really difficult in many ways. But it's not rocket science. It's. It's actually not that complex. It's like, you know, simple but not easy. And so we created an education company where we are attempting to teach. We've taught about 10,000 people how to do it. And if the average, you know, the average American doesn't even own a business. And so it's really hard to get good data on how many people will ever acquire a business. But we think it's like less than 0.01%. Like most people never acquire a business. It's very weird. So if we're able to take. Right now, we're about 37% of our people who come through our program acquire a business. And it's really important. You don't just acquire any business because there's a lot of risk. But what's fascinating me is when we started teaching people how to do this, the immediate response from many people and it seems to be like a pervasive. I can't really figure out why is like one, if you could do it, why wouldn't you just buy all the businesses yourself? Cody, why would you teach other people to do it? Two, education is somehow seen as, and there's a lot of bad actors, so maybe why. But it's seen as like low brow, scammy, couldn't work, not good taking advantage of people. And then it's also seen as like, like maybe not sophisticated. Like, oh, if you were really going to build something real, you would build trilogy. You wouldn't build an educational based system.

If you do do, if you can't.

Do teach, why is that it's so pervasive?

Correct. That is so if we want to get controversial. So I believe part of my role is to bring capitalism to education. And it is seen that capitalism is evil for profit. And capitalism or evil in education just straight out know that nonprofit is the only way to do it. And fundamentally I believe that's part of the problem. Which is non profit. I was, I gave a talk at Masters of Scale, which is, you know, how to scale big ideas.

Yeah.

And education doesn't scale in, you know, and the reason is non profit means non scalable. Like if I have a set of donations, right. And I build the world's best products, the better the product, the Faster my money goes away. And now I'm done, right? There's plenty of charter schools who have 3,000 person wait lists. And I go ask the head of the school, I'm like, well, why don't you open another campus? And they're like, I'm waiting on a $40 million donation versus I had a thousand people at an info session in New York City who are going to pay tuition to this for profit. I will have no problem raising capital to open a new building because of its for profit capitalism scales, right? This billion dollars that I threw in, that's not enough to fix education. We have to show what's going on, right? We have to show there's great businesses here. And so. But there's a view appropriately so there were bad actors and for lots of for profit scams. We just need to go get the good entrepreneurs who can use capitalism for good, right? Like one of the things we do is it's why we publicize all our academic results that we are like, guys, don't trust us. You shouldn't trust us. Look at our results, right? And, but unlocking human capital, well, that's what.

And the results mean SAT scores, right?

In this case, academics or the life skills, it's the three commitments. Parents are like, oh my God, my kid really does love school, right? And they're like, that's you actually as a parent when it happens, you're like, okay, this is great. Then the second part is, okay, they're crushing their academics. And then that third life skills when they're launching the food truck, you're like, okay, this is actually what my kid needs to do. Or they're building relationships or whatever that life skills. No, they watch the tough mud or they're like, okay, this was better than my school. So they look at that product. You just need a product focus and like for yours. Here's how I would design the product, right? In a for profit world. So we have a set of high schoolers who are like, okay, we're going to build a program to make be a millionaire in high school. How do you make a million dollars in high school school, right? And so they're talking about pricing and so one of their proposals is we're going to charge $150,000 a year tuition, money back guarantee if you don't make a million dollars. So it'll take $600,000 of tuition over four years. But if you make a million dollars, it pays for it, right? And it's a money back guarantee. So if they don't deliver back to your point of your scammy. You're like, it's free for the person, right? And it's that kind of product design that no nonprofit would do that. But a entrepreneur who's saying, oh, wow, that's the kind of thing that we should go build where you have this closed loop where you're unlocking their potential and then people are willing to pay that people would make that trade. They're like, wow, if you teach me how to make a million dollars right, while I'm in high school and it's going to be fun, I'm going to love it. It's be all these great things and we have to make sure of how we're teaching them. We're not teaching them how to do it. Scam One of our final character, right? Character, community, classmates and culture, right? That's one of the huge elements of school. And at the end of the day, character is the one parents really care about. Are you teaching these kids to be good kids? We can teach kids to build ethically awesome businesses, right? They're building apps. They could build crappy apps. They're building an app to teach 100 million kids to contribute to their community, right? So we can teach all these great values to kids as part of school. That's one of the jobs. And we can teach them ethical business at the same time.

Okay, last question. What about for people who are really scared to have AI teach their kid?

Yeah, that's. That's a great question. You should be terrified. So today your kid, 20% of kids, right? I think Brendan uses a stat that He they calculated 20% of your kid's life is influenced by AI. They are being brainwashed by TikTok today, right? This is that or Fortnite. Whatever the is out there, it is and it's getting worse. And what you put into kids heads really matters. And so part of one of the things is you have to figure out who are the trusted people putting it in. It's why I say chatbots are cheap bots and they're terrible. Like if we could ban like those chatbots being in school, that would be great, you know, and so part of what our job back to branding and stuff, you have to build a trusted relationship with parents that what you're putting into the kid's head is good. Right? Now what I can do with AI, right, is actually build one where the parents can validate and trust it. Right? So we know what it is, right? But if you have it just, you know, wild west freeform and you're not doing it. Like, what is your kid doing online? Right. That is something. It can be very bad and people should be worried. AI could be good or bad. Right. And we need to have a huge effort to make sure that we use it for good. You know, we have to build. We have a project where we are building the TikTok that is engaging as TikTok, but it's going to put all the cool stuff into your kid's head, not the bad TikTok stuff.

We need it. Although, you know, people talk pretty badly about TikTok these days, and I'm a big Elon fan, but I have found that like, TikTok algorithm is actually pretty easy to, to change and manipulate. And so, you know, on my TikTok, there's a few things I like. I like those. I get rid of the others. I don't really see any nonsense. I don't see brain rot. I don't see any of that. I do think these days on X it's harder. There's so much negativity and I think it might be more sophisticated. But, you know, I think, I think optimists, they sound too Pollyanna. But, and, but they make all the money and pessimists sound smart and then make nothing.

Yeah. Well, and to this on online, we believe teaching kids healthy online habits matter. And how you're talking about, you're curating a TikTok feed that's healthy for you. Right. You can also curate a bad one.

Yeah.

And if you don't teach kids how to do it right. They'll end up with a bad one. Yeah. And we, I actually believe, because we have kids on. On X doing the same thing, you can curate a great feed on X. I'm working on domain expertise and all heavily using mute words and all that stuff where, you know, your block list and mute word list has to be really long. Twitter has a lot of experts where if you want to learn about learning science. Yeah. If you want to learn about learning science, you can build a filtered list on X where you can become an expert in how to learn 10 times faster.

Yeah.

So it's all these things, they can be good or bad. Right. And you have to figure out how to actively curate your presence. And also back to tracking. Having kids track where they spend their week. This 168 hours helps them. Right. Of I don't just want to be a consumer. I want to become a creator. And that's what, as parents, we should all care about.

Is there some resource you Love or something that you have from Alpha, an article you've written that we can mention and say, and if you want that, click here and then we can drive people direct to you.

My daughter will love me if I do this Austin scholar, it's, she's got, you know, 200. She writes every week. She's got 200, you know, articles out. It literally is from, you know, 10 years of not having, you know, a teacher in this new world, what it's like to go to college in it all. And it's, it's academics plus, you know, the social emotional learning side that would be. We'll put that in. That's the single best source. That's the single best source.

That's a good dad right there. Proud dad. Joe, this is so cool to hear about. You have my brain spinning about ideas here and I just want to thank you for building something that is not. You know, One of my CEOs used to say to me back in the day when I first started getting online, he said, you know what? Here we get rich quietly. And it was. And I get that because it was his thing. He had built, he had built this incredible business that he had every right to do it. But I thought, I don't know, I don't think it's a zero sum game. And so I started getting on the Internet for that reason. And I think people like you sharing this and creating an area for education is like, like the only way we fix so much of what I see on the Internet every day.

I couldn't agree more. And if, if I can convince some of your listeners, right, some of your audience to come over to education, this, there is nothing. So back to my whole career. I obviously had a good career pre being a principal. The last three years have been the best years of my life. And I'm going to do this 20 years. I am more excited about the next 20 than my last 20. And I get need to go get other builders and entrepreneurs to come over here and see how awesome it is. Right? And so if you're like that, send me an email DM me and let's get you building to solve education. Because at the end of the day, there is nothing more important for a society than how it raises its young. That is the single societal issue that really matters. And so come, come work on that.

Thanks, Joe.

Thank you very much.