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

“And now we still teach 2x in two hours, right? We just emphasize the two hour parts. No, we literally took, it was two X in two hours. And I'm like, let's just drop it and call it two hour learning where you learn to X in parentheses. Well, let's talk”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are you pressuring Johnny to learn to X? And I'm like, well, okay, got it. And it took me hundreds of meetings to realize the parents don't value it. Now, 10% of the market does. 10% of the market totally cares about great academics, right? And so those guys, they demand it. Like they don't like two-hour alert because it's not enough learning. But we switch. So that was our big product market fit. If you had to say the biggest pivot, you know, from a marketing point of view that unlocked all the stuff around Alpha was, and I was slow, but hundreds of meetings in. I'm like, I'm going to change this message. And I'd have mom, dad, same Johnny, same mom and dad. Look, I'm trying to get Johnny out of here in two hours so he can do all the cool stuff the rest of the day, trying to get him out of here. And you know, he skips the videos. And if you just watch him, he'd be done in two hours. And then mom's like, Johnny, what's wrong with you? Don't you want to get out of here? Right. People want to get out of the 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
“They're very tightly correlated in the rest of the world and not in the US. And so there's a big thing among parents who are just like, Academics don't matter that much. There's all these other things the life skills and all these other skills that matter more than the academics. And so I don't really care as much. And I guess a good story about this was when, you know, I became principal three years ago. And, you know, our first product, the way I positioned it, you know, was 2x learning. Your kid will learn twice as much. Fundamentally, I got incredible pushback from parents about that, like surprising amounts of pushback. And I was so surprised. I mean, I was doing hundreds of parent-teacher meetings, right? With, you know, and explaining it. And I'd be in a meeting, you know, and I'd be like, you know, mom, dad, and Johnny. And I'd just be like, look, Johnny's not learning 2x because, you know, when he misses the question, the video that comes up that explains why he missed it and how he can do the next one right, he skips it. He just skips it. You know? And, but he could 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
“This is, I think, where it gets complicated. At least, and you have US versus Globe is a little different, which is as a society, everybody in America is like, wow, our schools suck. There's every article, right? Just constant stream of, there's an unending stream of, look at how bad all these school scores and grades go down and everything that COVID was even worse. But, you know, just everything's bad. 80% of the great inflation, everybody knows 80% of people at Harvard get A's now. It's like, oh, just give A's out to everybody. And so we all know that the standards have been dropped, but the thing in the US that's different, especially if you look globally, is in the US, there's a big disconnect between educational outcomes and your earning potential, which is they're not as tightly correlated as they are in the rest of the world.”
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 based on IQ and conscientious, you could pour all the money you want into it, and it doesn't change those, right? It doesn't make kids more, I give them higher IQ, give them more conscientiousness. And so it doesn't fix the problem. And so that's a lot of the issues that you have.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you don't, you don't do well, right? And so, and the system doesn't adapt for anybody who doesn't do well in those two elements. And so you have that as sort of one dimension of why the system's not working because if you're not one of those two. And then the second dimension over here is fundamentally about resources and factually independent of any political or anything is just factually one of the strongest determinations of whether you learn your educational outcome and how much you know is based on your family's income. And the whole system is just geared that way, sort of just look at the results. And so you sort of have these just two systems like this, and that's why there's like, okay, we'll spend more money and all these things. But fundamentally, it's just broken because those elements, right, aren't being changed, right? If you have a time-based system,”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keep It's, you know, there's a lot of reasons around it. A school is a complicated bundle. And academic performance. Is only one element, and it's one fundamentally that schools have basically said it doesn't matter that much anymore. And so everybody's willing to let everybody involved in the ecosystem has been willing to let the standards drop. And I believe part of it is because the way our system is built today, you know, there's basically a couple truisms about the standard school system. The first is the way it's structured is a time-based system where you move up every year and you have a teacher in front of a classroom. There's basically, you have two attributes for people who do well in that system. One, it's IQ coded, which is higher IQ better, is better. And second, it's big five conscientiousness coded. Are you a natural grinder? And if you have those two attributes, you do really well in our existing school system.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, and schools are failing that if you look at, you know, just pure academic results, just take academic results, independent of AI, you're right, test scores keep going down every year.”
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 biggest picture, I think, if you talk to parents of like why there's agitation for change, is this AI world is coming and we're all terrified of what it means. But what we do know, and we don't know exactly what it means, but what we do know is the education system that we all went through isn't going to prepare the kids for that world, right? And I feel that as a catalyst for people to say the old system wasn't working or the old system needs to change, that's just a huge driver. Like if, you know, I talked to lots of kindergarten parents, and they're just looking and saying in a dozen years, you know, if I put my kid in standard school that I went through, is that going to prepare them for this AI world? And they're like, no, that's not. So there's a drive that we need something different.”
2026-03-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Alpha School: AI and The Future of Education | Joe Liemandt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source