YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Liemandt

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2026-03-31
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2026-03-31
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  1. “So I was talking with him, and I was like, Why did you guys pick breakfast foods? You know, for your food truck. They're like, have you seen the gross margins on a breakfast food? And I was like, okay, this is the most awesome thing ever.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Know and just back to high standards like that guy crazy high standards gross margin you brought up that one you know where they had sold their um they'd swapped their business with i think it was thompson medical at the time where they had tvs g had tvs and thompson they swapped it for their cat scanners because they had g medical and you know one of these deals And I was like, dude, like TVs are the only cool thing you guys make when you're young, right? Cat scanner, really boring. And Jack's like, let's talk about gross margin, right? Because TVs have none and cat scanners make a lot of money. And so I was learning about gross margin. And I'm going to bring that back. I'll go back to the story, but I'm going to bring it to a related one. So we have kids who launched a food truck, our fifth graders launched a food truck at Alpha.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's like religion for us. It's the religion. And he's like, and so Jack's like, okay, I'll only do this. There's a race at the end of the year. Jimmy Peak was the name of it. He's like, you two need to come in first and second. And if you guys are willing to do that, I'll let you switch over to skiing. And he's on the phone with my dad. He's like, Greg. Our kids are going to be first and second in the race, so they're going to have to work really hard. So buy your kids some skews, you know. Literally, we would literally, you know, during the summer, like you'd run up the mountain, literally after school, they drop us off weekends, drop us off ski, end of the year, Mark came in first. I came in second. And Jack's like, wasn't it worth it?”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Oh goll, there was a lot. So, you know, between he and my dad, there's a ton of them if you want them, which is, you know, one was Mark and I were playing hockey and we were small for our age and both our dads played hockey. Jack and my dad. And so we weren't good at it. And so we're like, we want to switch to skiing. Tell a hockey dad that you want to be a skier. Okay. My dad was from, I was born in Minnesota, so you know hockey is.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So Jack, you know, my dad passed when I was 25. So these will probably be the later ones you're talking about. And Jack called me and is like, Look, I'll be your mentor going forward. And so every year I would actually fly up and spend a couple days at GEN at Jack's house with him coaching and helping.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yes, he did. And so he was Jack's strategic planner. Mark, his son, you know, we play hockey, Goski and together. And so I had a business background upbringing, which is maybe why I knew I wanted to be on the”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, no, that's totally true. My dad very much was worried about me being a spoiled kid. He grew up with nothing and then got to success later in his life. And so it was terrified of that. And so, you know, he's like, look, if you have a good idea, other people are going to invest in it. And if I'm investing in it, right, it just means no, it was such a crappy idea. No one else would give you money. He's like, so go convince people that it's a good idea. You know, back to the standard, which is a true statement, right? If your parent, you know, you know, if your parents leading. Right? Or giving you money, then, uh,”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “But he's interested in it. Kids will learn endless stuff if they're interested. And what we have to do as schools is say this is what we want them to learn because these are fun. There are fundamental things you want to learn, but we need to do it where they're doing projects that are hard and have meaning to them.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Kid knows it for every World War II battle. Like, you can show him any picture from a battle. He's like, oh, that was in Poland in 1943 and whatever. That's crazy. I mean, it's just insane.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Of a sudden they're ready to, right? They're going to learn, they're going to dive in and become the world's experts in all those skills. And so the thing that when you talk about stuff, associating it with stuff kids love, that's in their interest, right? Back to I understand their interest graph. Kids will love it and work because it's, and everybody knows this, right? If it's related to what your interests are, you'll spend endless time on it. There's kids, like just think of how long they spend on YouTube on some of you. Thing where you're just like, oh my God. Like, no, we have a kid who can, like, he knows everything about World War II battles. And, you know, like those geolocators who know anything in the whole world and a little picture and it's there.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Exactly. So, and let me, I'll give you an example our sports academy. We want to teach public speaking, right? Storytelling and public speaking is such a great skill, right? For kids or for adults, everybody. But you go to a 10-year-old boy and you're like, we're going to teach you public speaking. You like, okay, they've turned off. But at our sports academy, Are you ready for it? And these kids are like, okay, like, right, and you're going to learn all those skills, those same public speaking skills where a rise is going to grade you into it. Of course, they want to do that, right? Or you're going to learn financial literacy. Roll the eyes. We got to work on your Nike $5 million contract.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And this girl will spend endless hours on it because she loves it, because she's putting on her musical. It's hers, right? And the team and all. And just think of those projects for all kids, right? Everybody can do that. And so, and that's where when we talk about with this, if we're going to get them ready for this AI world that's coming, that's what we need to get them ready for, not forum for six hours a day in class where we waste 90% of their time learning a bunch of material that is becoming commoditized. LLMs are reducing, right, the value of that knowledge. AI also, it's taken it away on that side, but it's also letting you learn 10 times faster. So, you know, it's sort of this balance of just you got to figure out what parts you want to learn.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Exactly works on. It's like my now job, which, by the way, just is a sidebar. Everybody should go into education. If you're wondering what you should do the next 10 years, come into education is awesome. But because it is fun. But we have a high school. She's doing a Broadway musical. All team produced Broadway musical. She sourced all the singers off TikTok, million streams the first week when they went Can fill, they filled like four times, they filled a venue. It's not big enough to be on Broadway. It's still not quite big enough that they're doing it. And, you know, you listen to her and she's like having to learn about music rights, right? Legal content, right? And all this stuff.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Now, there's some minimum academics you have to do, right? You want to start a business plan, you got to know some math. You want to write good proposals, right? You have to be able to write. So it's not like you can skip all the academic side, but you do it motivated by stuff that you love, right? And back to if we want to get kids, we're competing with TikTok and Fortnite. But kids' vision of who they want to be is awesome. So let's go get right, associate with what they want to be there, right? And that's what's going to drive and motivate them to, you know, learn all the skills they need. If you look at our kids doing these huge Alpha X projects that are so impressive, it's because they're working on stuff. I mean, it's harder stuff than we ever worked on in high school. They don't think it's work because they love it.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Like, you know, and he's like, you know, I was so worried that you were a lazy little your whole academic career. You were just a shirker, right? You just, you never engaged in anything. You know, as a parent, like, you don't want your kid to be just, you know, a slacker. And he's like, and you found it. You found what you love and you're working your ass off on it. And it's just great, right? And my view of that is that concept, what I found after dropping out of college, we want to get that into kids, middle and high school. Like, what do they love? Like, as they hit an adolescence, who do they want to be? What do they love? And let's get them started on that.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I loved it. I found my spark. I found what I loved. And I'd never worked harder in my life. Like it was insane. And my dad, who, you know, there's this, he was not happy that I dropped out, right? But 18 months later, when we were talking, he's like, God, I'm so glad you dropped out.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Right. No, no, no. It's definitely not a good student. And then I drop out. And then I started working 100 plus hours, sleeping under the desk, right? Super passionate.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And so, anyway, I drop out. So there's nobody who thinks I was a good student. I wasn't a good student, but there wasn't like, oh, nobody. It was just”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “But there's no A minus, no A plus, no nothing just, and an 89.5 rounds to a 90, which was an A. And I literally would do the minimum work to get an 89.5, like not an 89.6. I remember one time I didn't turn in, I didn't answer all the questions on a test because I knew I didn't need to finish the test to get the 89.5 in the grade. And my teachers just like, what, right? I was just a nightmare because I just, whatever the minimum was. And my parents weren't really excited about now, it was a minimum bar of, okay, I'm still going to get in Stanford because I want to go there, but I want to go there because I want to start a company, right? I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And so I go and then I'm in class at Stanford. I'm like in some Spanish class. I'm like, okay.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And I'm just like, I don't care about these classes. And I dropped out, you know, and I started my company. I used to do the minimum amount of work. I mean, I literally in my high school, the way our grading system worked is you.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I was, you know, academically, you know, people would definitely say, I can't believe Joe's doing education if you knew me at Stanford. I dropped out. You know, this is, you know, back to. Every kid has a passion for learning. It's just not always academics. And that was me, right? I just didn't care.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “They publish that Harvard, you know, there's a great paper. Harvard says AI tutor is better than Harvard teachers. And, you know, they learn twice as much using the AI tutor as going to class. And so it just facts, right? And so 100 series classes in university are going to go away. Like as soon as everybody figures out the SAI tutor stuff, they're just going to go away. Now, small group seminars, they love it, right? You're a small group writing seminar that's super awesome, like in her writing classes and stuff. So it's not like universities are going to go away because some kids still need time to grow up, right? And they need the socialization and all those other things. But the big lecture classes, those are gone. Those are a waste of time.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Right, the teacher is terrible. Is not a good teacher, right? And this is just a waste of time. And they all learn, you know. So like back to my daughter is a math English major. And she's like, I just use math academy. She's like, you know, I used to skip classes when I was, I didn't like school. I was not like my older daughter. And she always had disdain for me where she's like, you should go to class dad. And now that once she finally went, she's like, okay, I get it. I get why you skip class because it's totally a waste of time. And so I believe in college. You know, Harvard published a paper that their best teaching class is their physics 101 class, one of their best, you know, teachers. And they did an A-B test with AI tutors versus them.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Literally, I sit in there, and there are just terrible. Four of them had written editorials to their school papers about can we stop the charade that are these lectures? Literally, there's 200 people in a class. None of them are paying attention. They're all on their computer, like scoring TikTok or just doing other stuff.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It's college. No, here's what they did. No, so they do. So we went. So I met with them at Christmas after they all, the 11 who went. And it was six or seven of them. And I was like, okay, guys, how are we doing? Everybody had a 40. They were crushing it. They loved college, the whole social environment and stuff. And, you know, some are in sororities. And, you know, they're doing all the different things and they loved it. And I was like, well, what's the worst part? They're like, okay, those lectures are a total waste of time. They are a complete waste of time.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Huge contrast and super impressive, right? I mean, this one, she'll probably kill me because I'm not supposed to talk about it. But, you know, we may have no high school student has ever been lead researcher on something published in nature. And we have an alpha kid who submitted, it hasn't been accepted yet. And so that's why she doesn't want to mention it yet in case it does it. But literally, like no one, right? That's usually, I mean, if she was a PhD. Would consider be considered like one of the most impressive things of her career. And she's literally 17 years old in high school. And it's because they have four years to work on awesome things and do just amazing things. And so, anyway, in college, but now it's time.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “People want to go because our academic scores are just through the roof, then we also have these killer alpha X projects in the afternoon where kids have four years to work on a passion project. We didn't even get into this. And so they look just a completely different character. Than the average college grad.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “You know, the material. But at the college level, so we had, let's see, here's one where do people go? So our first class was we had 12 graduates. 11 of them went to college. The 12th is one of the world's best water skiers. And so he's building his media empire Wiley water skis. It was like, I'm not going to college. The other ones all got into their first choice colleges. We get into, you know, Stanford or Vanderbilt or NYU Shanghai or.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Well, one of the things, even though we have high support, all our kids are self-driven learners, right? They have to during the two hours learn how to be able to learn on their own, right? And so that's one of our tests of our US self-driven learner. Our eighth graders all know how to get a five on an AP on theirself. Like every eighth grader actually knows everything I want to learn is on YouTube. And so you're just like, okay, pick some random AP that you're interested in, you know, not one of the core hard ones, but just pick one, right? And go learn it. Go figure out. And there's all the resources available. And then, you know, so that's our show, okay, you're a self-driven learner. You can learn anything for the rest of your life, you know, without somebody spoon feeding you.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Physics graph is the way to go. I know a couple other products that are about to be released next year, but if you're in it right now,”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “And so I would go get it. I don't know. I think back to AP, I'm trying to remember exactly their product. There's like physics, I was ABC, one, two, three, whatever it is on the AP test. The first one is based on algebra. And then the third one is based on calculus. And so, I don't know if they've released the calculus one yet, but on the algebra, the other, you just use physics graph.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Why do you have why is there a huge after school tutor market? I'm like, we commit that your kid will learn during the day. They don't need that time and you don't have to hire a tutor. That's insane”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “It's an A, right? And then what happens is when they take their PSAT or SAT, it's not as high as they want it. But then it's like the school's like, well, too late. And then some parents hire massively expensive after school tutoring, right? I mean, the after school tutoring marks like $50 billion. It's insane. It's insanely huge because school's parents, even at high-end private schools, like the percent of kids at a high-end private school who also have a tutor. When I look, I was like, this is insane. Aren't you sending your kid to the school to like learn?”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Honors is 1550. And the difference is it's three hours a day to do honors, which is 1550 plus fives on your APs. 1350 and a four or five on your AP, that only takes two hours. So it's just, and to kids, it's an effort issue. You want two hours, you want three hours. Just pick, it's extra time. That's it. And so, but anyway, but that whole thing, you change their mindset, but back to this why in standard school can't do it. You have the parents screaming at you if you try to put your kid to do the whole filling, as we call it, right, to go backward and do fourth grade. They're like, I want the teacher to teach my kid seventh grade because that's, you know, and it's just, so you have that problem in the schools are just like, you know”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “To 90% then, right? For 90% for sure, like just off the charts. And we measure all this. We're like, well, how many can we get to 1550 plus, right? If you're on our high school program, non honors is 1350 minimum.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Totally. There's a little SAT has a little bit of IQ coding at any time test has a little bit of IQ coding. But yes, fundamentally, you should think 1350, which is top 10%. Problem. 1550, which is your top 1%. It gets a little dicey on, you know, what.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “So, but it just sets that mindset of every kid's like, of course I could get 100. The reason we get so many 790s and 800s on the SAT is all our kids are like, of course I could get a perfect score on the SAT. It's just how many hours is it? It's an hour question, not a capability, which is that unlock we did about IQ. Most people think it's IQ, and I'm like, it's effort. Effort, not I”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Same thing where once you show them how to do it, you give them the ability, they're like, Oh, I can get 100. So we have a thing now where we'll advance you at 90% to the next grade level. So when you score 90% on a standardized test, you know, your state standardized test, it shows you you have mastery. Let you go to the great above it, but you get 100 for 100 if you get 100. And so all the kids are like, okay, there's a couple extra, right? And you're like, oh my God, an hour or two, and I'll get the extra questions. Because even if you miss them, you can go back and learn them and then retake.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “And that's how we came up. That's how it came out. I'm like third grade. They did it fourth grade. And then they moved up, right? And that does, it also has this other real thing about academic performance. The self-confidence it does, all these kids are like, okay, I can get 100 on any standardized test back like your son.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Non starter. There's only one person who hates it worse, their parents. Oh my God, I was yelled at so many times by parents. My kid must be at grade level. Why are you putting him in earlier stuff? Every parent's been trained. My kid must work at grade level, which is just the learning. That is not, right? They just don't know learning science. That is not what the learning science says, right? You got to go back and fill, right, mastery the basics, master the basics. But the parents hate it. That's why eventually I still to this day don't know how to fix the parents. So I sort of went around them. And that's when we came up with 100 for 100. I'm like, guys, I got to get you to do it.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Everything's fine. And so you have that. That's number one. Get over that one now. Let's get to the second one. There, and this I fought like this was at 100 for 100 we were talking about, I went my first year to the seventh graders and I'm like, guys, you have holes. I got to get you to do earlier work. You got to do some fourth and fifth grade holes. You got to go fix it. And let me tell you about motivating a kid and making him love school when you tell seventh grader they have fourth and fifth grade material.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Like, if you go to our website, we have testimonials of people. You know, we open San Francisco, right? And this guy's like, I've had my kid in a $50,000 school for eight years. And he couldn't answer some fourth and fifth grade questions. It's not the kid's fault. Right, and the parent didn't know because the school's given A's as good brand. Good brand thought”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Third grade material you're missing, and that's a beak. And so the problem is parents in our world, A's and B's, like A's are good, B's, okay, do better next time, but they don't give out C's D's and F's anymore. So A's and B's have to cover the whole range. And so parents basically are being lied to because they're using their old point of reference 80% of kids at Harvard get A's. Just they've had such great inflation that the school is like, oh my God, I can't do the AI tutor because I'm going to show the kid needs fourth grade material and the parent doesn't know that. And as soon as they put it in, it's going to be obvious the assessment's going to show them. That's actually what causes lots of people to move to alpha. Just give them the assessment. They're like, what's going on?”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Three years behind. So, this is seventh graders who, when we give them the fourth grade test, are missing a significant number of problems. You got bees, you are from three years behind to seven years behind. So these are high schoolers who are like, okay, I need to have you in third grade.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “So there's a few different reasons on that, just tactical, practical reasons. First is they've been lying to their parents. And I don't know public schools much, but let's talk about high-end private schools, right? I know the high-end private school market. The high-end private schools are all lying to their parents by giving kids A's when they don't deserve them. So we pulled in, you know, so we had hundreds of kids join, you know, whatever, a couple months ago across the country, right? And these are people coming from 40, 50,000, $75,000 private schools. And we give them our assessment test. And if you had an A, if your transcript was an A coming into alpha, you are from, there's some students who are one grade level ahead, super awesome, all the way more of them were three years behind”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “A lot of work. It's, you know, and there's not enough proof yet, and you have a bunch of parents who are like, I don't want screen time anyway. And so you have all these good excuses to slow it down. Now, if you look at alpha's like, we're the most talked about school in the world, right? It's just give us one more year, right? Give us one more year and everybody's just going to be like, okay, we need to do this stuff, right? And so that's part of our job and that's part of why I'm out there is just educating parents, right? Our schools educate kids, our marketing department, we have to educate parents that this is all doable. But that's when you look at sort of this whole loop is it's hard to put it in a normal school right now because you do have to do a rebuild. They need more proof and data.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Not going to engage, and that's why it might be part of the problem with normal schools adopting it. You know, you're the principal of a school head of school, and you're like, what am I supposed to do? Like two hours a day, and they're not really teaching. And what do they do the rest of the day? It's a whole real...”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Because they all want the AI because it's not judgmental to them. They don't feel all that pressure. Parents are the opposite. And so it's this very dynamic where I make guys, the kids want this and I know you don't like it, but you got to get over it because your kid wants it. And it's let's do what they want. And so the kids love the AI tutoring, right? They love the feedback. They love the monitoring. Okay, I'm wasting time how to do better, right? And now the second part is if you don't have a motivation on the coaching, like on why they should do it. Like, because I tell like other school districts are like, great, I'm going to go put this in my class. Let me give me this time backstop thing and get magic. I'm like, if you put this in a standard school day of six hours, it's not going to work. Like ed tech generally has failed. And it's generally failed because the kids aren't motivated to engage with it. If you don't give them their time back.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “That grades your public speaking. And you're like, do you want to practice with the human to give you the feedback? Or do you want to practice with or I, this app? You know, until you get to 90%. Filler words and, you know, pacing and all that. And they're like, give me the ORI.”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “So let's talk about the monument, which is it's actually really interesting, which is, I just went through this with some of our middle schoolers, which is kids. Like the monitoring and the coaching because I want to get better. Parents don't like AI monitoring. They're terrified of it. Right? There's this boogeyman of AI monitoring. Kids, they're like, I want a human to do that, not an AI. The kids are like, I don't want a human to look at me ever because I'm judged by adults. Kids. Kids don't want to be judged by adults. They're like, let me talk to the AI. Like if you tell an app,”

    2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source