Billionaire’s Advice to Young People | Joe Liemandt

Most billionaires disappear after they make their money. Joe Liemandt did exactly that — vanishing for 20 years after building Trilogy into a software empire. Now he's back with a radical mission: transform education for a billion kids using AI. In this episode, the reclusive tech mogul breaks his silence to reveal why he's betting another billion dollars that everything we know about school is wrong. Thanks to GoDaddy for sponsoring this video! Head to ⁠godaddy.com/codiesanchez⁠ to get started with GoDaddy Airo® today. From fifth graders negotiating food truck gross margins to middle schoolers getting paid $1,000 to hit the top 1% academically, Joe's Alpha School is flipping education on its head. Kids learn twice as much in just two hours a day, then spend afternoons launching Broadway musicals, building apps, or training for D1 sports. The results? 96% of students love school more than vacation, and every single class tests in the top 1% nationally. We dive deep into why Joe believes the 100-year-old classroom model is dead, how AI tutors can teach kids 10x faster, and why paying students to learn might be the most controversial — and effective — motivator yet. If you've ever wondered what happens when a data-driven billionaire decides to rebuild education from scratch, or if you're tired of watching kids hate school while the world leaves them behind, this conversation will change how you think about learning forever. ___________ 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:24 The Forbes List and Raising Kids Without the Billionaire Label 00:02:39 Why Money Matters: Teaching Financial Literacy from Kindergarten 00:06:45 The MBA Myth: Why Business School Won't Make You an Entrepreneur 00:08:01 Alpha School Revolution: Where Kids Learn 2X in 2 Hours 00:08:43 Breaking the 100-Year-Old Education System 00:18:33 The Three Girls Who Proved Math Isn't Gender-Specific 00:20:05 Paying Kids $1,000 to Reach Top 1% 00:26:59 From Broke to Billionaire: The Trilogy Story 00:28:08 The Entrepreneur's Blind Belief That Changes Reality 00:30:58 From Consumer to Creator: Breaking Kids' TikTok Addiction 00:34:01 High Standards Are the Key to Happiness 00:40:02 The Food Truck That Teaches Gross Margins 00:47:05 Motivation Engineering: Time Back as Currency 00:52:49 From Tech Bro to Principal: Joe's Personal Transformation 00:58:58 The Billion Dollar Mission to Transform Global Education 01:08:51 Making Millionaires in High School 01:10:32 AI in Education: The Good, Bad, and Terrifying ___________ MORE FROM BIGDEAL 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@podcastbigdeal 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigdeal.podcast 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@big.deal.pod MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@codiesanchezct 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codiesanchez 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realcodiesanchez OTHER THINGS WE DO 🌐 Our community: https://contrarianthinking.typeform.com/to/WBztXXID 📰 Free newsletter: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3XWLlZp 📚 Biz buying course: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3NhjGgN 🏠 Resibrands: https://resibrands.com/ 💰 CT Capital: https://contrarianthinking.biz/4eRyGOk 🏦 Main St Hold Co: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3YfGa8u Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:29Codie Sanchez?

  When you look at education today, do you think we can actually re-educate the entire, let's even just say the US, using the technology we have?

• 0:38Speaker 02

  100%.

• 0:39Codie Sanchez?

  What about for people who are really scared to have AI teach their kid?

• 0:42Speaker 02

  You should be terrified. They are being brainwashed by TikTok today. AI could be good or bad, and we need to have a huge effort to make sure that we use it for good.

• 0:50Speaker 03

  Founder of Freeology Software and ESW Capital. Joe is now the principal of Alpha School.

• 0:56Codie Sanchez?

  Today, we're here with Joe Lamont. I saw a tweet from you. Three girls in my Alpha High Group were described by their parents as not math-science girls. They've been focused on other pursuits, but their math SAT scores? 790, 790, 790.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  People read that and say, that's crazy. In our school, that's normal.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  If we spent 10 years and educate kids the way we've been educating for 100 years, those kids are going to go into an AI world and have no skills that math. AI gives these kids superpowers.

• 1:22Codie Sanchez?

  You all believe if we educate kids like this, they will be more successful, and thus, we will have all these beneficial repercussions. What does the data say?

• 1:30Speaker 02

  We are the best performing academics in the country. Every single class we have is top 1%. No school can say that. Here's why, though. Here's what you should actually do if you're a parent.

• 1:43Codie Sanchez?

  So you've been described in so many news articles as private, reclusive, mysterious, and a billionaire. But now you're back in the spotlight, in this room, on camera. Why?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  I believe two things. I guess back, I was big in the 90s. And then in 2005, I got married and shut everything down. My last podcast, sort of prior to this, was in 2005. And so I was quiet for 20 years. My youngest is now a senior in high school and she's going to be leaving. And so my next 20 years is all about transforming education. And I think we can transform it for a billion kids. And to do that, we have to, I have to get out there and explain why it can be awesome for kids around the world. Like the co-founder of Alpha McKinsey, she says, this is the best time in history to be a five-year-old. And we totally believe that. And we need to go out and build that and make that happen.

• 2:42Codie Sanchez?

  Was there just no point to be in public beforehand? Like too much hate on the internet, not fun? You just like working with computers?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Well, two, I'm definitely naturally an introvert. And if I have a choice of just sitting inside, I definitely would do that. The other was just for family. I didn't want my family to grow up in that environment. And it was, I wanted to make it as normal as I could for my kids. It's not quite normal, but not being in the press all the time makes it a lot easier. The other thing I got that happened in 2005, I got Forbes to take me off the list. So I was on the list in all the 90s, the rich list. And I got them to take me off.

• 3:16Codie Sanchez?

  How?

• 3:16Speaker 02

  And so, well, there was a dot com turn down. And so they were all like, oh, and if I don't give them data, right? Then all of a sudden, they're like, oh, okay, you must have lost all your money. I'm like, yeah, totally. And so then they found out later and put me back on it. And I had to sit down with my two daughters and I'm like, kids, I hate to tell you this, but I've been, I've been lying to you. We actually have more money than we think. And it's going to go, it's going to go out next week. And you're going to see that we have more money. Cause I had basically been trying to have them grow up in a world where it wasn't surrounded by, you know, billionaire kind of stuff.

• 3:53Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, smart. I was just with another friend of mine, Jenny, who is also, you know, a billy. But she, she was saying last night, she was like, we purposefully never put out how much we were worth. Which I think for young people, they're like, why not? Where are the Rarries? Where's the planes? But I think that's also like often an indicator of perhaps not everything's very great. If you're having to demonstrate that as your indication of wealth. So do you think for, for young people, or if somebody's listening to this? Should you try to look poor? Is it a negative signal to actually focus on projecting wealth?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  You know, when I look at kids motivation, you know, and students motivation, right? We're all, or all our schools are about what motivates students. And parents like it or not, one of, you know, what do motivate, what motivates kids? Kids want to be influencers. They want to be famous, right? They want to be athletes. They want to be star athletes, right? They also want to be rich, right? Those are all dimensions that drive kids motivation. And, you know, you have one where when you get wealth, you're often like, oh, honey, or, you know, son, that's not really that good. And it's hard, right? For the kid to be like, no, I want to go prove myself. I want to go do this. And, um, and so I believe it's just an intrinsic motivation in a lot of kids.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  And that you need to teach them the right way, right? There's all these great character building and life skills you can teach under that to get the habits you're looking for, right? In, in our schools, we start teaching about money in kindergarten, right? And so we have a whole financial literacy program that starts in kindergarten all the way up through 12th grade to teach all the good habits that people need to have.

• 5:37Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, well, I think it's good you're talking about it again because what I've found is once people get money, then to your point, they're like, oh, well, that's not important for us to talk about anymore because it seems gauche. And so then, you know, but then how are you supposed to get it? If all the people who have it will never tell you the real path to it.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 5:54Codie Sanchez?

  And so I think it's actually pretty liberating now that some people on the internet are saying, hey, okay, this is what it took. This is what it looks like if you have this much. It's hard to even conceptualize some of it. And so I, I think it's good.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I would, I think teaching how to make money and capitalism, I believe there's a view of, you know, if you on, you know, if you're in the TikTok world, right? There is a view that socialism is much better than capitalism. And we don't teach why capitalism is good and it's a force of good, right? And it can be very productive. It can be bad, but you can also teach kids, this is how it can be additive to society. And that's not out there, and I believe it should be for sure.

• 6:36Codie Sanchez?

  What do you think are some of the ways you can teach kids? Or how do you teach kids? About money or to get money.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  We want to teach kids how to earn money, right? How to save money, how to spend money effectively, how to invest and how to donate, right? And it's all of those things. And for kids, right? It needs to be real money. It's why kids often got allowances and things like this, which is you're having to teach them how to be responsible about it. That yes, you have to earn this. And when it's your money, you're going to spend it differently than if it's not your money, right? And you are going to learn how to invest. So like in, you know, in our middle school for when they earn money, they can run and, you know, basically Robin Hood for kids, right? They can invest. And, you know, there's, there's just so many great lessons. One of the things we allow the kids to do after they've earned it, they can invest in anything they want.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  And some seventh graders YOLO that money on some crazy thing and lose it all, right? And their parents are like, wait, what's going on? Why, why'd you let them lose it? And the answer is the best time to have that happen to you is when you're in seventh grade, not when you're 27, right? Or if you're going to have debt and a credit card, right? The time to learn it, we, we let the kids borrow, you know, around it. And then they have to pay it back with interest. And our kids know what 25% credit card debt is, you know, when they're in fifth grade, because they're having to earn back, you know, whatever they borrowed to buy. And so all these life skills that you want to teach are totally teachable and actually need to be taught, right? If you say, if you ask most parents, you're like,

• 8:10Speaker 02

  what are the life skills I really want my kid to know? Financial literacy, entrepreneurship, right? They want that as a, as a course. And in standard school, historically, you haven't been able to, sort of in our new model, you can absolutely spend plenty of time teaching kids these skills.

• 8:25Codie Sanchez?

  That's so smart. Yeah, I mean, we always say the best business school is being in business. Like I find business school to be kind of a funny misnomer. I think it's maybe okay for the network, but actually I think a better network would probably be building things with other builders.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Hundred, I couldn't agree more.

• 8:39Codie Sanchez?

  What do you think? Should people go to MBAs?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  That's an easy one for me is no, we, uh, there, it is a great two-year period to build up a set of great relationships, but no, there's nothing on the business knowledge that you're going to come out of there that is a fraction of what you would get from building your own thing for that two years, like just not even, not even close.

• 9:02Codie Sanchez?

  And putting the hundred K on the line for a startup.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:05Codie Sanchez?

  Instead of just getting debt that you can't ever escape.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 9:08Codie Sanchez?

  For business.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  No, it just, and back to the skills, the skills are all of how to start a business. You have to do it. So we're our, you know, in our high school, we have a set of students who want to create a new curriculum for next year. And the curriculum they want to start is how to make a million dollars in high school. Right. And they want to program, because all our afternoons are they get to work on their passion project for four years. They're like, we can totally teach kids, right? How to be able to, what are the skills to build a business, starting in high school. Right. And that is really effective and it's not going to be a traditional MBA curriculum.

• 9:44Codie Sanchez?

  You know, people have said lots of things about Alpha School and hey, billionaires are teaching our kids and how can we do this with AI and it's completely free form and oh my God, you give them debit cards. But then if you pause for a second and you think about what school is like for us, you know, at least I'll say for me, you know, really hard wooden chairs with tiny little desks that you have to sit in for eight hours a day where you have to ask to use bodily functions and be taught from somebody that's never actually done the thing that they're teaching you about. It's actually, it's wild. And so, you know, if we were taught, you go to school, you get great grades, you go to college, you get a good job, then you make money and that's how you get rich and happy. What do you think the real process is?

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Well, I think, I think the way to think about it, or the way we think about it is, you know, if you focus on K through 12, you know, it's been a hundred years, we educate everybody on the planet the same way. Right. It's put them in a classroom, six hours a day, teacher in front of the classroom. And that was actually a hundred years ago, the best way to educate the population. Right. And it, it is the most equal thing on earth. You can be in the poorest school district in any country in the world, there's a teacher in front of a classroom. The building's not very nice, or you can go to really expensive private school and there's a teacher in front of the classroom in a nice building, but it's the same mechanism. And, you know, sort of where Alpha came from was if you stepped back and said, okay.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  AI is coming, the world's going to be different in 10 years. And you have a kindergartner and you're like, am I preparing them? You know, for a dozen years from now, right? What would that be? And you rethought this from the ground up. How would it be different? And so that's what we did is we just sat there and the first thing back to the experience, the first thing that we said was if you're going to send kids in this for a decade plus, they must love school, right? That is just a design goal, right? I'm a product guy, right? And so I just look at this as a product manager where I'm like, how would you design a product? And so the first thing you'd say is they should love school. And we literally measure it on, we ask kids every eight weeks. Do you love school?

• 11:49Codie Sanchez?

  You have like an NPS score?

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Absolutely. 90 plus percent, 96% in the last one said they love school. We actually had to ask a new question because it got so high, it was sort of useless to ask that. Is we say, do you love school more than vacation? Right? And 40 to 60% of our kids each eight weeks, depends on the workshops and whether they're really cool or what their vacation choice is. But we sit and we want to strive to build an environment that if we're going to send your kid there for a decade, decade plus, like they should love it more than vacation, right? You know, my highlight, I've been principal for three years was a few months ago, in the spring, two thirds of the high school students sent me a note and said, can we keep the school open this summer? We don't want summer break.

• 12:34Codie Sanchez?

  What?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  And I did not like school. And what I went through was not that, I got in trouble for skipping school all the time in high school.

• 12:41Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, you dropped out of Stanford.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  And I dropped out of college for the same reason. And, you know, so I, but that is crazy. But that is what our design goal should be, right? If you're going to rebuild school and your kids, right? It should be that.

• 12:53Codie Sanchez?

  But don't people even push back on that, on you on that? Like, I know my, my parents were like, you're not supposed to like it. You're supposed to go, you're supposed to listen, it teaches you discipline. So do you get pushed back, like, should we actually love school?

• 13:06Speaker 02

  So I didn't start Alfred, started a decade ago plus, and Brian and Mackenzie started it. And there's a long story on getting my own kids in it. But when I sat down with Brian, you know, when my kids went in a decade ago, I said, what are the things I don't know as a parent that I'm wrong about? You know, about education? And he's like, the first thing is kids must love school. And I was like, you know, it's spinach. It's spinach. And he's like, you are so wrong, Joe, and you will figure that out. And I can now tell you now that I'm principal, if you want to build a great school, they do have to love it. And if you ask back to learning grit and hard work, one of the life skills we learn is grit and hard work. Right?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  And our kids, you know, all our eighth graders, three weeks ago, finished a Tough Mudder. Right? And crossed the finish line at the same time. It was a teamwork grit combo life skill workshop. Right? And so kids will do hard things. Right? But you want to do it in a framework where they love it.

• 14:09Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah. And hard doesn't always mean monotonous either.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Those are two totally different things. They're exactly the opposite. If you want a kid to love school, it can't be monotonous. It is literally the opposite. And so, so that design goal of, you know, you have to learn, you have to build a school that kids love. That is what unlocks kids' potential. Right? Is they're doing it because they love it. The kids don't come in in the summer because they're working on some monotonous. It's that they believe they're changing the world. Right? The reason that that team who's working on it is they're working on a project where they're building an app and their goal is to teach a hundred million teens, the key to their happiness is contributing to their community. Right? And they're building that app and they're like, we are going to change the world with this app. It's going to be the greatest. They have all these influencers who are helping them.

• 14:56Codie Sanchez?

  Mine was like, get an A minus and no more because what would be the point of that?

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Right. And so, so this whole point, right of, exactly, I was the same way of, you know, what's the minimum academics I could do to still get through the system?

• 15:07Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  This is, you want to engage kids on their passion, right? Starting in middle school, we start passion projects.

• 15:12Codie Sanchez?

  Well, let's back up though, because I think people could listen to that and they might think, well, that sounds really nice. And they won't know your background and that you're incredibly data driven and the success that you guys have had. So like, it's not just you're like, that sounds good. I'm Joe. I'm a touchy feely hippie guy. That's not you. You're the opposite of that. In fact, like many times, I think people had said, or you had said, I would be the last person to be building this kind of company. So like, what does the data say? You, you have a particular way we're going to talk about on this podcast, that you all believe if we educate kids like this, they will be more successful and thus we will have all these beneficial repercussions. But your success has been pretty wild. So tell us like, why we should listen to you on this?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  First of all, we use on the academic side, there's multiple parts, but one element is, are they actually learning academics in our schools? And we are the best performing academic school in the country. On any, every single class we have is top 1%. And so in every grade, every subject, no school can say that. And the, here's why though, here's what you should actually do if you're a parent. We have known for 40 years that kids could learn 2, 5, 10 times faster. There's a whole field called learning science that has been studied for decades. Papers came out when I was in high school, right? About how we could radically transform education and allow kids to learn 10 times faster.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  But they all started with, this will not work with the standard teacher in front of a classroom model. And so there was no way to solve it, right? Cause economically, you couldn't give everybody an individualized tutor. You couldn't go master, you couldn't implement some of these learning science concepts. And you know, one of the things that has changed, right? And our second, when we talk about if we're going to redo education for the next decade, our second principle is kids need to learn 10 times faster, right? We need to allow them to learn 10 times faster because sitting in class for six hours a day and homework is not going to prepare them for the world that's coming. And so that was part of why I got involved three years ago was I had to go build a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  And you know, all these learning science papers, every parent can go read them and understand it's possible. We took AI, Gen AI, combined with learning science to build this engine. So if you come to our schools, you sit down at this learning science based AI tutor. That's not like ChatGPT, it's, it's different that you'll have to experience it to understand it. But it's going to teach the kids 10 times faster. So in two hours a day, they sit down for two hours, they learn more than twice as much as if they sat in class. And so they're learning so fast, it doesn't matter where they come in, they can come in, you know, top 25%, bottom 25%, they are going to get to top 1%. The longer they're in the system, right?

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Cause they just keep learning twice as fast as anybody else and doing it in only two hours a day. On the academic side, kids can crush it. Like, if I could wave a magic wand to fix things. If parents could understand a couple of things. One, your kids should love school. There's, you can't say you should have a crappy 12 years. No employer would say, come work for me.

• 18:31Codie Sanchez?

  And hate it.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  And it's gonna suck for 12 years. Like, when we talk about love of school, it's just so obvious in every other part of our life. We would be like, that's ridiculous. And yet, you know, what employer, like, it's gonna be terrible. But that same parent who's running a company with, you know, thousands of employees, when they look at kids, they're like, yeah, you should twill a decade. You know, it's terrible. You should hate it. Right? It's good for you. And that's why all these kids are unhappy, right? And that's why they're not engaged. And that's why middle school and all these mental health issues. It's because we've designed a system that pours the crap out of them. We hope they hate it. And then we're like, let's put stress on them. And you do all that stuff, and you're like, God, that doesn't work out that well. Right? I mean, it really is insane, like, the, the system that we've designed. And so going back, you're like, yes, you should love it. So parents need to understand that.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  That's critical. And who, at the end of the day, wants to look at their kid and be like, I want you to hate this? The second is, though, you can crush your academics in two hours a day. That's it. That's all you need. So all of us who went through, because all we know, six hours a day at homework, you wanna do better, you have to, you know, all this crazy amount of time. That's not required. Two hours a day, you'll crush it.

• 19:38Codie Sanchez?

  And what's, how many students have you taken through this? So over the last three years, you have a lot of data to back this idea.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  No, so we, we publish our data, so you can go to the website and it'll download, right? Map, we are huge believers in standardized testing. You know, and lots of parents don't like standardized testing. When they come to Alpha, they actually love it because they don't believe me that the kids are learning in two hours. And so all these parents who are like, no, I don't like standardized testing. I'm like, great, just trust me. Don't worry, they're learning. They're like, no, okay, wait, wait. You know, and then until they get the standardized test back that shows their kids crushing it, they are very skeptical.

• 20:13Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, I saw a tweet from you on it. And the tweet was, "Three girls in my Alpha high group were described by their parents as not math-science girls." That, this happened to me, too. Um, they've been focused on other pursuits. Launching a Broadway musical, competing for Miss Teen USA, building millions of TikTok followers, and became nationally recognized, uh, as a teen dating expert. But their math SAT scores, 790, 790, 790, which is wild.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  People read that and say, that's crazy. In our school, that's normal. Which is, you know, there's a view, there's a meme in the world. You know, and in our middle school, a lot of girls come in and they're like, I'm not math science. It's just, it's a TikTok meme out there. And so they all say it. And one of the exercises we make them do is we're like, oh, really? Well, go find the learning science paper that's been written, because there's 10,000 of them written, that shows that middle school girls can't learn math science. Right? And there's obviously none. They all can. And so that's where you get into the motivational part. A lot of what you're trying to do with kids, right? When you're raising them is what are the limits they have in their head? Right? What do they think they can't do? And how do I break through those? Right?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  And that is the part, like, that is what our guides do, right? We have guides and coaches whose entire job is to sit there and say, instill a growth mindset, kids, you can do anything. And how do I motivate you to put in the effort to show yourself to do it? Right? And so if you want the most controversial thing we do about paying kids and all these kinds of things, so we will take any middle schooler, girls or boys, and we will pay them a thousand dollars if they get to top 1%. Because lots of kids come in and say, I'm not top 1%, right? I can't do that. Only GT kids can do it. Everybody else, I couldn't be a 790 SAT. And we're like, well, a thousand dollars.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  And we show them, because of how these AI tutor works, it's not about IQ, it's literally about effort. Wow. And we show them, if you, if with this tutor put in the right way, in the, in the system, they all can do it. And it literally will calculate for them. It's this many hours of time for you to get to top 1%. And they're just like, okay, well, that's many hours. Okay, I'm willing to put in the work. And then when they hit 1%, it changes how they see themselves. Right? A lot of what you're trying to do when you're breaking through these blocks is they're like, I'm this kind of person. I'm not a math science girl. And you're like, no, that's just not a true statement. And then when they get top 1% in science,

• 22:52Speaker 02

  they're like, oh, I guess I am. And then once kids, you have to pay the 1,001s to sort of get the breakthrough. But once they hit it, none of those girls needed any incentive to stay. That's actually not true. There's one, one of them needed some more incentive to get 790. And we'll talk about that. But they didn't need any incentive to get to 790. Right? Because they saw themselves as, oh, I am a top 1% math science girl now. Even though I'm still trying out for Miss Teen USA and all of those. The Broadway musical is another one, because we can talk about that. Another controversial part is for her, she is trying to first all teen produce Broadway musical, right? She sourced all the singers off TikTok, right? They had a million streams like the first weekend. She

• 23:37Speaker 02

  needed to go to New York to meet a producer, right? She's, I think she's run three or four shows off Broadway already. But she needed to get to that producer meeting. And I was like, well, and she wasn't at 790 math. And I was like, you can totally do it. And there was an incentive. And it would pay for her to fly up to New York to meet the producer. And she's like, okay, I'll go do that work, right? And then fly up and get it done. And so we will, you know, back to earning, you're like, maybe you didn't want to do it. And there was a little extra work to get to that 790. But you earned money that then you could spend on your passion project, right? That you could do. And when parents hear that story, okay, do you want to have a framework, right? To earn and save

• 24:20Speaker 02

  and spend? If your kid's earning money on some of the academics that's breaking through some of, you know, their inherent limitations, and it's being spent on learning how to invest or investing in their business or passion project they're doing. Generally, parents are like, okay, that's really a great idea. Like, I heard the headline of Alpha and I was like, this is stupid and I don't like it. And then, sort of when they dive down, they're like, okay, wow, that's great. I wish my kid would go through that.

• 24:45Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, well, I think the headline's actually pretty fantastic. It's like, where students learn 2X in 2 hours, test in the 99th percentile, and then give students the rest of their childhood back? That is good. You got some, that's a good marketing slogan. And the best part is always when your slogans are true.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  Buying a business or launching your own venture can feel impossible if you're stuck figuring out the website, logo, email, marketing, all at once. But here's the good news. GoDaddy Arrow is here to help. So, just a few prompts. It builds a professional website, a logo, an email, even social content, all tailored to your business. It's like having a whole launch team in your laptop. Instead of months of grinding, you can go from idea to launch-ready business in minutes. No more waiting, no more guessing. Just a real online presence that you can grow with day one. Suddenly, the thing that was just a tiny idea in a notebook is online, polished, and ready to scale. So if you're ready to take your idea to life, head to godaddy.com backslash Codie Sanchez and try GoDaddy Arrow today.

• 25:42Codie Sanchez?

  What about for like, the rest of us? So people who are listening who don't have kids, who would have loved to go through this, but maybe feel like they've hit their levels. They can't get further. This sounds great for these malleable brains, but for them, it's not possible. Are they just out of luck? Like, can you learn how to change your brain and become a top 1 percenter past high school?

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Yes, you can. It's not the market we're focused on. But all these learning science concepts, you know, there are some elements at age, but fundamentally, you can apply them for your entire life. And, you know, K through 12, or, and take higher ed. If you take higher ed, higher ed and down, the education market is a global $7 trillion market. And so, we're focused on the K through 12 for now. But there is a huge opportunity in education to take all these same concepts for adults.

• 26:34Codie Sanchez?

  What's the TAM of the larger side?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  I mean, near infinite in this world. Here's the issue you have, just, right? When you look at the world today... Right? AI is going to change everything. There's going to be massive reskilling that needs to occur, right? And we're focused on, okay, how do we prepare the world for the, you know, from kindergarten up, right? And then, but there's a whole nother set of, okay, all these jobs are going to be obsoleted, right? And how are we going to retrain all those adults? And I believe that's a huge market and that somebody needs to go in there. And I believe entrepreneurs need to go in. We can't just count on the old educational system that we're all, we all have been doing for a hundred years. We need new entrepreneurs to go in and take these concepts and say, how are we going to reskill all the people who need it?

• 27:20Codie Sanchez?

  You're on, obviously, the very cutting edge of AI and you have been forever from, I don't know if you would have called, you know, some of what you were doing back at Trilogy and ESW. Did you call it, did you say you were AI focused?

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Well, it technically was AI. So the AI, my AI world was, in high school, I wrote a paper on AI. And one of the segments back then, this is in the eighties, this is in the eighties, so this would have been like 1985, was neural nets was a new aerial. And I was like, they're decades away. Back then, what AI was, was like expert systems and ontologies. And so I went to Stanford and I was literally in class with Professor Feigenbaum, who's the father of expert systems, which was AI. Now, the problem was AI was in its downturn phase. It had boomed sort of early eighties. There was a bunch of failed AI companies. So you could never call it AI. So when we started our company, when I dropped out of

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Stanford and started the company, we didn't call it AI at all because of the negative connotations. But it was the first AI product to sell a billion dollars. And so that was, that was sort of our claim to fame in the nineties of what built Trilogy, the software company, was, was AI. We just didn't call it that because we didn't want the connotations.

• 28:36Codie Sanchez?

  That's fascinating. And now, obviously, the company's huge and you've bought all these companies and, you know, you're sort of a behemoth in tech. But God, I was reading some old stories on you. And I'm sure sometimes it's even hard to like reimagine. But I loved this one line about how like by the fall of 1991, you guys are like, at this point, I think, still in your garage, sort of like a couple, five guys, no money, and you'd been three months away from product for two years. And, you know, you did the thing of working 20 hour days and sleeping under your desks. But the part that's interesting is, How people were talking about how your former classmates, they were going to work for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and how some of the other friends of yours began kind of telling you like,

• 29:21Codie Sanchez?

  what the hell are you doing? What are you doing? Like, you're a smart guy. You dropped out of Stanford. You're going to build this thing. You've been two, three months away for two years. This is going to fail. Stop being even maybe what your dad said to you when you graduated Stanford. Was that Gregory was your dad?

• 29:36Speaker 02

  It was my dad when I dropped out. I didn't graduate. So, yes.

• 29:39Codie Sanchez?

  Ah, yeah. And he, did he call you a moron for dropping out of Stanford?

• 29:42Speaker 02

  It was a big title in the magazine, like Forbes, I think that they're like, the title was, you're a moron because that was his quote.

• 29:49Codie Sanchez?

  Does that still feel weird or does it not register to you anymore?

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Well, no, but back to that is I, I believe, you know, the back to, and we were talking about the MBAs before. Here's my difference of an MBA and an entrepreneur, right? Entrepreneurs believe they're going to change the world no matter what everybody else thinks. Right? That they just sit there. And I remember back to one of the, you know, we were building this engine, this, you know, configuration engine and we're in it and we were just like, we're totally going to do it. And of course we know how to do it and we'll get there. It just needs some more time every three months. Right? We kept, kept doing that. And I remember the parent of one of the founders, right? Of the co-founders is just like this, you're, and he had dropped out. And so the parents like mad at me because the kid's dropping out and doing this futile task.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  And it was all dumb and stupid. And my dad's calling me a moron, all those kinds of things. And I was like, no, no, no, you don't understand. Bell Labs had a hundred PhDs working on this and they failed. Right? I mean, isn't that awesome? And to me, I was like, because we're going to solve it and nobody else has been able to figure this out.

• 30:58Codie Sanchez?

  This is not awesome.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  And literally they're like, that literally is an example that convinces me you're never going to succeed. Right? And it's just, it's that blind belief that you are right. Right? And that is what entrepreneurs do. You know, back to the MBA, I used to give talks at Harvard Business School and stuff back in the nineties. And I, I would just sit there. I say, here's your problem as an MBA. You're going to look at the spreadsheet and you're going to Say that cell doesn't work. So the spreadsheet doesn't foot, right? It doesn't work. So I'm not going to do this idea, right? Because you're just looking at it and analyzing it. I'm like, an entrepreneur looks at that cell and says, I will change that cell. I will make that work, right? And that's sort of the difference between the two. If you're going to be a builder and an entrepreneur, you're going to go change reality.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Like when we started back, you know, three years ago when I became principal, I'm like, I have to build an engine that teaches kids 10 times faster, right? And I'm like, no, we got the learning science, this Gen AI, it's totally going to be doable, right? And yes, you can do that. But if you analyzed it, if it wasn't obvious, I think today people still don't really believe it. But that is what you do. You go out there and you say, I'm going to go build a school that people love. That, you know, all those crazy things that you read about, entrepreneurs go make that a reality. And that's what's awesome. And I believe just, you know, are they made or formed? You know, um, you know, we believe in our high school that you can teach kids this skill. And if they're following their passion, they all have ideas where they think they can, you know, dent, put a dent in the universe.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  And we just need to help them do that and give them the skills to do that.

• 32:31Codie Sanchez?

  Why do you think your brain worked that way? Why was your neural network wired to the fact that you looked at something almost impossible? And thought, yeah, we're going to do that.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  I think humans naturally are like that. And I believe the standard school system sort of beats that out of them. And, you know, if you talk, so starting in middle school, a lot of people come into our schools, right? We had a few hundred people join, you know, we have schools now all over the country and they joined, you know, in the last 10 weeks ago when school started, you know, and they come into middle school and they're consumers, what we call consumers, right? They scroll TikTok, they play Fortnite all day, right? They've been caught in that dopamine evil screen time hook. And we run everybody through an exercise where we say, what are your values, right? Go do a values exercise, do a Japanese Ikigai, if you know what those are. What do you love? What are you good at? What does the world need, right? What do you get paid for?

• 33:24Speaker 02

  And do a vision board, if you think is as a way to think about it. These kids' vision board is not, I want to scroll TikTok. All day or be a consumer. They want to go change the world. They believe they can. Right? They want to. They just don't have the skills. And then the after they create all this vision board of who they want to be, it's always awesome. Kids want to be awesome. They want to do great things. And then we make them do a hundred and sixty eight hour project where they track every hour of the week. And you are what you do. And that's when they have this realization, you know, this middle school girl comes up and she's like, I guess I'm going to be the world's best TikTok scroller. Right? But the disappointment in her voice when she was like, I just did my vision board of who I want to be.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  And I realize, right? I've been caught in this consumer mindset and I'm trapped. And that is what our job in middle and high school is to teach kids the skills to go be a builder, to go be a creator. Cause they all want to do that. It's not that this generation, right? It's like, oh, there's no ambition. They don't want to. They want to. Our school system just doesn't give them the skills to make that transition.

• 34:31Codie Sanchez?

  So have you found that you can take your brain back from being hijacked by this attention economy we're in?

• 34:38Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. So I'll another example. This one came, this was probably a month ago where a student came up to me. Where this was one of somebody who worked super hard. This is the other part about hard work.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Ten weeks, he came up to me, he's like, ten weeks ago. If you had said, sign a contract, I'll pay you a hundred dollars an hour for the rest of your life. And you will just play video games. That's it for until you die. He's like, I would have signed, I would have sold my soul and sign that contract. Right? This is, and just that was it. He was caught and he was sort of happy. It's like literally he was signing up to live in the matrix. Right? And he was totally willing to do it. And he's, and he's like today, and he was presenting to the other high school kids at Alpha. And he's like, today. I don't even have time to play video games. Right? Because he is building. Right? And so you absolutely, all these kids, but what they need to work on, if you put them in school for six hours a day and homework.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  You've made an environment where they're like, okay, my escape is to scroll TikTok and play video games because I'm not building, I'm not engaged, I'm not doing hard things. Like, the third thing that I need parents to really believe, that a lot of parents don't believe, you gotta love school, right, you gotta learn, you know, crush academics in two hours a day. The third is, the key to your child's happiness is high standards. And high standards are when they engage, they want to engage in hard things. They don't, they want to go build an app that's a hundred million kids are gonna use, that's gonna, right? They want to go build that, and that's hard, and they know it's hard, right? But they will, right? And that's why they'll come in and put the effort in, right? If you think about athletics, I don't know if you have an athletic background, but athletics, the

• 36:21Speaker 02

  athletic ethos in America, we actually believe all these things. We just don't believe when you apply to academics, it just, we think it the opposite. So, Westlake, right? Parents in Austin are like, I want my kid on the Westlake football team because they're gonna be state champions, it's gonna be the hardest thing my son ever does, right? They're gonna work, they do go in the summer for practice, right? They do, they're in the weight room at night, right? They are doing the hardest thing they've ever done to be on the Westlake football team, right? But they'll remember it the rest of their life. But if you said that same thing, right, and said, that's academics, right, or what the school day should be like, they're like, no, no, no, definitely not. I'm not gonna have my kid do that. It's only in after-school athletics where we believe that.

• 37:01Codie Sanchez?

  It's so good. I mean, I hope you guys expand past even high schoolers at some point, at your point that somebody listening right now hears this, and somebody who has built billion-dollar businesses is getting so fired up about changing people's mentality in education. And what I'll say is like, it's the same thing I see with a lot of employees in our companies. There's actually some sort of disease or virus where we want to get by. We kind of want to get by. We do have the vision board, maybe, of a really cool life. But this idea of hard things as the key to loving life is something that we subscribe to. Here, our first line at Contrarian Thinking is Creed is, those who say it's impossible should get out of the way of those of us who are doing it. And so, we believe that deeply.

• 37:46Codie Sanchez?

  But people don't last here very long if they don't believe that. And I like kind of proactively will say to the team, if you ever say, like, "We can't do that," or, "That's not my job," like, you're fired. And like, you're welcome, too, because hopefully, it snaps you out of it and you go somewhere else. Do you find this broad, like, not even in the kids, but in the talent, in the guides that you're hiring, in the employees in your companies? Like, am I jaded in that I'm saying there does appear to be, there's like, these two worlds. One world where there's builders in Austin, like, our mutual friend Brendan, and, you know, Dino, who I think you know from Serronic 2, and they're just animals. And there's this one, and then there's this other side, where there's so many people

• 38:28Codie Sanchez?

  that I just want to shake them and be like, "You have so much potential. What the fuck's going on? You're in your own way."

• 38:34Speaker 02

  That world, I completely agree with. But, and we believe every kid, right, can be a creator. The reason, the issue is, they haven't found what their passion is. So, when they come here and they're not engaged, it's because they, this isn't the hook, right? We talk about, every kid has a passion for learning. It's just not always academics. So, back to my story of my dad, you know, I was a shirker in school. I was the slacker who, I wasn't trying to do impossible things, right? I'm, I'm the one who was disengaged all the way through school, right? And then I drop out, my dad's like, "You're a moron." But then, there's a follow-on to that, which is, 18 months later, he sits down with me,

• 39:16Speaker 02

  and he's like, "I'm so glad you dropped out," right? "I'm so glad you dropped out," because we'd been working 100-hour weeks, living under the desk, right? And he's like, "You have found what you love." And he's like, "You know, before this, I was worried that you were a lazy little shit." Right? And parents terrified of having that, right? And that's in school, that's what I was, right? But then, once I found what I wanted, right? And you just take off. And we look at every student that we have. That's our job is to find what is it that lights them up? Right? And that's what school, why you have to say is kids must love school more than vacation? Because you know, you found it. Anything else, it's a parent pushing their values on the kid, not what the kid wants to do.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  And so instead, you're like, oh, you wanna be, you wanna build video games? We're gonna let you build video games. You wanna write sports like, so we are starting, right? A sports academy where if you love sports, right? You get to start sports in the afternoon, right? And you still have to do the rigor of the academics in the morning in the two hours, right? But those kids are gonna be the best academic performing athletes in this country. But they're also gonna engage in what, you know, be a D1 bound middle schooler or a D1 aspirational middle schooler. And it's always tying things in to what the kids passions are that unlock it. Like one of our, our, our life skills that we teach in the afternoon? Teamwork and leadership, entrepreneurship and financial literacy,

• 40:44Speaker 02

  socialization and relationship building, storytelling, public speaking and grit and hard work. Right? Those are the things when we say, you know, in the AI world, you know, those are the life skills that kids really need. And so take public speaking. Okay, you go to a 10 year old and you're like, public speaking? They're gonna be like, okay, right? They're not gonna engage. You're like, what's wrong with you? Why don't you, it's such a valuable life skill. Oh, my God, look what you can do. You know, and the parents are lecturing and it's, it's terrible. You say, wait, post-game press conference, right? You wanna be able to go crush your post-game press conference. So at our sports academy, literally, we don't call it public speaking. We actually teach them how to do a post-game press conference. And they're like, and they become really good, right?

• 41:28Speaker 02

  They become great public speakers on that, right? Because that is their hook that engages them. If you talk about, oh, you have to learn all this math and financial literacy, like roll your eyes. You're like, we're negotiating your Nike contract, right? And all of a sudden, all the skills they need to learn, right? Let's take on the entrepreneurship side gross margin. Okay, what could be more boring to a fifth grader? Our fifth graders launch a food truck. Right? And my, you know, this was a day, this was last year. I go up to them and I'm like, why did you launch? Why'd you pick breakfast food? You know, as your product for your food truck? And they're like, have you seen the gross margins on breakfast food?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  And I was just like, okay, this is so awesome. Right? And they couldn't have been more excited about the business.

• 42:18Codie Sanchez?

  Nothing hotter than gross margins.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Right? And they are just sitting there and they are loving it. They're talking about and they're thrilled and they're having to learn teamwork.

• 42:24Codie Sanchez?

  How old is this kid?

• 42:25Speaker 02

  So these are fifth and sixth graders. So two years ago.

• 42:30Codie Sanchez?

  You're like fifteen?

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Twelve, no. Yeah, you're, yeah, you're like eleven, twelve years old.

• 42:34Codie Sanchez?

  I don't have kids. Does it show?

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry. No, yeah. So, yeah. So you're, excuse me. So, yes, here's eleven year olds who are out there and back to teamwork. Right? And so they would go to like car dealerships and set up the food truck. Right? It's all breakfast food. You know, they'd make a thousand dollars, but they were dealing with real world business things where one of the kids, the kid who's on the grill doesn't show up. And they're like, oh, my gosh, how are we going to be able to do this? And all these kinds of things. So all these kinds of things you can do in the afternoon where you ignite kids' passion. Right? That's the key. And I believe as we look, these skills that we talk about where you do the values chart in your 168 hours, kids will use that for the rest of their life. Those are the life skills because they will somewhere in their career. Me, three years ago, right?

• 43:17Speaker 02

  I'm like, oh, I guess I'm doing a big pivot from software to education. I'm going to go be a principal. Right? And how do I go get the skills and engage in it and all those? And so I think, I think these, the skills we're teaching today are what adults will need going forward for sure.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 44:03Speaker 05

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body with a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 44:32Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, because it seems like you need both, or you can use either as a lever and maybe explain it to me differently, but yes, kids need to love school or they need to love, or you need to love what you're doing. But isn't it also that like you need to learn to love the game or like you find what you love inside of it? Because it also seems like you have like, yeah, pure, whatever you call that, intrinsic love for X activity. And then you have like extrinsic love for an incentive such as dollars or outcome or reputation or whatever. And so do you need to play both of those?

• 45:10Speaker 02

  So absolutely, which is you like what you're good at.

• 45:13Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  And so one of the things like why people in athletics, why they hold kids back is they're going to be a little bigger, right? And then they're going to be better. And then because they're better, they like it because they're getting accolades and then they get more playtime and you get that positive cycle loop.

• 45:27Codie Sanchez?

  Just like a Pavlov's dog.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you just start getting into it and you, people want to do things they're great at.

• 45:32Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  You know, in middle school, these girls would have said, no, I'm never going to do that. But now they're like, yeah, I can totally do that. And they want to stay because we showed them they can be good at it, right? People don't want to do things they're bad at. So if you're bad at something, right? It's how do you bootstrap them to get better, right? And that's why the old academic system doesn't work is once you get behind or you are labeled bad, right? If you're a C student in third grade, there's like a 90% chance you'll be a C student for the rest of your life, right? It just, and that's not, there's no inherent brain chemistry around that. That's just a systems issue, right? The way we design school. But we can take those same C students and make them top 1% and show them, no, you could actually be really good at this.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  And we think that's true for all the life skills as well, right? The Tough Mudder one, there were a set, some, there's some new, you know, three of these middle school girls, right? So they're, you know, 12 year olds. And, you know, I asked them, they were new to the school and it was the week before the end of the session. And I was like, you know, hey, break's coming up. Are you really excited? And they're like, no. And inside, because they don't want to go on break. And I was like, inside, I was happy, right? I did cheer because they wanted to just keep going to school and not go on break. And I said, well, if you could wave a magic wand and fix anything about the school, what would you do? They're like, you wouldn't, we wouldn't have to run the adult course for the tough mutter. Right? They're like, that's so hard.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Right? But their guide, who's motivating and showing them they can do it. I was like, go talk to some of the high schoolers who did it. Right? And all the high schoolers have a picture of, you know, all their whole team, right? Their whole classmate, they're all covered in mud. Right? And they're all, you know,

• 47:15Codie Sanchez?

  I've done it. It's miserable.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Right. But they're all there as a team and it's a team picture and they all still have it on their wall. Right? Because they did something they didn't think they could do. Right? And that kind of thing, you have to bootstrap these kids. That's what school is. Right? You're bootstrapping them to show them they can be capable here. And so a lot of these things, when you talk about getting people into the right roles and what they should do, it is this Japanese ikigai of you're trying to figure out what are you good at and what do you love? And sometimes you're like, I really love this, but I'm not good at it. And on some things, you can bootstrap them into it. Right? Like, okay, let's get you good enough so you can do it. And then once you hit that, right? Then all of a sudden, you're like, oh, I'm capable.

• 47:58Codie Sanchez?

  So does intelligence have a big predictor on success?

• 48:02Speaker 02

  That's a good question. So in K through 12 today, the best students, there's actually two, it's all coded on two things, IQ and big five conscientiousness. School today in a time-based system with a teacher in front of a classroom, you basically need to be high IQ and conscientious grind, right? You have to be a natural grinder. And our view is I have to get this out to a billion kids, right? So I can't have those two limitations. So on the product side, we're like, how do we break those two things? So back to learning science, a mastery-based, individualized, personalized lesson plan solves the IQ issue to, to an extent, which is, we can't make everybody, you know, I'm going to do quantum

• 48:43Speaker 02

  computing and figure it out. But for sure, in, you know, K through eight, The K through A curriculum, you know, if you take 95% of America, they could all be top 1%. That there's just nothing intellectually challenging enough, if done with a mastery-based education with an individualized tutor, that they couldn't get to top 1%, right? I'm never going to be a nuclear physicist at Stanford, right? I just, I don't have that IQ, right? So there are some upper bounds where it really matters, but for fundamentally of just teaching our kids, that's not true. But in a time-based educational system, it is. Because, you know, when you're in sixth grade and there's a hole where you miss some knowledge, you basically need more IQ to make, to bridge the gaps. But if you have an individualized tutor, it's going to go fill those gaps for you.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  The second on big five conscientiousness, you know, if you're a natural grinder, you're all set, right? We use our motivation model to compensate, which is how do I motivate this kid to grind, right? And get through it and do, do the hard work. And so, and motivations, lots of different things.

• 49:48Codie Sanchez?

  Is there a formula for motivation?

• 49:49Speaker 02

  So we spend, you know, when we look at educating a kid, there's two parts to educating a kid. The first is, and 90% of it is having a motivated student. And so we spend, our schools are designed, 90% of my design work and our emphasis is on motivating. 10%, which is the second thing you need is, you need to put them in lessons of the correct difficulty, right? Which AI tutors do great, right? They'll figure out what you know and don't know and say, look, I know your age grade is sixth grade, but you need fourth grade math. And I'm just going to give you fourth grade math, fill it up. But now I have to get you to want to do the fourth grade math. 90% that's motivation. So the number one motivator, like we have a huge motivation framework on our schools. The number one motivator and the name of our product is time back. Give kids their time back.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  There is nothing, more than money, more than anything, time back is the biggest motivator. And, you know, and so that, that's why we're two hours. If you want six hours a day in homework, right? If you take the Westlake honors track, right? You can't pay those kids enough to be happy. But if you go to those same kids like in our high school and say, it's two hours a day. If you want like fifteen, fifty plus on the SAT, it's three hours in high school. But that's it. And then you get all your afternoons for four years to work on your passion project. That motivates students, right? If you go to our sports academy and you're like, okay, I'm going to give you the whole afternoon, right, to play basketball, but you have to engage in the app for two hours. The kids are like, that's a fair trade.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  And just as a product manager, the story, my first week as principal, you know, McKinsey and Brian had started, they're like, okay, we'll let you be principal, but you've got to live up to the commitments, they have to love school. And so I go to the fifth graders, my first week, and I'm like, you guys love school? And they're like, they're brand new, they're like, no. Okay, what would make you love school? They're like, less school. And I'm like, how much less? They're like, none. You know, and I'm like, okay, that seems a little light, you know? And, and we literally negotiated it, right? I was like, so two hours a day. If I had, would you engage in these apps? If I give you an app for two hours a day, if then four hours a day was awesome, fun stuff you loved? And they're like, okay, that seems fair, right? That's a fair trade. And so that's literally how we got the two hours. No, people were like, how do we get two hours?

• 52:02Speaker 02

  And they want some sophisticated analysis. I was like, okay, we got two hours and these kids say it's okay. Then I went to my learning science team and I said, can we, you know, fill their brain with all the awesome knowledge they need in two hours? And they're like, absolutely, we totally can do it. And so that was sort of the beginning of it. And why, and that's why it was codenamed time back, but we actually made it the real name is, give kids their time back. Then, once you give kids their time back, there's tons of other motivations, right? So our teachers, right, when you, we call them guides and coaches, they don't teach seventh grade science because the AI tutor does that better, right? So instead, they are hired for motivational and emotional support. And their job is to say, how do I motivate this kid to greatness? How do I get them to do hard things, right? And what are the things?

• 52:47Speaker 02

  And sometime, you know, in kindergarten, it's like, here's a sticker, right? And the kid's like, oh my God, it's a sticker, right? I couldn't be happier, right? Eighth grader's a little harder, stickers don't work as well, right? But you're like, oh, the time on your passion project, right? Oh, you want to do a Broadway musical? Wait, you want to write a book? Oh, wait, you want to go become an equestrian, right? And we'll let you out in the afternoon off time to go do that, right? Whatever the motivation is that will get them. You have a whole range, everything from time, there is money, financials and incentive, privileges, right? So like mobile squad, yeah, and the Broadway privileges is also just freedoms in the school, right? If you crush all your academics and hit some goals,

• 53:30Speaker 02

  you get mobile squad, you know, at the end of the session and mobile squad gets to go on some trip somewhere, right? Or you get the privilege of learning in a beanbag, right? Like the younger kids where you're like, okay, you know how to learn on your own, you become a self-driven learner. You don't require a teacher, an adult to, you know, babysit you. You learn on your own. You have the freedom, like our middle schoolers get to go to the second floor where there's, you know, less, less restriction and less rules and they can sit in a beanbag and sit on their computer and learn or do whatever. So there's all these different things around motivation that allows kids to learn. You know, off-campus lunch, right? Everybody, younger kids, the number one motivator to the younger kids is lunch with their guide, right? They love their guides, right? We,

• 54:15Speaker 02

  how we measure our guides and teachers, at the younger, like a kindergarten, you're like, do you love your guide? As you get older, the question we ask kids is, every adult had one or two teachers who transformed their lives. Is your guide that for you? Right? These are, and that is the standard, and that's what our guides do, is their job is to say, right, I'm gonna help you achieve your goals, right? Your dreams, that's what I do all day, because I don't have to sit in front of the class lecturing or grade quizzes or whatever. I get to connect with the kids, right? And people talk about, okay, this is like AI is gonna change the role and teachers are gonna change in our world, right? But teachers did not become teachers to grade, seventh grade science quizzes.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  They became teachers to transform kids' lives. And in our world, and why everybody wants to be an alpha guide, we had 80,000 people apply for our jobs. They wanna be an alpha guide because they get to spend their entire day connecting with kids and helping them transform their lives into who they wanna be.

• 55:17Codie Sanchez?

  Do you, did you, you seem to have pretty high EQ. Would your wife disagree?

• 55:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, my kids would too. Like, both my daughters. I have two daughters.

• 55:27Codie Sanchez?

  Well, I found in tech, it's not always a huge correlation between the two. But now you, like, are you the same person you were when you were building Trilogy and these other companies now?

• 55:37Speaker 02

  No, I, if, 90s Joe, right?

• 55:40Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  And I, versus family man Joe, right, is totally different. Right? And it was, I could not have, I could not be the principal if I did not spend 20 years, like, raising my daughters and being a family man, getting married.

• 55:53Codie Sanchez?

  What were you like back then?

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Then, I would have, I was absolutely your consummate tech, 90s tech bro guy, and...

• 56:00Codie Sanchez?

  What does that mean? You were just intense and focused?

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Intense and focused and relationship and the EQ part, like, a zero. Like, I just, what are you talking about? Just, if it was a pure mathematical equation, well, obviously, logically, this is the answer, do this, right? And it was, it was very much there. And this concept that relationship building, right, and building out your network, right, is so valuable, right? I mean, right, socialization, relationship building is one of our key life skills we teach the kids. I had zero of that, right, back in the 90s. And I'm like, why would you do that? I'm just gonna build a better product or whatever. And the human component was, you know, so far down on the list.

• 56:46Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  And so, and versus today, where, right, when we think of the skills we need to equip our kids for, for the future, those are the skills that matter, right?

• 56:56Codie Sanchez?

  So, a guy who's built multi-billion dollar software companies, who was really happy doing this, I'm a little bit happier doing this too, I need to get over it, I'm working on it. But now, you think that relationship building and human connection is more important?

• 57:13Speaker 02

  I'll give you an example, and it's my own daughter, as an example. My oldest daughter was, is an introvert like me, naturally introvert, and great student. So she got 1,600 SATs, she's a math, English double major at Stanford, right?

• 57:24Codie Sanchez?

  Slacker.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  And she's one of these, I love acad, she was the opposite of me on this, she loved academics for academic sake. You know, in high school, she, like, read calculus books for fun. You know, when she got to Stanford, she's like, wow, these STEM boys can't write. So she created a writing program called equation-based writing. Cause she's like, cause in freshman English, you have to grade, she's like, God, he's so bad, let me help him out. So she's like, loves academics.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  But in high school, back her guide, I was like, look, what really matters for her is relationship building. Because she'll naturally just spend all her day doing academics. But in our school, we're like, the afternoons have to be about the life skills development. So she started her own Substack, right? And writing online because she loved to write. But to promote it, right? She's like, okay, I have to go on Twitter and like, build an audience.

• 58:13Codie Sanchez?

  Place is dark.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  And I mean, her guide would sit there and it took her guide six months of motivating her and convincing her and working her through till she'd send her first DM, right? And she finally sent a DM to Sahil Blue, right?

• 58:28Codie Sanchez?

  Buddies with him.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Right? Because and Sahil was like, had written something that she's like, oh, this is so applicable to high school kids and literally wrote the article, right?

• 58:37Codie Sanchez?

  What is your daughter's name? Or do not say it publicly?

• 58:39Speaker 02

  On Substack, she's Austin Scholar.

• 58:41Codie Sanchez?

  I think I have engaged with her on Twitter or met her.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  You, you may have. She has now 20,000.

• 58:47Codie Sanchez?

  Put it together.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  So she has 20,000 moms, basically, who listen to her about what it's like to have a, you know, no teachers for 10 years and go to Stanford. And what is you, her thing is, university needs to change too. So she, you know, her and the Alpha kids.

• 59:02Codie Sanchez?

  Does she not get invited back to Stanford then?

• 59:04Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 59:04Codie Sanchez?

  You both not? Or is Stanford open to it?

• 59:06Speaker 02

  She's thriving at Stanford. But what's interesting is, a school, you know, schools are bundles of things, of which academics is only a piece, right?

• 59:14Codie Sanchez?

  True.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  And so she hates her 100 series lecture classes. She's like, okay, my math class is a complete waste of time because the apps I use, right, are way better. I learn way faster. She's like, but everything else at Stanford, her dorm mates, her classmates, right? She's in a sorority, right? Her after school activities, the environment of Stanford, she's thriving, even though she's like, okay, this math class for an hour is a total waste of time. And and everybody knows that right back to these same things. Harvard has published an article that says AI tutors are better than Harvard teachers. Right. So it's not like we don't know this. It's just, you know, how are we going to change as this goes forward? But back to the relationship building, you know, and all that. This key life skill she needed, she didn't need more academic.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  She didn't need physics to AP, you know, in high school. She needed to spend her time supported by this guide. Right. Because one of the other things you get in adolescence, you don't have kids yet, is they stop listening to their parents. Right. In middle and high school, right? There it's just, it is their job is to, right? Get accepted by society. So they start caring about their peers more than their parents. Right. Which is always a transition for a parent to realize that. Right. And so like when she was applying, you know, it was Chloe she trusted. Right. Who was her guide? Who is like Chloe, when she said, look, relationship building is important. Okay, it's like, okay, but it was really hard for her and she needed that coaching. Right. And support it's it's high standards, but high support.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  It's not just drop them in the deep end. It's coach her through it. And then eventually she got it and now she has this great network. Right. But it's and so those kind of skills, you know, if you have a relationship person, you're also to my the arts theater girls. Right. You're like, okay, guys, you're going to do math. Right. You are going to do math. We're going to show you, you have all these skills. And if you're the you're the academic, we're in teacher relationship building or entrepreneurship or whatever else over there. If you are the EQ girl already. Right. We have girls who have millions of TikTok followers and we're like, yeah, you're going to get 790 math. Right. You're going to be we're about one of our kids is about to do something that in science that like. Nobody in American history and science has ever done this in high school.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  Right. And so and if you had asked as a middle schooler, would they do it? The answer was no.

• 1:01:32Codie Sanchez?

  When you look at education today and where we're at, like, do you think we can actually re-educate the entire, let's even just say, the US using the technology we have?

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  100%, 100%.

• 1:01:44Codie Sanchez?

  How long will it take?

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Well, this is why I want to be, what I want to communicate, my goal in this is, we need entrepreneurs and builders to come in. If we keep on the status quo, not going to happen. Right? It's a 100-year-old system. It's not changing.

• 1:02:00Codie Sanchez?

  And what happens if we don't change?

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Oh, it's really bad.

• 1:02:03Codie Sanchez?

  Like, like, paint a picture of somebody who deeply understands AI and education.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  The skills you're gonna need, like, back to just, if, if we graduate, then if we spend 10 years and educate kids the way we've been educating for 100 years, those kids are going to go into an AI world and have no skills that matter. Right? And people are going to say, why, what did, I just wasted their whole childhood, right? And I made it miserable and they hate it, these things. And they don't have the skills that need, right? Like, when we look at the world, right? If you're an Uber driver in Austin, right? Robo taxis, right? Waymos, all this stuff. That's not a good place to be as an adult. There's massive transition on the adult. And somebody, entrepreneurs need to go fix that. But I'm focused on the K through 12, which is, there is no better time to be a five-year-old, because AI gives kids superpowers.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Right? If you look at, they can learn 10 times faster in the mornings. Right? Now, give them ChatGPT, that's really bad. They'll all use it to cheat, right? Chatbots are cheatbots if you're a parent. If you're wondering, if your kid's using chat on academics, 90% of the time, they're cheating. But in the afternoons, when they're doing life skills workshops and launching a food truck, right? 11-year-olds don't know how to launch a food truck. And there's not a teacher who can teach them. But AI is going to help them figure out how to do it. You can't, high schoolers can't launch Broadway musicals. Right? Except AI gives these kids superpowers. And we need to show them, right? It unlocks their potential, right? And they love it, and it's exciting, and right?

• 1:03:31Codie Sanchez?

  Such immediate feedback loops, too.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  And so that, if you're a parent, you're just like, this could be the best 12 years of your kid's life, right? And we need to go change it. And now to change it, though, we need way more entrepreneurs than just me.

• 1:03:47Codie Sanchez?

  Because it can't be cheap, too. Like going to Alpha School, what does it cost?

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  So Alpha School is expensive. So our tuition is forty to seventy-five thousand dollars. And so when we, back to design goal, though, when I designed it, I was like, pretend price is no object. What can you do? Now, we are building a whole nother set of schools, right? At half the price, at twenty thousand dollars. We spend in America twenty thousand dollars a kid to educate them. So that's sort of my price target. We're launching, right? And we've launched ten of them so far. We hope to open hundreds next year of these Texas sports academies. They're fifteen thousand dollars tuition. My middle school, right? They're microschools. They're twenty-five kids, middle school D1-bound athletes. Think twenty-five really good basketball players, right? In middle school who do academics in the morning, you know, basketball in the afternoon.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  And so think of hundreds of these schools around Texas. At fifteen thousand, which the voucher program just was announced, which is like twelve grand. So parent pay will be like three hundred, four hundred dollars a month, right? So dramatically more accessible than Alpha. And so we're building a whole set of schools like this. I need lots of entrepreneurs to go build this, right? We need a school for gifted and talented kids, right? Those kind of things, sports, arts, theater, music.

• 1:05:00Codie Sanchez?

  Because if you don't, you could have a world in which you basically have massive discrepancy. Those who are taught at Alpha School use AI, you know, are unlocked, and everybody else.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Correct. Oh, you, absolutely. Like, I have, my job on this whole thing is, you know, Alpha is the first product we're building. It is the high-end one. Just branding-wise, you have to own the high-end in education, right? You can't, you, you want to start at the high, you want to be the Ivy League, right?

• 1:05:26Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, you don't want to be the discount degree.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  Correct. Parents don't know about education, so brand really matters. They trust brand. And so you have to go establish the brand, which we've done, right? We're the most talked-about school in the world by 10x, right? And so that's what Alpha is doing, but now we're bringing it down. And so we're building the software platform where it will be available. And, you know, to solve the US, I have to get to twenty thousand. But to get to a billion kids, I got to get it down to a thousand. Thousand, right? I have to get it down to where, you know, in five years, everybody on the planet, billion kids have to be able to access a tablet that's less than a thousand dollars that will teach them everything they need to know in two hours, right? And so that's, that's what our design goal is, is getting it down so that everybody can have it.

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  Because we have to, because in this world of AI, we have to prepare the kids differently than we have the last hundred years.

• 1:06:17Codie Sanchez?

  Does that daunt you? Are you like, we're gonna do that?

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  Oh, we're totally gonna do it. That's a, that's a, the learning sign that's, I mean, it's a lot of work, obviously, right? There's a ton of work, you know, back to the billionaire side. Like, I put in a billion dollars as to kickstart this.

• 1:06:31Codie Sanchez?

  Just to alpha, right?

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the software platform and stuff. So we're doing in the sports academy. So I'm funding a set of different things. But to change education, so education's a seven trillion dollar market. Like, a billion's a drop in the bucket, right? Texas alone spends a hundred billion dollars a year on education, right? So societies and parents spend a lot of money on education. Like, if you do surveys of parents, they will spend up to 10% of their income on educating their kid. So it is actually a really good market. Societies generally spend 5% of GNP. So it is this great market. It's just we've always had the same system for 100 years. And now what's different is, okay, can we go get entrepreneurs and builders to come in and build these awesome products, right?

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  That will transform what the 12 years is like.

• 1:07:20Codie Sanchez?

  We, um, you know, it's interesting you say that because we have an education business. It's called Contour and Thinking, and we teach people two things. One, we teach them how to buy businesses, like normal, my, my theory was, you know, I was in private equity, I did acquisitions, and I thought, this is not that different. Like, what, what the PE guys do at the highest level, leveraged buyouts, is not that different materially from what you do with an SBA loan or with seller financing of a very small business. You've bought a shit ton of businesses. And so it's not easy. It's actually hard and awful and really difficult in many ways. But it's not rocket science. It's actually not that complex. It's like, you know, uh, simple but not easy. And so we created an education company where

• 1:08:02Codie Sanchez?

  We are attempting to teach, we've taught about 10,000 people how to do it. And if the average, you know, the average American doesn't even own a business. And so it's really hard to get good data on how many people will ever acquire a business. But we think it's like less than point 01%. Like, most people will never acquire a business. It's very weird. So if we're able to take, right now, we're about 37% of our people who come through our program, acquire a business. And that, and it's really important, you don't just acquire any business because there's a lot of risk. But what's fascinating to me is when we, when we started teaching people how to do this, the immediate response from many people, and it seems to be like a pervasive, I can't really figure out why,

• 1:08:44Codie Sanchez?

  is like, one, if you could do it, why wouldn't you just buy all the businesses yourself, Cody? Why would you teach other people to do it? Two, education is somehow seen as, and there's a lot of bad actors, so maybe why? But it's seen as like, lowbrow, scammy, couldn't work, not good, taking advantage of people. And then it's also seen as like, maybe not sophisticated. Like, oh, if you were really going to build something real, you would build trilogy. You wouldn't build an educational-based system.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  If you can't, if you do do, if you can't do teach.

• 1:09:17Codie Sanchez?

  Why is that? It's so pervasive.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:09:20Codie Sanchez?

  Why?

• 1:09:21Speaker 02

  That is, so if we want to get controversial. So I believe part of my role is to bring capitalism to education. And it is seen that capitalism is evil. For-profit and capitalism are evil in education, just straight out. Know that nonprofit is the only way to do it. And fundamentally, I believe that's part of the problem, which is nonprofit. I was, I gave a talk at Masters of Scale, which is, you know, how to scale big ideas.

• 1:09:47Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  And education doesn't scale in, you know, and the reason is nonprofit means non-scalable. Like, if I have a set of donations, right? And I build the world's best product, the better the product, the faster my money goes away. And now I'm done, right? There's plenty of charter schools who have 3,000-person waitlists. And I go ask the head of the school, I'm like, well, why don't you open another campus? And they're like, I'm waiting on a $40 million donation. Versus, I had a thousand people at an info session in New York City who are going to pay tuition to this for-profit. I will have no problem raising capital to open a new building because of it's for-profit. Capitalism scales, right? This billion dollars that I threw in, that's not enough to fix education.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  We have to show what's going on, right? We have to show there's great businesses here. And so, but there's a view, appropriately so, there were bad actors and for-pro, lots of for-profit scams. We just need to go get the good entrepreneurs who can use capitalism for good, right? Like, one of the things we do is it's why we publicize all our academic results. That we are like, guys, don't trust us. You shouldn't trust us. Look at our results, right? And, uh, but unlocking human capital.

• 1:11:03Codie Sanchez?

  Well, that's what, and the results mean SAT scores, right?

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  In this case, academics or the life skills, it's the three commitments. Kid, parents are like, oh my God, my kid really does love school, right? And they're like, that's, you actually as a parent, when it happens, you're like, okay, this is great. Then the second part is, okay, they're crushing their academics. And then that third, life skills, when they're launching the food truck, you're like, okay, this is actually what my kid needs to do. Or they're building relationships or whatever that life skills. No, they watch the, the tough mother, they're like, okay, this was better than my school. So they look at that product. You just need a product focus. And like for yours, here's how I would design the product, right? In a, in a for-profit world. So we have a set of high schoolers who are like, okay, we're going to build a program to make, be a millionaire in high school. How do you make a million dollars in high school, right? And so they're talking about pricing.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  And so one of their proposals is we're going to charge a hundred and fifty thousand dollar a year tuition. Money back guarantee if you don't make a million dollars. So it'll take six hundred thousand dollars of tuition over four years. But if you make a million dollars, it pays for it. Right? And it's a money back guarantee. So if they don't deliver back to your point of your scammy, you're like, it's free for the person. Right? And it's that kind of product design that no nonprofit would do that. But a entrepreneur who's saying, oh, wow, that's the kind of thing that we should go build where you have this closed loop where you're unlocking their potential. And then people are willing to pay that. People would

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  make that trade. They're like, wow, if you teach me how to make a million dollars, right? While I'm in high school, and it's gonna be fun, I'm gonna love it, it's gonna be all these great things. And we have to make sure of how we're teaching them. We're not teaching them how to do a scam. One of our final character, right? Character, community, classmates, and culture. Right? That's one of the huge elements of school. And at the end of the day, character is the one parents really care about. Are you teaching these kids to be good kids? We can teach kids to build ethically awesome businesses. Right? They're building apps. They could build crappy apps. They're building an app to teach 100 million kids to contribute to their community. Right? So we can teach all these great values to kids as part of school. That's one of the jobs. And we can teach them ethical business at the same time.

• 1:13:16Codie Sanchez?

  Okay, last question. What about for people who are really scared to have AI teach their kid?

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's, that's a great question. You should be terrified. So today, your kid, 20% of kids, right? I think Brendan uses this stat that he, they were calculated. 20% of your kid's life is influenced by AI. They are being brainwashed by TikTok today. Right? This is that, or Fortnite, whatever the is out there. It is, and it's getting worse. And what you put into kids' heads really matters. And so part of one of the things is you have to figure out who are the trusted people putting in it. It's why I say chatbots are cheatbots, and they're terrible. Like, if we could ban, like, those

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  chatbots being in school, that would be great. You know, and so part of what our job, back to branding and stuff, you have to build a trusted relationship with parents that what you're putting into the kid's head is good. Right? Now, what I can do with AI, right, is actually build one where the parents can validate and trust it. Right? So we know what it is, right? But if you have it just, you know, Wild West free form and you're not doing it, like, what is your kid doing online? Right? That is something, it can be very bad and people should be worried. AI could be good or bad, right? And we need to have a huge effort to make sure that we use it for good.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  You know, we have to build, we have a project where we are building the TikTok that is engaging as TikTok, but it's going to put all the cool stuff into your kid's head, not the bad TikTok stuff.

• 1:14:56Codie Sanchez?

  We need it. Although, you know, people talk pretty badly about TikTok these days, and I'm a big Elon fan, but I have found that like TikTok algorithm is actually pretty easy to to change and manipulate. And so, you know, on my TikTok, there's a few things I like. I like those. I get rid of the others. I don't really see any nonsense. I don't see brain rot. I don't see any of that. I do think these days on X, it's harder. There's so much negativity. And I think it might be more sophisticated, but you know, I think, I think optimists, they sound too Pollyanna, but and, but they make all the money. And pessimists sound smart and then make nothing.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and to this on online, we believe teaching kids healthy online habits matter. And how you're talking about, you're curating a TikTok feed that's healthy for you. Right? You can also curate a bad one.

• 1:15:47Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  And if you don't teach kids how to do it right, they'll end up with a bad one.

• 1:15:51Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  And we, I actually believe, because we have kids on, on X doing the same thing. You can curate a great feed on X.

• 1:15:59Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, I'm working on it.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  Domain expertise and all heavily using mute words and all that stuff where, you know, your block list and mute word list has to be really long. Twitter has a lot of experts where if you want to learn about learning science. Yeah. If you want to learn about learning science, you can build a filtered list on X where you can become an expert in how to learn 10 times faster.

• 1:16:20Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  So it's all these things. They can be good or bad, right? And you have to figure out how to actively curate your presence. And also back to tracking, having kids track where they spend their week, this 168 hours, helps them, right, of, I don't just want to be a consumer. I want to become a creator. And that's what as parents, we should all care about.

• 1:16:41Codie Sanchez?

  Is there some resource you love or something that you have from Alpha? An article you've written that we can mention and say, and if you want that, click here. And then we can drive people direct to you.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  My daughter will love me if I do this. Austin scholar. It's she's got, you know, 200, she writes every week. She's got 200, you know, articles out. It literally is from, you know, 10 years of not having, you know, a teacher in this new world, what it's like to go to college and it all and it's academics plus, you know, the social emotional learning side. That would be, we'll put that in. That's the single best source. That's the single best source.

• 1:17:20Codie Sanchez?

  That's a good dad right there. Proud dad. Joe, this is so cool to hear about. You have my brain spinning about ideas here. And I just want to thank you for building something that is not, you know, one of my CEOs used to say to me back in the day, when I first started getting online, he said, you know what, here we get rich quietly. And it would, and I get that because it was his thing he had built. He had built this incredible business that he had every right to do it. But I thought, I don't know. I don't think it's a zero sum game. And so I started getting on the internet for that reason. And I think people like you sharing this and creating an area for education is like, the only way we fix so much of what I see on the internet every day.

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

  I couldn't agree more. And if if I can convince some of your listeners, right, some of your audience to come over to education, this, there is nothing. So back to my whole career, I obviously had a good career, pre being a principal, the last three years have been the best years of my life. And I'm going to do this 20 years. I'm more excited about the next 20 than my last 20. And I need to go get other builders and entrepreneurs to come over here and see how awesome it is. Right. And so if you're like that, send me an email, DM me, and let's get you building to solve education. Because at the end of the day, there is nothing more important for a society than how it raises its young. That is the single societal issue that really matters. And so come, come work on that.

• 1:18:43Codie Sanchez?

  Thanks, Joe.

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 1:18:51Speaker 06

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy to layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.