No PriorsNo Priors Ep. 133 | With Alpha School Principal Joe Liemandt
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
135 min read · 26,605 words- 0:00 – 0:27
Joe Liemandt Introduction
- SGSarah Guo
(instrumental music plays) Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, we're here with Joe Lamont, the founder of the legendary technology company, Trilogy, and now the principal of Alpha School. He wants to educate a billion kids differently and also recruit a generation of builders to work in education. Joe, thanks so much for doing this with us.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, good to see you.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Great, thank you. I appreciate this.
- SGSarah Guo
So,
- 0:27 – 2:45
From Trilogy to Alpha School
- SGSarah Guo
you have an amazing story as a technology entrepreneur. Trilogy is a legend of a company. Can you just talk a little bit about how you went from that to being principal of a school?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Absolutely. Rolling back on background, in high school, I actually wrote a paper on AI, uh, and it literally had a paragraph on neural nets that said, "This is decades away."
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And back then, it was all expert systems, ontologies and all of that, and I went to Stanford and, uh, actually was in a class with Ed Feigenbaum, the father of expert systems, ended up dropping out to build a AI company. You couldn't call it back then because AI was bad back then.
- SGSarah Guo
Right.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Uh, and it was the first product in the '90s to sell a billion dollars of AI. So we built a software company and did that for 25 years, uh, but then...
- SGSarah Guo
That helped with sales configuration-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah, it was sales configuration-
- SGSarah Guo
... and, and many things.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... and, and, and all of that, uh, and so think just classic SaaS enterprise software-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... both organic build and, and acquisitions. But then, uh, 10 years ago and sort of how we got to the school is, uh, MacKinsey Price, who's a Stanford grad who I had hired into Trilogy, uh, back in the '90s, she started a school, started Alpha, very different school, and, uh, we can talk about how I got... But for two years, I was just saying, "I'm not gonna go to your weird school."
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And eventually, though my kids went, and then three years ago when gen AI came out, I was like, "Wow, neural nets are finally here and now, uh, we can scale this." The problem with all education is it's not scalable. There's lots of, you know, point good education systems, and what my view was, "Wow, this is finally a technology that can get this to a billion kids and take the magic of Alpha, which was great for Austin's kids and my kids, uh, and get it out to everybody."
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so I'm a product guy, and I said, "I guess I have to be principal to go figure this out," and what happens when fifth graders get in a fight and what do parents yell at you about and how do you design a product from the ground up? If you just did, you know, let's start with parents are gonna drop their kids off at a school, at a building, and there's gonna be other kids in the building and there's gonna be adults in the building. What would you do to sort of unleash human potential if you had 12 years to, you know, re-envision it?
- 2:45 – 4:16
How Joe Changed His Mind About Alpha School
- JLJoe Liemandt
- SGSarah Guo
So, what was your original thinking about your kids going to MacKinsey's school?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
Like, what was the resistance and what was the-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... reason they eventually went?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Well, lots. I mean, I, uh, is... Every parent basically wants their kid educated the way they were. Right? That's what you've experienced. We've all experienced the same model for a couple of hundred years. I went to Catholic school. I didn't even like it, but my kids were going to it, right? And so they're in the local school and MacKinsey's giving this other, you know, weirdness, and I'm just like, "No."
- EGElad Gil
What was weird about it? What was different?
- JLJoe Liemandt
We... Well, she was... They were using apps in the morning, right?
- EGElad Gil
Nice to hear.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And it was... You know, it was a mix. It wasn't what we are today-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... but it was the, the, uh, formation of it.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And you're like, "Are kids gonna learn really with an app and no teacher?"
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Are you real... Seriously?" Like, everybody knows good school equals good teacher-
- EGElad Gil
Uh-huh.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... or good teacher equals good school, and you're like, "No, this app, DreamBox back then-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... was the app," and I'm like, "That's better in math?" And so you just have that hangup, and that, that's true today, right?
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
That, you know, when we look to open a new location-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... basically everybody wants to go to an Alpha once there's 100-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... kids in the school. No one wants to go when you're the first 20. Like, are you... It, it takes somebody like a MacKinsey who's like, "I wanna be a founding family," because the, you know, the bundle that is education, part of what she loved was, "I get to go find the other kids that I wanna surround my kids with."
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? And so it took her two years-
- 4:16 – 9:06
Reenvisioning the School Day
- JLJoe Liemandt
- EGElad Gil
But you're taking an even more radical approach, I think, right? You're basically saying kids really just need two hours a day with structured class work or-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
... you know, some interaction with applications, et cetera, and then the rest of the day can go to other things. Could you extrapolate on that a little bit more-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Sure.
- EGElad Gil
... because I think it's a very interesting
- NANarrator
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
... future model.
- JLJoe Liemandt
So, well, if I, I had to step back when we... just talking about how we re-envisioned it.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? There's, you know, the pillars of, of reinvention, and if you say, "If you could reinvent school and had to make it 10 times better, what would it be?" So the first one and the most important-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... and this was MacKinsey's co-founder who actually was the one who, uh, t- told me this. 10 years ago, I said, "What do I not know about school that I should know?"
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
He's like, "Two things. First, kids must love school."
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And I'm like, "Uh, you know, it's finnick sometimes."
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
He's like-
- SGSarah Guo
(laughs)
- JLJoe Liemandt
... "Nope, you're gonna learn kids must love school."
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And I said, "What's second?" He's like, "When kids love school, your expectations of your kids are too low."
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And I'm like-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... "Whoa, whoa, whoa. I have really high-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... expectations for my kids. There's no chance." He's like, "Call me back in 100 days."
- EGElad Gil
Ah.
- 9:06 – 20:13
An Example Day at Alpha School
- JLJoe Liemandt
- SGSarah Guo
Can you make that, um, like, uh, easy to picture for-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... parents or builders, uh, listening here? Like, I am a new fifth grader at an alpha school. Like, what does my day look like?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah. Your day looks like this. You come in, you do Limitless Launch. Think Tony Robbins for kids, right? Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
Okay. (laughs)
- JLJoe Liemandt
And it's all about growth mindset, you're gonna be able to do this, right? Our view, kids are limitless, they're awesome, and we need to create an environment that helps unleash them. So, you jump into that. Uh, then you literally sit down at your app. And so you're gonna have a AI tutor that's gonna be there for two hours, that's going to give you personalized lessons-
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... right? Based on your, right? Your level. Age grade and knowledge grade are two totally different things. Yeah. Right? The number of people in the average sixth grade class in this country who actually needs sixth grade content is very small. Mm-hmm.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so this is why all the test scores keep going down, is a sixth grade teacher's job is to deliver sixth grade content. Her audience, right? (laughs) Her students actually aren't ready for it. Mm-hmm. They... just to give you, like... we just had hundreds of kids join in the last, you know, couple weeks as we started across the country. And you know, my message to the parents, you know, my first academic talk to them was, "I- I hate to tell you this, and it sounds extreme, but your $50,000 private school that you were at for however many years has been lying to you." Uh-huh. "Your student academically, on our stand- on standardized tests that we use, are somewhere between one grade level ahead if they had a straight A transcript transferring in to us.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
"One level... one grade level ahead to three grade levels behind." Mm-hmm. And if they're a B-
- SGSarah Guo
That's tough. Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... and if they're a B, three grade levels behind to seven years behind." Wow, yeah. I have freshmen who are transferring in, you know, who have... can't write a third grade grammatically correct sentence. Right? And- Yeah. ... it's just... and these are coming from high-end private schools, right? And so- Yeah. ... that's the first part. The second part though, and this is where the 10 times faster learning matters, I'm like, "Don't worry, we can catch you up."
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? And this is why we get such great academic performance, is learning science engine, you know, the content, when you talk about 10 times faster, the average grade level subject combo, so ma-... fourth grade math. Sure. ... takes between 20 and 30 hours to master. That's it. So you think, there's a 180 school days, hour a day, plus you have homework, so you're thinking the average, when I'm behind, it's hundreds of hours. Yeah. We're like, "You're 20 or 30 hours." And so these kids who come in, instead of our two hours a day, they can do a third hour. Mm-hmm. And they can do it at school or out of homework-
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... if they want. And so you're literally like, well, you're really only 60 hours behind, which is 60 days. We'll catch you up to grade level quickly.
- SGSarah Guo
These are like 60 pretty hard hours, right? Because I don't know what your memory was, but-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... in elementary school, I spent a lot of time-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... like drooling-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... doodling on my desk because there-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... wasn't anything going on.
- JLJoe Liemandt
You're bored, yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
And so, so this is... this is like hard focused work. How do you get a second or fifth grader to do that?
- 20:13 – 22:56
Educating Based on Motivations
- JLJoe Liemandt
huge.
- SGSarah Guo
How universal do you think this is? Because like, let's just say like-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah, sure.
- SGSarah Guo
... I have a couple of kids, they have different temperaments, right?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
Some of them are sports oriented, they have more natural resilience, some are less so. You know, some people are more motivated about learning, less so.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
Like, how do you... How do you handle that as Alpha School for a particular type of kid?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Our job is to get this to a billion kids, so we're working to make it available-
- SGSarah Guo
Okay.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... to everybody, uh, both price point as well as, uh, personality type. And a lot of it is when we talk about love of school, it helps you design your product, which is, you know, I get all the guides. We've opened, besides Alpha, uh, we opened up different schools, branded schools for different afternoons. So I have a sports academy-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... where you play sports all afternoon.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
I have a gifted talented school, where in the afternoon you do academic enrichment; robotics, math olympiad, write a book. And a lot of it is when we, when we asked the guides, we're like, "Okay, we only had 40% of the kids love school instead of vacation. How do we juice that to 75?" You know, the GT guides-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... are like, "More academics."
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
They want a third power hour.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
You know, and, "What are we gonna do?" And that's what fires them up. My oldest daughter is like that.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Like, she read calculus books in high school, and you know, she's a, a double major at Stanford now, and she literally is like, "These STEM boys can't write."
- SGSarah Guo
(laughs)
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so she wrote a English cl- writing class that's equation based writing-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... to help teach them, right?
- SGSarah Guo
Cool.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so she can do academics all day, she loves it. My younger daughter, who's still in high school, wakes up every day, and while academically does great, and you know, uh, just took the SAT, hopefully has as good scores as her sister, uh, is like, "Is this the last academics I have to do?"
- 22:56 – 24:40
Incentives-Based Learning
- JLJoe Liemandt
your afternoon's awesome."
- EGElad Gil
Do you want to talk about that a bit more actually, like your, uh, focus on incentives, and I think you've been-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
... very forward-thinking in terms of like, just give them any incentive as long as it motivates-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
... them to do the things you want them to do.
- JLJoe Liemandt
It's-
- EGElad Gil
Could you extrapolate on that a little bit?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Sure. Um, you know, this is, once again, we do obviously controversial things.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Uh, but motivation is one of the biggest ones, where we wake up every day and say, "How do we motivate these students-"
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... "...and do it in a way where they're gonna love school and have great results and high standards?" And so... And our guides literally create all these different motivational programs. There's an Astral Codex article that one of our, uh, GT parents wrote, and you know, his summary was alpha bucks.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? Where we give them, you know, uh, bucks is the number one motivator, which that's not actually true, which is it, we'll talk about when money-
- EGElad Gil
Sure.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... matters, but time back by far is the biggest motivator of kids, where if you took our West Lake High School, uh, you know, in Austin where they do six hours a day in class, four hours a day of homework if you're on AP, Ivy League track.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? You can't pay those kids enough money to be happy.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? They are just grinding it, and if they love academics, great, but for everybody else, it's a grind and they hate it.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
But if you tell those same kids, "Look, it's two to three hours a day. You can still get 1550 plus on your SAT and fives on your APs, but then you get a- afternoons, four years of afternoon in high school-"
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
"... to do awesome stuff you love," and that's true across all of them. Now, when do we use other motivations? You know, every guide wakes up every day and says, "I have to make this kid love school and set high standards." Right? High support, high standards. What's gonna motivate the student to do it? And sometimes it's a sticker, right? Every kid has different-
- EGElad Gil
That's true.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... motivations. Some are competition, so we have leaderboards and we have people who have com- who are like, "I'm gonna win just 'cause
- 24:40 – 26:39
Standards for Guides
- JLJoe Liemandt
I wanna be first."
- EGElad Gil
What is the incentive system for the guide? Is there a differential compensation based on how well their-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
... students do? Is it some other-
- JLJoe Liemandt
So, um-
- EGElad Gil
... incentive system?
- JLJoe Liemandt
So the guides have to deliver all three commitments to all their guide group, right, and that...And it is, they are accountable for it. So if you are not delivering all three commitments, love school, 2x learning, and life skills, to all your kids, you won't be at Alpha Long.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- SGSarah Guo
So it's not a tenure system.
- JLJoe Liemandt
There's no tenure system. It is, you are here-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... right, to deliver that. Second, you know, we survey the students-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... and say, "Every adult had one or two teachers who transformed their life."
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
"Is your guide that for you?"
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And that's the standard that they have to live up to. At kindergarten, it's like, "Do you love your guide?"
- EGElad Gil
Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
But as you get older, and then there's a second one if you're gonna be our middle/high school guide, which is at middle and high school, one of the things we tell parents is, you know, the key is high standards, high support. High standards is hard with an adolescence, right?
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so our question we ask parents is, "Do you trust your Alpha guide to hold the high standards so you as the parent can provide the unconditional love and support?" Which totally transforms your relationship with your teen if you trust them. Like, my oldest daughter, you know, she's like, "No, Dad, I'm not gonna let you read my Stanford application."
- EGElad Gil
Uh-huh.
- SGSarah Guo
(laughs)
- JLJoe Liemandt
And I'm like, (sighs) you know?
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
(laughs)
- JLJoe Liemandt
And I'm like, she's like, "No," 'cause she doesn't want fe-, right?
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Teens don't want that. But for me, Chloe, who's her guide, right? Harvard grad, who wants to, you know, uh, Chloe's like, "Don't worry, I got it," right? "And it's gonna be fine." And that's what you want. The same way you outsource to a coach in sports, right?
- 26:39 – 35:12
Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivators
- JLJoe Liemandt
all of that.
- SGSarah Guo
So one of the things that was, like, most controversial to me when, uh, we were first speaking is, I feel like, you know, schooling is mixed up with a lot of parenting philosophy.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
And that makes it complicated, and I, I think there's a popular view of, like, if you give kids a bunch of extrinsic motivators-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... right? It could be stickers-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Mm-hmm.
- SGSarah Guo
... it could be time back, you're hurting their building of intrinsic motivation. They should just-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Totally.
- SGSarah Guo
... wanna do it. How do you react to that?
- JLJoe Liemandt
No.
- SGSarah Guo
(laughs)
- JLJoe Liemandt
The answer is just very clearly-
- SGSarah Guo
Okay.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... that's just not true.
- SGSarah Guo
Okay, but explain yourself.
- JLJoe Liemandt
It's a belief.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah, yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And I know everybody believes it.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And I was trying to, w- I, I pause 'cause they're like, "Should I go through, like, the research that goes into this?"
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah, I'm like, "I can't pay-
- JLJoe Liemandt
But-
- SGSarah Guo
... my kid when they're 30 to be a self-actualized person."
- JLJoe Liemandt
But no-
- SGSarah Guo
You know?
- JLJoe Liemandt
But here's, here's wh-, you're paying them, it, so let's talk about paying.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
So paying is the most controversial side. And so let's just, we hit it. We start in kindergarten, you can earn an Alpha buck. And we s- we have an economy based on this, where kids learn how to earn.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- 35:12 – 39:13
Tackling Learning Differences
- JLJoe Liemandt
- EGElad Gil
How do you think about... There's, there's sort of this broader societal context right now where, uh, you know, there- there's the sort of hate book around Coddling of the American Mind and sort of things being too easy, lack of resilience, et cetera. There's a separate thing which is sort of this mental health wave that's gone through schools, where if you look at things like autism spectrum disorder, it went from one in a few thousand to 3% of the population in terms of diagnoses. You have massive ADHD diagnoses and a lot of kids on Ritalin, which is effectively certain drugs.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
You have, uh, very strong perception of mental health crisis for teenage girls-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
... and a lot of them end up on SSRIs. And so you have a mix of medication, diagnosis, all these other things that is-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
... really the milieu for, or the context for schooling.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
How do y'all think about that in the context of Alpha?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah. All those things are true, and I believe part of it is 'cause we have this terrible 12-year system that we subject the kids to. And if you literally sat down and, you know, said from first principles, what do we expect if we set low expectation, waste 95% of kids' life, and put endless pressure on them? What happens after 12 years? You're like, "Not good things."
- EGElad Gil
Uh-huh.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so, you know, and the... a lot of the diagnoses, right, IEPs and whether-
- EGElad Gil
Sure.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... you know, and why-
- EGElad Gil
It also gives kids more time in the school to take tests, uh, you know, it actually is, uh...
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah. And, and so there's, there's this whole thing-
- EGElad Gil
Sure.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... where fundamentally what an IEP is, is trying to give your kid a personalized education. Right? Everybody knows an individual tutor is better than one teacher-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... in front of 30 kids.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so all these IEPs and diagnoses-
- EGElad Gil
What does IEP stand for?
- JLJoe Liemandt
It's, it's-
- EGElad Gil
So that people can understand.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... it's a plan in a public school-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... that gives you a... Basically, it's an individualized plan.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- 39:13 – 43:08
Alpha School Pricing Structure
- SGSarah Guo
a very awesome experience for the kids-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Mm-hmm.
- SGSarah Guo
... and very ambitious. It also sounds very expensive.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Mm-hmm.
- SGSarah Guo
So, uh, how do you ... You said, like, the goal is a billion kids.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
Um, uh, how do you pay for a billion kids-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... to have this type of experience?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Sure. And so we're talking about Alpha, and so just back to the things we're building. So at Alpha, it's a high-end branded school. So there's gonna be, in 100 cities, there's gonna be an Alpha model. It's gonna be expensive. Literally when it was designed, we said, "Pretend price is no object."
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
You know, and just- and set that there. But now we're building out other schools, right, at half the price and lower, uh, to where we actually have schools now down to 15,000, which is lower than your average public school spends-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... today. Um, and so we're- now it changes what your product is.
- SGSarah Guo
Yep.
- JLJoe Liemandt
So, for example, a sports academy is actually for kids who love sports. You don't need all these expensive workshops. You just need a field and a coach. And you can have 25 to one, right? So w- things of how- where you lower cost ratios. Schools are driven by how much you pay the teachers-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... and what's the student/teacher ratio.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Now, crazy part about the student/teacher ratio is, you know, in normal school, because you're trying to just replicate an individualized learning, smaller class size is better, you know, in a lot of cases.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
But in our schools, it doesn't matter.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? And if you actually ask our high school guides, and I was like, "Okay, I can double the pay for a guide, but you're gonna have twice as big a class size. What do you guys want?" They all vote for twice as big a class size. They want a more awesome person to help coach them.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? And so you can fix your economics and drive that. So GT school also is very cheap. (laughs)
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
They- that- the GT kids are like, "Oh, I wanna do math Olympiad and robotics."
- SGSarah Guo
(laughs) Yeah.
- 43:08 – 44:54
Education Tech at Alpha School
- EGElad Gil
builders, are you most looking for engineers? Are you looking for operations people to run these schools at scale?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
Are you looking for-
- JLJoe Liemandt
All of them. So we're releasing Time Back, which is gonna be a platform that you can build schools on. So literally, you don't have to know, you know, all the learning science. It's gonna be all packaged, right? And then you basically do the afternoon, right? And so that's what this Texas Sports Academy is. It's literally, it's coaches, you know, in a thousand school districts around Texas. So there's that, that aspect. There are set of coders and builders, which is once you start... Most of ed tech does not use learning science, right?
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Which is one of the biggest issues.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And once you say, "I'm gonna build an app from the ground up based on learning science," right, you all of a sudden can say kids can learn in 20 hours. Like Math Academy is like the best math app that's out there, right?
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And that's a great, awesome team who, you know, if you wanna learn about it, just go research all their stuff.
- EGElad Gil
Sure.
- JLJoe Liemandt
But we need that for every subject, right? And so we need builders, and parents will pay. Like one of... I'll, I'll give you one aspect on top of Time Back that's being done is there's a Triple A video game team, right?
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Who is building a video game on top of it, and this video game is gonna be both free to learn for everybody on the planet, but they also believe it'll be the most vi- profitable video game ever built, right? That there's just easily, you know, just in America alone-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... there's 10 million moms will pay 100 bucks a month to have their kid be in the top one or 5%.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so as you think about, you know, getting it down to scale, there is a software element, right, that is gonna be available for the software builders. But it is even builder. We need sort of the full stack.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
You know, you're gonna have buildings and real estate and guides and teachers, but I think, you know, I think there's gonna be just an explosion of different opportunities.
- 44:54 – 48:43
Rebuilding Education in the AI Age
- JLJoe Liemandt
- SGSarah Guo
I think for our audience-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... which is a lot of tech and business people-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... they'd be like, "Oh, well, you know, Joe's a software guy."
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
"Seems like a pretty confident executive, and he's about to run into the wall of, like, the slowness of the education system-"
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
"... and regulation and the fact that, like, most kids go to public school."
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
"And there's a bunch of restrictions around what you can do."
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
"And you can't get that time back."
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
And so how do you think about, like this is parallel system on how quickly you can make that transition or how, like, everyone should think about it?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Well, no, this is a great... 'Cause in my first year, part of when I got into this, I'm like, "Ah, how do I make a business out of this?" And, you know, I, I put in the first billion.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And just said, "Okay, this is my seed fund," big seed fund-
- SGSarah Guo
(laughs)
- JLJoe Liemandt
... "to be able to go figure this out." And, but, uh, a lot of it is I gotta get this to product market fit that then can go funding. To rebuild education is gonna take hundreds of billions of dollars. There's 10,000 buildings that need to go, be built.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? It's, it's a huge endeavor. Um, you know, every country is going to want its own LLM, right? 'Cause when you talk about sovereign AI-
- EGElad Gil
Sure, local context, yeah, yeah, of course.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... the number one use case of sovereign AI, it's either military or education, yeah?
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Obviously, education is the one everyone wants to talk about.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so there's a... The investment here is gonna be enormous, and so how do you build profitable models? So one of the things about education, you know, as you're, you know, as you're doing your whatever mental model of what's your beachhead, the private school market is huge. So the private school market in the US is already over $50 billion.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- 48:43 – 56:25
Reforming Education Policy
- JLJoe Liemandt
- SGSarah Guo
If you could, uh, convince every, uh, relevant policy or lawmaker that has to do with education of something, what would you, what would you say? Because I- I'd say like-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... well, one thing is to make the default something that is Time Back powered or, or follows this model more.
- JLJoe Liemandt
School's a hard bundle, and this is the problem, we gotta get it to public school eventually. I believe it is gonna be a long lift, right? I think it is gonna be a decade to get it to public school, and part of what we are doing is, we have to show, we gotta get the data. Mm-hmm.
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? There's all these fads in education, EdTech, one more, oh my God, it's not gonna work- Sure. ... all that. I'm like (claps hands) , "Let's go build-"
- SGSarah Guo
What data in particular? Like, academic performance data, you have.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah. Well, not a, my end's not big enough, right?
- SGSarah Guo
Okay.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Let's go get a million kids-
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... right?
- SGSarah Guo
Let's see.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And let's do, let, why don't we do pharmaceutical-grade randomized controlled trials for education? Mm-hmm. We don't do that at all, right? We, any latest fad is like, "Oh, this is what we're doing in schools these days," right? And I'm like, "No, let's actually sit here and have the government sit and do, you know, studies where we're gonna be able to say this works." Right? The learning science is there, right, where you could build products, run them through a test, right, and then be able to say, "We should adopt this wholesale." Mm-hmm. There's been a lot of things that have been adopted in the last 25 years that are terrible. Yeah. Right? That you're just like, "Oh my God, I can't." And the-
- SGSarah Guo
What's an example?
- JLJoe Liemandt
There's a new wave coming back, which is the science of reading.
- SGSarah Guo
Okay.
- JLJoe Liemandt
But how we taught most of the kids to read, you know, 20 years ago is why they can't read. Right? We'll all take modern ones, let's just take modern ones. Sure. "Okay, we're not gonna have kids m- memorize their multiplication tables." Mm-hmm. "That's bad." And I'm like, that is the worst thing you could do to a kid. Yeah. That, you know, all the cognitive load theory, right, you know, you have working memory slots and then how many reps it takes to store into long-term schema. And your working memory slots, you can't do advanced math problems. If you're in the middle, if you have limited working-
- SGSarah Guo
If you're spending it trying to...
- JLJoe Liemandt
Correct. Yeah. If you're in an advanced math problem and you're doing seven times eight, and seven times eight- Yeah. ... to you is still a calculation-
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah. ... right, you're doomed, right?
- SGSarah Guo
(laughs)
- JLJoe Liemandt
There's just, there's no way around it. You'll start making careless errors. Sure. You know, I, I have plenty of stories around this. All the kids who transfer into our school from, you know, public and private do not know their memorization ta- their multiplication division tables.
- SGSarah Guo
It's considered bad now, I was aware, yeah? Okay.
- JLJoe Liemandt
It's considered terrible. Yeah, yeah. And, and so you're like, "Let's go back to this." And it's just a fad, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a bigger wave coming, there's a bigger wave coming, which is the current school system does not know what's about to hit it. ChatGPT, first of all, I, we don't even get into the technology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chat is literally the worst thing in the world. If you give kids ChatGPT in school and academics- Uh-huh. ... 90% will use it for cheating. Uh-huh. It is a cheat bot. It is not a chat bot. Sure. It is terrible. Uh-huh. And so, like, in our academic two hours, there is no chat functionality. We've tried and the kids all jailbreak it and get around it. Yeah. And, and so, the, it's terrible. And so kids are knowing less and less, and the current system is not set up to stop that. Yeah. Writing is prompting. Kids write one prompt and they think, "I'm a writer." But writing is thinking, right? And the best way- Yeah. ... to re-write, to learn something long term deep and re-write, restructure your schema is writing, and no kids are doing that anymore. There's also a whole set who are like, "Well, we don't need to know anything," right? "We don't need facts in our brains- Yeah. ... because ChatGPT..." Th- there was a wave with Google years ago- I think there's some teachers like that now too, honestly. Yeah. And they're just like, "We don't need to know that." Yeah. But here's the problem, the n- this next sentence out of the same parent's mouth is, "But I want my kid to critically think." Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And that concept, there is no learning science that will support that concept. None. You know, if you have a LLMs who try to reason with no facts, we call it hallucination. Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
(laughs)
- JLJoe Liemandt
And that is basically what kids are doing. If you don't give them a fact base- Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
And you ground in-
- 56:25 – 58:58
Ed Tech as a Product
- SGSarah Guo
before we run out of time, can we talk a little bit about, like, where ed tech does matter, if, if you even considered ed tech, like, where you are on the product today and, um, what ambition do you have for it to, like, be better, uh, for engineers and researchers, whoever else would go well for you?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah, I mean, the, the problem with ed tech today and why it's failed and nobody wants to invest in it is you're trying to sell to a school system-
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... who actually doesn't care about academic outcomes, back to the bundle.
- SGSarah Guo
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And you can't change the, the metrics that matter. And so w- you can't get any money for it, so there's no, right, there's no ARPU, uh, and then s- endlessly long sales cycles. And then second, your product's actually not that good. Sorry, ed tech guys. It's just not that good. And go rebuild a product based on the concepts of learning science and build an awesome product, right? Have a much higher standard of what your product has to do, and that, I believe, can change things. Like, you know, the fact Math Academy, right? How many math apps are there? A zillion of them. I mean, the results that you get with Math Academy are just step function different than everybody else. Um, you know, it only takes 28 hours for fourth grade Math Academy, 26 hours for fifth grade, 22, right, for sixth and seventh grade, I mean, to master the material. But there's... All the other math apps don't do that, right?
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
But he has a 500-page book on the learning science behind Math Academy.
- EGElad Gil
Uh-huh.
- JLJoe Liemandt
The... And so that concept, right? If you're not... You have to go back and rebuild your product based on these fundamentals that just ed tech never adopted. Um, and I believe then... The, uh, second one I would do is in the meantime, 'cause the school, schools, straight to schools is a failed model, parent willingness and propensity to pay for education that their kids love is enormous. So this is back to the other side of the market. It doesn't matter what your income is. Parents will pay 10% of AGI, right, of their income on their kids' education. Societies pay 5%. The, I mean, it's a $7 trillion industry. We spend a ton of money in this country, and be... If you have a solution, right, that, that kids love to engage in-
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
... right, that does deliver awesome academic outcomes, parents will pay for that. And we need builders who wake up and say, "That's what my job is," not running the bureaucracy at, at, you know, the school boards and all that stuff.
- 58:58 – 59:45
Fixing Gaps in Education
- JLJoe Liemandt
- SGSarah Guo
So there's more flexibility with kids that are struggling in the public school system. If you're gonna be more aggressive in that, what else would you do?
- JLJoe Liemandt
The number one thing that I would do is the 100 for a100 program that we do, which allows kids to go back and master, right, all their basics, right, no matter what their, their age grade and knowledge grade are different, that program that we run, we need to run that for everybody in America. And for $400 maybe $500 of incentive, remember, average education, right? We spend lots of... We spend up to 20 grand a kid. 500 bucks, we can totally fix and change the trajectory and all these bad test scores and all of that by making sure we're motivating the kid to go back and do this.
- 59:45 – 1:01:49
Why Education is Joe’s Mission
- SGSarah Guo
Why is this your mission? Um, like, you have kids who have successfully gotten through-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... you know, old system, new system, right?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
Um, or are almost through, in the case-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- SGSarah Guo
... of your younger daughter. Um, uh, you know, you're financially independent. You've built a company before. Like, why go all the way wade back into this, uh, mess of a, of a very hard space?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah, uh, because it's awesome. So I, I obviously had a good career beforehand, and three years ago, my last three years in principal, so this would be my last message to the builders out there. I did fine before. It was, it was, it was good. There was nothing to complain about. The last three years have been so awesome, right? There is nothing more important for a society than raising its next generation, right? It is the definition of whether it continues. And kids are awesome, right? And when you sit and say, "We can transform what their decade's going to be like or their first 12 years or even beyond it," right, the, the rewards you get out of this are just 10x, right?
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
It's just... And we didn't even get in to... The students' stories coming out or the parents' stories, you know, um, you transform lives, and so if you say, "What am..." You know, my kids now are gone, right?
- SGSarah Guo
Mm-hmm, yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so I spent the 20 years with them. I was, you know... And then now, it's like, "What am I gonna do my next 20 years? This is gonna be the best 20 years of my life. It's gonna be awesome." And, uh, and so I believe what we do need, it- it's societally important and we need to go get builders like this to say, "We're gonna bring new insights, new ways, even business and capitalism, to education." And I- I'm- I couldn't look forward to, you know, uh, more than I do.
- EGElad Gil
Joe, this is incredibly inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us today.
- SGSarah Guo
Thanks, Joe.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
- SGSarah Guo
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