How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt | Andrew Huberman Transcript

Andrew Huberman interviews Joe Liemandt, founder of Alpha School, on accelerating learning through AI-personalized education

Andrew Huberman speaks with Joe Liemandt, principal of Alpha School, about a radically different approach to K–12 education.

Summary

Andrew Huberman interviews Joe Liemandt, principal of Alpha School, a network of schools where students spend just two hours a day on academics using AI-personalized instruction and the rest of the day on life skills, entrepreneurship, and hands-on projects. Liemandt argues that the core failure of the current education system is that it delivers grade-level content to students who have foundational gaps, compounding deficits year after year rather than diagnosing and filling them. He presents data showing Alpha School students learn at twice the rate of peers in a fraction of the time, with K–2 students testing in the top 1% nationally and freshman honors students averaging 1400 on the SAT. Liemandt contends that motivation is 90% of the learning problem, and that high standards combined with genuine support — not one or the other — is what causes children to love school more than vacation. He also outlines plans to scale the model to low-income families through Texas voucher programs and a free educational video game targeting 500 million children globally.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

The Origins of Mass Education and Why the Model Needs to Change

Andrew Huberman: Tell us about learning and education a hundred years ago, because that sounds like a long time ago but it wasn't, and then we'll use that as a contrast point to where you're trying to take learning and education and schooling for young people now.

Joe Liemandt: A hundred years ago, we were trying to figure out how to educate everybody. Universal access to education — two hundred years ago — was not a thing. Every person on the planet did not have access to education. A hundred-plus years ago, people said, "Let's start educating everybody." And we're talking K through 12. The industrialized model started over in Prussia and then was imported. It was very controversial, actually, if you look back. You have a rural society and you're saying get off the farms and get into schools. The best way to educate people back then was: let's put them in a room, let's teach them how to read and write, let's have a teacher in front of the classroom. And that became the model.

That today is actually one of the most universal things in the world — the education model. You can go to the richest school district down the street here, or the richest private school, and there's a teacher in front of a classroom of kids. You can go to the poorest school district in India and the building's not as nice, but there's a teacher in front of a classroom. We have universal access.

What we are trying to do is bring universal learning. There's a vast disparity in how much kids learn during those 12 years. While they may have access to it, learning is very different. Because of new things that have become available — things like AI and technology — for the first time in 50 and 100 years, you can revisit and change education. How we educate kids is going to be radically different in 5 and 10 years than it was in the last 50 and 100 years. That's what we're out doing — building that model, building the set of schools around it, and then figuring out how we scale it and get it out to a billion kids so that everybody can have access to it.

Milestones, Standards, and the Decline of Basics

Andrew Huberman: It seems to me that we think in terms of milestones. Even before a child is born, if they can have an ultrasound, the parents are looking: are they meeting milestones? We think of biological milestones and cognitive milestones. How much of the current schooling system is based on milestones that make really good sense? By the time you finish a certain grade, you're supposed to be able to read, you're supposed to be able to write. What we decide is a critical milestone can easily change, but I'm guessing there are still some milestones that are cemented in that don't make any sense any longer.

Joe Liemandt: There's a whole set of milestones that people have — especially the ones parents and grandparents understand — which is whatever you went through are the milestones that you understand. Kids should read by third grade. It used to be you memorized your multiplication tables by third grade. You'd learn cursive before that. And the standard books — you would read books. There was a book list in high school and you would read it and understand the content in those books.

What has happened — and I think where a lot of the unhappiness in education is — is those standards have gone down. They've pulled those standards away around the academics for a lot of different reasons. When you think about development, there are behavioral standards, academic standards, and then nonacademic skills — whether it's vocational or life skills — financial literacy and things that have changed from what was true 30 years or 50 years ago to where they are today. There's generally a view of broad unhappiness, whether it's the standard itself or students' achievement of that standard, and that's causing this big demand: we need to change our education system.

That's sort of half of it. The other half is people are looking at things like AI and saying the world is really different. The world that's coming is really different. It puts in parents' heads that the educational system they went through isn't going to get their kids ready.

We're building schools everywhere and doing education, so I talk to lots of parents. When I have a 12th grade parent talking to me, they're at the finish line — they're just trying to get the kid out. But when you talk to the kindergarten parents, they are forecasting forward 12 years and they sit there and say, "There's no way the current system is going to get my kid ready." They have the high demands to say, "We need to do something different."

Why Kids Must Love School — and Why High Standards Make That Possible

Andrew Huberman: I've heard you say before that most of the way we teach kids how to navigate life in the United States is in sports, not in academics. And I completely agree. The contrast with academics is really striking because there's this idea that by the time kids are in high school, they're going to be good at certain things and other things not so much. The words "do the best you can" sound like support, sound like high standards, but they kind of avoid both. Maybe we could drill a little more specifically into what support really looks like at the level of parenting and peers.

I can imagine high standards on a zero-to-ten scale — zero being "you'll never be anything," ten being "you can do and become anything you want." We believe the ten model in America, and there are examples to support it, but it's not totally true. I went to a very competitive public high school and there were some phenoms in my class at sports — a pair of twins, Joe and John Cannon. One became a goalie for the San Jose Quakes, the other had a 100-mile-plus fastball in high school. Their younger brother, Colt Cannon, picked up a skateboard and eight months later he was on a team, then had a pro model. There's something going on in that family. So in sports, some genetics plays a role, family lines play a role, and we're kind of okay with that conversation now. But the support thing is the one that's completely opaque to me. We know what the zeros are — figure it out on your own. And we know the other extreme — I'm going to do everything for you, climb the rock for you, do your homework for you. We know that's not good. But we haven't really defined clearly what truly useful support is. Maybe you could enrich our thinking about what it looks like.

Joe Liemandt: I didn't start Alpha — I'm the principal going into my fifth year. It was started by Brian and McKenzie 12 years ago. Parents want to educate their kids the way they were educated, even if they didn't like it that much. I went to Catholic school. My two daughters were in Catholic school. McKenzie starts this school and she's like, "You've got to come to my new school." I looked at it and I'm like, "This is a totally weird, janky school." There's no teacher in front of a classroom. I'm like, "This is totally crazy." They're going to learn on some apps. The girls were reciting their vocabulary words while doing handstands. I grew up in a standard school system. It was weird. It took her two years of trying to convince me.

I actually saw one of mine struggling in standard school. Then what happened was St. Gabriel got out at the end of May and Alpha was still in session. My kids were going to go to summer camp. McKenzie convinced my daughter: "Why don't you come to Alpha for a week before you go to summer camp? My daughters are there. It'll be really fun." I'm like, "You want to go to school in the middle of the summer?" "Sure." So they went for a week and came back at the end of the week and they're like, "Dad, we don't want to go to summer camp. We want to go back to Alpha." I thought that was the craziest thing I'd ever heard — that someone wanted to go to school instead of camp. That was an indicator to me: they have something here. The kids were in second and fourth grade. I'm like, let's try it out. That was about ten years ago, and it really worked out for us.

When I put my daughters in, I talked to Brian and I was like, "What do I not understand as a parent?" He said, "There's two things. First, your kids must love school." And I was like, "Oh, that's not true at all. It's like spinach. You just grind it. Sometimes it's okay, but you just grind your way through it." He's like, "Nope. Someday you'll figure this out and you'll see with your daughters that kids must love school." I was like, "Anything else?" He's like, "Yes. Your kids have so much more potential than you expect, than what you think." And I was like, "Oh, that's not true." I'm sort of like a tiger dad. I think my kids are going to do a ton of stuff. I have really high expectations. And he's like, "They're going to blow you away."

That's the dichotomy that really confuses people about Alpha. Kids love school. We make three commitments to the kids and the first one is: you will love school. About 90% of our students, when we survey them, say "I love school." We actually in the last year or so have started asking a follow-up question, which is: would you rather go to school or go on vacation? Depending on the vacation, the session, and how good our workshops were, between 40 and 60% of kids said they'd rather go to school than vacation. As a standard — loving school. And when you engage kids and you think, I'm going to put them in this system for 12 years, as a parent you want them to love it.

But now let's talk about doing hard things. Kids want to do hard things. Kids have to do hard things. When I'm talking to parents who are worried because we have such high achievement — we're the number one academic school in the country, every grade level is top 1% in every subject — my freshman honors SAT score, freshmen are at 1400, which is better than almost every senior class in the country. Parents are like, "Wait, is this a high-stress, high-standard environment?" And we explain to them: the key to your child's happiness is high standards. I can't run a school that they love more than vacation if I have low standards. It is that paradox, that tension, that is the magic of Alpha School. Kids think they're awesome and they are awesome, but they need to be put in an environment where they get to go do hard things with their friends. And with that, they do the grind.

In America, we have a very different view. We have a certain way we treat academics and a certain way we treat sports. If we took the sports ethos and the athletic ethos in America and applied it to academics, we would fix every academic problem in this country. For example, the Westlake High School football team in Austin is going to win the state championship. Every parent's like, "I want my kid to be on that team because it's going to be the hardest thing they've ever done, they're going to have to work harder than ever, it's going to be crazy, but it's going to be the most fun thing they ever do and they're going to remember it the rest of their life." We believe that about sports. You can make education the same way. That's what we're building.

I know you had Dr. Joerger on. His book, 10 to 2: The Science of Motivating Kids, is all about high standards and high support, and it is that combination that you want from a school. That's what we built. He created our guide training. All the adults in our buildings follow that high standards, high support, his mentor mindset program. Most parents are one of two things: either high standards, low support — "I'm just going to throw my kid in and expect them to do great" — or low standards, high support — "I never want my kid to have stress." Both are bad. The real answer is you do both. Schools should have high standards and high support.

Back to my athletic analogies: great coaches do that. There are thousands of movies in America about a sports team in last place and a coach comes in and says, "I know we're in last place, but we're going to win the state championship next year." The whole movie is about how he turns around the team by having high standards and teamwork and hard work, and they win. Where are those movies about academics? I think there are three. We know that's how you develop kids. Child development experts will explain: the key to developing a child is that they struggle and fail on their road to success, supported by a caring adult. You just want to run that loop.

If you talk to most parents, they're like, "My kid learns the valuable life skills in after-school sports." Parents are like, "Yes, they're going to struggle, they're going to fail, they're going to lose the game, whatever is going to happen, but it's going to be on the road to success. And that coach — I picked the coach because I know he cares about my kid achieving it and he's going to be there to support them." That's what you should just do in school for the other seven hours — have those same loops.

I will add one thing that happens especially when you start with kindergarten. Kids struggle and fail, sometimes cry, on their road to success, supported by a caring adult. And it's really hard for parents as soon as the kid cries. That's the lynchpin for parents being like, "I don't want the struggle." You're like, "Well, why don't you just do it?" And you're like, "Well, when you're a parent and your kid's crying, you want to go protect them." That's why you have to make sure they're in an environment where you think they're safe, where the adult in charge is making sure it's not low standards and they're not leaving them hanging.

At Alpha, we have great workshops where 85% of Alpha parents in the last year said, "I saw my kid do something that I literally thought was impossible for their age." Our kindergarteners climb a 40-foot rock wall. At our San Francisco campus, they rode their bikes five miles, learned how to ride a bike, rode it five miles across the Golden Gate Bridge without stopping. We have what we call Alpha tests for these life skills. Ten weeks into school, the kindergarteners are climbing up, and sometimes they do get halfway and they're stuck and they're worried and the parents want to go rescue them. We always tell them just watch, because this is what the school's about. Their guide is down at the bottom of the wall coaching them up. Eventually — maybe they have to wait there, maybe they even whimper a little while they're struggling — they say "I can do it" and they climb to the end, supported by their Alpha guide at the bottom. When they come down after achieving it, they ring the bell, and that kid is beaming and their parents are beaming. That's why we have such fanatical love of school and such evangelism. The parents go through that experience and they see their kids thrive via things that are hard. That is the environment we need to build for kids, because that is how you develop kids.

When you think of old societies, every society had rites of passage. They were hard. It's the struggle and fail on your road to success, supported by an adult. That's what the educational system needs to be and should be. We do it a lot in sports and not a lot in education.

The Science of How Kids Learn: Individualized Instruction and Mastery

Andrew Huberman: In terms of homeschooling — because I know there's a lot of interest in that now, but not everyone can afford it — what do the data say about the outcomes for homeschooling?

Joe Liemandt: Homeschooling is totally bimodal, which is: are they homeschooling for high standards or not? There are a lot of homeschoolers who are like, "I don't like standardized tests. I don't like the standardized curriculum. I reject that whole system." Those people do very poorly on anything like that. The level of academics those students know is very low because the parents have basically abandoned it and said, "I care all about the life skills." For parents who really care about academics, those kids crush it. You have ex-teachers homeschooling their kids in a one-on-one environment and they can do it dramatically better. There's still value in homeschooling — socialization — and because we have these high standards and the life skills at our schools, we actually have a bunch of homeschoolers who come and say, "Wow, this is the schooling system I was looking for, because I get both the high standards on the academic side, but then all the afternoons of these life skills that I thought I'd only get via homeschool."

You want to get to one-on-one, and that's the magic. Let's go on this because we haven't talked about the academic side and what is the breakthrough that allows us to change education from 50 and 100 years ago.

There's a whole field of learning science — cognitive load theory, cognitive science. There's a famous paper from the '80s, Bloom's two sigma problem, where he's like: if you give an individual tutor to mastery level, kids can learn at two sigma. Two sigma is top 2%. We could get everybody there. So when you talk about the frontier, he's basically claiming you can get everybody to the top 2% performance.

Andrew Huberman: Assume having high levels of motivation?

Joe Liemandt: Correct. Mastery is actually the part everybody forgets about on that. If you have a tutor that's not mastery-based, you won't get the top 2%. One sigma came from the tutor. One sigma comes from mastery. We all accept mastery in athletics, but we explicitly reject it in education. You need both. You need individualized instruction at a mastery level to get that performance. Now with AI tutors, cost-effectively, you can give every kid perfectly tailored lessons at their level, for them, at a mastery level. That is the magic that allows kids to learn ten times faster.

In our schools, when we talk about being the best academic performing school — top 1%, doing it in two hours a day — our average student does not sit in class for six hours and do homework. They sit at an AI app and spend two hours a day. The average kid spent 121 minutes last year in the apps and learned more than twice what they would have sitting in class for six hours and doing homework. Depending on the class, it's between five and ten times normal speed, because you have six hours a day plus homework versus two, and you're performing at a level that exceeds the average student by 2x.

Andrew Huberman: Could you enrich the picture of what this kid is doing for 121 minutes? Is it a human face teaching them, or text prompts? What does it look like?

Joe Liemandt: The first thing to be really clear on: when people think AI chatbots, it's not chatbots. If you take a chatbot and put it into a standard school, 90% of the kids use it to cheat. Doesn't matter what grade level. I can't remember which Ivy League professor gave a final that he made in person — literally everybody failed the exam. They were just ChatGPT-ing their papers. They're not reading books. They're getting ChatGPT summaries of them. There's a whole push to ban them.

Here's how you want to think about it. What you know is the basis of what you can learn. Having a foundation and building on that foundation is critical. If I'm in material that's too hard, you can give it to me all day long and I'm not going to learn it. In my world or your world, if you gave me an MCAT, I don't know the words on the page. You can tell me to have grit or growth mindset or whatever you want. I'm not going to pass that test. You need to roll me back to freshman bio and say that's where you are, and then build me up from there.

That's the problem in our current education system today. We are taking eighth graders and delivering them eighth grade content because that's what an eighth grade teacher does by law. If you look at the stats, we have people who need to be in seventh grade in that classroom, sixth grade, fifth grade — because of COVID, you even have some who need to be in fourth and third grade because of all that learning loss. They never learned it. We have kids who didn't learn how to read in third and fourth grade. And so now we're wondering why all the curves are going down. It's because they're in eighth grade being told eighth grade content and no one ever taught them how to read. They took away memorizing multiplication tables and the science of reading, teaching phonics — they took away some of the basics that, as you get into higher grade levels, just kills you.

Andrew Huberman: What was the rationale behind doing that?

Joe Liemandt: It gets into a lot of debate. I don't think there's a clear answer. I believe at the end of it, they didn't realize how important it was. The learning science — cognitive load theory, cognitive science, how all this works — is not a main part of what's taught in schools of education. These teachers don't know it. We just had our staff days before school starts. I have hundreds of teachers — the best teachers in the world, the employer of choice for teachers around the country. I asked how many of them had learned direct instruction, which is one of these concepts. About 5% raised their hand. There's Project Follow Through, a big project in the '70s, the largest educational study ever about effective ways to teach kids. I asked how many of them had read Project Follow Through when getting their master's. None.

We had a big teacher from the Houston School District who came and is now an Alpha guide. I saw a Twitter post after the staff day. She's like, "I learned more in listening to Joe's six-hour presentation about how kids learn than I did getting my master's or even my PhD." That curriculum — we don't have that knowledge and we need to fix that.

Andrew Huberman: Is there a textbook for teachers? In neuroscience, if somebody wants to get a degree, they read Principles of Neurobiology by Lichtman, or Principles of Neural Science by Kandel, Jessell, and Schwartz. Everyone gets those books. You learn electrophysiology from Hille, biochemistry from Stryer. These are the books used everywhere. So it doesn't matter if you're at a state university or at Stanford — pretty much everyone is educated at the front end from the same textbooks. You can go to a big international meeting and everyone understands the action potential. Education is not that.

Joe Liemandt: Our educational system is not fact-based, which seems crazy. There's a dean of a school of education for one of the best schools in the country who, when talking about the status of facts in education, put up a picture of Galileo's trial and said, "This is a religious war. This isn't a fact-based trial about these things."

Take the UC system. There's a huge debate on whether UC schools should use standardized tests to get in. Should kids have a standardized test to graduate high school? That's a debate, not a fact. About 2,000 professors said, "Yeah, we should use these." But the board of regents voted not to take them. Whatever decisions are being made around this stuff are not fact-based decisions. They're opinions. People are trying to optimize on something besides academics.

The goal of a school is not purely academics. When you look in education, it's a really complicated thing. What is the purpose of a school? What is developing a child? Does academics matter? When you think of these basic things — well, the kid was struggling on his multiplication tables and I was worried about his mental health, so I just told him don't worry about it — you're like, well, that's really going to hurt him to learn algebra.

I have massive empathy for everybody running these schools. In Austin, we're closing a bunch of schools — public schools closing because they're not hitting academic standards. Five years in a row they've failed. They're literally not teaching these kids. These are eighth graders who can't read at a third grade level. And there's a mom who's just furious at the meeting. She's like, "I don't care about that. What I care about is my older daughter in seventh grade had teacher ABC, this great teacher who changed her life. And I want my younger child to have that same teacher. And if it means they're not good at math, whatever." The rules of the government school system are: we are funding this to educate them on academics. Parents' demands are very different.

Part of my magic — and part of why Alpha is getting all this hype — is we're teaching kids five to ten times faster. There is a set of learning science where the results are there. And there's a set of learning science that we're proving that hasn't been able to be implemented before. That's why all these great learning scientists are coming and working with us. They're looking at this data and saying, "Holy cow, this data is breakthrough level."

Working Memory, Fluency, and Why Basics Matter More Than You Think

Andrew Huberman: I want to touch on something. My understanding of neuroplasticity — an area I come from, though not specifically in the context of education — is that if a brain or a body can execute a particular thing, a movement or a cognitive process, a math problem, there is no reason for it to change. The error signal is what actually drives the opportunity for change. Without errors, there's no struggle, and therefore without struggle, there's no learning. So I don't see a world where you can teach without a kid or an adult feeling some degree of mild agitation. They might learn to think of that as excitement and curiosity, but there's got to be some level of arousal. You've got to be brought to engagement and attention.

Joe Liemandt: Exactly what you're talking about. Errors definitely do matter. Let's take an example. I'll give you a math problem — no instruction, figure it out. That's one way to try to learn. The better way, the faster way, is to give them a worked example where you show them, and then you progressively remove the parts of the example where they're having to progressively go up, and by the end they can solve the problem with no scaffolding. It's a question of scaffolding. That's a faster way to teach kids than just saying good luck. It's incremental learning with an example at the front end.

Then you have spaced repetition, which is: everybody has a forgetting curve, and they're different by person. Right before you're going to forget it, you want to remind them. If you do that over a few times, it gets your recall from long-term memory. It will be there when you need it in the future.

Now there's a debate about whether you need some drill-and-kill — known as initial mastery — where you have to hit it with initial mastery the first time you're learning it, or whether because of spaced repetition, by the third or fourth time you'll get the equivalent of mastery.

Andrew Huberman: And you're defining mastery as like 95% or better?

Joe Liemandt: Correct. So that's been a debate. You can't measure that in a school — it's too fine-grained. We actually measured it over the last year. Our learning scientists, because of the papers published, found very much that you don't need initial mastery. You can do it with spaced repetition. What's interesting is at the end of the year, looking at our scores, in 8th through 12th we crushed it with just worked examples and spaced repetition, because once you get into algebra, the multi-line problems, worked examples really matter. But in 4th through 7th, it wasn't as effective because the problems are easier. What you lose is you want more initial mastery because the worked examples aren't as important. So this year when we saw the scores go down, we added initial mastery back. You get the worked example, you get the initial mastery, and then spaced repetition. That data set doesn't exist out there.

Andrew Huberman: It seems to me that data set would be very valuable for schools outside of Alpha School — just to understand that for whatever kids are generally taught in the curriculum from fourth to seventh grade, they need to get to 95% or better proficiency. If they don't need to get to mastery, where do they need to get to?

Joe Liemandt: They need to get to mastery all the time. Initial mastery always matters. Whether it's learning your vocabulary words — reading comprehension is a function of vocabulary. We can measure now that the best way to do well on SAT English is to read lots of books and look up the words you don't understand. With the verbal GRE, it's always a little tricky with people in the sciences. You're like, "I'm worried about the verbal GRE." You just go read a good book and underline every word you don't understand. Look it up and build a vocabulary. Everyone ends up in the 90th-plus percentile if they actually do that.

That's why good schools that do well on the SAT have a great lit program. Here's our book list — this is what all the kids read, because that's what's going to drive vocabulary, which drives those scores. It drives knowledge acquisition as well. In our apps, we can literally determine — we can teach you the vocabulary words. We've actually learned the problem: when you take a vocabulary word and it's just a flashcard, you don't know its limits. What's the difference between "happy" and "ecstatic"? If you're just flashcarding, you really can't tell the range. That's what you get from reading books. When you read 10,000 pages, you then understand the difference between "ecstatic" and "happy" — where are the boundaries of the vocabulary words. That's how you build a rich vocabulary and reading comprehension capability. In our apps now, we can give you vocabulary words and show you the limits and help educate you directly, which is a more effective way than read the book and look it up when you don't know it.

Back to all these different things — initial mastery matters on everything. There's the concept of: have you solved it once? Have you done it enough to mastery? Which is, I can do three easy problems or I can do ten hard ones. The ten hard ones is mastery. And then even if I can do the ten hard ones, can I do it a month later? Did I cram the night before? Because cramming is bad. Spaced repetition covers that.

There's a third dimension that really matters, and this is back to cognitive science. The way the brain works is you have a certain number of working memory slots and then you have long-term memory. Your working memory slots are limited. That's where you're thinking — that's your computing. The concept of fluency is this magical concept about brain science. If you memorize something to fluency, when you use it, it doesn't take a working memory slot. Working memory slots are a function of IQ. It's the best way to be farther on your frontier curve independent of your brain chemistry.

If I have memorized something to fluency — here's the example. Let's take multiplication tables and why algebra is hard if I haven't memorized my math facts. If I know 7 times 8 is 56, that takes nothing. I just know it. I have it to fluency. If I have to calculate 7 times 8, I'm actually using my working memory slots. The problem is I only have a few of them. So when I'm in algebra, in a multi-step word problem, I'm using my slots up for something I can't, because I need them for other things. That's why when kids get to algebra and start to struggle, the issue is not the algebra. The issue is the third grade math facts they didn't learn. The way to fix the problem is not pound them with more algebra. It's to go fix the third grade problem.

The most striking example we have: we had a girl with a low 700 math SAT. She kept taking the test and kept getting careless errors. "Focus, focus. You need to focus." Then we figured out she didn't know her math facts. So we had her go back and memorize her multiplication tables. First of all, back to changing education — you can't convince someone with a 710 that the problem is a third grade lesson. You definitely can't convince their parents. That took a lot of motivational pushing from our guides.

Andrew Huberman: What was her attitude toward it?

Joe Liemandt: Her attitude was: "I can't — I don't need to do that. Look, I'm good in math. I'm in advanced math. 710 is not a bad score. It's not 800, but it can't be that I need my multiplication tables." And everybody was telling her, "It's careless. You're being careless." She was just running out of working memory slots. So she went back, memorized her multiplication tables, and she got a 790 SAT.

Andrew Huberman: Which speaks beautifully to what we know about neuroplasticity of learning. People always say, "Oh, it's like the hippocampus passing to the cortex." The fluency piece — this notion of freeing up working memory slots. People assume that even if it would take this young woman a little longer to do the multiplication, she could then move to the next step of the problem. There are two issues there. One is the time pressure on the test, and the other is that we know the ability to focus is also constrained by things you're not consciously thinking about. We know this from the phone, for example. I'm curious how Alpha School treats phones. We know that if the phone is upside down on a table — based on a good study — performance drops. If it's out of the room, performance is rescued. The issue is they don't have enough cognitive space to elaborate on ideas, come up with novel solutions. It's not really a focus issue. It's that the brain is computing consciously and unconsciously.

Joe Liemandt: Correct. The number of working memory slots is the number of unique chunks you can think about. I'll give a different example. You just have a limit and you run out. If you're using them for something, you can't use them for something else. A certain math problem takes a certain number of slots. I can predict whether you're going to struggle with a math problem based on whether you have fluency or not — even if I know you know the problem, even if you've been taught the material.

You can take gifted kids as an example. They have the most working memory slots. But every gifted kid goes through this in math: they do everything in their head. They never write down their work. And everybody's always like, "You're going to have to write down and show your work." They're like, "Whatever. I just do everything in my head." And then every gifted kid at some point hits their wall because there's some math you just can't do in your head. They haven't learned the good habits of how to do a multi-step problem where you're working it down. They hit a wall and for the first time they're like, "I can't do a math problem."

Andrew Huberman: Is that one of the reasons why child prodigies don't continue on a linear trajectory to hyper performance? I was once told by someone who was referred to as a child prodigy — he corrected me immediately. He said "former child prodigy." He said you should look up the data on child prodigies. The outcomes are not super impressive. Sometimes yes, within a very narrow domain, but the outcomes are usually not that impressive as adults.

Joe Liemandt: We have a school that we're building for gifted kids. A lot of the problems in our current school system is we're not challenging and we're boring these child prodigies, and we're teaching them the worst habits in the world. We're giving them 12 years of the worst habits, and then even their capability can't overcome that. It's the super gifted athlete who literally has every bad habit in the book and then in the MLB you're doomed. That is what we do with most of our gifted kids. They're not challenged. They sit there bored and can answer every question like that through the program, versus giving them the challenging problem when they're in third and fourth grade and having them learn all the right skills so they can progress through.

We also in our culture highlight gifted athletes a hundred times more. It's better to be the quarterback on the Westlake football team than to be the number one academic kid at that school — in the US. In foreign countries, very different, but in the US.

One of the things we're going to do with that program is find the 100,000 smartest kids in this country and turn them up to 11. If these kids can learn ten times faster, let's get it to everybody. We started this program — Texas has a voucher program. We have rural Texas kids whose school just doesn't have access to it. They're joining up this program and they are crushing through it. We're going to get that out broadly across America. There's always been the dream: where's the next Einstein? Maybe this Einstein kid — she or he — doesn't even know they have this capability.

Joe Liemandt: Our goal is to get these 100,000 kids academically MIT-eligible by middle school. That's 1580 SATs, fives on Calc BC, Physics C, AP Lang — those kinds of things. These kids have all this potential and we are wasting it. We're boring them and we should just turn them up. But we think it's every kid. Every kid can't get to MIT-eligible by middle school, but the ones who can, we should. And we can get every kid in America dramatically better than where they are today in academics.

Andrew Huberman: We can get them to their frontier.

Joe Liemandt: Correct. We can get them to their frontier. And that's what this system does. Reading is just fluency, right? When you're learning how to read, you're struggling because you don't know the words. Eventually it becomes fluency and you don't have to think about it, and you can crush through it, and then reading becomes much more fun, much more enjoyable.

A lot of this is just: we don't do the basics. We need to nail the basics. Just like in sports — my famous example I always use — if you lose the ball 20% of the time going down the court, the coach is not saying, "Let's work on the dunks and the alley-oops or even the layups." They're like, "Ball handling. We're going to get ball handling. 20% isn't acceptable. 15% isn't acceptable. You can't be 85, 80% accurate."

In America, we're like, "You're getting a B, man. Move on. We're moving on to dunks. You just finished fourth grade at 80%. Let's get you into that fifth grade stuff." And the answer is no. Because then all those problems compound.

Let's go the other way. If you're struggling in chemistry, I can give you an algebra test and tell you how you're going to do in chemistry. Because chemistry is basically algebra with cool word problems. And if you don't know algebra, the time to try to learn algebra is not in the middle of a chemistry problem. Algebra is basically: can you do fast manipulation of fractions? And fractions are just: have you memorized your multiplication and division tables? Math more than anything — but even reading with vocabulary words — it's all just layers. If you don't have the foundation and you just keep pushing kids higher, that's why the learning curves in this country slow down.

If you take our learning curves relatively — kindergarten through middle school and high school — the median student in America doesn't learn anything in high school. There's a test, the NWEA MAP test, a 300-point scale. The average eighth grader to 12th grader goes up one point — from, depending on the subject, 233 to 234 — four years later. They don't learn anything. The reason is because if I'm in advanced math and I don't know my multiplication tables, and I don't know it to mastery, I'm not going to be able to progress and it's going to eventually catch up with me.

The same way in basketball: if I have a player who's a B player — 80% across every function — they're not going to score one point in a basketball game because they're going to miss the pass, they're going to lose a dribble. There are too many things you have to put in sequence. You put all those things in sequence around education, and that's it.

Before, we just didn't have the system. Now an AI tutor can sit there and say: I know exactly what you know. I can give you an assessment. I can know exactly what you know and what you don't know. I can give you a lesson personalized to you that says you need this lesson, and then I give it to you, and I'm going to hit you to mastery. I'm going to keep you in that loop to mastery. Now I'm going to let you go on to the next one.

Last year, starting to open lots of campuses — we're a high-end private school, so these are kids coming from $50,000 private schools, the best schools in the country. The average student when they transferred into Alpha and took our assessment test was 2.2 grade levels behind. I got in front of all the parents and said: look, this means two things. First, don't freak out. You are going to freak out because we're about to send you the scores. It's going to show that your eighth grader can't answer some sixth grade questions, some fifth grade questions even. When it got to writing, it was even lower because everybody's been using ChatGPT to write their papers. You're going to freak out because your kid is two or three grade levels behind. But you're thinking that takes 200 hours, 180 school days. Our average student can do an entire grade level in one subject between 20 and 30 hours in K through 8. 20 to 30 hours. Back to the ten times.

Andrew Huberman: So they can catch up.

Joe Liemandt: Do an hour a day of homework to catch up and you're three years behind — that's 90 days. The most positive use case: if you said what's the number one thing we could use AI for, it's not giving kids chatbots. It's giving them an individualized lesson plan based on their level to catch them up to grade level. That would be the single best thing we could do to fix education in America.

Let's talk about motivation and why it matters. If you take an eighth grader, you can't put them in third grade classes. And if you leave them in an eighth grade class, they can't learn. We have this system where it's not the teacher's fault — I have to teach eighth grade material. I'm not teaching the third, fourth, and fifth grade stuff. If we gave these kids individualized lessons, AI could generate individualized lessons for everybody in America and we could catch them up. It doesn't take that many hours. It takes lots of hours when you're teaching years ahead of their capability. It's 20 to 30 hours per grade level if they're motivated. And that's the problem with edtech — motivation is 90%.

When we design our schools, we need to design a school that they love, so that even when it's hard and they don't like the subject — when you love a subject it's all easy, right? Those problems solve themselves. But what about the STEM kid who doesn't want to read the book? Or the arts theater middle schooler who's like, "I can't do math"? That's why we say motivation is 90% of the problem or the solution. You have to be able to motivate the person to engage with these personalized lessons to learn it.

The first step is we show them it's tractable. When you're like, "I'm three years behind," you're out. It's too far. Too much work. When you're like, "You're 22 hours behind" — totally different message. We are taking kids who are years behind and catching them up because they see it and say, "I can do an hour of homework a day to fix that problem."

Shame, Self-Perception, and the Psychology of Learning Gaps

Andrew Huberman: It seems to me that one of the really wonderful features of what you're describing is also the removal of the shame component. We're thinking about students not as robots, but there's a whole social psychological context here. As you're explaining Alpha School, I'm seeing and to some extent remembering the many times I or others were either not in keeping or were ahead or bored. If every kid is behind in something — or most every kid is behind in something — the idea that you're 22 hours behind in something, that gap can be made up, not in total isolation but not with peers observing.

I have a friend — a brilliant and very successful musician. He describes an experience in the sixth grade where he got called to the board to do math. He's dyslexic and he wrote his seven backwards and the whole class laughed. He told another friend of mine — they went to elementary school together — what happened, and this older kid said, "Well, if you think sixth grade is hard, seventh grade is way harder." He told himself at that moment he was terrible at math. Turns out he's brilliant in music and actually exceptional in math, because certain music is very mathematical. These key moments in people's childhood — getting picked last for the kickball team — the psychological component gets embedded in people and can set their trajectory off from finding their frontier in a major way. What you're describing is really wonderful because, assuming the digital tutor is not shaming the student, they can go, "Oh god, I don't know this thing. I need to go learn this thing." And they can make up the gap and they're done.

Joe Liemandt: You are 100% right. Let's talk about motivation being 90% of the solution. You talked before about bad standards. We talk about learning twice as much in two hours a day, and that's independent of your starting position — which is a critical part of our motivation, which is this no-shaming. When we're sitting there saying you're learning twice as much, it's that eighth grader who needs to be in third grade material. First off, he's getting lessons — nobody knows he's in third grade material. He's learning twice as much. It's showing his rate of lesson learning. For them, all our students are like, "I don't care where I am because I'm getting my points." Our motivational model is based on wherever they started from, and if they're learning 2x, eventually they catch up to the norm.

Now, that's something in our school system that's very bad — we measure our schools based on achievement. This is one of the big problems. There are two dimensions: are kids at grade level, and how fast are they learning? We should be looking at the slope of the line.

Andrew Huberman: You've got to look at both obviously, but if the slope's enough, they're eventually going to get there. And you should measure a school based on the rate of learning and the slope of the line — the growth rate — not its achievement.

Joe Liemandt: This is why everybody talks about selection effects. "Oh, good schools are just selection effects. If I just go get all the best kids, duh, they're the best." What we should be measuring schools on is development. Schools are supposed to develop kids, not just select them. That's why we use growth rate — 2x in two hours — because it doesn't matter where you are. We believe a school's job is to accelerate their growth on lots of dimensions, whether academic or life skills, as much as you can, and to measure that. That's what parents should look at: put your kid in an environment where they're going to grow at a rate that is independent of their starting location.

When you talk about motivation, one of the elements we always talk about is what our guides do. Kids have blocks. "I can't do that. I'm not that kind of person. I'm not good at that." The job of a school and the job of an educator is to break that block — to crush that block and show the kid that's not a true statement. You're awesome at that.

When you think about teachers — our schools are full of teachers and they're always going to be full of teachers. AI is not going to replace the role of the human. We had 100,000 people apply for our roles last year. People want to be Alpha guides. The reason: think of the best teacher you had. Everybody remembers the one or two teachers who changed their life. It wasn't because they marked up your paper really well. It was because you had some block, they saw you, and they convinced you that you could do so much more. They removed that block. That's what our guides do every day. They're like, "Where's the block on this kid and how do I remove it?"

Part of it is how do you set a system up where the learning system itself is not based on achievement but on growth rate. The other is what motivations do you have to blow through the blocks.

We have a set of three girls who, when they were in middle school, would have been considered arts theater girls. There's an epidemic in America of middle school girls who are like, "I'm not good at math and science." They just have this block. It's cultural. They can learn this math and science — it's middle school level, back to their frontier. So we figure out what's the motivation that will get them there.

My daughter was one of those girls when she was in middle school. She's like, "I'm not a top 1% math science girl. That's just not who I am." And I was like, "Well, I do know you love to shop. I bet you a thousand bucks you can't get to top 1%." She filled her shopping cart with $1,000 worth of stuff and every day she went and did the science problems and she got to top 1%.

Andrew Huberman: Tell me more about paying kids.

Joe Liemandt: We'll pay $1,000. We'll give you $1,000 to get to top 1%. When kids go to Alpha, we will pay them $1,000 to get to top 1%, because we want to show them they can all get there. There's a whole lot of things and you get into self-determination theory and whether it kills motivation. It doesn't — we can get into that debate, but there's research that shows why. How I would term it is: these kids have a block that they can't do it. You do whatever you can, including paying them, to break through the block. They then see themselves as a different person, which creates the intrinsic motivation going forward.

My wife and I were arguing about this — you're setting a higher standard, top 1%, and two, you're paying for it. My wife wasn't as excited about it. After my daughter hit it, she went in and said, "Mom, I know you didn't like this. You need to understand it's changed how I see myself. I didn't think I was as smart as my older sister, but now I realize I can do everything she can do if I just put the effort in."

When you put things through the loop — try hard things, get them through that motivation, whatever it takes, have them see themselves as capable because they experienced it — have a kindergartener climb a 40-foot rock wall, have a middle school girl say "I can be top 1%" — those three middle school arts theater girls all got 790 math SATs. Didn't have to pay them on that. They're like, "Oh, I guess I can do math." This concept of showing kids they're capable and breaking through whatever their blocks are, whether academic or life skill, is the unlock. Back to growth — that is what growth is.

Kids will do hard things. They'll grind through it. Sometimes you have to decide what the motivation is. Even if they're not intrinsically motivated, they're not intrinsically motivated because they see it as too hard and that's not who they are. You're figuring out: how do I get you through that? It's the same in athletics. I'm not a soccer player. How do I get you to do the drills? How do I get the reps?

We talk about money on two things: one, when you're trying to get them to do something hard and break through; and second, to do the daily habits — if I can get the reps in, I'm going to build a good habit.

Here's another place where we pay. This was one of my hardest problems my first year. Four years ago, I came in as principal and I'm like, to these seventh graders: "You could all get a 100 on the Texas STAAR, our state test." These kids are like, "That's impossible, Mr. Liemandt." I have to teach them to hole-fill to do it because it's correct — they can't today. There's no chance they can get one today. But I need them to go backward and do the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh — wherever they had holes in their knowledge — to get them up to mastery because they had mastery gaps.

I then went to their parents. "We need to go do hole-filling with your kid. They don't know this material." Seventh graders don't want to go back to fourth grade material. Parents want it even less. American parents have been told their kid always has to be at grade level as an educational philosophy, and the learning science does not support that. But I couldn't convince them. I can't fix that if I don't get those holes filled.

So I went to the kids directly and I was like, "You can get a 100 on the seventh grade test." They're like, "No, you can't." I'm like, "Well, I'll give you a hundred bucks if you get 100. 100 for 100." They're like, "That's still impossible. I still can't do that." I was like, "No, no — we have a catch. Any grade level." They're like, "I can take a kindergarten test and you're going to give me a hundred bucks?" I'm like, "Well, the Texas STAAR starts in the third grade." And they're like, "I'm in."

They take the third grade test and get 100 bucks because they got 100. They take the fourth grade test and get another 100 bucks. Then they take the fifth grade test and get an 85. I'm like, "Do you want the AI to generate those lessons you missed so you can get 100?" They're like, "Let me see how many that is." They're like, "I can do that this week. Sure." Then they get 100. Then sixth grade. Then seventh grade. That's an example of: I have huge blocks — society, kids, parents — nobody wants to do what the learning science says. You pay the kid $100 per grade level and you can go fix your problems for $500, for $1,000. We spend $20,000 per kid in American public education per year. So $240,000 over a K–12 career. I'm like, let's take all those middle schoolers and pay them $1,000 to get to top 1%, or pay them $500 to fill their holes.

By law, actually, public schools can't give out cash to kids.

Andrew Huberman: How does that law get changed?

Joe Liemandt: Exactly. And what's the proxy? What's the other proxy I can give them that they really want? Instead, they pay on the back end when they go out into society and hit a wall. The societal optimal thing is just to pay the kid. There are parents who don't like the whole pay-cash stuff. I get a lot of flack from my own Alpha parents about it, but it's super effective when that's needed. Now, if everybody wanted to fill their gaps, I wouldn't have to do this. Hole-filling is: master the basics. Go back. You're not good at dribbling — let's go back and work on your dribbling skills. That's the sign of a good coach.

Andrew Huberman: The shift in self-perception is the most important piece, right? Because we were talking about the importance of the slope of the line as well as meeting standards, but ultimately it's that recognition: "I can do hard things."

Joe Liemandt: Yes. And maybe that phrase should be changed to: "I can do what I thought were hard things, if it's delivered to me in the correct context and the correct way."

Andrew Huberman: I've spent a lot of time on this podcast trying to convince people to get morning sunlight and hydrate and exercise, and then I try to teach them neuroplasticity. There's a great Max Delbrück saying — I think it was Max Delbrück — which was "assume zero knowledge and infinite intelligence." The dirty secret is there isn't infinite intelligence, but there's always some place where somebody has zero knowledge. What you're saying is the motivation piece is really the recognition that learning in one context has some similarities to learning in other contexts. It's going to hurt a little bit, but we don't have to make it hurt a lot if it's delivered correctly.

Being the child of at least one parent who's a first generation immigrant, I was told my entire life how lucky I was — you were born at this time, you're in the United States, you went to one of the best public schools in the country. It's true. I didn't make as much of it as I could have or should have, but eventually I like to think I made up for it. There's probably still a few gaps.

In many countries in Europe, it's just thought that you're good at something or you're not, and your life trajectory is kind of set. The United States has always had this idea that you can become anything. But I do think the Spud Webb examples — this quite short guy winning the Slam Dunk competition in the NBA — send a complicated message, which is: how hard should we grind? At the root of almost everything we're talking about today is: what should our attitude about suffering be? Are we talking about learning to suffer to fill gaps and get better, where everyone meets a very high standard? Or are we talking about a different way where the suffering is minimal? Maybe we could just talk for a moment about suffering.

Joe Liemandt: If I can teach you something and it doesn't require suffering, that's better than requiring suffering. If I can teach it to you and you can just learn it and it's easy, we should teach you as much that way as we can. Now, back to suffering — when is suffering good? When do people want to suffer or when do they suffer? They suffer when they're doing things that they care about. And this goes back to motivation. When you talk to people who say, "I have the greatest job in the world," there's a lot of suffering in that job. And they are happy and fulfilled and excited. There are students who are very motivated academically who struggle through it because it's doing something. There's no athlete who said, "Yeah, I just never had to struggle. I never had to suffer." But they did it in pursuit of something. They were able to do the struggle because they were trying to hit their goals.

If you look at education, K through five, fundamentally kids are just trying to make their parents happy. So if their parents say this, they follow their parents' lead in K through 5. As soon as they hit middle and high school, it changes. It's social. Dr. Joerger's whole book is: middle and high school is about being accepted by the tribe, socialization. Why there were always rites of passage. Why a 10-year-old would never do anything to make their parent upset, but at 15 they'll do something they know their parent hates if it gets them street credit or social acceptance.

So what you have to decide for parents is: starting in middle school, you basically have six or seven years in middle and high school where you're trying to decide one of two things. Are you trying to unlock your kid's potential or impose your value system on them? Parents are trying to do sort of both. A lot of the suffering that is ineffective in education is the kid is just like, "I'm not into this," and you can push them as far as you want and all they're going to do is push back harder. If instead you lean into things the kid loves or is focused on, they'll do incredibly hard things. Then it's the educational system's design of: how do you put those two things together so we can do both — where they learn the hard things that are important but also get to be doing the things they love?

The Sports Academy: Motivation Through What Kids Love

Joe Liemandt: Let me take an example. We have a sports academy where we have kids who are years and years behind academically — bottom 25% in the country. We'll be the largest recipient of vouchers in Texas for families who make less than $65,000. We have over a thousand kids who aren't excited about academics, haven't done academics basically for years, middle and high school age. And they're in our schools learning faster than the best private schools in the country. Two hours, 2x in two hours. And you're like: how do you get them to do that hard thing?

First, you make the learning as easy as possible for them. Don't take that eighth grader — age-wise — and put them in eighth grade material when their knowledge grade is third, fourth, and fifth grade. Don't do that. That's impossible. That's not hard — that's not doable. Give them third, fourth, or fifth grade lessons, which our individualized lesson gives. He's like, "Oh, this is now doable. It went from impossible to doable." Now he still has to spend the two hours. He has to grind through it. He has to learn his multiplication tables he never did. In our system, for the first time, they're actually in a lesson that's not too hard or too easy. It's right for them.

But then: I'm not into education. I don't see what's important about it. What drives it? Well, you know what drives motivation? At noon, if they do the 2x in two hours — if the AI says, "You've learned enough today because you're on track for 2x in two hours" — you get to play basketball. I have a high school in Dallas. Jermaine O'Neal, the six-time NBA All-Star, is the head of the school. They get to go practice. They're the number one basketball team in the country. Those kids are like, "Yeah, I guess I'm going to do the academics because I want to play basketball and I want to be on the best basketball team." We have the best baseball team in the country.

Sports — we're rolling this out broadly. Across the state of Texas, there are going to be kids who, with a voucher, are able to say, "I got this new advanced learning that's the best education you can get in America — the fastest, better than the best private schools — and at noon I'm going to my sports facility and I'm playing whatever sport I love." And they're gated. We used to do this a lot in education — you had to have a GPA minimum to play on after-school sports. That has been way watered down for a lot of reasons. In our schools, we're like: no, they're gated. You have to do this.

One of the things this allows us to say is: if you go to one of these schools, your odds of a D1 scholarship double. Because every college coach in the country will tell you: if I have two equivalent athletes, the one who's the great academic, who's ground, who's done hard things — I want them on my team. That's a differentiator. You're going to double your odds of getting one.

So when you look at things, we wake up every day on this hard and struggle and say: how do we build a school kids love — love it more than vacation — because that's what's going to drive them to do hard things? We as the adults have to develop kids and say: you can't just play and do all the things you want. There are requirements. You have behavioral standards. No cell phones during the academic part of the day. That actually changes when we get up into upper high school because we're trying to get them ready for the real world. K through 8, no way. As you start to get into high school, you can earn your cell phone because we have to show you that out in the real world there's going to be no one hiding it. But we're not going to force it because we have to get you ready.

Back to all these rules: adults have to set the standards for the kids. This is what great performance is. Kids want to do it. They'll go live up to them. We're not having trouble on the two hours on the academic side in the sports academy because they're doing what they love and they see: okay, this all makes sense. This seems like a fair trade.

Kids will do hard stuff. Parents, guides, adults — we need to set these high standards for the kids and they can live up to them if we're helping them be who they want to be, not just pounding them into whatever square peg we think they should be. That's the dichotomy. When you talk about mental health issues in high-end elite schools, a lot of it is the kids are being pounded into a cell they don't want. If instead you're like, "I'm going to help you achieve what you want, but here are the things you have to do to be part of it" — that's the difference.

Founder School, Entrepreneurship, and the Builder Philosophy

Joe Liemandt: We just announced a high school program — Founder School. It's an entrepreneurial school and its promise is: you'll start a business, earn a million dollars of profit, or you get all your tuition back. And just life skills are trainable just like other skills. You can teach grit and hard work. You can teach financial literacy. All of our kindergarteners learn how to earn, save, spend, invest, and donate. Financial literacy is the number one thing parents request that schools don't teach. We just start it in kindergarten.

Going up the stacks, we have middle school kids who are running Airbnbs and launching food trucks. They have vending machines. They learn gross margin — what products do I put in the vending machines and how do I get it placed somewhere where I can earn money?

And then a million dollars by high school — it's totally trainable. Alexis Ohanian is helping design the program.

Andrew Huberman: He's perfect for this.

Joe Liemandt: And all the kids love him. He's like influencer central and they are like, "He is the one I want to learn from." But for that — if you go to the Founder School website and look at the academic standards — they are as hard as any school in this country. This isn't going to be creating crypto bros who are just hacking the world to make money. This school is building philosopher builders. The academics — if you ask AI to analyze this book list — it's different than a classics book list you'd get at Exeter or the best schools, but it's not less rigorous. These kids are like, "I will absolutely do all that," coming in. They were not thinking this was their path — to crush academics. But back to the standards, they're like, "I will totally do it because I get to start a business and earn a million dollars."

Andrew Huberman: All the adults listening are like, "I want to go back to school."

Joe Liemandt: We have an event this weekend for this Founder School. We thought there'd be like 10 or 15 people who wanted it and there are 150 people showing up. We literally have people moving to Alpha cities because they're like, "My 10-year-old's going to go to Alpha so they're ready for Founder School."

Focusing on designing a school — we have them for 12 years. Let's build schools where the kids are like, "I wake up every day and I rush to school because it's so awesome." Back to Sports Academy — there's a great testimonial where a mom is basically like, "He used to skip school 25% of the time. I could never get him to go to school. Today, he wakes me up and it's like, 'Mom, we can't be late because I've got to get my two hours in because I can't keep coach waiting.'" That whole picture — that's when we look at the problem. It's not just make kids work harder. It's be aligned with what they want and they will willingly work harder. As long as we as the adults set the high standards for what that is, they'll totally do it.

Andrew Huberman: So it's suffering with a purpose, and the purpose is internalized in them. Because parents can try and ram stuff down kids' throats all day long and that just creates more resistance.

Joe Liemandt: It does. And parents can help. Parents want their kids to excel, and actually when kids are excelling, parents change their frame of what they expected. They just have their frame of what they think excellence is. But when they see their kid excel in a different dimension, they're like, "That's really great, too."

My example was with my dad. In academics, I was the total slacker. I didn't like school. I tried to do the minimum possible. I wanted to go to Stanford. I knew I wanted to go to Stanford. So I'm like, what's the minimum work I could do? You'd round up — an A was a 90 or above. I'd be like, "Well, I need an A — 90.5." I would literally do that much work and not one question more. If I didn't need to go to school, you didn't see me there. Got in trouble for skipping too many times.

Then I got to Stanford and academically I was sort of the same way. One of the things I was interested in — I wrote a paper in high school in 1985 on AI. It was old school AI, not today's. Neural nets — I had a paragraph saying they're decades away. Expert systems and ontologies were the thing back then. I then went to Stanford. Professor Feigenbaum was the father of expert systems back then and he was talking about all these great opportunities. And I'm like, "I can't motivate to go to Spanish class. I just can't." I dropped out.

Back to my dad and this whole thing about what parents expect — my dad was so devastated for my whole academic career. He's like, "You're a total slacker. You're not meeting your potential. You get in trouble at school. You do the bare minimum. You go to a great school and you freaking drop out." In the '80s, there weren't a lot of people dropping out. He was just devastated because he had his frame of what was success.

18 months later, he was like, "Thank God you dropped out. That was the best thing that ever happened." Because in those 18 months, he saw me go to work 100 hours a week. I'm sleeping under the desk. We're doing everything we can to make this startup successful. He's like, "I was so worried that you were a lazy kid." He just needed to see the gears turn.

Andrew Huberman: Exactly. And that is what parents want.

Joe Liemandt: I was a total failure in his book on all the academic side because he was not seeing the life skills, the grit, the things that make you successful. I wasn't demonstrating them through my academic career. It was only when I dropped out and started my business where he's like, "Ah, my kid's not going to be a loser. This is going to be great. He's going to be fine."

In our high school, in the afternoons, kids do these projects called Alpha X's — their passion project for four years. They change a lot because kids change, but it's what they want to do and these kids do amazing things.

Andrew Huberman: Could you give me some examples?

Joe Liemandt: We had one student who is doing a Broadway musical. In Broadway venues, all the music was sourced off TikTok. She can fill a thousand-person venue with the songs. They streamed a million streams like the first day it was released. She's an arts theater girl. And she had to learn legal rights, music rights. She got in a big fight with one of the TikTok singers because in the audition she picked somebody else first, and this person with millions of views said, "I will ruin you." That's a life education. She was 16 and 17. The parents are like, "This is the greatest thing ever." And she was one of the 790 girls. Got into Northwestern and NYU and USC and UCLA and all that stuff. She was doing what she loved and had to do hard things, and that taught her what grit and hard work are, which made it easier when she has to do hard things in other domains.

Other examples: we'll have the first high school student lead researcher published in Nature.

Andrew Huberman: That's no small feat. Nature and Science are the two apex journals — international journals. The rejection rate for even reviewing a paper up front is about 90-plus percent, and the final acceptance rate is somewhere around 1% or less. Many scientists will go their entire career without ever publishing one. And if they do, you should ask them where they were on the author line. Being first or last on the author line is truly an accomplishment.

Joe Liemandt: She trained an LLM in social-emotional advice, because there's a view that AIs are terrible. AIs can be good or bad — if you use them as chatbots, they're bad in education. If you get addicted to them, it's bad on the social-emotional side. But they can be trained and done well the other side. The interesting part of the study was she trained an LLM to give teens social-emotional advice. The surprising finding was it crushed parents at giving social-emotional advice to teens.

Andrew Huberman: So she designed specific prompts that are better than any sort of generic prompts of what a parent would say?

Joe Liemandt: And the domain was dating. What advice would parents give? A lot of it — if you look at the paper — is just that parents give really bad advice about dating today because they're using their context and they don't understand online and all these crazy things. It's a different environment than it was back then. She had this huge data source — she has like 53 million likes on TikTok — of giving dating advice online. They embedded this into a chatbot, tested and proven, and then showed with all her user base that it's super highly effective.

Other big projects: we have one who's now marketing Martin Scorsese's latest film. We have a set of our AI kids who built Open Claw — they presented at South by Southwest and Claude Con. They built little businesses. They earned $50,000 in 10 days.

These kids — it's not just academics that they can crush through. There are all these life skills if you teach them entrepreneurship, if you unlock their potential in the afternoon.

Let's step back a little. When we sit and say we think people should reimagine education for the next decade — versus the last hundred years — it's development of the whole child. McKenzie, the co-founder, her favorite line, which we believe super strongly: Alpha is this is the best time in history to be a 5-year-old. Our ability to make that first 12 years awesome and unlock their potential on all dimensions. They get to love school for 12 years. Their academics — they're going to learn ten times faster. These kids are going to have a headful of knowledge that's more than what their parents had. The learning science shows that the more you know, the faster you learn. And then the third part is the life skills. They're going to have most of their day to work on this.

The framing we use about philosopher builder — who are the kids that are going to come out of school? On the philosophy side, one, it's a proxy for good academics. You can crush your academics and fill your head. The other part is philosophy, which alternates over history between the most important thing and the least important major. I believe with AI coming, it's coming back into focus — what's humans' role when there are all these AIs around? What are the existential debates? What did all the great thinkers think about?

But the second part — and I believe schools really need to do this — is the builder side. We need to create builders. That is what kids need to be doing. That's what adults need to be doing. You can't just be thinking. Schools can't be just sitting in class all day. You have to build. When kids get to build — whether it's physically in sports, climbing, building drones and robots, building a business, writing books, making videos — that's what engages kids. That's what they love. We need to bring that back.

There are whole vocational programs now for high schoolers where it's like: we're going to have you learn how to do advanced manufacturing and build robots. A hundred years ago or 50 years ago, shop class — build things. We are very strong believers in the build philosophy.

Let's take middle school again — this time of transition. We get a ton of transfers into Alpha who are consumers. They're on the dopamine loop. They're caught on TikTok, caught on Fortnite. Just caught in the loops. Causes mental health issues. They're isolated. All these problems. What we do is we have a program called Dream Launcher where we're like: we have to break these kids out of this loop. We have to develop them. But you can't develop a kid who's in that loop.

Dream Launcher is: do your vision board. Who do you want to be? Kids — even the ones in the dopamine loops — have great ideas of what they want to do. Not only do they think they're awesome, they're like, "I am awesome. I'm great." Back to the Japanese concept of ikigai — what do you love, but what are you good at? Back to: you can't just follow the passion. You have to be good at stuff. And yet, if you can develop the skills, great. But you can't do things that you're terrible at because the world won't pay you for that. What does the world value? What does the world pay you for? What are you good at? And what do you love? You help them understand and they can figure out how to find their sweet spot.

So they have these great visions of who they want to be. They start thinking about it in middle school. These Alpha X projects in high school — they do it more. And then we hit them with reality. We were like, "Now you have to do the 168-hour project. You've got to track every hour of your week." And that's when they come back and they're like, "I guess I'm going to be the world's best TikTok scroller." Their thumbs — and the depression. They understand it. They're like, "I just drew my vision of who I want to be. And now I realize my day-to-day habits aren't going to get me there."

Andrew Huberman: That's a big delta to internalize. That hits hard, but it's great to get the lesson at the time they're getting it.

In addition to this notion of motivation and suffering and the concepts around that — and I think you illustrate beautifully how one can reconcile those and hold high standards, still feel supported, still come at things from an intrinsic place of "I can do hard things," even if there's a lure of cash or a D1 scholarship — I feel like this is the piece I want to double click on because most of the world are consumers. It only occurred to me like five years ago that even though I wasn't a particularly good high school student, the friends I was skateboarding with — even though I wasn't good enough to turn pro — they either turned pro or started companies or were dead or in jail. And the ones who started companies started big companies. Part of our staff here were recruited from DC and from action sports companies that are like huge companies. Those were started by kids we knew.

There was always this model embedded in my mind that like, yeah, if you want to build something — oh yeah, you want to make a movie, you film your friend skateboarding. This was before camera phones. I realized a few years ago: oh yeah, building a podcast — we set up cameras and get a team together and do this. But I think for a lot of the world, this feels very much out of their reach. And yet they hear about it and you can learn about it all day from Hormozi or from whoever online. There's this gap between what people are being told they can do and what I believe they actually can do, but then how they're spending their time.

So how do you embed in people's minds that the ultimate experience in life — at the level of personal life, family, learning, and business — is to create something? You can still consume stuff, but how do you embed that into people's mindset? Because I feel like this is what this country was built on. This attitude has been challenged in recent years. And because of the emphasis on tech and AI, for many people, they hear tech and AI and think of the five or six guys — mostly guys — and the press has cast them as bad people. This was not the way that Jobs and Bill Gates were cast early on. They were like nerds and designers. So I think now people hear "builder, AI, motivation, learning, Alpha School" and they go, "We have to become tech nerds. There's no place for humanity in this. I can't build things." And then they feel overwhelmed. So how do you get people past consumerism to really internalize that they can build something?

Joe Liemandt: If you talk to Alpha parents, they're like — there is this impression: robot, terminator, Alpha, AI, this is divorced from humanity. And if you ask the moms at Alpha School, they're like, "This is the most socialization-rich, human environment that's unlocking my child's potential." And it's not because of tech and AI. It's because of the guides, the humans, the culture, the building.

We couldn't call them teachers because they're not teaching academics. We had 100,000 people apply for our roles. We're getting the best ex-teachers. We also get world's best athletes, best coaches — if you're great at motivating kids. But our guides and coaches are what the role of teachers is in a normal school. They don't do academic teaching because the AI gives good lessons for that.

McKenzie Price just did a podcast with Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America. The line is: teachers didn't become teachers to grade seventh grade science quizzes. They became teachers to transform kids' lives — the human part, to develop humans. At Alpha, our adults, our guides and coaches, that's what they do all day. They don't grade seventh grade science quizzes. Let the AI do that. What our guides do — and why teachers became teachers — is spend time developing humans. Run them through the struggle, fail, supported by a caring adult loop that we talked about earlier.

Let's hit AI generically and then go back to the other one. I understand why the AI pitch is negative. If you put chatbots in most schools, kids will learn less. The overall pitch of "hey, AI is going to make it efficient for some people so we lay everybody off, but don't worry because the world's going to end soon right after that" — there's not a positive view out there of AI. Completely agree.

When we look at education and how we want to transform education for a billion kids, we look at it as: we need to make sure when we use AI and tech in our schools, with humans in development, it's a win for everybody. It's not win-lose. It's the best time to be a 5-year-old. Using this stuff is just part of the solution, but what it does is it unlocks the humanity. It gives the humans time. Kids get to love school. They get to learn more. Their parents get to see, "Wow, my kid is being held to high standards but loves it and is struggling through it." The teachers love their job. That's why we have so many applying — they're like, "Wow, this is why I became a teacher. I'm connecting with these kids. I'm motivating them. I'm helping them thrive. I'm unblocking their biggest constraints. I'm letting them see that they're so much greater than what they thought." 85% of our kids are doing stuff even their parents thought was impossible, but not our guides and teachers.

Our whole loop for education is: we have to make it better for everybody, not some win-lose or dystopian robots-are-taking-over scenario. Nobody wants that.

But when we talk about how do we take consumers and make them creators and builders and philosopher builders — the bigger picture is our education system was built to create consumers. Just fundamentally, 100 years ago, we lined you up in a classroom and told you to sit there and listen and write stuff down. You were being built for an industrial factory. The Prussians started it — they needed people who follow rules, who do what they're told, and we put enough knowledge in that they can do those jobs. It was an industrialization of education to create industrial workers. That was why it started and that is what we got.

We've created a system where that's all these kids. We put them in that system for 12 years. They're like, "Yeah, I scroll. It's the only fun thing I do all day." And then they get caught in the loop. We aren't giving them the chance to be builders. They can watch a YouTube video, but back to what you said — everything MIT is online, and so are all these entrepreneurs who started their own businesses. You can't watch a YouTube video and say "I can build a business" any more than you can get your MIT degree that way. You need to be taught. You need to have workshops. You need to be with your friends. Just like when I dropped out — I dropped out with my friends and we went and built a business. I did it during my school-age years. We've normalized that at least in college — that you can drop out with a bunch of friends and build something significant.

Back to what we do in these afternoons: our afternoons are the builder afternoons. These life skills — we're going to make you climb rock walls, have you start food trucks. One of our workshops about character building: the key to my happiness is contributing to my community. That's one of our values, one of our workshops. Every kid does it across all campuses.

Our Austin kids — Austin City Limits, right? Big music town. We're doing Alpha City Limits. These are fifth and sixth graders putting on their own music festival. First of all, they all learned how to play an instrument, had their own band. It's almost like Jack Black and School of Rock.

Andrew Huberman: It's one of my favorite movies, in part because of the musical references he describes on the chalkboard — he has great taste, very specific knowledge in certain genres. But the amazing thing about that movie was the energy he brought to the work, flipping the switch on for these kids by identifying their unique abilities, but also pushing them through the keyhole sometimes of their lack of perception. It's such a more important movie than it appears to be on the front side.

Joe Liemandt: Just imagine — everybody watches School of Rock and it's like, "Oh, I wish my school would do that." Well, why don't they? Because they're like, "Oh, we have to teach academics." No — we teach academics ten times faster. It gets done in the morning. Now we have the afternoon and Jack Black, if you want to teach one, come on in. Our guide is Jack Black in that movie saying, "We're going to launch a music festival." He sent the kids out and they had to raise $25,000 selling sponsorships. The kids afterwards are like, "Can you believe companies will pay $1,000 just to have their name on the banner?" They learn about advertising. And then by the end they're like, "We could have charged way more." They're learning — they're out there doing it. They're learning instruments, putting a band together, doing this at fifth grade. And they're like, "Oh, I can do this." Whether I'm learning an instrument, whether I'm learning to sell sponsorships, whether I'm calling bands and saying "will you play" — that building concept, we should have all kids doing that.

Andrew Huberman: We had a sadistic shop teacher. Everyone knew this guy, Mr. Mitchell — the coin flip of teachers. But we had auto shop at our school. Nobody went — this was Gunn High School in Palo Alto. It was considered like, "Why would you do that?" You're in Silicon Valley. It wasn't relevant. I learned how to balance tires. That was kind of cool. Not relevant nowadays, but it's kind of cool to get under a car.

Joe Liemandt: Back to that — we have a life skill. They have to learn how to change a tire. Physical. We can't keep them on screens all day. We minimize our screen time to two hours and then you're like, "Yeah, you know what you're going to do in the afternoon? You're going to change a tire."

Hands-On Science, Labs, and Engaging Kids Through Building

Andrew Huberman: Could I ask you about biology and medicine? When I was in middle school, I dissected a frog — wasn't my favorite biology experiment, but getting in there and seeing things and feeling things with your hands is a very important experience in becoming a biologist. When you said the microscope changed everything — the ability to sit at a microscope and pan around, to actually stain cells or do a dissection of a brain — there's a lot of tactile learning inside of what we think are often just intellectual pursuits. So do they get the opportunity to do experiments? It's an amazing thing to see a brain. It looks all white and gray and then you put on a particular label, explain to somebody what it's labeling, and they get to see it light up like artwork. You go, "You have these inside your brain and here's what they do." There's something completely different about that experience than watching it on a screen.

Joe Liemandt: 100%. And back to that — yes, part of what we're doing is we're redoing normal dissection biology classes, chemistry classes, whatever labs you do. We're trying to build next-generation ones. So if you have ideas about how we can make this ten times better than whatever any lab you ever went into — I don't know what the upper limits are.

Andrew Huberman: If you gave me carte blanche, I said we put channelrhodopsins into some live animals and shine light on their heads and their behavior will change.

Joe Liemandt: Yeah, we'll have to go see what level we can do. Back to engaging kids around experiments and science in general — Mark Rober, right? We're working with him on some things where we're like: that is what science needs to be. You can watch all the Mark Rober videos, you're still not going to pass the test because you haven't actually learned it to mastery. So we're like: spend the 11 minutes, get it to mastery, but then spend 45 minutes the rest of the class doing this experiment and this project because it's awesome and it's engaging. Kids will do both. It's combining those.

One of the things we have in labs is: when you first get into labs, you're trying to do two dimensions — how many steps can you do in a row, can you follow instructions, and what's your margin of error? We'll start the kids early with baking and cooking. Can you follow the instructions and what's your margin of error? Did you put the sugar instead of the salt? If you do a cooking one with third and second graders, they're going to start to be like, "Oh, I'm now getting the skills of labbing."

Then we have our chemistry one that all the sixth graders start — it's called PFX, special effects. We have videos online where you can see it. They're doing everything from lighting your hand on fire using certain things to creating plate glass so you can walk through a special effects glass that's safe. It's super hard — it's like a 40-step process and the margin of error at any step is very low. Kids will start it at 1:00 and be like, "Oh, I'll be done by school." At 6:00 they're like, "I'm not going home, Mom. I've got to finish this one." They want to post on Snapchat of them breaking through it. The kids get totally engaged and learn all the fundamental skills. You can build ones for any subject — physics, biology, chemistry — that engage kids where they're like, "This is awesome. I love to do this."

You can do it on computer science too. Go build things. Back to being builders. Kids naturally want to build stuff. You want to teach kids how to program or use AI — you can say, "Let's go build a music video. Let's build a movie trailer." They can now do that at a quality level that couldn't be done before.

We had a hackathon on the weekend about learning how to use Cursor. Fully voluntary. Kids would come in at 6:00 on a Friday, work through the weekend. We had a set of girls who were building one that was a Love Island social thing — so when they were all watching it, they could all chat online while doing it. They're building projects they like, but they're learning all the skills of: okay, I can be a builder. This would be a set of students who normally wouldn't do programming. When you engage around what kids like, you make it hard. They're coming in on a weekend. One of them showed me — it was 10 o'clock Saturday night. She's a junior. She's like, "All my friends are out at a party and they're all jealous of what I'm building in here."

Back to doing hard things and having fun because they were building stuff that was significant. They were also working on an app: how do we show 100 million teens that the key to their happiness is contributing to their community? It's an app that builds the daily habits of contributing. Their special hook was that influencers are contributing and helping them. So they're able to spend time with the influencers. The influencers get reach, but they're like, "Wow, I'll go work on these things."

When you think about what we need to do in school and development of kids — and what AI is letting kids learn — once kids can learn ten times faster, the question every parent and every education minister has to say is: what are the skills we want our family or society to have going forward? We believe this whole concept of being a builder — these life skills that we teach: entrepreneurship and storytelling, financial literacy — that's where we should spend our kids' time. And by doing it, you actually see these kids thrive. They totally unlock. They love it.

That's the opportunity we have because we have built an educational system that generates consumers. It forces them down that path. We all know we don't want it. We're on a bad path here. And now we have the opportunity to say, "Okay, here's a new one. Here's a new different way to do that." The capability of your child — back to what I was told ten years ago — we as parents are limited because we went through this terrible system. We're fish in water. What we went through, our parents went through, our grandparents went through. It didn't help move the frontier. It didn't develop kids to their utmost potential. That's why in sports, more than anything we do in America, we do that. Music the same way. We have these stars who get developed. We just don't do that broadly in schools.

The name of our product is Time Back. Give kids their time back. We've used up a hundred years of six hours a day plus homework. We have this new magic that makes it ten times faster so it only takes a couple hours. You've given kids their time back, which is the actual biggest motivator. And then once they have their time back, how do we want to spend it? How do we want to help these kids become builders and creators who learn the skills that we think are the things you need to do to thrive in the world?

There's a fourth grader in our New York campus. She loves quantum mechanics and so she started a podcast called Quantum Explorations and she's using it to go find the other kids who love quantum mechanics. Back to that thriving. She is learning. She's thriving. You can teach them how to be a creator as part of it and do it productively. You get the best of both worlds.

Gender, ADHD, and Reaching Every Kind of Learner

Andrew Huberman: I have a question. Throughout today's conversation, it almost seems that boys and girls are equally supported by this program — maximizing potential, whatever you want to call it. I haven't looked at the latest data on the discrepancy in male-female performance, but when Scott Galloway was on the podcast, or if you look at today's New York Times, or even Fox News, you're going to hear about this gender gap in performance. It almost seems like that's been eliminated at Alpha School. Is that true?

Joe Liemandt: Back to the frontier and wherever it is, most of these are self-imposed constraints that at least in the framework of K–12 don't exist. If I have ADHD boys who now aren't doing as well as the girls on one dimension — broadly — when you only take two hours a day, you know what happens to ADHD? They're building all afternoon. We always tell the parents when they come in and they have their ADHD diagnosis: can he play a video game for 25 minutes straight? They're like, "Yes." And I'm like, "Well, we do 25-minute Pomodoro blocks. It'll be fun."

Andrew Huberman: This is the hallmark of ADHD. The kids can focus if it's engaging enough.

Joe Liemandt: If it's engaging and motivating. In the worst case, like in our sports academy, they run them before the apps. You can take any second or third grader in engagement and solve that, and then they're doing things in the afternoon they love.

One of our Alpha X projects — Rat, he would just crush his apps in one day and then he went and he was a mountain biker. He built a bike park outside of Austin. It was the best bike park in Texas. Texas Monthly wrote it up. Actually, one of the Walton family members told me, "We saw his bike park — that motivated us to go build one here in Bentonville." He went down and SpaceX hired him to build one on Starbase. So it took this kid who was not into just sitting at the books all day, and all of a sudden he's like, "Okay, I can spend the time building."

All these different discrepancies of where they're good and where they're not — I believe as you unlock their potential, you'll see these differences go away because the kids are all just doing much better. Whether you're male or female coming into Alpha, your kid is going to perform at their frontier, wherever it is.

Scaling Alpha School: Selection Effects, Income, and the Path to a Billion Kids

Joe Liemandt: Let's go to another dimension just about reach, which is selection effects. "This only works with rich kids." In education, there's a concept that I think is really poison and why we have trouble innovating in education — there's a view that you must serve everybody all at once for free. Anything you do in education, no matter who it's for, they're like, "I'm going to come up with a counter-example where it doesn't work for everybody all at once for free." That's not how products are developed. There's no venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who, when you're presenting, said, "I promise you I won't release it until it serves everybody all at once for free." You would never get funded. Whether it's the Roadster to the Model S to the Model 3 to what'll be 20-cent robo taxis, you have to move through a cost curve. You find a market where it works and then you expand the radius of that market.

Why do we start? We started high-end private school. So Alpha's an expensive private school. Everybody dismisses our academic results — "Oh, selection effects." But we have a very different view on it. You know who doesn't dismiss it? Parents. That's why everybody's coming to the school and we have such demand.

Andrew Huberman: It makes the current education system seem either completely deprived or partially deprived. But I think even taking a steel man, there are a lot of educators who are trying to fix things. A calculator is faster for a lot of things than what people were doing on pen and paper. Both are valuable. But any new technology — which is really what this is — it takes time.

Joe Liemandt: It takes time. But here's how we look at what we've done: using technology, we didn't build a robo taxi that just works on a test track. We literally have a robo taxi — our system — that beats F1, that wins F1 races. We are competing against the best schools in this country, the best students, the best teachers, the best systems. Our 1400 freshman year, we're doing 2x in two hours, but our benchmark of 2x is given your percentile. So our top 1 percentile kids are learning twice as much in only two hours a day as other top 1 percentile kids are learning all day. I want to go against the best educational system. It's not just rich kid selection effect.

Andrew Huberman: That's how you isolate the variable of what you're doing specifically that's working.

Joe Liemandt: Correct. So build that. Now, our answer is: how do we get that broadly? The American educational system today — because of how it's built and structured — the single biggest indicator of your performance is your family income. You can predict somebody's test scores basically.

Andrew Huberman: Not IQ?

Joe Liemandt: IQ is a secondary effect within that. Then with IQ, the second one once you get to the next level is IQ and Big Five conscientiousness. IQ — you get more working memory slots. So if you put in material that's too hard, you can struggle through it easier. Big Five conscientiousness is interesting — our educational system isn't a mastery-based system. It's time-based. You got an 80%, you got a B, you're moving up to the next grade level. Conscientiousness is the concept of you're a natural grinder. You do all the problems on the problem set. You do all the problems in the back of the book. You are basically implementing a mastery system for yourself. So if you have high IQ and high Big Five conscientiousness, those are the people who thrive in the traditional education system. High IQ people who don't have conscientiousness — those are the people who don't thrive. They're always like, "Ah, he's smart and she's smart, but whatever."

Andrew Huberman: And maybe I'm just extrapolating from a few examples, but you see that a lot in wealthy families with smart kids who had enough exposure to good conditions early on and then just kind of blow it off. When you left school, you went into fifth gear. It wasn't as if you left and were like, "I'm going to travel the world." You built something immediately at full time.

Joe Liemandt: That's why I left and that's what I wanted to go do. But back to this — motivation is the piece. If you have all the skills but you don't have motivation, it doesn't matter. Our system — we wake up and we're like: I have to solve this. If I have to get this to a billion kids, I can't build a system that's based on income, IQ, and Big Five conscientiousness. That's just rebuilding our current system.

The first part is on IQ. If I give you a lesson that's at your level, you can learn it. If you're in seventh grade and I give you seventh grade lessons when you need fourth, you can't learn it. But if I give you the fourth grade lesson, you can learn it. The way US Common Core is designed is for people to learn it — the conceptual leaps aren't that big — so that everybody can learn it. So when you think through eighth grade, I can get everybody through eighth grade if I give material at the right level. That solves your IQ issue of learning it.

Second, I need you to go to mastery. I need you to grind through it. I'm going to solve that with motivation. Whatever motivation I need — you've got support in the afternoon, grind through those lessons first. I've got to pay you. I'm going to do what I need to supplement that you don't have Big Five conscientiousness naturally. You're not grinding naturally.

And then on the income side — the income side is just: are you designing your product for somebody who can afford it? Alpha is expensive, but we're going to be in public schools this year where we're designing for about $20,000 on average. We're in schools at $1,950 and $2,400. We're designing our workshops in the afternoon for that budget. Sports is actually one of our cheapest. We have over a thousand kids who are getting it for free because there's a voucher system. We have to solve that for less than $20,000 a kid. Sports is actually cheaper because fields are cheap — there's capex, but then there's no ongoing cost to your annual cost. A coach is used to managing 30 kids. I can manage a team of 30. So I can hit your cost target.

When I think of the US educational system, we absolutely can do this, but you have to redesign the whole school day. You can't just throw edtech in. You can't take our Time Back and throw it into a school. It's not going to work because you haven't solved any of the other problems. Edtech is not a silver bullet. We literally have to say: in America, we want this new thing. We want our kids to thrive. We want them to love school. We do want them to learn 2x. But we want to teach them all these life skills and make them builders in the afternoon. And we're willing to redesign the school day for it.

Some of these public schools — I wasn't able to convince the superintendent to go to two hours, but they're going to do three in the apps. The superintendent's like, "I don't really believe this, but okay." He saw enough of our results to say, "Let's try it." But then the afternoon workshops — our Alpha-like workshops designed for their constituency, their price point. Our goal is we can get it out.

Back to selection effects — I believe you have to design your product for your customer. We have the sports academy school. If you don't like sports, it doesn't work right now. Your family income doesn't matter if I've designed it for the right price points, because I'm going to give you lessons at the right level and you're going to be motivated, and that's independent of income.

We have a gifted and talented school. It's the one place we actually test cognitively — you have to be top 10% cognitive. But we also say: when I ask what would make you love school more than vacation, you're like "more academics." It's like 5% of the market — one in 20 kids is like, "I want more." We're like, "We're going to design a school for you and we're going to crush you with academics because they love it."

Andrew Huberman: My youngest daughter's the opposite. My oldest daughter was reading calculus books for fun. She's at Stanford. She's like, "Oh, I'm going to get my master's while in undergrad." She's an English-math double major. She's like, "More, more, more." She's hungry for it.

Joe Liemandt: Schools are communities. Socialization matters. Putting those gifted kids around each other — they build on each other. The number one motivator to get rid of a block is actually not the guide. The number one thing that convinces kids they can do something is watching their classmate do it.

Andrew Huberman: This is huge in athletics. Being around people that are much, much better at whatever sport you're in — you just push yourself harder. Being a postdoc at Stanford years ago was the first time I looked around the entire room and like everyone is at least submitting their papers to the top-tier journals and they deserve to be there. You just push harder. You think harder. You don't just work longer — you actually think much more carefully about what you decide to do and what not to do.

On the backdrop of all this — I hit 50, so I think I can editorialize a little bit. I've lived in this country my whole life. There seems to be a cultural stance that has been around a lot more in recent years, which is: if somebody didn't suffer and have disadvantage, we don't really want to see them succeed. If you look at the stories that are celebrated, they are stories of the underdog. That's like an American tale. But there almost seems to be a pushback against people who had things mostly right getting to their frontier. I realize that's not your stance. That's not the stance at all that Alpha School takes. In fact, it takes quite the opposite stance — let's develop everyone to their frontier.

The big question in a lot of people's minds is probably this "everyone" piece. You're saying we have to start here before this can wick out to the entire educational system. Totally understand and support that. But I think there's an opportunity in this discussion to embed in people's minds that seeing somebody succeed is not necessarily taking from anyone else, especially if the way they got there can be exported to anyone. The specific circumstances we've tended to focus on in this country have been the outliers — the Spud Webbs — and these are remarkable stories, but there's not a lot that's exportable about that story except "if you really want it and work really hard, you can have it." We've sort of sold this myth that anyone can hit their frontier. And for the person who's listening thinking, "How do I ensure that my kid someday gets access to something like this?" — it's not just a financial barrier, it's also a mindset barrier.

Joe Liemandt: I 100% agree. We absolutely have to get this to everybody. I put a billion dollars in to say, "Let's make sure I have the resources so that it's not just for high-end private school kids." That's why we can sit and say: yes, we'll be the biggest school with kids under $65,000 income in Texas next year, and those kids are going to learn at the rate of private school.

Andrew Huberman: I think you should repeat that once more so people hear it. You'll be the largest school with kids with less than $65,000 family income.

Joe Liemandt: Yes. That's our sports academy. Sports is actually one where you can design for lower cost because fields are cheap for workshops. Coaches are used to teaching bigger teams. Kids are totally motivated by it and they love it.

Texas vouchers allow people in Texas — either you have a learning disability or you're under $65,000 income — to get a voucher. On January 1st when the vouchers opened, to 100 days later, we had over 120,000 families in Texas say, "If I get a voucher, I want Texas Sports Academy for my kid." We got a little over a thousand vouchers, which is the largest voucher recipient in the state. These are all families who are under $65,000 income. Their kids love sports. Those kids are going to be on the same academic system as Alpha's super high-end private school and they will be learning 2x in two hours. Their academic achievement coming in is below what Alpha is. They aren't at the same rate. They will be learning at the same rate. They will be learning faster than standard private schools.

We believe we can expand that across the country. There will be public schools where this is released where if you're in those public schools, in two hours you will be on the Alpha system, Alpha Time Back, and your afternoons are going to be our workshop creator-builder ones that we've all talked about. They'll be a little different because you have a $20,000 budget instead of Alpha's 40-plus thousand dollar budget, but they're still going to be fantastic life skill workshops. $20,000 a year — you can make a 10-year-old love school.

Our job is to make that work. We have to prove it. So we signed a deal with MIT — nobody believes us obviously because it's all too fantastical. MIT Blueprint Labs, their Nobel laureate group, is going to run the tests, run the RCTs, show that this works, show where it doesn't work, and get that data out so we can start expanding this to everybody. There are 55 million kids in America and we need to get it to everybody. We're on that path. We believe we're going to have a bunch of data over the next year that shows it.

We'll have the sports academy one as the big driver. The other one we're going to have is this GT Squared where we're going to make 100,000 kids MIT-eligible by middle school — academically eligible by middle school. It's going to be rural kids. It's going to be available to everybody across the country. For those who love school and more academics makes them love it even more, they'll do four hours in the apps instead of two. Those things will be free — able to be paid for with vouchers and different programs. There are also philanthropies who'll do it. And then we're going to be putting it in public schools.

It is going to take 20 years to change a whole educational system. I don't want to say it's overnight. But we're working on ones to get it out there as quickly as we can.

We have one of the other schools — we talked about the Founder School for entrepreneurs, and our sports school. We're also opening schools in Africa. They have a price point — I have to get down to less than $1,000. That's going to take even longer and harder, but we're starting to work on that. We have a bunch of Alpha high school kids who are like, "Okay, we know what Alpha is here. How can we go learn more and spend a year abroad figuring that out?"

Andrew Huberman: So the students are building a school in Africa.

Joe Liemandt: In Africa. They're like, "We have to bring in solar and Starlink and dig a well and the community is very different." When they signed up for the school, back to hard things, we made them sign something that said: "I understand this will be the hardest year of my life." But back to the key to my happiness is contributing to my community — they're all in. One of my biggest problems was I have an Alpha middle schooler who's like, "I want in." And her parents are like, "She's too young. Don't let her in. Get her to wait till she's in high school."

Then back to getting this access out — one of the things we have is a group of the best video game developers in the world who've been building a world-class video game. Not like all the edtech video games that have been out there. It'll literally be built by a team who's built the best video games in the world, and they are building one on these learning science concepts — Time Back — and imagine embedding that with a game. The economic model for that is it's going to be available for 500 million kids, starting with third through fifth grade reading and math, and then it'll expand to the full curriculum through 12th grade. Any kid in America after school is going to be able to use this and learn as fast as if they were in the best private school in the country. It'll be free. So it'll be free to learn for 500 million kids in the world. Kids can play it after school. Even if your school thinks edtech is terrible, you'll be able to use it at home. You're going to love it so much you're going to use it instead of whatever video game you play after school, except it's going to put you in the top 1% of academic performance.

Andrew Huberman: Amazing.

Joe Liemandt: These are the kind of things when we talk about unlocking kids' potential and putting this all together — and why we're so optimistic about it. It does take a lot of capital. They just had to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of capital to build this kind of stuff. We are at a renaissance in education. It's the best time in history to be a 5-year-old. Every parent is going to be able to sit and say, "My kid will be able to thrive at levels I never expected, doing things that I couldn't do at their age." We have an incredibly optimistic view and we believe it's our job to build it and get it out to everybody.

Andrew Huberman: I love it. What you've built and where you're taking it is truly incredible. I say that both from the stance of somebody who loves learning, who also had a period of floundering and then found the track — and when those gears switch on, it's a remarkable thing. And I can tell you want it for everybody.

These kids sound incredible. The guides sound incredible. And I'm just very grateful to you for coming up with this, organizing the team. I realize you're part of a team that came up with this. I understand you're the principal. And for taking the time to come educate us about Alpha School — because what's more important? It sounds so cliché, but what's more important than the neuroplasticity and learning of our species as they grow up and eventually replace us?

I also have to say, in listening to your previous podcast, I'm going to flatter you a little bit. You have a remarkable mastery of the learning data, the neuroscience. We didn't get into critical periods and stuff today, but you have a mastery of that. And dare I say — I'm not a psychologist — but you're super organized, but you also have this almost childlike delight about these children learning. It comes through. And in my experience, that's perhaps the most important thing about any educator. The best teachers have mastery of the material, but they're also looking at the material and what's happening with the students with the same kind of awe and excitement as the first time they learned it. So thanks for letting me and everyone else experience that today.

Joe Liemandt: Well, thank you very much. And to that point — I had a great career before I became principal four years ago. It was fantastic. The last four years have been the best years of my life. Watching these kids thrive — back to your point about education — it is awesome. There is nothing more exciting. There's nothing more important for a family or society than this. But as an individual — and this is my appeal to everybody who's listening — if you want to come change education, I can promise you this will be the most rewarding thing you do in your career. Wherever you are — coming straight out of college, in college, after college, retired — this is the opportunity to spend time. There are a lot of people who never went into education. These software developers, these game designers had never been in education before. We're pulling in the best people in the world who want to help and change this. Come join the team because it's awesome.

Andrew Huberman: Well, your applicant pool just got bigger.

Joe Liemandt: Great. Thank you very much.