Transcription
Welcome to the stage, the co-founder of Summit, Jeff Rosenthal, and the founder of Trilogy Software, Esw Capital, and the principal of The Alpha School, Joe Lamont.
Hello, hello. How you guys doing? Thank you for being here.
Hey Joe, hello. How's it going? What's up? Glad, glad to be here.
What's going on? Fill us in. Give us all the hot gossip.
All right. Uh, what got me here, I guess, uh, the short take, the short version is, um, uh, I'm, I'm a principal of a school now, full-time. Been doing it for two years. And the short history of the 25 years before that was sort of just the classic. I was a, uh, Stanford student, dropped out, lived in a garage, built a tech company. The classic.
Okay, we can expand upon it a little bit further. Tell, tell the audience a little bit about Trilogy.
A little bit about Trilogy was, um, I was sitting in a class and the professor's like, it was actually, uh, artificial intelligence back then, which is not like today. '90s AI was a different set of things, expert systems, not neural nets. Anyway, he's like, if someone could ever solve this problem around building an expert system, uh, it would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I remember sitting in class saying, "Why are we in class?" And so I got, uh, buddy of mine, and it was five of us in total. Two of us dropped out and started this company to build it. We thought it would be super easy. Uh, took years and years longer than we expected. But it actually ended up, this product, expert system, ended up working. And it was actually its claim to fame in the '90s was it was the first, uh, AI product to sell a billion dollars worth.
Awesome. And was it a good outcome for you? Did the company succeed?
So the company succeeded and for, actually still does, uh, to this day, is still here. Made billions of dollars and, you know, was a big success. It's a leading question. I knew the answer. Uh, big success. And then two years ago, when Gen AI came out, which was totally different than the AI we did, uh, I went to my team and I was like, "Guys, for 25 years, you've been telling me you could run this company way better than I could. So we're going to see. I'm going to go be a principal. Good luck." And so now it's, uh, still available. It's, I'm a nightmare shareholder who demands they have big dividends that I can waste in education.
Wonderful. And, and what was the path to education? Why education of all things?
Um, so, uh, a set of different things that, uh, came together. First, uh, I hated school. I hated school always growing up. I dropped out of Stanford. I was almost expelled from high school for skipping all the time. Uh, I thought class was just a complete waste. Um, and so I'd always been, "There's got to be a better way," uh, to do it. And, uh, tried over the years to work. I worked with, I live in Austin. I worked with AISD, trying to reform the school system, super unsuccessfully. And then two years ago, when Gen came out, I was like, "Okay, there's finally a tool that actually can fix this." Um, that this, we are going to be able to change education for, you know, the two and a half billion kids throughout the world. And 10 years from now, we're going to wake up and education is going to be completely different than everybody in this room experienced.
And so how did the journey start? Tell us a little bit about the foundation of Alpha School.
Sure. Well, let me, let me spin back. Let me go back even a little further, just about education in general, uh, just as context, which is, you know, when you think about the big, the largest untapped resource in the world, um, it's not solar energy, it's not nuclear energy, it's human potential. Right? The most important job of society is to raise their kids, to unlock their potential. Um, there's nothing more important for a society to do. And over thousands of years, people have, societies have done it differently. Thousands of years ago, right? What you had, if you want to roll all the way back, right, to the Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, Alexander the Great, right? You had rich families had individual tutors who would coach, coach their kids. And then about 150 years ago, or so, we have our current system that was developed. And this was so that everybody could get educated, not just the rich. And this is what we all know as the teacher in front of a classroom model. Right? And it's actually one of the things that's the most equal thing on Earth. You can go to the poorest school district in India or sub-Saharan Africa, and there is a teacher in front of a classroom. The classroom is not very nice, but it's a teacher in front of a classroom. You can go to the $40,000 private school in Austin, Texas, and it's a super nice building, but it's a teacher in front of a classroom model. And so that's been going on. That's what we all know. It's what our parents know. It's all what we expect. Uh, and then about 40 years ago, and that's been 150 years, 40 years ago, the schools of education at all the universities, you know, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, they started learning science, right? The science of learning, how do kids grow, develop, and learn? And one of the first things that happened, the first, as they started researching this, was they realized that the teacher in front of a classroom model was the worst way to learn. I'm better than not teaching them, but literally the worst way to learn. And over the last 40 years, there's been just 10,000 papers that have been published about how kids can learn two, five, 10 times faster, right? Just dramatically better ways than the teacher in front of a classroom model. Now, it hasn't been cost reasons, right? The first paper that's written, uh, famous paper, uh, there, written when I was in high school, just said, "Well, this is obviously unrealistic to provide this to every kid. Just can't do it." Right? And now with generative AI and advances in technology, you can take all that learning science, package it up, and now provide it in a mechanism to every kid on the planet. And, uh, that's, I was given a talk, uh, to the ministers of education of a lot of different countries. And, you know, my, and this was two years ago when I realized it, sort of fast forward to where we are today. Uh, we're not there yet, but sometime in the next five years-ish, every kid, every four-year-old is going to get a tablet, and it is going to teach them everything they need to know in two hours a day, right? That is coming. It's going to have it. If you're an, the head of an educational system, you have to realize, what am I going to do with my educational system when that happens? Uh, as a new principal, there is one thing I've learned that the parents don't want you to send the kids home after two hours. So what do they do the rest of the day, right? It's going to totally transform how education's done because we do, there is no reason to have kids chained to a desk for six hours a day and then send them home tons of homework. Just not going to happen.
And, and you talk about giving students superpowers with AI. Do you mind expounding upon that? I mean, one, I'd love for you to talk a bit more on how you're achieving Common Core, you know, the successes that you guys have had, um, how they're learning the same amount in two hours a day. And then I'd love to know how you're using those tools to empower, you know, these great kids. How are you helping them grow in other areas outside of just that, you know, basic core education component?
Great. So, uh, we, you know, we sort of divide the day into two parts. The morning two hours, which you should think is Common Core, reading, writing, arithmetic, right? Math, science, language, English, um, and, uh, the AI tutors. The kids come in there. There is not a teacher in front of the classroom. It is literally just one-on-one. And, uh, the tutor is able to use everything taught for those who know cognitive load theory and learning science, right? It, it's relatively easy to actually teach a kid, uh, where they learn twice as much in two hours a day as sitting in class for six. So we have schools, we have thousands of kids around the world actually who use this system and are able to get through what we had to spend six hours a day, 12 years in class, uh, and they're able to crush through that at their own pace, at a dramatically faster. And then the second part of the day, uh, is all around, "What should you do?" And so what we do is create project-based life skills. And I bet if I took a survey here and said, "What are the five, three most important life skills?" I'd actually get a lot more than three. Everybody has a different idea of what are the life skills that you really want to teach a kid, right? Leadership, teamwork, grit, uh, entrepreneurship, public speaking, uh, receiving feedback, right? Whatever, whatever category it is. And so we actually have an afternoon curriculum which is all these life skills. And we create workshops, project-based workshops for all the kids where they teach them all of those skills. And so, uh, you know, for grit, you know, and we think of, well, how do you grade these life skills? Um, and so like for grit, we literally are like, "Okay, well, I guess every third grader should be able to do a Rubik's Cube, right?" So at our school, every third grader does a Rubik's Cube, right? And every eighth, seventh, and eighth grader, really every kid is a third grader. So that's some, some move fast, some, it takes, I imagine, quite some time for them to get that done.
No. Uh, so in the workshops, uh, the first time we rolled it out, this was two years ago when I first came in, parents were like, "It's impossible. My kid can't do a Rubik's Cube. That's super impossible." And one of the things you'll realize as a parent, if you can't do it, you generally think your kid can't, right? And that's just, it's just a real thumb. And back to, uh, our school, we literally have parents at the beginning of the year list out five things they think are literally impossible for their kid. And then we have the students do it during the year. And it's one of the greatest things in the world when you know, this is getting off your question, but I think it's important thing, which is one of the things you have to realize is we have so lowered our expectation of kids' capability because of the standardized school system that we just have all wrong expectations of what, what these kids could do. They are limitless. They will blow your mind. On, you know, why we're getting, uh, such amazing results is because we let the kids, we unlock them. Um, you know, back to my, you know, Alexander the Great, I think he like conquered the world by the time he was college age. And nowadays, we're like, "God, I hope my kid shows up for class." You know, it's just these. So Rubik's Cube would be an example. Uh, we have, we break it, we do six-week sessions, um, uh, with one break week between them, uh, during the year. And so at the beginning of the session, we said, "Okay, kids, there'll be a time block in the afternoon where you get to work on your Rubik's Cube." Now, we all teach them, learn to learn, right? Because it's not, so they go on YouTube and find videos that teach them how to do, you know, Rubik's Cube. And at the end of the first session, everybody except two kids had finished their Rubik's Cube. And then in the first week of session two, the other two finished. And so literally within, you know, eight weeks, seven weeks, every kid was able to do a Rubik's Cube. And the key on those, when you back to teaching kids that they can do the impossible, right? One of the things you always want to, with a kid, is teach them growth mindset. Right? You can do anything. And so what our guides do, and we'll talk about how the teacher role evolves in this world where they're not teaching seventh grade science, but our guides, right? They have what we call confidence anchors with kids. Part of teaching kids they can do things is they think it's impossible too. And then when they do that, you're able to use that to build up their confidence anchor. So the next big challenge they have, you can always remind them, was this like the Rubik's Cube thing, like where you said you couldn't do it, and then, "Oh, look, you can do it in like less than a minute now." And so you're always constantly trying to help build up their self-confidence. And you build up self-confidence not by telling kids they're great. It's actually by putting them through things where they struggle, sometimes fail on their road to success. And that is actually what leads to long-term confidence.
So what's the grit program for the seventh graders?
Oh, seventh grade, we do, uh, uh, Tough Mudder, like that big, the big obstacle course, you know, you know, we have a set of, you can imagine a set of middle school girls who don't like PE and definitely do not like rolling in the mud, right? And, you know, it's one of the things. There's, it's two, it's, um, grit plus teamwork, where everybody in the class has to pass the course and finish the course. So literally, other students will carry people who are struggling through it and bring it all through. So amazing.
And I love how you were describing how you identify and help kids really learn, like what are their definitive characteristics, what are the things that they truly love. You mentioned it with even your own daughters, how you help them both on the things that are not their strengths, like when you recognize that something is perhaps a weakness that they need to grow, and then how you build a real, uh, process to help them define self-identity and then how you lean into being exceptional at that thing. Do you mind touching on those?
Sure. Uh, so, you know, back to the, one of the things, it's amazing when you have four hours a day to actually teach kids these life skills, how much you can actually teach them, and how young they are at that age. So we start, once you hit middle school, sixth, seventh, eighth grade, uh, time frame, right? Kids are becoming independent, right? It's their first time they're not doing everything their parents say, and they're developing their own identity, but they don't know who they are, right? And then actually, in today's world, right, a lot of kids get sucked into massive screen time. I sit and play video games all day. I'm scrolling some social media all day. And so when, to the first exercise we do when you move into our middle school, uh, is what we call the, uh, values Ikigai 168. It's a complicated name, but what it is, is the kids sit down and do a values chart. Who am I? Right? How do I see myself? What do I really value? Then the second phase is, okay, uh, do the Japanese Ikigai project. For those of you who know, what are you talented at? Right? What do you love to do? And what is the world value? And how do you figure those three things out? And then, uh, and that helps them define, what do I love? What do I not love? What do I want to work on? Who do I want to be as a person? And then we do the 168-hour project, which is they literally just track every hour of their week. And the greatest day in the world is when they have to reconcile the two, um, uh, because you'll find that kids' view of themselves, yet, you are what you do, they actually spend their time completely differently. And so, to the example, my daughter came home, uh, when she was in seventh grade, after doing this exercise, and, uh, self-confidence is not one of her issues. And, uh, she came home and she's like, "Wow, I guess I'm going to be the world's best TikTok scroller, right?" And it was incredibly powerful thing because she woke up and realized, "That's not who I want to be." And for all of, for parents who have middle school kids who are starting to start scrolling stuff, one of the things that's true is kids do not want to be consumers. Kids want to be great. Right? They want to do awesome things. They want to be creators. And so after we do this whole exercise, we then have a "Be a Creator, Not a Consumer" workshop, where they all learn, "Okay, I'm not just going to play video games. I'm going to build video games," or I'm going to do something around it. I have one kid who's like, "I want to be an investor." And so he's like researching every video game stock in the world to figure out how to invest and make money on it because he likes it. Um, uh, in my daughter's case, she's like, "I have to actually go figure out how to be a creator, not just scrolling." And to this day, she's a junior in high school. She gets about five million views a day on TikTok. She has a, um, she gives safe teen dating advice and is shipping, almost shipping an AI dating coach. And that actually helps teenagers figure out how to navigate, you know, today's dating scene. Um, I think it mostly tells boys, "Be better." It's incredible.
And, and you touched on guides, you touched on how teachers evolve in this type of an environment. So, uh, you can't, we, we have no guides at who teach academics. Right? So there's no teachers who teach academics. We call them guides and coaches. Um, and, you know, the, and everybody here's, um, rolling back couple things that's really important is, first off, teachers really matter. Right? Adults who help kids grow up really matter. Um, we're not going to have the random AI bot raise your kids. But you have to be able to, every adult had one or two teachers in their life who changed their life, where it was like, "Wow." Right? And everybody has that. And, but what's interesting is it wasn't the teacher in front of a classroom model that was great. And it wasn't because they graded one of your tests really well or had that super awesome lesson plan, right? It was because they got to know you and they were motivational of what you could do and achieve, right? They inspired you to greatness, or they provided the emotional support to help you get there, right? It was either motivational or emotional support. That is actually what a great teacher is about, not, "I really am, I'm crushing the quiz grading." And so what we've done with the tutor, we move, right, the lesson plan and the quiz grading out of their job, and they're exclusively measured on how do they motivate and support kids. And they have all day, every day to do it. So during the two-hour session in the morning, when the kids are all, you know, with, uh, their apps, you know, learning the, they, we use 25-minute Pomodoros as the cycle. And so the guides will take one student out of it while the rest are still doing it and have a one-on-one, right, with every kid during the school week. And it's just, you know, and that one-on-one is, "How's your weekend? How's the soccer game go? What's going on? What are your challenges? Right? What are you worried about? How can I help you?" And they really get to know these kids at just a real fundamental level. Um, and that's what allows kids to flourish is because they know they're supported, right? And, you know, we talk about at the kindergarten level, we wrap the kids in love, right? And that's the critical part. As the kids get older, they're like, "Whoa, whoa, you know, I'm, I'm an adolescent. You know, I don't, I don't need all that." But, and, and I love, uh, talking to you about motivation and bridging the motivation gap. And I think some of these things on the surface too, are actually quite, uh, unheard of, right? The ways in which that you'd be willing to like get a kid through extrinsic motivation to grow into an intrinsic motivation. Do you mind touching on that?
Sure. So motivation is by far the most important thing in education. There's nothing even a close second. Uh, that when we look at it, um, we believe, like, like even, and just even taking, like the AI tutor, the pro edtech has failed for 30 years. You know, edtech after edtech keeps coming out and test scores keep going down. Right? There's, it doesn't work. And the problem, and the reason is, is because historically, edtech vendors, generally feel that they're the solution. Give the kids edtech. Edtech in the tech is like 10% of the solution, and 90% of the solution is a motivated kid. Right? The two things you need to do to, to educate a kid is first, motivated kid. Second, you need to put him in lessons of the right difficulty, right? You can't put kids in over their head. You put me in a med school exam, I can't read half the words. I can struggle, right? You can tell me to have all the grit in the world and try harder, and I'm not going to be able to answer the questions. Right? Roll me back to freshman bio, I'm all set. And then build me up from there. And that's actually what, uh, AI tutors and edtech does really well is figure out what the kid knows and doesn't know and put him in the right difficulty of lesson, right? Create personalized lessons for each kid. Um, and so there's that part, uh, but the real part is all motivation. And how do you solve the 90%? And so our entire school system, right, all we do, everything, my job for the last two years is all on the motivational part. And, uh, talking ways through it. Um, well, we'll take, so we call our system two-hour learning. Right? You can go to a website if you want, 2hourlearning.com. It'll tell you all the stuff. It has a big graph that says 90% of the problems, motivation. Uh, but when I first came in, right, I was, remember, I came from software. I was one of the dumb edtech guys before I became a principal. And the product was actually 2x learning. You could learn twice as much. And so I'd sit around with the kids, right? I'm sitting there with fifth graders, or remember, it's like my first week, and I'm like, "All right, guys, isn't this awesome? You guys are going to learn twice as much." Yeah, no, they don't care about that, okay? At all. Like, at all, right? There's 10%. I guess one thing, just for all these answers, there's 10% of the kids in the world who are super self-motivated. And those guys are the ones who like finish MOOCs and, you know, do everything great on their own. And those kids love it. "Oh my God, 2x learning." We have a second grader who's top 10% 10th grade math, right? But that's a real, it's 90% of the people were more like me in school, were like, "Can I skip? Do I really have to go? What am I doing here?" Um, and so the 2x learning wasn't valuable at all. And I was like, "Well, what, what would make you guys love school?" One of our core values of a school is that kids must love school. And we survey them every six weeks, right? And over 90% of our kids, every six weeks, are like, "I love school." And it's not just a, we have a secondary to make sure it's really has edge in it. We say, "Are you willing? Would you rather go to school or give up and give up your vacation?" Right? And it depends on the session, like if they really like the workshops or not, but we get over 50% of the kids, right, every six weeks saying, "I'd rather go to school than go on vacation." Um, and so I'm talking to him like, "How, what's going to make you love school?" They're like, "Less school." "Less school?" "I'm like, how much less? Like, what's a good?" They're like, "Zero." "Zero sounds really good, Mr. Lamont." I'm like, "Oh, that, that, I don't, I don't know if we can do that. We're sort of a school." Um, I'm like, "How about?" And we literally negotiated based on their, and I, they're like, "Okay, yeah, if you two hours, I would give you like, give me a solid two hours, no screwing around, right? You're going to like focus. Give me, how, how many hours will you give me?" And they're like, "I'll give you two hours if you give me four hours back." Right? The code name of a stuff for writing. And so I went to our team, software team, and I was like, "All right, code name time back. Right? Give the kids their time back because that's what they want. And you guys got to figure out how to get everybody educated in two hours." Um, and that is the single most powerful motivation that we have today is just giving the kids a time back. And so, uh, and we're down to two hours. The kids are pushing our engineering team. They get on meetings with them. They're like, "When's one-hour learning coming out?" You know, but that's that whole thing is they want the time to do the stuff they love. And so we use that motivation, which is we don't focus on love of learning, so to speak, we focus on love of school. If the, the nuance between it, because it doesn't even, that 10, 10% of the kids, you know, it's hard to have every kid love every subject every year, right? And we can teach, okay, when you're good at something, you like to do it more than when you're bad. And so, uh, when they start achieving academically, they're more interested in doing it. When they're not in lessons that are so hard they can't read the questions, right? They like it better. And so you can drive motivation through, through that element as well. But the single most important one we use is two versus four. Now, given that, we also use lots of other ones. Let's get into it. You want to get, let me give you the most important part. No, this, we can talk for, I can talk for 35 more minutes on it. Um, uh, I'll give you, I'll do the controversial ones, not the easy ones. So we'll pay kids, just straight up pay kids. And yeah, the skeptical. Yeah, I had to, by the way. So when, when I heard this, I started bribing my son to read the books I want him to read. And we have $2 books, $5 books, and $10 books. It's not just because he's like a little capitalist. He loves Legos, and he's like, "Dude, I want this Lego." My guy, a $600 Lego. It's getting, it's like, "Buy that's a lot of books." It's a lot of books. And so, you know, he reads the ones he likes, but he has a stack of dad books, which he gets paid for, and he's been ripping through them. Yeah. And so we have, we use every motivational model that you can do. I mean, you know, leaderboards and prizes and recognition, right? But the one, there's two actually of the most powerful ones that you want. Money is the most broadly one that you can use, but it's very powerful. And so we limit it to two uses of when we use money. The first is if we're trying to develop daily habits in a kid, right? Where they don't have a routine, and you are what you do. And so getting kids into a routine, where we'll pay them every day. An example of this was our high school kids last summer, went to Ukraine to train 500 Ukrainian refugees on using our, they don't have schools and teachers, so it's perfect use. You know, let's have them go there. And so they, they flew there. And, you know, before they flew, right, the refugee workers, right, who were running the camps, were like, "Oh, they love learning. They're just dying for this. You know, come help them. It'll be great." And so our high school students get there, and they start talking to the kids, and they called me. They're like, "Uh, Mr. Lamont, yeah, they, they don't really care about learning at all, you know, at all. And if we give them these Chromebooks, we did, and yeah, like the boys are watching porn. What, what should we do?" And I was like, "Well, what would you guys do?" And they're like, "Well, let's, let's use some motivation. Get some motivation problem." And so they came back and they're like, "$2.50 a day. Just pay these kids $2.50 a day to the two, two hours, because given their state, they're absolutely happy to do it and they'll crush through it." And so now there's 500 Ukrainian refugees who get paid $2.50 a day, and they crush their math. They do math and English as their two subjects.
And when you say "crush," how are they doing compared to say, American kids the same age? Like, how, if you thought about like an average, if you took, uh, e-school districts, one of the best school districts in Texas in Austin, um, they're learning faster than the kids in E-school District. Incredible. That's our benchmark. Of, we always have to beat them. Um, and so that, that would be one, pay for daily habits. The second one we do is when you're trying to change someone's intrinsic view of themselves. And so I'll use my daughter as an example, but this happens a lot. Uh, she loves being the, uh, example guinea pig. So I have two daughters. I have the older daughter who's the student and loves it, and like she's part of the 10% and reads calculus books for fun, and she's obviously not my kid. And then I have my younger daughter who very much is like, "Dad, what's the minimum I need to do? Like, what, just give me the bare minimums." And so when she hit, um, uh, top 10% academically, she came to me and she's like, "Dad, you know, I'm not, I'm not Kate. I'm top 10%. And so, you know, I'm done." And I'm like, "Oh, Kate, L." Her name's L. Like, "L, I bet you $1,000 you can get to top 1%." And the one thing L loves more than anything else is shopping. And she's like, "$1,000, Dad?" I'm like, "$1,000." And she created an Amazon cart with $1,000 in it. And every morning she'd look at that cart, and she'd do her apps, right? And she'd do her apps. And this was a good one. This is a good one for the audience because my wife did not like this. There's lots of people who don't like this, and my wife was one of them. My wife doesn't like that I bribe my son. Yeah. And it was, it was a combination of two things. One, you're pushing her too hard. She says she wants to do it, so while you're pushing her. And number two, I mean, it's just so wrong to pay kids to do this. Like, this is just wrong. I don't know what to tell you. My mom also called me and yelled at me. And so she does it though. And she hits top 1%. Right? We measure everything based on standardized tests. Grades, by the way, if you don't know, are just totally made up. Right? You should never trust a grade A school gives you. Um, and so, uh, she got to top 1%. And this is the part that mattered. Was she sat down with my wife and it's like, "Mom, I know you hated this, but you need to understand how impact, how important this was to me. She's like, I always thought I was dumber than Kate, right? Because everybody told me our whole life, Kate's smart, blah, blah, blah. And I now realize I can do everything Kate can do. I just have to want to put the work in. And I literally now see that I'm a smart kid. I can do whatever I want." It's beautiful. And that, and that transformation is available to every kid. So we now offer every middle schooler, right, $1,000 if they get to top 1%. And if you look at it, right, almost all our kids, right, within their two years of middle school, actually get to top 1%. And it changes their view of themselves, right? From who I am and what I can do. And that's one of the problems with a standard teacher in front of a classroom model is you can't do that, right? That teacher in front of the classroom model is an IQ-based system, right? Because the teacher is moving through it, and if you miss it, you miss it, right? And so pace of learning and all that stuff, it's higher IQ does better in a mastery-based system like ours, right? It just doesn't matter. It might take you a little longer, right? But everybody can get there. There is no concept. I, I never say this, and God, I'm going to regret saying this like publicly. All of your kids, every kid can be top 10%. What we call, what is the grade that is top 10% today through K through 8? The way Common Core was actually designed, right? The way the system was designed, it was designed so actually 95% of kids can master all the material, right? But that's not what our school system delivers. Right? I, the reason I hesitate to say it is I said it my first day. I was like, to all the parents, "You're right. Remember, I'm the new principal who doesn't know anything." And I'm like, "Oh, all you kids can be top 10%. Don't worry about it. You know, we'll get them there." And obviously, everybody, all the parents thought I was totally whacked and didn't know what I was talking about. Now it's two years later, and 95% of our kids are all top 10%.
Yeah, I mean, that's that's counterintuitive to me too. I always thought that there was a median and you could raise the level of the median, but then, you know, exceptional means exception to the rule. There's like a law of exceptionalism. Do you believe in a law of exceptionalism?
So, I mean, there are, there are different rates of learning. We have a, we've opened other schools besides Alpha this summer. One of which is a gifted talented school. It's, we don't test anybody. We'll take no matter where you are, we'll take kids in the bottom 10%, median, top 10%, doesn't matter for most of our schools. GT School, gifted talented school, we, you have to be in the top 10%, and those kids do like crush it and outperform. But that doesn't mean every kid at all my other schools can't be what is today considered top 10%. Um, and so there is, you know, there are differences. Just if you study cognitive load theory and how brains work, right? You know, there is some kids need fewer repetitions from when they have when you're thinking, you know, think of flashcards. Some people need to see a flashcard fewer times, five times. Some people need to say, see it 15 times, right? For it to be stored in long-term memory. And so if it takes you 15 times instead of five, it just takes you longer to learn. But it doesn't mean you can't learn the concept. You just have to learn it. Yeah, put the 15 reps in instead of the five. But that's the biggest thing you should take away is all kids with these new apps, we will, we just took over the, you know, uh, worst charter school in Austin, right? So we were asked to come take it over. All the kids are bottom 10% academically. And so when you think about a school like this, you don't realize how bad bottom 10% is. Like, this is fourth, fifth, sixth graders who can't read, write, they don't know what, you know, 6 times 4 is, just all of that. And we'll get all those kids in one year to top 50%. Like, just no chance, no, no doubt, absolutely no doubt.
Yeah. Well, you mentioned, and by the way, we had a little back and forth to our talk now, you know, we got a little groove to our our conversation right now. So you mentioned, you know, all these different means of motivation. You did not mention the one that we see most prevalent in social media or gaming, which would be random prize generation, or you know, variable feedback, loot, loot boxes. I don't know if you know, there's many of these. It's the same sort of concept as Bingo or, you know, slot machines. And it seems to be the most prevalent way to build a billion-dollar social gaming company right now. So is that intentional that that's avoided? How do you feel about it? Based on your body language, it seems like you hate it.
No, it's actually a big debate. So we had this debate this summer, which is, um, video gaming is actually, you talk to the experts in video gaming, and they know more about motivating kids and addicting them than anybody alive. And they have categories. And so we talk to a lot of the video game teams. Um, and they have white hat and black hat, you know, categories. And, uh, what you're describing, random generated loot box and stuff, are black hat because they're super addictive. And we have said, we will not use those in our educational software. We had a long culture values discussion, right, of core values. Um, you know, what do we stand for? And, you know, our core value is actually that our kids must learn. Right? They have to love school, but they must learn. Um, there's a lot of educational stuff out there where you don't really learn. And we're like, we really believe in that. And then the next one under it was we decided, but it was a big debate, was we won't use black hat. Because this is just, does the end justify the means? If I have a kid who's bottom 10%, he's in the sixth grade, he has, right, the education system has failed him. Can I put him into a black hat video game and just freaking crush it to get his education up? And we have voted no so far on that, because white hat works. So we don't need to, uh, so don't put me in pressure where I, I actually need to do the black hat, but it works. Yeah, but we don't, we don't want to do that.
And do you think that's because there can be like sort of a patterning of that type of a behavior over time that you guys don't want to, yeah, create foundationally?
Just to give you a scale of black hat, like video game companies can get 10-year-olds to steal their parents' credit card and charge $500 on it by using black hat techniques. And I'm just like, let's stay away from that. That's too much. But the, but the one other thing, and related to the video game side, the other, when I said there were two main motivations, cash was one, and we only use it for daily habits or to change a student's interest view of themselves, that it's worth it, right? It's worth $1,000. All your parents who don't think this is true, I would beg you to reconsider. It's worth $1,000. Right? We spend $20,000 a kid per year in the public school system in the US. So we have plenty of money. We give every kid, every middle school kid, one year, time, $1,000, and change their view of themselves forever, right? We can do it. It's totally worth it. Um, the second thing that is as powerful as cash to a middle school gamer boy is video games. Games. And it is as good as cash, actually, sometimes better. So, and the story around this one, we took, in January of this year, we took a bunch of kids. And back to video games, let's take a survey here. How many of you would love to send your kid to video game school? Yeah, no, nobody wants to do that at all. Zero hands. Nobody. It's really crazy. Now, I'm going to ask these following questions, and I will get you to raise your hand. Let's say your student is in middle school and they're getting ready for high school, but they're one year behind. And high school's is hard academically, and they're one year behind. And we could guarantee they could catch up. Would you do it? Then what if they're two years behind? How about three? There's a curve in, in most of our things. And so in this case, the parents raised their hand. We had a set of kids who had just come in. They were two years behind academically. And so our guide, you know, they were not super motivated, they weren't excited. And she sat down with him and is like, "What's going to do it for you?" They're like, "We want to play video games." And she's like, "All right, here's what we'll do." And so literally, they were allowed, they had to do three-hour learning instead of two-hour learning because they had to catch up. And she's like, "You will have to make up two grade levels in six months because it was January by June. And we're going to put you on this three-hour learning track, and you'll make up two grade levels by June. And in return, we'll give you 90 minutes of video gaming in the afternoon workshop block." Every single kid made it. Every single kid made up two years. And when we say "made up two years," all of them on the Texas STAR state standardized test scored above 90. We had some who literally scored a 100. And one of the kids who scored 100 in December, right, his mom was like, "I don't know if Alpha's the right school for him. You know, all these kids, you know, these high expectations, top 10%, you know, I just don't think my kid really is that smart to be able to do that, right? That's, he's just not capable." Six months later, with just letting the kid, literally nothing changed about the kid except we motivated him by letting him play what he loved, video games in the afternoon, he scored 100% on the state test, right? It's just those kind of things are all totally available. It sounds too good to be true. And by the way, the, the reason I invited you here is not that I thought it sounded too good to be true, it's because I think it is the most exciting, the most inspiring thing happening in education that I've heard of globally. Um, but I do want to talk about some of the things that you think need development, like what are the downsides? What are the things where you see this and say, "Okay, this is something that does fall off. Is it social? Is it, are there any components of, you know, child development that you guys are saying, 'Hey, because we're doing it this way, this does drop slightly or this does need more work?'" Or tell us, tell us where you intend to lean in or where you want to see improvement.
Okay, I'm going to answer the question. I want great. The biggest impediment to this whole system is the parents. The reason every kid is not going to be able to access this is because of the parents. And this is just, it's just totally true. There is, it is, parents want their kids educated the way they were educated. This is too new. It is too different. It sounds too good to be true. Um, and, and myself as an example, McKenzie Price, who actually co-founded it, and for those of you could, there's a Future of Education Instagram that she has that has all the, all the stories and videos if you want to follow it. She was actually the one, and for two years, she's like, "Joe, you got to send your kids to the school. Got to send your kids to school." I'm like, "I'm not sending my kids to the whack-out school. Like, no way. This is so weird. No, I went to Catholic school. I'm going to send my kids to Catholic school." And so my kids are in Catholic school, right, for two years. Right? And then what happened is the, our school year ended. Alpha was still in session. And our, we have girls the same age. And so I was like to my two daughters, I was like, "Oh, you want to do a week before you guys go to summer camp? You want to do a week, you know, at Alpha?" And they're like, "Oh, sure. Yeah, we'll go with, you know, our friends." And at the end of the week, they said, "Dad, we don't want to go to some summer camp. We want to stay at Alpha." And you have to remember, I hated
School, I thought it was like, I, I couldn't believe there was a human who would ever say that. And it was my two daughters, like saying, "I don't want to go to camp. I'd rather do this." And that was sort of my eye-opening thing that I was like, "Oh my God, I have to change."
But two years for me and all of that, it's the, the rate of change of people willing to change educational systems, right? You know, back to teachers, when people hear AI tutor, right? You're like, "Oh, there's no way I want that." Um, being able to separate the concept that teachers are critical, but a teacher in front of the classroom is terrible. That's really hard for people to do. Um, and so it's a big education thing. It's figuring all that kind of stuff out, um, to be able to make it broadly applicable. And it's not just so parents, it's level one, then two, it's the systemic issues, right?
I talk to superintendents of our public schools who have five million kids, right? And if you know these are, and back to financial, uh, our big cities, right? They all spend over $30,000 per year per kid, right? LA has like $37 grand per kid that they spend. Um, and so there's plenty of money, and something like 40% is administrative, right? Like a massive amount of, yeah, massive administrative. And nobody knows, and the kids don't learn anything. It's, it's terrible.
But, you know, in talking with them, they're like, "Now, explain, explain this to me. You want me to fire all my teachers? And then what do the kids do the rest of the day?" They're just like, "I, I, I, what do you? This is so far above my pay grade. I'm, I'm not making these decisions, right? Society has to make these decisions, right?" And so this is going to take time and effort to change all this because, right, this isn't an easy one. And what is the collective view of what the life skills we should, what should we do the rest of the day, right? It's a lot of big things that have to happen.
Um, it's a lot of, what I'm doing right now is, I'm literally trying to figure out product-market fit of what do we want to do. So, like, we have Alpha, which is this high-end private school where we're like, "If money's no object, like, how high is high? What can kindergarteners do?" Right? We have kindergarteners like ride their bikes five miles and, you know, do crazy, you know, crazy things. We have fifth graders who like launch Airbnbs or run Airbnbs. We have them, another group launching a food truck in Austin. You know, our middle schoolers, heard our high schoolers went to Ukraine, they wanted to go. Um, there are things that are impossible. Parents will not let your middle schoolers go to Ukraine. Um, so they went to Poland instead, and they trained 500 refugees in Poland. Um, so all of those, that's Alpha.
But we opened up a sports academy, so the afternoon is all sports. Um, we opened up the gifted talented school where the, the afternoon is all robotics, math Olympiad, writing books, you know, whatever academic-oriented things. We opened up a middle school, pure middle school video game school, right? For those to catch the kids up, uh, who needed it. We're opening up an Arts, Music, Theater, uh, an entrepreneur school. So it really is, what, what, what is going to change in the educational system and how do we get there? And I believe that's the biggest thing because this is coming, right? There will be, you know, software that you can download from the app store, and they will be wrapped in motivational frameworks, even video games that will wrap around the two-hour learning that your kid will do in two hours for fun and learn twice as much as they'd learn sitting in their class for six.
And as those get unleashed on the world, even if you're in standard school, your kids are going to wake up every day and say, "I'm bored," because I know everything that's being taught in class because I was playing this video game that taught me all this stuff. I think that's a motivator for parents is like, if it's, if every, if you're starting to see that and other kids are learning at this rate and have these tools, to keep that away from your child would be a huge disservice. So there's something that has to do with just scale that makes it inevitable where everybody essentially has to do this.
Yeah, no, we have to prove it. That's why all of our stuff is all standardized tests and proving, like, and different demographic groups. You know, we have a school down in Brownsville where it's half SpaceX kids and half local, um, scholarship kids. That's super interesting where the kids come in the bottom 25% if you're local transferring in. If you're SpaceX kids, you're generally in the top 25%. They all are in the same apps. They're all learning twice as much in two hours a day.
And how are you seeing the, the distribution of exceptional outcomes, top 1%, top 10% as these kids have been in that mixed school a little? Well, linger. Um, yeah, for the most part, in K through 8, um, it really is kids' interest versus IQ that drives the exceptional performance. If the kids want to just go through it, they can just sit, you know? So we had one kid who really likes math, right? And so he would just go home and bring his computer and his, you know, during the summer was always on his computer doing math, and he loved it. And his mom's like, "Go outside." And he'd bring his computer outside and do it, right? And he just really loved it, right? And, you know, he went up six grade levels over the summer, right? And so it really is just interest. If you're interested in something, you can accelerate and go at your own pace and become an expert around it. Um, and so, and, and so anyway, but back to the parents, that's the, that's the part is you have to prove it to parents, right? Parents need two things to move their kids from a school, generally from one school to another, which is, first, they need a reference from an adult they trust. Did this work for your kid? I don't want to be, I don't want my kid to be a guinea pig. Like, are you sure? Right? So you need a reference. It's very much a reference sale. Um, uh, credibility. And the second thing is, is they need to see a kid at that school do something their kid can't do. And that creates FOMO because every parent does not want to have their kid left behind. They want to make sure that they're doing everything they can to provide for their kids. And so if they see those, where, "Okay, look at that," and there's an adult who's like, "No, it totally works for my kid." Those are the things that we have to get out.
Unbelievable. And Joe is dedicating, you know, he, he built one of the most, an incredibly successful software company that had a really fantastic, uh, outcome. He's dedicated his time and his capital to solving this issue at scale. When I first heard about it and met you, I was basically like, "Well, anything I can do, wherever, whenever." Um, there's just not enough people in the world that, that have the capacity that are willing to go in themselves. So what I just want to applaud the fact that like, not only are you like spending money, donating money, investing money, but you literally show up every day at these schools and work on the product and the project. Um, and it's just absolutely incredible. Um, and I, and I feel greedy with your time, with your, and with your, uh, with your intellect here on this particular topic. I've been, you know, just firing questions at you now for 50 minutes, but I do want to know about the future here. I imagine you have a vision about where this goes. Um, so paint a picture for us. You know, here we are, it's 10 years from now. You know, perhaps that's too far out, maybe it needs to be five. But where do we go from here? What, what is the vision of education that you want to see?
Sure. And let me answer the, the first part though, about, uh, involvement. Education's going to change. And for those of you who are interested in it, there is nothing more fulfilling and rewarding, right, than being in education. So it is not a, you, you should not feel this is, you know, uh, hard for me. I live, I was in software forever, did really well. My days today are 10 times better than they ever were. Um, it's awesome. And so for anybody who has any inkling, we do get a lot of people who have kids who are like, "Okay, you know what? I want to move. I want to move to education." We need innovators. We need entrepreneurs. We need people who are willing to break the mold and do things differently if we're going to rebuild education. And we need a lot of them, right? There's, we need a lot. This is, education's a trillion-dollar industry K through 12 in the US. We have to go build 10,000 schools, right? Back to capital, we need a ton, right? Donations don't get this done. We need to build this, um, billions and billions of dollars. Um, it gets eaten up fast. I put the first billion in to like set this going, and you're like, "Wow, AI is going to take a lot of capital." So is rebuilding the entire educational system. Um, and so anything I do as a sales pitch to get people involved, it's totally worth it. It's awesome.
Um, and then, uh, the second question of where's it going to be, uh, the, uh, there's two dimensions. And I'll answer this part first of, and we don't know, right? Which is, what is the future five and 10 years from now in a time of AI? Like, are we preparing? We sit around and stress about, okay, delivering Common Core. We got that. We'll two hours, maybe we'll get to an hour. All the kids are going to learn that. Okay, what really matters five years and 10 years from now when AI is smarter than all the humans, right? What is that? What is that world? And what do we have to do to get kids ready for it? Because if we're, we, we got 12 years, right? Our kindergarteners, how are we getting them ready, you know, for that future world? And I, it is, it is scary because who knows of what we're doing. But I can tell you what we're doing is going to be 10 times better than what the existing system is.
And so, for example, we have, if you go to our GT kids, you know, their slogan that they use is they're like, "We're going to be the last humans smarter than AI." Right? And that's their goal, right? Is we're going to be the last ones. Um, and you're like, "They totally are, right? That's what you want." Um, our high schoolers, right? So at high school, when you get to high school, what we do is we do, um, if you want to be on the, the, uh, top 20 track, Ivy League track, we do three-hour learning where you're doing SAT prep work in the mornings. And then, but all kids in the afternoon do, uh, what we call Alpha X projects. And these are their big passion projects that they're going to work on for four years, and their Olympic level in size. Um, there's something that is being as impressive as being an Olympian. And so when you think about expectations, right? We have very low expectations around what our kids can do generally. The one, one place where we don't say, "Do believe that," is actually the Olympics. Right? We don't tag Olympians with, "That's good for their age." You literally are like, "No, they're the best in the world." Yet, every other high school endeavor, you're like, "Oh, that's super awesome for their age, right?" And what our high schoolers do is Olympic-level projects where they are the best in the world, right? They're just not athletes.
So, for example, you'll, one of our, uh, 17-year-olds just testified in at Congress around food safety, right? As the domain expert. Right? She was half the age of anybody else there. Right? She's, she's now probably gonna, uh, she just, uh, gra, she's a freshman now in, uh, at University of Austin, the new university there. And, uh, I probably won't say this publicly, but she'll probably drop out and join the administration, RFK stuff about, uh, the new FDA rules about food safety, and just because she's a world's expert. Um, we have lots of kids who do things that are considered best in the world. We want more. We want more, more examples.
And so, um, so if you take, uh, raising money, just as a simple one. So we have a, he was a great mountain biker, right? Did tons of mountain biking, and he's like, "I'm going to go build a bike park." And he went out and he raised $3 million. I met this kid, Joe, was running him around. He's, he's talking to PW Mountain now. Yeah, yeah. So Rhett Jones is his name. And he was just a mountain biker as a little freshman. And when he started, and is like, "I don't know, I don't know what I could do." I'm like, "Well, what do you love to do?" Back to following what your passion is. He's like, "Well, I love mountain biking, right?" And then, and he's like, "But, you know, there's no good mountain bikes in Austin, right? All in Texas, they all suck, right? And you have to." He went and toured all the best, you know, bike parks around the country. And this guy is, you know, he can talk to you for 15 minutes about the composition of dirt, right? And what makes a good bike trail, right? I mean, he's just a total expert because he loves it, right? And gets into it. And so, but he didn't know about building a business. And so his project, every time was, he learned how to build a P&L. And, you know, he went out and he, he emailed everybody on LinkedIn who had both mountain biking and investor in their thing, sent out 500 and got people to respond back and help them. One of the things we teach all our kids is that, uh, successful adults overinvest in them. They're like, "Go, we'll invest, right?" And so he launched a bike park. He makes like $50,000 a month, um, you know, as a high school student. We have kids, you know, there's back to you, you know, some of these ones where there's social media experts, you know, YouTube kids who make a million dollars a month, um, uh, you know, and build, are building businesses and products. We have, uh, we have a set of high schoolers, back to their ambitious project, um, is they are building an app that is going to teach kids how to stay smarter than AI. Back to this world where where they're wrapping it all together. And they believe they're going to be able to build an app. Now, they're building it for, right, teenagers, for high school kids. But I was, I saw the review of it. Uh, I, I was looking what they're building, and I'm like, "Uh, you understand that that's really good for adults too." Like, this, there's nothing like this app. This app is actually an incredible mechanism when people are worried about what, what's going to happen to AI. Like, this app, and it's not done, and they have to finish it all. But that's the kind of stuff that they're working on where they're like, "Yes, I'm going to build as a high schooler, I'm going to build the next Facebook, Twitter, you know, WhatsApp, all those kind of apps. The app that teaches everybody more than AI, um, themselves." It's incredible.
It's an amazing age to have that kind of relentless optimism matched with the willingness to learn how to do things the right way. You know, I find that once we get older, we either do one or the other typically. We're either a little naive or a lot of naive, and we have big grand ideas, or we, you know, we, we settle for 75% of the dream.
Yeah. And to the naive, they're definitely all naive, right? These are, these high school kids don't know what they're doing, but they have endless enthusiasm and their optimism for the future, right? They are looking forward to AI that gives them superpowers. They realize that AI makes them better than adults. And they all think, like, if you go to Alpha High and talk to the kids, I mean, they won't say it overtly, but they definitely believe that AI is going to wipe all you guys out, and they are going to thrive. Like, that is very much the Terminator is coming for you guys, not them. Right? And so they're very optimistic because it does, it lets them do things they can't do, and it puts them at a level of performance that wouldn't, you know, five years ago, you could, you couldn't expect a high school student to do it.
Well, they're probably right. I mean, like, I've Googled things for my grandparents. It's not the same thing. They're native to it. We're not. It's highly likely that they're right. Um, and, and, you know, I, I, we're, we're almost at time. I want to thank you. It's been amazing. I mean, can we give it up for Joe, guys? I, what, talk, where do you want to leave it? Last words, last, last words, walk-off home run, what do you want to leave us with?
For everybody here, five and 10 years from now, if you have a youngster, their 12 years of education is going to be 10 times better than what you went through. They are going to be able to thrive, right? And accomplish things that today, if you wrote down on a list, you think things are impossible, they will be crushing through all of that. AI is going to affect tons of society. The place it's going to have the biggest and most positive impact is on all our kids. It is going to transform their first 12 years into an awesome experience. And we all have a lot of work to do to make it happen. But there's nothing more important than us working on that. Thank you, Joe. Thank you all.
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