YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Liemandt

lines on the record: 209
first: 2026-03-31
most recent: 2026-03-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But each person's different. But you could imagine an LLM that sits on top of all that data and generates the perfect next lesson for you, right? And so that's where we use the generative AI, not to have kids do a Socratic tutoring thing because they're just you instead saying, I'm going to generate a perfect lesson. And those lessons are all based on learning science. So I'm going to make sure that they're engaging and not passive, right? It's going to be a worked example in math because that's actually the best way to teach kids. You know, I'm going to be measuring if it's too hard. If it's, you know, and you get it wrong, I'm going to go back. And I can tell from the other questions, you know, even if it's multi-choice, the AI is going to make them so that if I'm unsure, if you really know it, I'm going to put some questions in there that'll tell me whether you know that prior knowledge or you don't.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You learn both faster and more engaged. It's sort of a combo effect. And then there's a fourth one, which is we're adding, it's not in our current one, but it will be in 26, which is cognitive load theory, which is a whole set of learning science of how your brain works. And you should think your brain's like a chip, a register, where you have these working memory slots. And everybody has a different number. And so you have four working memory slots. And then every person needs a different number of reps to take something from short-term memory and put it into long-term memory. Think of how many times do you have to look at a flashcard, an easy way.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, how we use AI in the morning to teach is what AI, it's the generative AI part, not the chat part. It's we generate personalized lessons for every kid, right? That's the part. And so imagine if you had an LLM and you fed it the following. You fed it the curriculum you're trying to teach, right? You fed it the kid's knowledge graph. What do they know and what do they not know? You also feed it the kid's interest graph. What do they like? Oh, they like baseball because then, right, one of the fastest ways learns analogies, right? Back to engagement. If I'm teaching you in something you love and that you're good at.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chat bots I am not talking. Our school does not teach people by giving them ChatGPT. Chatbots are cheatbots. 90% of kids who are using chatbots for academics are cheating and not learning. And, you know, in our schools, you know, we do the academics in the morning and then we do all these great life skills in the afternoon. And for that world, we say, if you're using a chat bot in the morning, you're probably cheating And if you're not using it in the afternoon for your life skills and all that stuff, you're probably failing. So AI needs to be, chatbots have a use just not on the academic side.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody else. Yeah. So it's well, it's important more important than the AI is the learning science. Like if I had to pick the two, but it's the combination really online. So how do they, but let's let me be clear. Let's dive into what I don't mean by AI.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is IMG, which is our head of high school actually came. He used to run academics at IMG. Because for big time athletes like at IMG, you do the academics in the morning, you play sports all afternoons. And that's why our sports academy is all being designed. It's just they know it too. That's how they catch up, right? Because they got all this time already used, and so there is a small set of group of people. There's others, you know, if you. There's a couple real experts of learning science. You know, Dean Schwartz, who runs Stanford School of Education, he's published a book on learning science. What are we”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's all they've ever done. There's two groups actually when you talk about who believes the two hours versus not. Traditional school just doesn't believe. They just don't believe it. The people who do homeschool people absolutely believe whatever. Their view is why is Alf so expensive? Because I do homeschool. Yeah, I did the same thing. Yeah. And so, and absolutely. The other group actually is athletes.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a group of people, and those are our early adopters, right? Who comes to an alpha? It's going to be, you know, families like yours. We call them founding families because they're like, I think I've seen enough. Homeschool families, like if you ask the average homeschool family, they know two hours is all you need. There's actually two groups.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I spend my time. Like, there, I definitely do. I've met a lot of boards and heads of school of the top schools in this country, private schools who charge $50,000, $75,000. And they really struggle to sort of believe. This works because fundamentally learning science, this concept learning science, they're not trained in it. They haven't read the 10,000 papers. They haven't built and seen it. They don't know the world's, they don't have a team like we do of seven of the 10 best learning scientists in the country working on it, right, who have all these unlocks. And they definitely don't have the data loop that we have. Like we know, because we measure every single thing how long the kid took to do it and what the scores are and what are the results and that whole closed loop.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do that. It's really hard to change the system, right? Which is the first off, first off, nobody believes, right? So the first thing you do when you look at alpha, right, and CR results is you're like selection effects is only rich kids and that's it. And so you sort of reject it and don't seriously consider it. But even in places that do, there's a lot of high-end private schools who their largest donors are like, I want my kid to have this two-hour learning. Go take a meeting.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's bored out of his mind in school. We waste 90% of their time. We know the teacher in front of the classroom is the least effective way to teach. You can argue whether it's 5% retention, but literally we're wasting 90% of the kids' time because we're teaching them in a very ineffective manner. Now, back to think, we didn't have a better way for the last 40 years. You know, if you're like, you know, school. Got to have a teacher in front of a classroom because I can't give everybody a tutor, right? And so there was nothing better. So let's not just tell everybody like you could learn 10 times faster, but sorry. Now there's no excuse for it. We can get everybody learning that fast.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you were gonna now, part of the problem is if you put kids in it six hours a day. Going to disengage, and we'll talk about why we designed the two hours. How we came up with that. But the material's just not that much. And that's why our kids can do 2x, right? Because everybody's like, that's just too much to know. And you're like, it's really not that much. And when you get it, right. You know, for parents, anybody who's looking, you should go, there's a great math app out there called Math Academy. They wrote a 500-page book that you can download Justin, who wrote it, that goes through all the learning science. They also publish how many hours it takes. Their app, I think, starts in fourth grade, you know, but from how long fourth grade math, fifth grade, math, sixth grade math, right? And it's, I mean, it literally is. It's like 28 hours and 22 hours and just not many hours to master material at these subject levels. And so that when you talk about the unlock, it's just, you know, when you say, why do kids? And we, you know, think of your kid, you know, where.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On our day, maybe some homework, a couple hundred hours, right? The average kid in our system with Which is our app. Learn to in 22 hours to mastery to mastery. Math, science, right? Between 20 and 30 hours. If you're thinking K through eight. Should think between 20 and 30 hours per grade level per subject.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's going to be, and think of the knowledge graph of everything they need to know here's the third grade curriculum. You can ask, AI tutors are good at figuring out what you know and don't know. Right assessment or tests, right? And so you can just have the kid take a test and be like, oh, you don't know this stuff over here. Let's give you these lessons until you know it. And then you can once you know it, we'll move you on to the next grade. Same thing at the next grade, and just keep progressing you up at whatever rate you go at, right? And this is the, but here's the part that's just crazy town. Kids can learn 10 times faster. So if you take, like just here's a metric for you, our subjects, take seventh grade science. In a normal standard school, you have 180 school days.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you just think about, you know, back to learning science there's 10,000 papers written about learning science about how kids can learn better, the zone approximal development, like give them questions where they're getting them 80 to 85% correct. Where if it's like 99 they're not learning because they already know it. If you get down to 50, like they disengage because it's too hard So, you want this crate zone every video game developer knows this, keep the kid engaged. And so, what you really want in a perfect world, you know, and sort of what is imagine an AI tutor, an app, whatever you want to call it, giving your kid an unending stream of questions at 80 to 85% accuracy, right? Where if it gets harder, they're going to tune it up, down.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Exactly. And with a mastery based AI tutor, you can go to those kids, right? And just say, I'll make sure you get the third grade phonic. So explain the master.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, because K through three has learned to read. And then fourth through 12th, there's read to learn, right? That's the flip point where you're like, okay, I'm learning, I'm bootstrapping to learn how to read. And then in fourth grade, you're like, okay, we all know you read now, so now you're going to learn science and social studies. You're going to get word problems on your math test because you can read. And if you can't, if you miss that bar, then all of a sudden you're all of a sudden all this material and it's just, you know, it could be like me handing out Greek to”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With this concept of, okay, someone's gonna teach them, right? But the problem is the fourth grade teacher is not set up to teach 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
“There's political and all, just it's totally impossible. And you do. So there used to be rules that you couldn't pass third grade if you couldn't read, right? And the problem is social promotion, where people are just like, okay, you are going to psychologically damage my kid if you hold him back, right? And so then you just promote him to fourth grade for all these other reasons with the concept of damage.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start fresh with these different groups. Well, and that's, and the pressure I totally feel if I was a, I could not do the public school job, I could not be a principal at a public school because it is really hard because the product you have is this bundle.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if you can't read, you can't, it's just going to school is a waste Unless, you know, if you're not, if you're in middle school, you can't read. All that matters is that somebody's teaching you to read.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I'm a teacher and I'm a sixth grade teacher. I got this GT kid who needs some seventh grade material and I got someone who's little behind, needs some fifth grade material. Post COVID, you're like, now it's a seven-year span. You have people in middle school who can't read.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Four years of learning nothing. Now, your top 1% back to this inequality kind of thing, the top 1% probably go up six points a year, right? So your top 1% kids are still learning like this, but your median person in the US is not learning in high school. There's no academic learning going on. And that's why there's a paper, I'm trying to think. I think you see San Diego run at the top schools, universities in our country, right? Just published a paper that like 50% of their freshmen can't answer fifth grade questions. Like back to holes and all this kind of stuff. Like, just back to how bad it is. It's like, you know, the learning and the holes that are in the system, because once, you know, in the part of what happened with COVID, everybody's waiting for the bounce back on COVID. There's going to be no bounce back on COVID because what happened to your point was the span, it used to be years ago.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, do you know it cold? And there's a view, though, in a time based system that you're like, look, it's time to move on. And we all grew up in a non-mastery-based system, which is then as you don't have mastery, you know, the holes compound. And then all of a sudden, the reason like if you look at the learning curves in the US, they start to slow down in middle school and basically flatline in high school. The average kid in the US. Like on this map score, this NWA map, there's a 300 point scale. If you take, I can't remember exact number, but if you take an eighth grader, Will go up one point by senior year. How is that the median? That's the median.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mastery means do you know the material cold? Like think of whenever I talk about mastery, think about sports. Just move to sports, which is if you're a point guard and you're going down the court. What percent of the time is the coach going to let you lose the ball? And whatever that number is is mastery, right? Because it's not very often versus in academics, kid gets an 80%. You're like, oh, he seems to know got to be, you know, in this thing, sometimes an A now, you know. And if point guard was losing ball 20% of the time going down the court, the coach would be like, master the basics. We're not working on dunks, right? We're not working on new stuff. Right? We're going to master the basics, and you're going to get up to 99. Whatever”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sigma better performance. Just crazy better performance. But, you know, the problem with that paper is you can't give everybody a human tutor. And then second, you also have to enforce mastery, which is hard in a lot of ways. What is mastery?”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know that can be ineffective. Yeah, it's just they can't read. And that kid needs a first grade phonics lesson. And that guy needs a second grade math question, right? And you can't, but the teacher, they can't sit here and every kid give them, right? It's just that's not. They're a sixth grade teacher. There's actually laws in state various states that you must teach at grade level. Like it's illegal for a teacher not to teach at grade level, right? Which is just totally insane, right? And so you have all these problems that are systemically designed in the system. And it's one now that parents, because, you know, and if you talk to people, we've known this back to learning science for 40 years. There have been papers written about how kids could learn, two, five, ten times faster, but they don't work in a teacher in front of a classroom model. Bloom's two Sigma, which is a famous one, and everybody fights about it, but it's a good paper, which is, you know, this is when I was in high school, it's like if you do AI tutor, not an AI tutor, a human tutor with mastery-based, you get two.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're just going back and saying, Oh, you don't know fourth and fifth grade, let it do it. But you're a sixth grade teacher, you have to hand out sixth grade material. Like we were working with a school with bottom 10% kids, right? And, you know, back to me being new, I go my first day to see the sixth grade teacher teach. I was a sixth grade teacher. And bottom 10% in America means you can't read. You don't know seven times eight, right? And I go into the classroom and she's handing out sixth grade material. I'm like.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's 100% of the problem, which is you have holes in your knowledge and knowledge is cumulative. And so when you start slowing down, it's because of your prereqs. And the system is set up. The teacher, it's not therefore, teachers are awesome. Teacher in front of the classroom is terrible, right? You have to separate those two concepts, and that's one of the things parents we all sort of put them together, but they're two separate things. And that's why everybody's trying to get small class sizes, because you basically want a teacher to give your kid individualized lessons. I mean, for the rich families who hire tutors after school, all the tutor does is gives them the fourth and fifth grade lessons. That's all they're doing.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got one, right? Because it's effort based, not IQ based, right? There's nothing like, and if you back to that whole correlation, it's just, you know, there's no concept in U.S. Common Core through the eighth grade that everybody can't understand. It's built that way. So it's just a matter of, and if you're having trouble, it's usually because you don't have the prereqs, right? And that's all, and that's the difference between a time-based teacher in front of a classroom model and a mastery-based AI tutor.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The third grade test. And they're like, Can I do fourth grade? And then you do fourth grade. Then on fifth grade, they only get a 75 because they have holes. They didn't learn all that material in fifth grade. And then the AI tutor, they're like, do you want the AI tutor to generate the lesson you're missing? And they're like, let me see how many. And they're like, I can do that like in a week or so. And you're like another hundred bucks. And so we get more hundreds on state standardized tests in a building of 200 people than a school district of 100,000. And back to this concept that you have to change with parents. If you interview alpha parents or any parents and say, can your kid get 100 on the state standardized test? Fewer than 10% of parents say yes. Because in our generation, like only the GT kids did that, right? None of us got that, right? And if you ask alpha kids, they're all like, of course.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they'll go into the system and we'll be like, well, we'll pay $100 if you get 100% on the test. And there are seventh or eighth grade of it. I can't get $100 on the test. And we're like, no, no, no. Pick your grade level. Like, you're going to let me do a third grade test and get 100? We're like, absolutely And so they go take the third grade test and they do get”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the problem with the kids learning isn't the kid, it's the system. Like we talked about that at the beginning where the systems coded in high acute conscientiousness and how do you unlock those? We built a system that breaks those two things, which is if you have a mastery-based AI tutor, right, that only allows you to advance after you've mastered the material, mastered the basics, right? which everybody in sports understands right That's what our system does, that makes it independent of IQ. That makes it effort-based, not IQ-based. And we have a ton of results, which is we run a program and we have a school, you know, back to the schools. Every kid can get 100% on their state standardized test. And we run this program called 100 for 100 to teach these kids. So we'll have middle schoolers coming into our sports academy.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different academic backgrounds, and you're going to be able to see, and we'll be able to publish those results that those kids can learn too, right? Back to the thing is, you know, we talked about why the kids are learning.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to have generally people who come in the bottom half academically, right? All people who love sports, right? And it's a middle school for D1 aspirational athletes, right? People who wake up and they're like, I love sports. Because back to us, I have to build a school they love more than vacation. So I need to know what lights them up. What drives them? And what drives them? And so I'm like, great. So we can do that. So we already have, you know, and we'll have a, you know, we'll publish all the results. These kids coming in, they go in to the same app set that you get at Alpha, right? They do the same two hours, right?”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Else's top one for St. Kids. And so selection effects matter. So for example, we have another school that's not alpha. So we have to get this down to everybody. I'm going to spend 20 years on this. I got to get it to a billion kids. So I got to solve all the different demographics and issues. So we have a school rolling out. We have a dozen that we've opened so far. Texas Sports Academy, right? And so on this one back to selection effects, our tuition is going to be $15,000 for this school. It is $15,000 for the school. And with the vouchers, it's in Texas and Texas has a new voucher program that they announced billion dollars of vouchers. So it'll be $12,000 vouchers. So any family who's income eligible for it, rich people can't get it. But if you're income eligible for it, you get $12,000 check. So it'll be a $300 a month parent pay to go to this school.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Am like as a product guy. I'm like, you must use selection effects to build your product, which is you have to select for the right person who you're designing your product for, right? And so, yes, there's no school that doesn't have selection effects. And yes, at Alpha, we select for those. And we absolutely have, you know, an easier cohort than there's other cohorts that we'll talk about that are harder than the ones we get. But compare us to every other high-end private school in the country. Great. I agree. Don't compare us to really hard situations. Have us go compare us to the best. Go take other 99% kids and see why ours are learning three times faster than those kids, right? You can get the score that says, we benchmark our 99% kids not against the average kid. We benchmark them against the top 1% kid. And our top 1% kids kill everybody else.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, so here's selection effects are a great discussion, which is I'll answer that second part of, okay, what if you're not rich after it, but before, you know, in most education, there's a view, and this maybe is my background because I'm not and I'm a product guy. You know, when I came into education, there's a view that you must serve everybody all at once or you will serve nobody. That's just sort of the view around everything. You have to serve everybody all at once. And that selection effects are bad.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right? And she's like, so we're even improving the product. Like, we're not done when we get into the learning science, if you want to talk about that and stuff. Human potential is unlimited and we are tapped in and have that improvement cycle going. So the amount kids can learn in a great environment that they love is just, it's going to explode like what our generation thought was knowing a lot.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know in the end, our product's gotten better over time. My oldest daughter was in the school, and she's now at Stanford, and she was back and she was meeting some of the third and fourth graders. And she was looking at some of their scores. And she's like, they are getting the scores I got in seventh and eighth 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
“And we move them years ahead. It's the same thing. There's even a GT program at normal school where you get one year ahead. I have third and fourth graders who outscore 50% of the high school graduates of this country”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And be like, wow, right? My kid learned twice as much, and they only had to spend two hours a day doing it. And so, you know, and so the part that is just amazing about Alpha is, you know, there are a lot of private schools that just select for good students, right? Which is one way to do it. The other way is to make them develop them. And so ours is all about growth. We'll take kids, right? And get them from bottom half to top half to top 1% that the growth rate of alpha is what the just unbelievable parts are. Like if you can go download or offer a website, like our results and you can put it into chat GPT and you're like, analyze the growth rate of alpha versus any other school in the country. And it's like it's like four standard deviations off the track because nobody does this because we take people who are behind and catch them up. But we take the top 1%.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every single class, yes, every grade, every subject, top 1%. And we publish them, right, back to, we publish all these results. We also, our kids fundamentally in the two hours are learning twice as fast as if they sat in school for six and did homework. And so like, for example, on the map test, it's a three-hundred point scale. And so if you have like a 220 and you're a fifth grader at 75th percentile, you know, coming into alpha, you know, it's going to say you're going to go up five points. You know, if you're a normal kid, you're going to go five points this year. Alpha, you're going to go up 10 points. And so it's just quantifiable so the parents can log in”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, our kids love school. It's just they're phenomenal results when you talk about academically. We're the best academic performing school in the country. Barnut. So you can measure us on, we are big believers in standardized tasks because no one, when you hear about the whole how Alpha works, nobody believes it'll work. And so even a lot of parents don't believe in standardized tests when they come in. And I'm like, okay, your kid's only doing two hours a day. And they're like, well, how do I know they're learning? I'm like, trust me. They're like, no, I don't trust you. And so when they score, you know, top 790 and 800 math SAT. They're like, oh, okay, it's working”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know about this no, it should be spinach. I'm like, is that what you think for your employees? Do you like wake up and say, man, you know what? This job just sucks. And it should suck. And no, I'm not going to try to make them like this job. Just suck it up. But delirially, they turn around to their kids and say the same thing. Like, dude, suck it up Right? No, it's ridiculous that you should like school. That's just insane because we didn't like it and we went through the system. But if we're rebuilding it, we just need to totally undo that thought process we have that, you know, kids should hate school. They should 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
“Million years. And I was just like, okay, we are, you know, and there's a lot that to unpack why they wanted it and all that stuff. But that's the core. If we're going to put our kids in for right a decade, 12 years of this stuff, we as parents, right, should just say they should love it. Like, you know, and there's this view that, no, it's spinach, you know. And that, I had that view, you know, that, you know, I wasn't the founder of Alpha, but I was talking McKinsey and Brian started it. And I was talking to Brian when I first put my kids in it. And I was like, what are the things I don't know about education that I should know? He's like, kids must love school. Like love school. And I'm like, it's spinach. He's like, you don't get it. Your kids are going to come here and you're going to figure it out. And now I'm like total religion, right? That they absolutely have to. And it makes all the magic happen. And what's interesting is when I talk to other business executives.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three years ago was when I started in May of this year, two thirds of our high school kids sent me a note and they're like, Mr. LeMont, can we keep the school open this summer because we don't want a summer break? And I hated high school. The school, I would never have asked, ever 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
“They must love school, right? And, you know, that is our core principle, and it's what makes everything happen. And when I talk about, you know, to principals and superintendents and other heads of school, I'm just like, if you don't believe that, all this other stuff you hear about, you know, to our learning and all, it's not going to work. You have to believe that core value that kids must love school. And we got our ranking like I think it was like 96, the last. We survey our kids every eight weeks. It was, you know, 96% of our kids said yes. But we actually raised it got too high. It's not a good metric when everybody says yes. So we added a second question, which was, do you love school more than vacation? Right. And we get about 40 to 60% of our kids, 40 to 60% of our kids who say they'd rather go to school than vacation, which is that's the metric now that we wake up every day is we're like, we have to build a school where the kids want to go and start a vacation. The highlight of my time as principal.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are the skills the kids need? How should they spend the day? How do you do that? What would it be? And so that's what we're doing in Alpha School. The other part we do is we also say we definitely took off budget constraints. It's a high-end private school. We're like, if money's no object, which is gives us a sort of our high-end design. Now we're going to get the cost down and drive it down. But for the first version, this alpha school, it's the high end. And so we have built a school that is totally different than every other school out there. And the principles that underlie it. First, we said if, look, if you're going to redo school and we're going to put our kids in this for a decade, the number one rule is kids must love school.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So alpha school is a high end private school expanding nationwide. We'll have 25 campuses around the country this year. And the way to think about alpha school is if you could revisit and just say we need to build an educational system that's going to be ready for when AI comes, whatever world's going to be here in a decade, right? What would you do? Just ground up rewrite, ignore everything you and I went through, right? Six hours a day in class and homework and all that and just rewrite 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