[Host]: This AI world is coming and we're all terrified of what it means. Why does education seem fundamentally broken today when it didn't 30 years ago?

Joe Liemandt: The the biggest picture I think if you talk to parents of like why there's agitation for change is this AI world is coming and we're all terrified of what it means. But what we do know, and we don't know exactly what it means, but what we do know is the education system that we all went through isn't going to prepare the kids for that world, right? And I feel that as a catalyst for people to say the old system wasn't working or the old system needs to change... Well, and and schools are failing. You know that if you look at, you know, just pure academic results, just take academic results independent of AI. You're you're right. Uh test scores keep going down every year.

[Host]: How is that possible? We keep spending more and more money.

Joe Liemandt: It's you know uh you know there's there's a lot of reasons around it... The first is the way it's structured is a timebased system where you move up every year and you have a teacher in front of a classroom. There's basically you have two attributes for people who do well in that system. One, it's IQ coded, which is higher IQ better is better. And second, it's big five conscientiousness coded. If are you a natural grinder... And the system doesn't adapt for anybody who doesn't do well in those two elements... and then the second dimension over here is fundamentally about resources and factually... one of the strongest determinations of whether you learn your educational outcome and how much you know is based on your family's income... If you have a timebased system that's based on IQ and conscientious, you can pour all the money you want into it and it doesn't change those, right? It doesn't make kids more give them higher IQ, give them more conscientiousness, and so it doesn't fix the problem.

Joe Liemandt: at 80% of the great inflation everybody knows you like you know 80% of people at Harvard get A's now... in the US there's a big disconnect between educational outcomes and your earning potential... And so there's a big thing among parents who are just like the academics don't matter that much. There's all these other things, the life skills and all these other skills that matter more than the academics... three years ago... our first product the way I positioned it you know was 2x learning... I got incredible push back from parents about that... I'm going to change this message... Look, I'm trying to get Johnny out of here in two hours so he can go do all the cool stuff the rest of the day... And then mom's like, "Johnny, what's wrong with you? Don't you want to get out of here?"... we literally took we It was 2x and two hours. And I'm like, let's just drop it and call it two-hour learning where you learn 2x in parenthesis.

[Host]: Well, let's talk about alpha school. What is Alpha School?

Joe Liemandt: So, Alpha School is a uh high-end private school um expanding nationwide... building an educational system that's going to be ready for when AI comes... Just ground up rewrite. Ignore everything you and I went through... if you're going to redo school... the number one rule is kids must love school... And we got our ranking like I think it was like 96 the last we survey our kids every eight weeks... we added a second question which was do you love school more than vacation... highlight of my time as principal three years ago was when I started uh in May of this year twothirds of our high school kids sent me a note and they're like Miss Liont can we keep the school open this summer cuz we don't want a summer break.

Joe Liemandt: academically, we're the best academic performing school in the country just bar none... even you know a lot of parents don't believe in standardized tests... but when they score, you know, top of 790 and 800 math SAT... or on stand NA MAP test... top 1%. Every single class, every single subject is top 1%... take seventh grade science. In a normal standard school, you have 180 school days... average kid in our system with time back... learns it in 22 hours to mastery... You should think between 20 and 30 hours per grade level per subject... That means you can basically be done school in September... Analyze the growth rate of alpha versus any other school in the country and it's like it's like four standard deviations off the track... I have third and fourth graders who outscore 50% of the high school graduates of this country.

[Host]: explain the mastery based AI tutor.

Joe Liemandt: The problem with the kids learning isn't the kid, it's the system... We've built a system that breaks those two things which is if you have a masterybased AI tutor, right, that only allows you to advance after you've mastered the material... That makes it effort-based, not IQ based... 100 for 100... Pick your grade level... AI tutor... Assessments... The zone approximal development, like give them questions where they're getting them 80 to 85% correct... Every video game developer knows this. Keep the kid engaged.

Joe Liemandt: AI does that second part well... But how do you solve motivation?... we basically negotiated two hours... If I gave you the four hours back to go do awesome stuff... how we got the engine and the waste meter. So for if you're a student... you're wasting 50% of your time, dude... change these behaviors and you'll get out of here in 2 hours... The unlock is like at the sports academy... until it goes green. And then they get to go play... choose your own adventure where you and your buddies are saving the world. And that kid will click page by page for an hour... funnel new vocabulary words to him...

[Host]: It sounds like guides and teachers are very different. What makes for a good guide?

Joe Liemandt: there's five things really if you're going to be a teacher... domain expert... good at teaching... connect and motivate... deal with parents... administration... we narrow the scope... AI does that... world's best at connecting and motivating kids... hold high standards and high support... dean of parents... Kids, adolescence do not want parents judging on them... Kate, my daughter, has a great such a relationship with Khloe. She trusts her and she trusts her to get her in...

[Host]: And so he used to work for Jack Walsh, right?

Joe Liemandt: I spent a lot of time with Jack... Jack's like, "Greg, our kids are going to be first and second in the race, so they're going to have to work really hard... Wasn't it worth it?"... high standards... Jack was both super, you know, harsh... young self-made member of the Forbes 400... Is this your first step or your last step?... Joe, I don't care if it comes from heaven above. If GE doesn't get an ROI, your product, you and your company suck... nothing matters... resetting me of are they getting value out of what you're doing?

[Host]: what is success for you?

Joe Liemandt: Um that we transform education for 1 billion kids. So that's nothing like what we had. And the the tagline, if I had to give my tagline, is our job is to make this the best time in history to be a 5-year-old.