Peter Attia MD366 ‒ Transforming education with AI and an individualized, mastery-based education model
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
120 min read · 24,415 words- 0:00 – 1:29
Intro
- PAPeter Attia
We're spending $1 trillion on K through 12 education, but our ROI is quite low. Why are we doing so poorly?
- JLJoe Liemandt
The standards just keep going down. If you're a B student, you are from three years behind to seven years behind.
- PAPeter Attia
Where did this virus infect us?
- JLJoe Liemandt
The best analogies we always use that parents totally understand is sports. Everybody in sports is like, "If you're not doing well, go back and do the basics." You think it's the current material-
- PAPeter Attia
Yep
- JLJoe Liemandt
... but it's your pre-reqs, right?
- PAPeter Attia
It's your foundation.
- JLJoe Liemandt
It's your foundation. It's so easy to fix. When you use these, you know, learning science-based AI tutors and the apps that we have, kids can learn 10 times faster.
- PAPeter Attia
You would still say that 95% of all eighth graders in the United States-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Could be what today is considered top 10% performance.
- PAPeter Attia
Yep.
- JLJoe Liemandt
The most important part of education is a motivated student. Two-hour learning is motivational for every kid on the planet. Our competition is Fortnite and TikTok, and we need to use things like Gen AI to create such compelling content for kids.
- PAPeter Attia
They've created a narrative that says, "I can't do math."
- JLJoe Liemandt
Once it becomes this mastery-based system, it's a decision, not an inherent capability, and there's this mental view of, "Oh, I guess I am a smart kid."
- PAPeter Attia
It's like the kindling that leads to the fire.
- JLJoe Liemandt
What's the simplest unlock to fix education in America? It would be this.
- PAPeter Attia
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. [upbeat music]
- 1:29 – 5:59
Joe’s early interest in AI & how he quit school to build Trilogy
- PAPeter Attia
Joe, thank you so much for making time to come over today. It's nice once in a while to have a guest who is local and doesn't have to travel so far.
- JLJoe Liemandt
No, it's great. I super appreciate it.
- PAPeter Attia
You know, look, people are probably wondering like, you know, how does this sort of tie into health and medicine and, and this is a topic that's a little bit about, out- outside of that, but, but really it's not because it's, where we're ultimately gonna go is education, and you can't have a great system of health and medicine if you're not educating, um, kids today, right? The, the, the people that, you know, are learning today are gonna be the ones taking care of us. Uh, so I think everybody should have a vested interest in this, in this process. Of course, also many people listening, um, have kids, um, across various spectrums of learning. But I think before I get into that, your story is just so interesting, and I know you don't really like telling your story, 'cause I know this 'cause I know you so well, and all you wanna do is talk about the work, but I'm gonna force you to tell your story a little bit. So where'd you grow up?
- JLJoe Liemandt
So, uh, moved around, I was born in Minnesota, and I moved around every couple years, uh, and alm- mostly up and down the East Coast. Um, my dad worked for General Electric, and wherever they had a factory, uh, whatever town, we'd, we'd move there.
- PAPeter Attia
You obviously did very well in high school, and you wound up at Stanford. So what, what were you, what'd you, what'd you major in?
- JLJoe Liemandt
I majored in econ. Uh, I did not graduate. I dropped out. But I would've been, uh, uh, an econ major. I mostly picked it 'cause it was easy, uh, in the, in the Stanford curriculum.
- PAPeter Attia
So w- w- uh, what year were you in when, when you dropped out?
- JLJoe Liemandt
So I would've been class of '90, 1990. Um, I would've been, uh, and I dropped out between junior and senior year. I, I was, uh, I'm sure my junior year professors were like, "He's not really engaged and probably misses too many classes." And, you know, for me, and just a little bit on the background was, you know, when I was in high school, I wrote a paper on AI, and, you know, one of the parts of the, the paper was about expert systems and old school AI, not what we know today. And, uh, there was a part, like one paragraph called neural nets, which is sort of today's-
- PAPeter Attia
Yep
- JLJoe Liemandt
... AI. And it was like, this is decades away. And so I then went to Stanford, and literally I was in a class with, uh, Professor Feigenbaum, who's considered one of the fathers of expert systems and old school AI, and he's just talking about how this is, you know, you can build these incredible systems, and they'd be worth, you know, millions of dollars, you know, if you could figure it out. And so, you know, f- uh, some classmates and I, we dropped out, you know, and started, uh, Trilogy. And the story around that was just, it was the first AI company, we didn't call it AI back then 'cause it had a bad rep, in the '90s to sell a billion dollars of AI products. Um, and so that's how we got our start, um, and eventually leads to, you know, today's story.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah, so, so y- y- again, you, it's, I always find it amazing when people are dropping out, like with one year to go, right? It's sort of like, why didn't you finish it? But you must have a strong conviction if you're saying, "I'm gonna forego my Stanford degree-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... to go and start this company that can't, it can't wait a year to do this," right?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Sure. Well, there's, and so back to this story, 'cause I, I had, you know, my dad, there's a famous Forbes, uh, headline that's like, "You're a moron," 'cause my dad was very clear what a moron I was being by dropping out.
- PAPeter Attia
[laughs]
- JLJoe Liemandt
And, you know, it's, the, the issue was I felt there was a time to market issue.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
It was a race, right? And I was just like, I, I'm sitting in Spanish class, [laughs] I don't care, right? And my market's gonna run away without me, and there's this huge opportunity to go build this company, and it just, it's that tension where you thought... Now, with 20/20 hindsight, it took us over three years to build the product, and we thought we could do it much quicker. And so there wasn't a time to market issue, and with, with, with hindsight, I could've stayed. Um, but back to that pressure, I just felt it. I didn't wanna miss it. I had to go do it. And so that's what actually led to the, the dropping out.
- PAPeter Attia
And did you guys come and set up shop in Austin right away?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah. Well, not right away. So we dropped out and did the whole, you know, we couldn't raise funding. Silicon Valley back in the late eight- n- '80s was not giving money to dropouts like us. And, uh, but we literally lived in a garage. You know, we had, you know, classmates who would like have a house, and we're like, "Can we rent your garage to live in it?" Uh, but then, uh, in '92, we moved down to Austin. Actually, John Lynch, who was one of the co-founders, was like, "Look, you know, if we're gonna be poor, Aust-" Back then, Austin was cheap. [laughs] It was like, it's a lot cheaper than Palo Alto, so let's go move down there. And so that's actually what led us, led us down here, uh, to Austin.
- 5:59 – 11:47
Joe’s first encounter with Alpha School & how it sparked his journey into education innovation
- PAPeter Attia
When did this idea of finding your next, you know, is, I guess it, is it, uh, is it David Brooks who wrote that book, The Second Mountain, right? So if your, if your first mountain was, was Trilogy, this incredible business, which really we're not gonna say much more about other than the fact that it basically created an, an unlimited essentially war chest of capital that you were then able to go and deploy to your second mountain, which is this passion around education. Y- yes, you always had an interest in AI, but when did these two become the next-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... frontier for you?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Come together. So, uh, back to education, so, uh, 10 years ago, 11 years ago now, uh, McKenzie Price started Alpha in Austin, and, you know, it's this b- still radical idea back then, you know. And one of the things I've learned as principal of Alpha is that parents want their kids' education to be however they were educated, and I was the same way. M- I went to Catholic school. My kids are in Catholic school, you know, and McKenzie's like, "Look, look at this great new school I got. It's gonna be awesome," you know? [laughs] And I was like, "Uh, McKenzie, I'm, I'm... That's weird." Like, at, when she started, it's literally in some guy's garage, I'm like, you know, her co-founder, and I'm like, "I'm not going to the weird school. Sorry." And it took her two years to actually convince me to move my daughters over. And, you know, they sampled it one time and literally loved it, you know, and they came back and said, it was, they did it after their Catholic school got out before they went to summer camp, and they came back and they're like, "Dad, we don't wanna go to summer camp. We wanna still go to Alpha." And I didn't like school enough to wanna-
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah, you weren't gonna miss summer for school
- JLJoe Liemandt
... at that. I mean, that sounded crazy to me. So anyway, I was like, "Okay, that's actually a really good sign, and we should move over," and that was 10 years ago. [lip smack] Then how I... But my discussion with McKenzie always was like, "This is awesome, but it's not scalable."
- PAPeter Attia
A- and, and yeah, just what did Alpha look like 11 years ago-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... when you first peered behind the curtain?
- JLJoe Liemandt
The other co-founder, Brian, right, and he had this philosophy. He had these rules. Like, when, so when I sent, moved my kid over to Alpha, I said, "Brian, what are the two things I don't believe about education that I need to understand?" He's like, "First, kids must love school. They must love school." And I'm like, "Sort of spinach sometimes, dude. Like, no, I, I..." He's like, "You're wrong, and you, you'll figure it out." And I was like, "Okay." And then his second is, "Your kids can do so much more than you expect." And I'm like, "Oh, I'm, I sort of have really high expectations." He's like, "They're gonna blow you away on what they can do, and your expectations are too low." And so, you know, he was, you know, uh, setting it up. It really, it was 20 kids, right? They weren't in the garage after two years but, you know. It is alternative. They would use a set of apps, right, to do academics, but, you know, they'd have br- you know, the teachers, right, would help academically if needed, um, and then they would have all these life skills. They'd check charts, um, and life skills, so it was some academics and then workshops and life skills, and that was, you know, 10 years ago.
- PAPeter Attia
And the 20 kids that are in there are-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... what grade/age range?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah. They're gonna be from, uh, they were probably second grade to fifth grade was probably the range, sixth grade, somewhere around there, and, you know, and they're clustered sort of like the one r- room schoolhouse, right? And, you know, you go in, and it is crazy. Like, he's like, "Oh, they're doing spelling bees." I'm like, "They're walking on their hands. You know, they're doing handstands across the room." And he's like, "Yeah, watch how they do it," and literally they would, you know, have to bi- try, they'd try to walk across the room in handstands but recite all the words on their spelling bee as doing it, right? And could they make it all across? And the kids were just having a ton of fun, right? And, uh, I was always like, "Uh, are they really learning?" and sort of all the academic side, but, you know, testing showed they were.
- PAPeter Attia
And what was the state of technology? What, what w- you, you referred to some apps-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... but what, what was the state of educational apps 11 years ago?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah. They were, um, there was things like Dreambox and, uh, Khan Academy was out, and-
- PAPeter Attia
Okay. So they were static. I m- i- static in the sense that, um, um, th- they weren't adaptive, I guess, is maybe a better word.
- JLJoe Liemandt
They weren't ada- uh, th- or they're, the, the, the problem with old ones, and ev- actually even a bunch of them today, is, you know, now we know with learning science, you know, all these much better ways to do it. Their standards of mastery were too low. Um, uh, their, their implementation of learning science was too little, you know, if, if you look at them. But they were good enough that you could, you know, get your way through. But back to some of the problems, like when my oldest, you know, first took her seventh grade test, um, you know, standardized test, she failed it all. [laughs] You know? And so-
- PAPeter Attia
Sorry. This is after being in the Alpha program?
- JLJoe Liemandt
This was she had been in the Alpha program-
- PAPeter Attia
Yep
- JLJoe Liemandt
... and with, with those apps.
- PAPeter Attia
Got it.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so the apps were, you know, janky and not all there, um, this is before I got involved, uh, except as a parent, and, you know, she failed her seventh grade, you know, test and standardized test, state standardized test, and you're like, "Oh, wow."
- PAPeter Attia
So something, there was a mismatch.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And there's mismatch. They just, you know, you can use apps, you know, and people say, "How does Alpha get all these results?" 'cause there's a lot of people who try to use these apps, and you're like, these apps have gaps and holes, and, you know, figuring out how to change that was a lot of what, how I got involved and, you know, what I've been doing the last three years.
- PAPeter Attia
So your foray into this is obviously then, in this logical way, through the experience of your own kids. I wanna
- 11:47 – 21:00
America’s declining K-12 performance & the hidden power of mastering fundamentals
- PAPeter Attia
just take a step way back and talk more about education in general.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
So I, I, I don't think anybody listening to us now is unfamiliar with the idea, uh, although this is, it's not particularly popular at the moment. We have enough other things that are going on in the world that have people up in arms, but it's, it's sort of cyclic when people sort of look at the data and realize that the United States is not doing well in, uh, primary and secondary education. Um- Or I don't know if those are the right terms, but whatever it is up to K to 12.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
Whatever. I don't know if secondary is considered college, but we, we start to do pretty well-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... in college, right? Uh, relative to the world. But, but getting to college, we're not doing well, and it's, it's, it's... This is further, um, I think the, the, the point is, is further made when you look at the dollars in to results out. So I, I think we're spending, what? $1 billion, or pardon me, $1 trillion on K through 12 education, which is about one-seventh of what the world spends, and of course, we don't have one-seventh of the population.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Mm-hmm.
- PAPeter Attia
So there's a huge mismatch there. Um, but our ROI is quite low. So it, it's actually kinda parallels the healthcare spending thing, right? Where we, on a per capita basis, we spend more on healthcare than anybody else, and yet we're actually not producing the best life expectancy. So let's dwell on that for a moment. Why does the United States spend so much money on K through 12 education? Um, and maybe more importantly, why are we not getting the results, at least if we believe we're measuring the results correctly?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
If the results are to be determined by these tests that-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... all the OECD nations take-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... why are we doing so poorly?
- JLJoe Liemandt
That's a really complex answer, but there's, there's a set of them, which it is, it is true, right? Our academic performance continues to go down, uh, across it. As an example, there's this test, a, a NWEA map test. It's a nationwide test. You know, when I was a kid, I took an Iowa test. This is eq-equivalent one. You know, millions of kids take it, and they just updated their 2025 norm table. You know, the last one they did, it's, is 2020. Um, you know, every five years, they update the benchmark, and A- America knows less now. So your average eighth grader in 2025 knows less than the average eighth grader in 2020.
- PAPeter Attia
Which knew less than the one in 2015.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Who knows less than the one in 2015.
- PAPeter Attia
Yep.
- JLJoe Liemandt
So, you know-
- PAPeter Attia
You can't just blame COVID on that.
- JLJoe Liemandt
No, no, no.
- PAPeter Attia
Like, this is a-
- JLJoe Liemandt
It just, it's going down
- PAPeter Attia
... continuing trend. Yep.
- JLJoe Liemandt
It's a, it's a continuing trend. It's continuing to go down. There is one actually anomaly, which is, uh, in both the 20... When from '15 to '20 and '20 to '25, there's one, one group who actually goes up, and that's your 99th percentile. So the top 1% academically in America in K through 12 continues to increase, right? Those are your Ivy League-bound kids continue to go up. Um, uh, now, but everybody else is, is, um, uh, going down. Things are getting easier in tests. You know, the, the AP tests in high school that you take, you know, they renormed them in the last couple years, and they norm up against college kids 'cause it's like, okay, if you take an AP test, that's like a college class.
- PAPeter Attia
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? And so they say, "Well, what do college kids know?" And they're like, "Oh, college kids know less, so now our AP test is easier."
- PAPeter Attia
Hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? And so it used to be at Alpha, if you were gonna be in the honors track, you had to get a four or a five on an AP. Now we're like, "Oh, you just need a five," [laughs] because the fours are too easy, right? Just the, the standards just keep going down. And, you know, I'll, I'll give some more data just, you know, I just gave the academic talk. Um, we had hundreds of families at Alpha across the country. We have campuses now everywhere. And, you know, start the last couple weeks, and so they all come in, they take a placement test. You know, and I got up in front of all the parents, and I was like, "Here's the message, and it's gonna worry you, but you should take away that your, you know, $40,000 private school, they've been lying to you." Which is, if your s- student has an A and you've been getting straight A's on your transcript, that student in our tests, right, is anywhere from one year ahead, that's great, to three years behind. This is an A student who's three years behind, and when we talk about three years behind, if they're a seventh grader, that means they're missing a significant number of questions on the fourth grade test. If you're a B student, you are from three years behind to seven years behind. So you've been paying your private school-
- 21:00 – 30:30
How traditional time-based grade progression undermines later learning, & how mastery-focused instruction can transform student achievement
- JLJoe Liemandt
is hierarchical, right?
- PAPeter Attia
Yep, yep.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And this is back to mastery, which is we've, why we do poorly. We've given up mastery in this country.
- PAPeter Attia
Why?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Um, we're a time-based system, right? At the end of third grade, you're moving to fourth grade, and at the end of fourth grade, you're moving to fifth grade, and we don't hold kids back. We don't, we just, we've said we're just gonna move kids through no matter what, um, 'cause it's time, 'cause there's all these other social issues, right? And you know, oh my God, I can't have my kid hold back, the pressure on the school to relax the standards. You know, 80% of kids at Harvard get an A now. You know, it's just grade inflation. You know, grades look like this.
- PAPeter Attia
Yep.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Learning-
- PAPeter Attia
Standardized test scores look like that.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah. Right. And it's just, we've just got, and for whatever reasons, we've done it, but in a time-based system, you know, and here's part, just even grading. You know, there's this concept that, you know, okay, you got a 70, you know, you can pass. An 80 is a B, right? That's great. Okay, my kid's a B student, 80. The problem is, you know, if you only have 80%, you know, knowledge, you're creating all these holes, and it all compounds where eventually, and it starts to when you hit algebra or chemistry, right? That you're, you think it's the current material-
- PAPeter Attia
Yep
- JLJoe Liemandt
... but it's your prereqs, right?
- PAPeter Attia
It's your foundation.
- JLJoe Liemandt
It's your foundation. And you know, we talk a lot about parents, 'cause a lot of this is, you know, we all grew up in this time-based system and just the old system, and so this new way is very different. But the best analogies we always use that parents totally understand is sports, right? Just like game film.
- PAPeter Attia
Yep.
- JLJoe Liemandt
We're like, "Review your tests. Figure out what's wrong." Mastery's the same one, you know, which is if you're the point guard and you lose the ball 20% of the time going down the court, the coach isn't like, "Let's work on the advanced stuff." They're like, "Kid, let's learn how to dribble," right?
- PAPeter Attia
We don't, we don't need to worry about dunking yet.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Correct.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
No dunking. Like, let's focus on, right, get up to 99%. Get to mastery, that you know how to do the basics. Everybody in sports is like, "If you're not doing well, go back and do the basics." Well, academics is the same way, and if you apply that same logic, right? But in a time-based system with a teacher in front of a classroom, right, you can't get every kid to mastery, right? And that's when we get into, like, the new solutions and, and why we get these crazy, you know, kids can learn 10 times faster. It's because we're able to get out of a non-mastery, non-time-based syst- sys- or a, a non-mastery time-based system that has a teacher in front of a classroom, right? Teachers are great. Teacher in front of the classroom's bad. Um, you know, that, that dynamic. And so, uh, but and to your point, hierarchical, you know, chemistry is just algebra with advanced word problems, right? Physics is-
- PAPeter Attia
Yep
- JLJoe Liemandt
... literally calculus-
- PAPeter Attia
Yep
- JLJoe Liemandt
... with advanced word problems. C- you know, algebra is basically advanced fraction manipulation. You can give kids a fraction test and predict their algebra score, right? And then fractions are how's your division and multiplication tables? Do you memorize them to fluency? And so it just keeps going down the whole track, you know, all the way down. And so part of what you have to do to fix the system, right, is figure out age grade. Oh, wait, I'm an eighth-grader in algebra. And knowledge grade. Wait, I don't know my fractions are different. And so, you know what a, a teacher in the front of a classroom, though, it's not their fault, right? I'm a teacher. I'm an eighth-grade teacher. What do you teach? Eighth-grade material.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And I have kids who don't, who d- who don't, who, who don't know some third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh material. What do I do, right? And this is why, you know, and, um, so many people hire tutors, you know, after school at private schools, right? There's, you know, um, it's crazy. We have all these people go to private schools and hire after-school tutors 'cause the school doesn't teach them, and you know, the tutor's just like, "Okay, I'm gonna go give you the earlier grade level material." That's it. Um, when we talk about kids, all these hundreds of kids coming in who are, you know, b- Three years behind, seven years behind. The second part of what I tell the parents is, "That's freaking you out 'cause nobody wants their kid this far behind, but it's so easy to fix." The remediation on this stuff is no time at all, that when you use these, you know, learning science-based AI tutors and the apps that we have, kids can learn 10 times faster, 10 times faster. So when you actually look at material, there's 180 school days, right? Hour a day plus homework, so couple hundred hours. Most of grade, that one subject, right, per grade level takes our Alpha kids between 20 and 30 hours to finish an entire grade level to mastery. So you can take fourth grade math and be like, "You got 26 hours, kid. You do an hour a day of homework, you're 26 days away," right? 22 hours is seventh grade and sixth grade, 22 each, right, for math.
- PAPeter Attia
And Joe, would this work if, and again, as just as a-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... thought experiment, if each student had one teacher, the private tutor?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
If you could put a private tutor in front of a student for 22 hours over the course of, you know, whatever-
- 30:30 – 39:00
Motivation as the key to high-level learning: how Alpha School fosters motivation with its “Timeback” model & leverages AI to accelerate learning
- JLJoe Liemandt
it's, it's back to, you know, the most important part of education is a motivated student. And, you know, for us, 2X learning is not a motivating idea except for, you know, sort of the top kids. But two-hour learning is motivational for every kid on the planet, right? And that's, if you had to say our, my biggest unlock was that realization. And, you know, the product became codename Timeback, give the kids their time back, because that is the most precious, right? That for 12 years we waste kids' time. We know that kids sitting in a lecture-based classroom, right, retain maybe 5%.
- PAPeter Attia
It's that bad?
- JLJoe Liemandt
It's that bad. It's that bad. And so, like, being 10 times better, you're like, "I need them to remember 50%," right? It's just, I... There's still, you know, it's, it's that bad. We know it's that bad, right? It's not personalized to them. It's not to a mastery, all these bad things. Um, and so we're wasting their 12 years, and you wonder why kids don't like academics, and they're not disengaged and all these things, is we're wasting their time. And so for this, it's like, great, just they're gonna learn two, uh, in two hours. Now they're still learning two X, right? That's just not the part we pitch. And so they're learning two X in two hours, and then you free up the rest of the day. And so we get all our kids, right? Our scores at our Alpha school, we're all top one percent, right? Academically, our, our classes are top one percent in the country. There's no school academically who's as good as Alpha, um, you know, in the country. And the reason is, is using this model, right? And we've, we're just implementing all these concepts that have been written in these learning science papers for 40 years.
- PAPeter Attia
Is there, is there a challenge to the intensity that's required in those two hours? So I'll give you an analogy. So I get asked all the time, uh, "Hey, Peter, look, I've read that, you know, I could just do one set to failure once a week for each body part and get most of the benefits of, you know-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Mm-hmm
- PAPeter Attia
... grinding it out for, you know, 10 to 20 sets per body part." And I say, "Look, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but there's some truth to this, right?"
- JLJoe Liemandt
Mm-hmm.
- PAPeter Attia
Like, if you could truly do one to two sets to absolute failure, uh, per exercise, yeah, you're gonna get great results. And they're like, "Well, Peter, why don't you do that?" And I, and I say, "Look, to be honest with you, it's really fricking hard to bring that level of intensity to every single set of every single workout every time you do it." Um, and there are a bunch of other reasons that I actually kind of like being in the gym or whatever, but, but the point is, um, it's true, you can get great results in much less time, but for many people, the intensity is not something they're willing to rise to.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
And, and so I guess the similar question is, if for two hours a day a kid can learn what a traditional kid is learning in six to seven hours a day and actually do it better, um, is there something that they have to be able to bring from an attention span perspective that is very difficult or not something that is, you know-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah. And so the answer is, it's not difficult, but they have to wanna do it. So motivation. So if, you know, if you talk to an educator, there's two things you need. You need a motivated student, and you need to put them in lessons of the correct difficulty.
- PAPeter Attia
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Not too easy, not too hard, right? That's back to... And ed tech, and why, you know, may- taking this a little bit, why doesn't ed tech work? Right back to these apps and-
- PAPeter Attia
Yep
- JLJoe Liemandt
... you know, test scores keep going down, but everybody keeps buying ed tech. And the answer is ed tech does that second piece, that 10% piece of put them in the right, you know, lessons very well. A- our AI tutors do it even better. It can figure out very easily what a kid knows and doesn't know and say, "Age grade, eighth grade, knowledge grade, fourth, give them fourth-grade lessons," right? And so that part's great. Now, the second part is, to the point of my parent meeting, how do I get them to engage with the app, right? 'Cause I'm spinning in the chair, I'm not paying attention, I'm talking to my friend, I'm scrolling TikTok, right? I'm doing anything except focusing on it. And so what is their motivation is 90% of the solution. And for us, that's why Timeback is so valuable, which is the kid has to engage with the apps for those two hours, or they don't get the rest of the day. They don't get their time back, right? They'll just sit there wasting their time. I mean, we literally in our app have a waste meter.
- PAPeter Attia
[laughs]
- JLJoe Liemandt
And it just coaches the kid, right? The AI, like, w- we can get into the AIs and stuff and-
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah
- JLJoe Liemandt
... chat, chatbots are terrible. Like, ChatGPT rolled out to America, students, they, 90% of kids use it as a cheat bot. It's all cheating. That, we don't have a chat interface in ours. But one of the things our AI does is it watches the kid's screen and coaches them up, and is like, "Look, you're scrolling the article and guessing. Not gonna learn that way," right? "You're skipping this," right? And it's gonna coach them of how to learn better. And if you have a motivation for the student to actually learn better and be effective, they're very happy to do that, right? We have a sports academy that we just, we just opened 10, 10 of them around Texas, and these are middle schools, right? D1-bound athletes, you know, kind of... And they come in, and they do the two hours in the apps, right? And then once they hit it, you know, and they go green, where they've done the lessons, right, they get to do sports all afternoon. And so you can take kids who are like, "I hate school. I skip school." You know, absenteeism is huge. And when they get to do that, all of a sudden they're like, "I'm totally motivated," right? We, it's only been a couple weeks that we've been open, but you get notes from all the parents who are like, "My kid always was sick, never wanted to go, everything. Now he's waking me up and is like, 'Let's not be late.'" Right? And it's because they have the motivation to actually learn. And so now, now y- so that's the most important, you can do that for everybody, right? And motivation really, really does matter, and Alpha's designed around how do we motivate kids. And the biggest motivator's Timeback. We also use a lot of other ones. Um, but that's, that's the biggest thing that makes our system work. And when then when you talk just is there also extra juice of the intensity-
- PAPeter Attia
Mm-hmm
- JLJoe Liemandt
... right? We measure do kids get through our apps 90 or 95% first time right, right? Where we're not making the lesson hard enough, where we wanna make sure the lesson's not too hard, where you don't have to have too much intensity.
- PAPeter Attia
Yep.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? Now, we also have a-
- PAPeter Attia
What is the sweet spot? Is it 90% correct?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Between 90 and 95% is where-
- PAPeter Attia
Oh, it is that high. Okay
- JLJoe Liemandt
... first time right.
- PAPeter Attia
Got it. Okay.
- 39:00 – 45:59
Core principles of learning: how high standards, mastery-based instruction, & supportive struggle foster both academic excellence & personal growth
- PAPeter Attia
back and talk a little bit about education science, right?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
You've alluded to it a couple of times. Um, tell me what is, what 90% of people would agree with, right? There's nothing that, I was gonna say is tell me something that is unambiguously true about education science.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
But, but let's, let's soften that a little bit and say tell me something that 90% of people who study education, study the science of learning would agree with.
- JLJoe Liemandt
90% would agree that individualized tutoring and a mastery-based standard is the best way to teach kids, right? It's, it's dramatically more effective than a time-based system. Um, that the concepts in learning science, zone of proximal development, uh, spaced repetition, right? Um, you would get, uh, the testing effect, right? That actually asking kids, active learning is better than passive learning, right? That retention of sitting passively in a classroom is the worst way to teach a kid.
- PAPeter Attia
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Um, they're gonna all of those things. Um, what else are really well normed? You know, cognitive load theory, um, is a newer area of learning science that's, you know, sort of developed in the, started in the '90s, and this is the how many working memory slots do you have, and then how many reps does it take to move from working memory slot, you know, short-term memory, basically working memory slot to long-term. Uh, they're all gonna agree conceptually.
- PAPeter Attia
By the way, it's so interesting to me that this is, that there's any dispute around that when you see the effects in sports. Like, the, sports illustrates that, I think, more than anything else. Um, you look at the difference between, like, a Tom Brady versus an exceptional quarterback who's, or a very good quarterback, and it's the, it's the processing speed, right? It's not, I mean, it's not how fast or how far he can throw the ball. It's his processing speed that sets him apart.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Mm-hmm.
- PAPeter Attia
It's w- it's the cognitive bandwidth of what he's doing, and it's this, this is... I mean, it's actually the same in, in Formula 1, right? If you look at what separates the very best in the world from very good, it's, it's cognitive bandwidth. It's the guy who actually doesn't have to think at all about driving-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Mm-hmm
- PAPeter Attia
... and can still drive at the limit while he can use all of his cognitive reserve for strategic decision-making and, and overtaking, stuff like that. So-
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so, like, that fluency stuff.
- PAPeter Attia
Just ex-
- JLJoe Liemandt
There's no c- there's nobody in learning science who's like, "It's better if they don't memorize their multiplication tables," even though our school system, you know, has abandoned that, and that's, that's, you know, pri- privates, it's not like, oh, these private schools are, you know, the private schools are bailing on it, too. It's not just-
- PAPeter Attia
But why was that decision made?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Um, back pressure from, you know, m- there's-
- PAPeter Attia
That's parental pressure again?
- JLJoe Liemandt
My kid is not happy. Like, one, one of the, so I, there's three things I tell parents-
- PAPeter Attia
So this is another one of the sort of coddling of the, you know, th- th- this is just-
- JLJoe Liemandt
It is. And he, there's three thi-- to come to an Alpha school now, I have a conversation with parents. I've sort of tried, you know, when he gave you those two things. But I've added a third, a third one to it, which is, you know, first, your kid must love school, right? Really love school, and we measure, literally measure, would you rather go to school or go on vacation? Like, super high standard, right? We should have kids love school for 12 years, right? And they're gonna be there your childhood. Why, why do we not have that standard? The second is your kid can learn in two hours, right, twice as much as sitting in class for six, right? Your, your kid can crush academics in just two hours a day, crush it. That's the second thing you have to believe to come to Alpha. And the third, and this is where the controversy parts, but it's true, you know, is the key to your kid's happiness is high standards Right? And that's the one that a lot of people do not believe, that they think the key to my kids' happiness is low standards. And the problem with low standards, I can't get kids to love school.
- PAPeter Attia
Where did this virus come from?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
Where did, where did the, where did this virus infect us?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Well, a, part of it is if you actually... You know, the parents wanna protect their kids, right? It comes from parents from a, a good place-
- PAPeter Attia
Mm-hmm
- JLJoe Liemandt
... which is I don't wanna see my kids struggle and fail on their road to success. They don't wanna see that. Like, I, I talk about, you know, this cycle.
- PAPeter Attia
Mm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
As a, as a principal, I can tell you, kids struggle, fail, sometimes cry, on their road to success if they're supported by a caring, loving adult, right? That loop, if you ask any child development expert in the planet, right, you can type that all in ChatGPT, is the key to kids' development, the key to their self-confidence, the key to their resilience, right, the key to their growth, that they go through a, uh, the cycle of struggle, fail, right, on the road to success.
- 45:59 – 52:35
Breaking down self-imposed limitations with foundational skills, defined time requirements, & a mastery model
- JLJoe Liemandt
if you move to-
- PAPeter Attia
And, and yet just reflect on that for a moment, Joe. Think of all the kids that are in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade who are good students i- in other domains.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
They're doing well in English.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
They're doing well in history. They're conscientious. They work hard. But they, they've created a narrative that says, "I can't do math."
- JLJoe Liemandt
And t- let's... I'll, I will dive into that, and we'll get into the, the second thing of how we un- We also use our motivation model to undo the conscientiousness limitation. You, you have to use more extrinsic motivators to let people who aren't high conscientiousness still perform like somebody who does. So those are our sort of magic unlocks on those two things that we think can fix education. But to your math thing, I gotta, I gotta give these examples. So, you know, it's an epidemic of kids who come into middle school, uh, you know, predominantly girls, I have two daughters, right, who come in and they're like, "I'm not a math and science girl." And there's just, like, society's, like, accepting it.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Like-
- PAPeter Attia
That's right
- JLJoe Liemandt
... that, and, uh, okay, let's go read all the learning science papers about how middle school girls can't do math science. Okay, there are none.
- PAPeter Attia
[laughs]
- JLJoe Liemandt
There's none. That doesn't exist, right? There's no such thing. But it's this total meme-
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah
- JLJoe Liemandt
... that they, they believe. And so part of what our job in middle or when they transfer in high school is to fix that, right? That there's this concept of, oh, I'm an art girl, or I'm an English girl, or whatever it is, and it doesn't... Girl, boy, it, there's just, there's no difference. And so, like, our-- We have, uh, some seniors, uh, this year. You know, the first one, uh, she's, uh, her big project that she does at Alpha, at Alpha you do these big Alpha X projects, she is doing the first all-teen, uh, produced, created musical for Broadway, right? She sourced all the song and s- songwriters off, uh, TikTok. She can fill a 1,000-person venue. You know, she's trying to raise it up so she can do it. So she'd be, you know, "I'm an arts, theater girl," right?
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
790 math SAT. We have another girl, right? S- These are seniors. She's, you know, uh, trying out to be Miss Teen USA, right? 790 math SAT, right? Third girl who is doing a, uh, this is my daughter, right? She has a, you know, uh, I call her TikTok girl. You know, she's got millions of likes on TikTok and tons of followers. She's building a, uh, a app to teach teen boys how to ask girls out on dates 'cause teen boys are terrible at that. Um, right, top 1% SAT math, right? That there's this concept that these people can't learn it, and you're like, they all can, right? There's just no... Now, what do you have to do when they come into middle school? They do. They don't know the multiplication tables, right? They don't know the prereqs. They are gonna struggle in algebra, right? And so you're like, "Okay, let's go back. Let's fill 'em up." And all of a sudden, once you fill the holes, all of a sudden they can do it. And then once you know algebra, right, you're like, "Oh, I can do chemistry Right? And I can move from, you know, it's 'cause y- K through eight science, there's no math, actually.
- PAPeter Attia
Right.
- JLJoe Liemandt
It's all just memorizing facts, you know, igneous rocks and, you know, the planets and stuff. Um, once you get to high school, that's where, you know, biology's still more memorization, less math, but then chemistry and physics are all math-based, calculus and, and algebra. And so you have to get these kids the prereqs, but then all of a sudden they're like, "Oh, chemistry's pretty fun," right? "Oh, I- now that I know calculus and I can crush Calc BC." All our kids in high school, right, if you wanna be on the honors track, it's five on Calc BC, right? And totally doable, right, for everybody. And so this whole thing, you know, our freshmen coming in, by the end of the freshman year, they're 1410 on the SAT, right? Which, you know, 1350 is top 10%, right? I mean-
- PAPeter Attia
And these are freshmen.
- JLJoe Liemandt
These are freshmen. Like, and most p- schools don't -- I mean, that's better than most juniors, seniors. Most don't publish their freshman results, right? And, uh, and we can get freshmen there. You know, and w- you p- and, and once it becomes this mastery-based system, how high you go becomes a decision, back to your effort, it's a decision, not an inherent capability. And so when you break that link, like alpha kids are just like, in a mastery-based system, they're like, "Oh, it's just more work." It's not, "I'm not smart enough."
- PAPeter Attia
Yep.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? And that is the unlock that we have to have and why we have to move to a mastery-based system, because you just need kids to be like, "Oh." So if you wanna be in the non-honor, if you're in normal Alpha high, right, 1350 is the minimum SAT, right? You gotta get to it, top 10%. If you wanna be in the honors track, it's 1550. And we're just like-
- PAPeter Attia
1550.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
I mean, that's top 1%.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And, but it's, it's just a decision. Do you wanna do the work to get to 1550, right, from 1350, right? And so this-
- PAPeter Attia
So it's just that, "Look, I'm willing to put in this many more hours this year."
- 52:35 – 1:01:00
Using short-term extrinsic rewards to help students overcome limiting beliefs & ignite lasting intrinsic motivation
- JLJoe Liemandt
And now, back to incentives, there's some kids who are like, "Do I care that I'm caught up?" But it's easy to incentive to wanna catch up, right? And you can figure out, okay, what do we have to do? You know, one of the things we, one of the things Alpha's known for, whether infamously or not, is we use extrinsic motivators, right, to drive-
- PAPeter Attia
Use money.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah, use money.
- PAPeter Attia
You pay kids.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Timeback is the most important one. It's more important than money is, you know, sort of the, you know, the Westlake track where you gotta do s- you know, honors track where it's, you know, six hours a day and e- eight zillion homework hours. I don't think you can pay a kid enough to, like, love school by going through that. Versus, you know, we're two hour-- Actually, and, and just to be clear, we're two hours a day for a non-honors track. We're three hours a day for honors.
- PAPeter Attia
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Back to the 1550. It does take more time. Um, but we will take middle school kids. Like this is, this is a middle school active program we have. Kids come in, and we will pay them $1,000 to get to top 1%. And, you know, uh, I, there's a lot of stories, right, around this where kids view, "Look, I can't do that. It's not ca- I'm not the smart kid. I'm not the math, science girl. I can't," whatever it is. And well, if you get there and do these lessons, and we're just gonna keep giving you lessons, and you do the work, you're gonna get $1,000. You know, you're, the, we'll pay kids, right, coming in middle school, $1,000, um, to get to top 1%. And the point of this is, you know, what's even more important than the academic knowledge, it's their internal view of themselves that changes. That kids come in and say, "I'm not a math, science girl. I can't be top 1%. I can't do this." Whatever limits they have. And a lot of education when you talk about it is, you know, holistically, you're trying to take limits in kids and release them, right? And have them understand you're limitless. You can do all this. And this is the best way academically we've found to do it. And so they come in, and the AI's gonna say, "Here's all the lessons you need to do to get to top 1%, and just go through them." And that motivation will get all these kids to top 1%. And the number of stories we have, you know, I have one, my own daughter, but all, you know, the Alpha families where their student is like, they come back and they're like, "I didn't realize I could be top 1%, and my personal self-confidence and view of myself, that I had to do hard work," right? You had to do the work, right? Now I'm, you know, I, I-- And then once you take a middle school kid who's top 1%, as they go into high school, they're not gonna give it up Because, and there's this mental view of, oh, I guess I am a smart kid, right? Or I'm a capable kid, right? And that unlock is so valuable. And so for us, that's when, you know, we think, you know, juicing it with money. I mean, we spend 20 grand a kid in this country per student, right? And you're like, in middle school, give a kid $1,000 in order to have them realize there is-- that the height, there's no limit.
- PAPeter Attia
Why does, why would most people, I assume, listening to us have sort of an uneasy feeling about that? Like, they can't reconcile-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... what you just said, which is, well, wait a minute. On the one hand, I know we're spending $20,000 per year per kid on these kids, and we're getting nothing for it.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
And you're proposing we give them a couple of those thousands of dollars-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... strategically to incentivize half of the equation, which is them having the motivation to do this, and yet that's gonna make a lot of people feel uneasy. Why?
- JLJoe Liemandt
So there's a view, uh, that there needs to be an intrinsic love of learning for it to be pure, and that if you-- it has to be intrinsic, not extrinsic, and that if you're buying it, it's sullied and not good, right? It's just, it's wrong. It's fundamentally wrong. And, you know, and that is a common view.
- PAPeter Attia
Are there any data that would support one view being favorable to the other? How would that be studied?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah. There, there is a set of papers that have been written that show that, you know, if somebody is not intrinsically motivated or is intrinsically motivated and you pay them, they lose intrinsic motivation. Now, that's not the case that we're sitting with. We have kids who aren't motivated, who aren't intrinsically going through it, right? They need the boost. Um, and if you actually ask Alpha kids, and maybe we'll do a study someday, no parent who has their kids at Alpha thinks, "My kids lost their intrinsic motivation." If anything, it's the opposite because now they think they're capable. And those papers don't talk about is how much of the issue was, "I didn't think I was capable. I now realize I am, and I get this crazy intrinsic boost around it," right? I-- my youngest daughter, again, would be this example, which is, you know, she came in to middle school, you know, at, uh, she hit top 10%. And-
- PAPeter Attia
By the end of eighth grade.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Sorry, this was before. This is going into seventh grade.
- PAPeter Attia
Okay.
- JLJoe Liemandt
She was top 10% coming in. So she'd been there, but she's like, "Dad, I'm not like my older sister. I'm not top 1%, right? That's just not who I am, right? I'm TikTok girl," you know, if we're gonna... And I was like, "You know, uh, you know what I know you know love more than anything is shopping."
- PAPeter Attia
[chuckles]
- JLJoe Liemandt
"And I'll bet you $1,000 that you can't get to top 1%." And so she literally would fill her Amazon cart with $1,000 of stuff, and in the morning, she'd then look and look at the lessons she had to go through, and she'd do it.
- PAPeter Attia
[laughs]
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right? She'd just grind through it. Now, back to this thing. It's, you know, we had a lot of family discussions around this because my wife, right, she was like, "Wait, there's two things," and this is, most parents are, are like this. "There's two things here. One, you're setting 1%, top 1%," and most parents are like, "That's too hard," right? And, you know, "Why are you putting that pressure, you know, for, on, on the kid?" And number two, "It doesn't feel right to pay 1,000 bucks to get this." This is just, we're all brought up that there's something wrong. And so, and, but back to the thing. So she does it. She hits top 1%, literally buys everything. But then she sits down, right, with my wife, and she's like, "Mom, I know you didn't like us doing this, but you need to understand what this has done for me, which is I never thought I was as smart as my older sister, and now I realize I can do everything, right, that she can do, and it's totally changed my internal view." Right? And that element there of, right, her, and now, in fact, she's also the one now who's top 1% on the SAT trying to decide if she wants to do the extra work to get a perfect score, right? That there, that change in their view of their capability, that unlock is so valuable, and I believe we should do this for every kid in America, right? That, but that's the dynamics of why people don't like it, and it's, you then just have to decide if you can use extrinsic motivation, whatever it is. Buy them concert tickets. Buy them, right, go shopping. Whatever, whatever motiv- screen time, video game time, whatever it takes to get the kid to realize, "I can go be and learn all this and be top 1% when I previously didn't think that," right? And I go through that struggle, fail, sometimes cry on the road to success loop that then unlocks my human potential, and right? The point of education beyond academics, right, you're trying to unlock human potential, and this is just a great, easy way to do it, and it w- it's now available in a time-based system.
- PAPeter Attia
And it sort of primes the pump.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
That's the thing. You don't, it nece- it's not necessarily something that has to happen indefinitely.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
It's, it, it's, what I, what I think makes sense here is that it's, it's an unlock that then creates a new state of awareness that therefore becomes self-perpetuating.
- 1:01:00 – 1:05:53
$100 for 100: a simple but powerful incentive system that helps students fill academic gaps & master fundamentals
- JLJoe Liemandt
Uh, you know, and since we're on this of paying, I'll give you my, my second one, which if I, um, uh, the Secretary of Education's coming down next week to meet with McKenzie a-around Alpha and stuff, and if there's one thing To fix education in America, just the, what's the simplest unlock? It would be this, which is, and it's all around whole filling and, and paying kids, which is, so when I first started, um, I wanted kids to go back and whole fill, right? We call it whole fill. You go back and do your pre-reqs. And so I'm sitting down with seventh graders, the boys, and I'm like, "Guys, you could get 100%..." Or, or before that, I'm sitting down with them, and you know what does not motivate a stu- a seventh grader? Doing fourth grade.
- PAPeter Attia
[laughs]
- JLJoe Liemandt
No kid wants to do that, right? No one wants to be going back. And the only people who want it less than the kid are their parents.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Their parents are like, every parent in America has been trained, "My kid needs to be at grade level," right? Which once again, the learning science does, right, that is not right. Get your kid to master the basics, and if it's pre- previous material, give it to them. Um, and so I, and I tried to convince parents, "Look, your kid needs to whole fill if we're gonna get this thing, whole thing working and stuff." And I basically ended up giving up on the parents. And so then I went to the seventh graders, and I was just like, "Okay, here we go, guys. You could get 100 on the Texas STAR," you know, our state test. They're like, "No way, Mr. Liemandt." I'm like, "No, no, no, I'll, in Century I'll give you $100 bill for 100 on the test." They're like, "That's still impossible." I'm like, "No, no, no, there's a catch. Any grade level." They're like, "I can take a kindergarten Texas STAR and you're gonna give me 100 bucks?" I was like, "Well, it starts in the third grade." They're like, "I'm in." They take the third grade Texas STAR, they get 100, I give them a $100 bill. They're like, "Fourth grade?" I'm like, "Absolutely."
- PAPeter Attia
Go for it.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Same thing, 100, get 100.
- PAPeter Attia
By fifth grade, they're running into trouble.
- JLJoe Liemandt
They got 75 to 85, right? They get 75 to 85, they, uh, there's holes. And I'm like, "Well, do you want the AI tutor to generate the lessons you missed?" And they're like, "Well, let me see how many it is." They're like, "I can do that in a week." They're in, right? Get the 100. Then s- you know, and o- on the way, sixth and then seventh grade. And for $400-
- PAPeter Attia
[laughs]
- JLJoe Liemandt
$400, you can take kids-
- PAPeter Attia
And you brought a kid up to grade level
- JLJoe Liemandt
... up to grade level, but more importantly, they all think they can get and know they can get 100 on the state test, which used to be only the GT kids and the smart kids get it. Like, if you survey incoming Alpha parents and say, "Can your kid get 100 on the Texas STAR?" Fewer than 10% say, "Yes, they can." After you've been at Alpha a year, 90% of kids are like, "I can totally get 100 on Texas STAR," 'cause they've done it, right? Our building, you know, over there, you know, gets more 100s on the Texas STAR than a school district of 100,000 kids, right? And it's just because we have a mastery-based system where you tell them. So our advancement now, and is built into our system, is we'll actually advance a kid if they get over 90, right? What is our mastery standard? It's in the 90s. So you have to score on the state test above a 90 to move on to the next grade level material, but we also have 100 for 100. And so the kids are like, "Okay, well, I guess I'm just gonna get the 100 'cause I wanna get the $100 bill." And so you have this concept where, and it just changes them, where I could advance-
- PAPeter Attia
That's an interesting experiment in and of itself.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Mm-hmm.
- PAPeter Attia
It's, it's sort of what we would call a natural experiment because it's not randomized-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... which is if the kid is motivated, um, basically just to do the bare minimum-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right
- PAPeter Attia
... they're gonna just take the 90.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right. And so you, so, and if you make it 100, it's just back to there's a little reality of bringing your parents and everybody along with you on-
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah
- JLJoe Liemandt
... this crazy journey we're on. And so that 100, it lets us out of it.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Which is, you know, when you get to the higher material and you've done 90, our app's still gonna go back and fill those 10% [laughs] 'cause it's the best way to learn. But it's just get them advanced, let them go and, and do that. But the 100, the kids all just do it because they know they can, and it just gets the right mindset going, which is why our kids literally, for the SAT, everybody thinks, you know, oh, you can't get perfect scores. They're like, it's just some extra work, right? Like, fives on APs. People are like, "That seems impossible." They're like, "Oh, how many hours is it?" Right? It takes 75 hours to go through, like, AP World History or AP, uh, US History. It's 75 hours. And they're like, "Oh, I got, you know, 15 hours left to get a five." And so you just change the concept that these... You know, now there's some upper bound where there is, you know, conceptual understanding and everybody can't get there. But K through eight curriculum, what would change education in America, we can totally do this.
- PAPeter Attia
So let's now
- 1:05:53 – 1:19:48
How AI is the pivotal technology that can finally allow proven learning science to scale & unlock unprecedented student potential
- PAPeter Attia
talk about the, the AI piece, which we haven't really explicitly talked about.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
And, and you, you, you, you said something to me once that I think was actually remarkable, which, which you used, you compared it to medicine, right? You compared education to medicine in terms of an unlock. So, so talk a little bit about that.
- JLJoe Liemandt
You know, if you go back, you know, to, um, the sciences, right? And whether it's biology or medicine, chemistry, physics, all of these had periods in the wilderness, I'm sure doctors bloodletting and things like this, but there was the invention of an instrument, right, in each of those that allowed more precise measurement that unlocked and inflected the science, right? And medicine had theirs. I don't know which one you thought.
- PAPeter Attia
I think I w- yeah, when, when I've heard you discuss this, I think it's the light microscope.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
If you were gonna talk about one instrument that took us from what would, what I describe as the Dark Ages of Medicine-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right
- PAPeter Attia
... 1.0 into Medicine 2.0-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right
- PAPeter Attia
... which is where we are today, that inflection point came primarily around, without the light microscope, it couldn't have happened.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote very eloquently about this in his most recent book, The Cell. But basically, until we could actually start to see microscopic organisms-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right
- PAPeter Attia
... we couldn't really handle germ theory.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
And until we could eradicate germ theory, we couldn't really live past about 40 on average.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
Right? There were just too many people dying too young. And so That one piece of technology unleashed an, an entire change in the way medicine has been practiced, which of course has spread out-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... far beyond infectious diseases. But, but that's, I, I think-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... it's impossible for me to imagine a scenario whereby we are alive today in the way we are without that.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right. So, and so when you, when you look at AI, that learning science, these papers have been written for 40 years, but they all start with, this doesn't work with a teacher in front of a classroom time-based model, right? You need to change it up.
- PAPeter Attia
So you had the solution, you had the conceptual solution for the last 40 years-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yes
- PAPeter Attia
... on how to fix education.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
But there's been no technology to make it happen.
- JLJoe Liemandt
You can't, exactly.
- 1:19:48 – 1:22:21
The emergence of generative AI that catalyzed Joe’s billion-dollar investment in education
- PAPeter Attia
About three years ago, you sort of decided, like, that, you know, you gotta step out of Trilogy, right? Like, it's this incredible company you've built. Um, are, are any of your co-founders still there? I think it's your-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... your sort of-- Are they-
- JLJoe Liemandt
No.
- PAPeter Attia
No.
- JLJoe Liemandt
So I-- People who've been... So three years ago, sort of the transition was when gen AI came out, right, which was three years ago, uh, neural nets are here.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Finally. And, you know, that was an unlock for me where I had seen McKinsey's great school and seen, you know, my kids in there, and there were issues like my daughter failing her seventh grade tests and stuff, where the apps aren't good enough, you know, and all those issues. And I'm like, "Gen AI will allow us to take the magic of Alpha, make it better, and scale it to a billion kids," right? 'Cause there's, there's lots of good educational things that just don't scale.
- PAPeter Attia
Yep.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And so what this was was my realization.
- PAPeter Attia
This was your light microscope.
- JLJoe Liemandt
This was it. Light microscope's here. Okay, I've been doing software. So I went to my team, who've been there for 25 years. I'm like, "Guys, for 25 years you've been telling me you're better than me. We'll see. I'm gonna go be a principal." And so they run it. You know, I'm now, you know, chairman, and I am now literally the worst shareholder you've ever seen, 'cause I'm like, "Guys, I need more cash flow. I need more dividends to fund this whole thing." You know, McKinsey needs $300 million to open up all these schools, you know. Where are we gonna, you know, get it for? So-
- PAPeter Attia
So how much of your money have you spent on this now?
- JLJoe Liemandt
So I took on-- Three years ago, I took a billion dollars out of Trilogy sort of as my first lump sum and said, "I'm gonna go use this billion dollars to figure out what I can with education and fix as much as I can." Now, what's crazy about that is a billion dollars is not enough to fix education. It's a trillion-dollar industry, and we obviously have made incredible headway. But we have to go back to building schools, right, back to McKinsey. She's opening up, you know, 25 schools, 25 Alphas around the country, right? She needs hundreds of millions of dollars for that. We're opening up these sports academies, which needs hundreds of millions. We're opening up 500 gifted, talented schools, right? So, you know, the total CapEx that's gonna be required. The, the second part is I'm gonna do this for the next 20 years, right? I got 20 years in this, right? My job is to go fix education, right, and make-- get it to a billion kids and give kids their time back, right? Change, change-- Use the light microscope, use AI to totally change the first 12 years of, you know,
- 1:22:21 – 1:35:11
The path & obstacles to integrating Alpha’s AI-powered model into mainstream education
- JLJoe Liemandt
a billion kids.
- PAPeter Attia
Now, at, at what point, Joe, did the two systems have to merge? Because one of the reasons that you're having to deploy such insane amounts of capital is because you're basically rebuilding things that are technically already there. I mean, we have-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... buildings. We have-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... schools. We have guides. They're called teachers. We have all those things, but you're creating a new system of infrastructure. But I assume you don't wanna scale-- You don't wanna have to build the scale to a billion. At some point, this way has to merge with the existing way.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yes.
- PAPeter Attia
At what point does that merger take place?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Well, my view is there's a point of if I had perfect randomized control tr-trials with, you know, back to a billion kids, I don't know, do I need 10 million kids going through it for everybody to be like, "Okay, this looks like it works."
- PAPeter Attia
But the bar is so low. I mean, I guess that's the thing that's amazing to me, right? When I think about, um, places in medicine, right, where massive clinical, clinical trials are necessary to-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right
- PAPeter Attia
... to, to change the direction of something, usually when the state of play is so bad-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... So let's, let's talk about an example, which a- again, I don't use this example to be offensive, offensive to-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... people that are within education.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
But, like, let's look at HIV in the '80s and early '90s. It was a death sentence. Like, the bar was pretty darn low when HAART therapy, highly antivi- high re- highly active antiretroviral therapy, came out in '95 or '96. And that, [clears throat] I mean, that's it.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Like, boom.
- PAPeter Attia
We just changed the protocol. Now, of course, pharma is easier than education in the sense that it's, you know, a simple intervention. It's a, you know, it... But who's pushing back-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right
- PAPeter Attia
... when you say, "Hey, guys."
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
"What if we just prove this out in a million kids?"
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
Like, why do I need 10 million kids-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Well, I mean, or-
- PAPeter Attia
... to prove this? Especially if they're-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Let's start with 25-
- PAPeter Attia
Especially, yeah, especially if they're spread out over a broad enough socioeconomic background.
- 1:35:11 – 1:44:08
Reimagining schooling from the ground up across five key dimensions
- JLJoe Liemandt
Uh, and then, and then, then the second part is, you know, and part of what Alpha is, is because it's this high-end expensive stuff, you're like, let's re-envision what a school is from the ground up, right? So we sit around and, you know, I'm a product guy. I'm like, what makes, what would make a school 10 times better than, you know, old school that, that we went to? You know, and so we, we sort of have five dimensions that we do, and the first is kids must love school, and we literally measure more than vacation. Like that has to be it. And we get 50-ish percent of kids, depends on the vacation, depends on the workshop if it's really good. 50% of kids who are like, "Yeah, I wanna, I wanna go to school instead of vacation." I have plenty of parent-- Well, my highlight as a principal was, you know, in, in May, uh, this year, two-thirds of the high school kids sent me a note and they're like, "Can we keep Alpha High open this summer? 'Cause we don't wanna take a summer break 'cause we love what we're doing." Right? The girl doing her, you know, Broadway musical. She's like, "This is the-- I, I wanna keep coming to school and doing it," right? And so, you know, we're, you know, back to my world where I was not into school and I was, you know, shirking and my dad, you know. I'm like, make a place where kids love school. Um, and vacation's a good standard. Number two, kids need to learn 10 times faster. We just, we need an engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. And so our AI tutor based on learning science teaches kids 10 times faster, right? And between five and 10, and we'll get it up, and you know. So that's the second part so that you can, then that gives you the chance to give the time back. The third dimension of a school is what are, if you-- Academics isn't everything, right, to developing kids. Everybody knows that. What are the life skills that every parent says, "That is what I wish I knew"? And some are, you know, traits, behavioral traits. I hope they, they are love learning and are a self-driven learner, right? You want things like that, and I want somebody who uplifts others in his classroom and behavioral and is an independent person. Others are like those ones I talked about where you're like, "No, I want entrepreneurism and financial literacy," or, "I want storytelling, public speaking," those, those type skills. And so the third is have that curriculum-
- PAPeter Attia
The suite of skills
- JLJoe Liemandt
... the suite of skills that every parent wants. So we actually have spent, you know, the last three years developing Life Core, right? The common core curriculum for life skills that, 'cause I have four hours a day to fill, right, with all this awesome stuff that kids can do, and it's just amazing what they do. Like if you take Atomic Habits, right, that book of 1% Better, most people don't read that till after college, right? And then they're like, "Oh, this is a way I can really develop." Last year, you know, our guide, Faith Second grade guide. You know, she sat down and she was working on her, her workshops, you know, and her life skills. She's like, "You know what? I wanna teach atomic habits to all the second graders 'cause the concepts they all can understand."
- PAPeter Attia
[chuckles]
- JLJoe Liemandt
And she's like, "You know how I'm gonna do it?" I'm like... She's like, "I'm gonna have all our second graders run a 5K in under 35 minutes." And y- that interest- I'm like, "Oh, no. Okay, the parents are not gonna like that," right? That's too hard. Back to high standards. They don't want struggle, fail. It ha- where's that road to success part, and what percent are gonna make it? And so I was... She's like, "Don't worry. It's to- I can do this." She was a UT athlete, and she's like, "We totally can do it." She was a, like a ch- head cheerleader or whatever. She's like, "Everybody can do this." And so she sits down with the second graders first day and is like, "Who, who can run a 5K?" And they're all like, "That's impossible, Miss Faith." The parents all are like, "That's impossible, Miss Faith." She's like, "Well, I signed you all up for the Jingle 5K," you know, at The Domain. And so she goes out to the track, and the first day they walk it, and they walk 5K. She's like, "Okay, so we all have established you're gonna finish the race," right? And then the next time, they ran a quarter lap, walk the rest. Next time, half a lap, walk the rest. And by December, right, all the kids are running the race, right? And, you know, when they cross the finish line, just that achievement. Back to the key to your kids' happiness is high standards. That's a really high standard, but they loved it. And they did have to struggle and go through and learn this, but they also learned that life skill of 1% better, right? And so the second grader's like, "Dad, I can do anything. I can do 50 pushups. I'll do one today and two tomorrow," and, you know, build up. And that skill, that life skill, we don't teach kids in school. It's a great life skill to have. And if you have half the day, you can do that. So that's the third element of, like, how do you build a great, a great school. The fourth element, and this gets to the teachers, what would make a teacher 10 times better than what it is today? And the answer is, well, not grading science tests all day and, you know, writing lesson plans, but instead connecting-
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah, it's mentorship
- JLJoe Liemandt
... with the kids, right? And so we ask, here's the questions we ask, you know, the students and the parents, which is, to kids, you know, at, you know, at kindergarten we're like, "Do you love your guide?" Right? And but, you know, as you get older, it's every adult had one or two teachers who transformed their life, right? Back to that. Is your guide that for you? Right? And that is what our guides... Right? That is the expectation, that they are the ones that the students are like, "You are helping me achieve things that I didn't think is possible. Miss Faith, you told me, taught me how to do the impossible." Right? And so that, right, that level. And actually then, you know, at the parent side, this gets into, you know, Dr. Yeager, um, you know, has a book, "10 to 25," right? Child psychologist, development expert. And it's, you know, from kids how to, uh, what matters for kids, right, from 10 to, from 10 years old to 25, right? And, uh, his whole theory, mentor mindset, you know, high standards, high support, the, the har- Most parents are not high standards and high support, which is what really matters to develop kids. They're either low standards, high support, that's what happened to all our expectations, or the, the inverse, high standards, no support. You know, this would be your classic, you know, tiger mom would be w- you know, "Good luck. Figure it out." Right? And the real answer for child development, you need both. High standards, high support. And so that's our guides. But the question we ask parents in middle and high school, right, back to having what's a school, re-envisioning it, it's like, "Do you trust your Alpha guide to hold high standards for your kid so you as the parent can provide the unconditional love and support?" Right? Which transforms, for those who've had [chuckles] adolescents, it transforms your relationship where you don't have to be the naggy parent for the high, the high standards. You know, my daughter, my oldest daughter, you know, she's writing her college essay, and I'm like, "You wanna let me read it?" And she's like, "No." Right? No interest in that.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And-
- PAPeter Attia
She's got, she's got it taken care of.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And-
- PAPeter Attia
She's got someone else.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And for me, I was super relaxed 'cause I was like, "I know Chloe," right? Went back to our guide, right? She's a Harvard grad. I know she was to- totally high standards for, for my daughter, and I know it's gonna be fine. And I don't have to get in a fight about it or whatever. I'm just like, "Okay," you know, I can give my daughter a hug and be like, "Good luck." Right? And so that transforms what teachers can be, right? Versus I'm delivering those seventh grade lessons. And so, you know, and then the fifth dimension that we talk about is w- the Cs: character, community, classmates, and culture. And these are also the, the hardest parts to measure, but at the end, they're what parents care about the most, right? Which is at the end of the day, all those other f- you don't c- Character, right? Is m- do I have a good kid? Did I raise a good kid, right? And is the school helping me make, right, raise a good kid? And so those elements are what we looked at and said, "Now that you wanna re-envision school, right, from the ground up, here's the dimensions." And so Alpha's trying to be the exemplar, you know, for, for all of it. And then the question is, okay, how do we get the price point down? Right? So we have opened a whole set of different schools, right, at half the price of Alpha, right? So Alpha, depending on its location, is between 40 and $75,000, right? Um, but we've opened-
- PAPeter Attia
Although there's scholarship programs.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Ton- Oh, so tons.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
So we have a huge scholarship. So, you know, we have a school down in Brownsville, right, where it's the second poorest school district. Um, we have-
- PAPeter Attia
In Texas?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Brownsville's the second poorest school district in the country. You know, and at, at that school it's, you know, SpaceX, uh, is there. It's so star-based, so you have a bunch of SpaceX kids. And then we scholarship all the locals to come in, and it's, we're, uh, 60/40, 50/50 between that makeup. And to be clear They all learn 2X in two hours, right? There's not a, right, back to where we, we testing it out. It works with all kids.
- 1:44:08 – 1:48:59
The potential to reduce inequality in academic success
- PAPeter Attia
So, so I wanna read you something that is, fits right into this. So this is, um, I think I read this in The New York Times. "Before kindergarten, the children of the affluent are much more likely to be in preschool. By sixth grade, students in the richest school districts are four grade levels above children in the poorest school districts." That's just by sixth grade. "By high school, richer kids' average reading skills are five years ahead of poorer kids. By college, according to a 2017 study by Raj Chetty, children from the richest 1% of earners are 77 times more likely to go to Ivy League schools than children from families making $30,000 a year or less. Um, the academic gap between the affluent and less affluent is greater today than the achievement gap between white American and Black American kids in the final days of Jim Crow." In other words, my read of this is that there is no greater predictor of academic success and failure than the wealth of your parents. So are you really suggesting that that could be wiped out?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Wiped out. I, there's always relative versus absolute, and I believe we can raise the absolute standard, right? And mayb- it's always an arms race and, you know, that, and so but if you said today, can we take where people-
- PAPeter Attia
Well, put it this way
- JLJoe Liemandt
... are years behind and catch them up?
- PAPeter Attia
Instead of the gap being 77X-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah, totally
- PAPeter Attia
... could that gap be-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Be totally compressed
- PAPeter Attia
... 1.2X?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah, 100%.
- PAPeter Attia
You know, or whatever. Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
100%. And the, back to that issue, 'cause here's what, what happens, right? You're in a rich school district, right? And I was up in New York and, you know, these are $75,000 private schools. A teacher in front of a classroom. But every one of those parents also is spending $750 an hour on a tutor after school, 'cause the school wasn't teaching them, back to that problem. But an extra 75 grand tutoring them, 150 grand a year, right? And you're, right, yeah, you need the tutor who's gonna go back and fill the holes and stuff. And no, if I am in a school district, right, and I'm a poor school district, I, I'm not, I, I'm not, I don't have the tutor. I don't have the access to that, right? You know, if you look in c- a- after COVID, right, the number one intervention and, you know, a lot of government funding was spent this was high-dosage tutoring. Everybody knows this, right? It's not a secret. It's just, it's expensive to give, you know, individualized tutoring. And there was a study that came out a few weeks ago or a month ago that was like, it was really working and then sometimes it, it, they did some w- you know, as it ex- expanded out, it did less well. And the difference was when it was really working, it was one-on-one, and then they started to say to save money, they had six to one. And tutoring six to one is not, right?
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah. At some point you're gonna become-
- JLJoe Liemandt
It's not individualized.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
It becomes a class. 'Cause it's just cost-driven, right? It just, that's the issue with, you know, if you have 30 kids, you can't generate an unending stream of content at 80 to 85% accuracy based on what the kid learns.
- PAPeter Attia
It has to be one-on-one.
- JLJoe Liemandt
It just, and it just, that is the delta is for each kid, it's personalized learning. A personalized lesson plan is what every kid needs. And so, and, and I believe that if you get all the learning scientists together and say, "Yes, AI is the light microscope. Don't you agree? And can we create a program, right, that's available to everybody, right?" Then, and I think they'd all say, "Yes. Yes, we can." And that the, the, the, the s- the software is not insurmountable, right? I believe we could do a... You know, I was actually talking to Stanford has their Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which is, you know, how, and Dean Schwartz runs it. And I was like, "You know, we could probably create an XPRIZE, right? For an open source available to everybody," right? You need, you also need better credible people than me. You, you don't need me saying this. You need Dean Schwartz and Stanford and the Ivy League, right, the people that everybody looks up to in education in America and saying, "We know this. We know this learning science. We can run," right? "We can take Stanford CS and AI department with the learning science," right, "and put that together and create this project," right, "for not that much money that we can then get to every kid," right, "and get it into every public school." Right? They have the relationships with all the teachers where, you know, they don't need the randomized control trial or the skepticism you'd obviously get from talking to me. So I, this is all very doable. You know, that's, that is this mission we have going.
- PAPeter Attia
What is the biggest
- 1:48:59 – 1:54:30
Why the biggest challenge to scaling AI-driven education is cultural adoption & systemic redesign
- PAPeter Attia
risk right now? Is it the equivalent of what we call market risk, where it's just adoption? It's just, it's the leap of faith that-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... we can somehow abandon the only model any of us know? Or is there still technology risk embedded within the AI that says-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah, I mean, there is still some technology risk, but that's literally like, uh, you can ratchet down and you don't have to be 10 times learner, but could we get them three times, five times today with more static versus some of the cool dynamic stuff? That, yes, you could, right? But it's are you willing to change the motivational model for the kids? Are you willing to tell the kid, "Use this app and I'll give you your time back"? Are you willing to say you don't have to sit in class for six hours a day, right? It's, it's the rebuild that's the problem, right? When we, if you take our software, our magic AI tutor, right, whatever it is, and you put it in a standard classroom, and the kid has to sit there for six hours a day, I can promise you it won't work.
- PAPeter Attia
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Liemandt
It will not work. And so that's the issue is are you really willing, back to what Brian told me a decade ago, are you really willing to say kids must love school? Are you really willing to then go rebuild your school system around that? Because if they do, they're gonna engage in the app, right? They're gonna, you're gonna give them their time back to do stuff they love. Is that all-- Are you gonna make those changes? 'Cause it isn't an ed tech solution. It's not, "Go build this ed tech, drop it in, and it's gonna work." That's just, we have that. Those apps do generally work, right? And to get the real revolution, you need to say, "Are we gonna rebuild what we think K through 12, the first 12 years of the kids' lives are?" And if that's true, then the sky is the limit. And what we're obviously doing is trying to say, "Look at this. Look at these examples," right? 'Cause parents, parents need, I've learned as a principal, they need two things to wanna change the school. Remember, I was skeptical for two years, right? I'm, I'm, I'm the average parent. You know, was they need a reference from an adult they trust. How's it working for your kid? Did it work for your kid? And second, they need to see the kid do something at the school that their kid can't do, right? And if you have that, that's actually the magic that unlocks, you know, a parent saying, "Okay, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna move to this new model." And, you know, what, what it is that the kid can't-- "Oh, he loves school. Oh my God, he wakes up in the morning. He's, you know, he's waking me up so he's not late, and he used to cry on the way to school." Or, "Oh, wow," some parents are like, "I love the academic performance," right? Or, "Those life skills I really care about," or, "He connects with his teacher so much more as guide." You know, 'cause it is different. And back to the choices, like why we're opening all these different schools. We have a gifted talented school, right? We have a sports academy school. We have a wilderness school, right, where you're fishing and archery and, you know, farming. Uh, you know, we're gonna be opening arts, theater, music. Parents want different things, and kids want different things. And so it's showing these things that is gonna be the connection that causes parents to say, "I, you know, I want this." And if you do, and, you know, if, a, a good example about motivation, you know, if you put the GT moms, you know, McKinsey has, you know, her roundtables, the GT moms with, uh, sports academy moms-
- PAPeter Attia
Uh, gifted and talented is what-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Gifted and talented. Sorry, that's GT.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Gifted and talented, and then the, the, the sports academy moms. You know, and they just look at each other like the other parent is, you know, off the rocker, where, you know, the, the sports academy mom's like, "You know, my kid was just, you know, comes home just sweating from just running around all day, and I literally throw him in the shower with their clothes on." You know, and the GT mom's like, "Okay, they were having a chess tournament in the afternoon, and then we came home and continued it," right? And it's, and, and it depends on the motivation. Each kid's different, right? And all your kids are different, and you, everybody knows that. And-
- PAPeter Attia
[chuckles]
- JLJoe Liemandt
You know, like when we ask, like I sat down with, at the guides, we're like, "Okay, how do we make these all better?" So on, you know, staff days, you know, 'cause we have all the guides from all the different schools, and I'm like, "Okay, what's gonna make kids really love school? How do we get it from 50 to 60 to 70 on love school?" The G- GT guides are like more, they want a third power hour of academics, and they want Math Olympiad, and all the other guides are groaning 'cause they're like, "No, our students do not want more academics. They want sports or let's do a better workshop," or, you know, what, what it's gonna be. And so the key on all of this is saying, how do we, you know, focus school on making it awesome for kids, right, making it great, have a culture where it is high standards, high support, where you have this magic unlock of they can learn 10 times faster, which then enables you to give them the time back to do all these other things. Um, but that's a big lift, right? That's why it's, it's gonna take 20 years, right? Um, but I do believe that, you know, everybody, every parent, right, the most important thing is raising your kids. It's the same at a societal level, right? The most important thing a society does is raise its next generation, and everybody cares about it. And one thing I-- We spend enough money in this country or globally, right, that there's enough money to actually rearrange this and build an education system that's great for the kids. Um, you know, 5% of GNP, right? I mean, that's $7 trillion, right? That there is recognition at both the societal or parent level, right, that this is where we should spend money, and we do.
- 1:54:30 – 1:58:58
Peter’s daughter’s experience at Alpha School
- PAPeter Attia
Joe, it's kind of amazing to think back. You, in the spring of 1989, you drop out of s- college to go start a software company. Obviously, there's no way you could have imagined, uh, both the success you would have in that company, you know, creating a multi-billion dollar company and, and along with it, a fortune for yourself, but then somehow deciding right at your peak that you were gonna completely walk away from that, take that fortune, and pour it into another endeavor that seems as far from anything as possible relative to what you, what you, what you, what you started with. Um, look, I feel really fortunate to, to, that, that you're starting this, that you started this in Austin. Uh, m- for the listener, I think may- may-- I probably should have said this at the outset. You know, my daughter spent two years at Alpha. It was an absolutely exceptional experience for her, really kind of e- experienced all the things you talk about, right? So showed up in... What did she show up? She showed up in seventh grade.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Seventh grade.
- PAPeter Attia
Shows up in seventh grade with the absolute negative story of, you know, "I love reading. I love arts. I love these things. I'm a musician. I'm not, I just don't do math and science. Like, that's, I know you did, Dad. That's not me. I can't do math. I never wanna do math." Um, I made the awful mistake of spending the past year trying to help her do math. That was a disaster that only resulted in tears. Um, but really, I think what, what appealed to me when we made that switch was it just seemed so entirely logical that the reason she was struggling was because there were things in third and fourth grade she never mastered, and I, I really appreciated the compounding nature of that gap. And, and it, it just made sense. It really clicked, and so it wasn't a big leap of faith to say, "Oh, okay. Yeah." And I feel very fortunate that as, just as you predicted, um, by the end of eighth grade, I mean, she was acing math, and that has continued all through high school. She did go back to public high school. I think, y- you know, that's probably something you, you do encounter is that are- there are kids that ultimately just wanna be back in the big public high school. They wanna play sports on the public, you know, in the public high school. They wanna be, you know, and of course, she's at a high school with a, a billion kids. Um, and she's very happy there, but I, I don't think there's a chance, I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell she would be doing as well as she is if not for the fact that she had that two-year sabbatical to Alpha, where she, um, really got to academically create a solid foundation. And I, I will share one last anecdote here, which is, um, at her eighth grade graduation, she was in tears saying goodbye to her guides. To your point, it's think of what the impact of those guides were on her life. She loved those people, and, you know, it's not that she doesn't like her teachers in high school, but she doesn't have that kind of relationship with them.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right. And, uh, back to, you know, you guys were, uh, I came in actually, you know, right then, and, uh, y- Andy M., who runs our academics, you know, uh, since you, since you brought her up, wants to give her a call-out because she spent hours with him going through lessons, helping figure out why is this not working or what is it. And, you know, one of the things when you're, you're starting these new schools, you need the, this concept of a founding family, right? And, you know, your family was one of the most important, and your support, where you, you got it. But your daughter, you know, Andy wanted to say, you know, thank you to her because she did go above and beyond, where our lessons and all this learning science and this closed loop, you know, he's like, "I'm way better because of the feedback and the time she spent with us." And so, um, you know, it is, it is transformative to kids. And to your point of high school, you're not. If you wanna be the quarterback on the Westlake team and run track, we don't have those in our high school, and so we can get you prepared. You know, we say our middle school prepares kids for any high school, right? And so all our kids in middle school can get, get their pick of high school that they wanna go, and some want Alpha, you know, Alpha High, which is that, but some want, you know, the traditional play. But we hopefully have equipped them where they know they're a self-driven learner and, and can do it on their own.
- 1:58:58 – 2:03:22
Alpha School’s expansion plans & need for people & resources for maximum impact
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah. I'll tell you, th- maybe, maybe the last story I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll share, Joe, which is no surprise to you is it really doesn't matter what corner, and I mean this literally, what corner of this planet I am standing on. When education comes up, your name always comes up. And this is, these are people who don't know that I know you, right? They don't know that we are friends. And I'll be, I will be literally on the opposite side of this planet, and if, if I'm talking with anybody about education, it's like, "What do you know about AI and education? Have you heard of this guy, Joe Liemandt at Alpha?" And it, it's, it comes up so often, which tells me that it is getting out there. It is, this is no longer just that little niche school downtown Austin. I mean, it's hard to believe what has happened in five years. It went from one building, one place, to how many now?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Right. So we have, we're now, uh, we opened 12 campuses this. We'll be at 25 Alpha campuses. We also have 25 non-Alpha campuses. We're back to lower price points. You know, we have, we have campuses open where, you know, it's charter, so it's free for kids. We have ones where it's $5,000 pay for the parents, $500 a month. You know, some at 20,000. So we're trying to figure out, back to innovating, we're like, "What are the right price points and everything?" But yes, you know, we expect 12 months from now there to be hundreds and hundreds of schools that use this model. Um, you know, uh, s- you know, the, the demand for the sports academy is through the roof. Um, uh, and we think that's gonna explode for sure.
- PAPeter Attia
Well, Joe, I appreciate you taking your time to come out today, but of course, more than anything, I just appreciate what you're doing. And, and again, I know this is, you know, not something that necessarily fits-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... into what we talk about on this podcast, but again, I don't think you can care about medicine, science-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... health, and not care about the foundation upon which it's built, and it all starts with education. So, um, you're-
- JLJoe Liemandt
If-
- PAPeter Attia
... you're working on such an important problem.
- JLJoe Liemandt
And if there's one last thing I can do, since I, I obviously had a great career obviously before this, and three years ago moved to education. If there's other people out there, and one of the things, if you're listening to this and you're excited, part of my job is let's go get more talent into education, and I can tell you the last three years have been awesome, and my next 20 years is gonna be better than my last 20 years. And so, you know, if I can, if I can convince you to come on in, the water's great.
- PAPeter Attia
What's the best way for f- 'cause I guarantee you there's a million people listening to us.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
There's gonna be, a non-zero number of them are gonna wanna reach out to you. What's the best way to get ahold of you?
- JLJoe Liemandt
Great. Literally my email, which is joe.liemandt@alpha.school. And send it to me, and, you know, uh, I am overloaded, Ray, uh, to your point. The hype has gotten very high about Alpha. Um-
- PAPeter Attia
What should they, what could someone who wants to get your attention put in the subject line? "Heard you on the, heard you on-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... The Drive Podcast," or something like that.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Heard you on The Drive Podcast, right, and, you know, we're looking for, you know, all sorts of people. One-
- PAPeter Attia
You want product people. You want engineers. You want-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Everybody who wants-
- PAPeter Attia
Everybody
- JLJoe Liemandt
... to come in. We have to go build, you know, we're building AIs, right? There's, back to expansion, we need entrepreneurs where, you know, GT School needs 500 schools. We need entrepreneurs who are gonna go expand it like it's, you know, a Chipotle chain, right? We need AI guys, right? I'm going out to Silicon Valley where we, we have to, you know, current chatbots aren't good. We have to make the LLMs better. Um, we need people, we need educators, right? People who are like, "Okay, I wanna do this new thing." Um, if you're one of the learning scientists that we don't have on our team, right, come do it, right? That is, we're a s- if you're, back to capital, we're gonna need a lot of capital as well to expand this. If, back to philanthropy, right, it's we need to be giving scholarships. We're funding a lot of it, but we need to make this available to everybody, right? We have to, your problem. It can't just be for the elite. It's gotta be for a billion kids. So education touches everything, and if you're just in, where you're like, that description where, of what they're building, I'm in, then come aboard, 'cause it's awesome.
- PAPeter Attia
Joe.liemandt@alpha.com. We'll link-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Alpha.school
- PAPeter Attia
Alpha.school. Okay. We'll put that in the show notes-
- JLJoe Liemandt
Great
- PAPeter Attia
... just so that people can click directly on it. Um, Joe, thanks again.
- JLJoe Liemandt
Thank you very much.
- PAPeter Attia
Wonderful as always. This is great. [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 2:03:22
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Transcript of episode 2g2n_CkAolg
