The Exchanges

Q Cause it can't be cheap too. Like going to alpha school, what does it cost?

A So alpha school is expensive. So our tuition is 40 to 75,000 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 20,000 dollars. We spend in America, 20,000 dollars a kid. To educate them. So that's sort of my price target. We're launching, right, and we've launched 10 of them so far, we hope to open hundreds next year, of these Texas sports academies. They're 15,000 dollars tuition. My middle school, right, they're micro schools, they're 25 kids, middle school D-one bound athletes. Think 25 really good basketball players, right, in middle school who do academics in the morning, you know, basketball in the afternoon. And so think of hundreds of these schools around Texas, uh, at 15,000, which the voucher program just was announced, which is like 12 grand. So parent pay will be like 304 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.

AI assessment note: “So our tuition is 40 to 75,000 dollars.”

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

A A hundred percent. So I'll, another example, uh, 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. Uh, 10 weeks, he came up to me, he's like, 10 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. Until you die. He's like, I would have signed, I would have sold my soul and signed 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, uh, at Alpha, and he's like, today, uh, 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, you, you've made an environment where they're like, okay, my escape is to scroll TikTok and play video games. Cause 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 h…

AI assessment note: “A hundred percent. So I'll, another example”

Q So does intelligence have a big predictor on success?

A 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 a conscient grinder, 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 computing and figure it out, but for sure in, you know, K through eight, the K through eight curriculum, you know, if you take 95% of America, they could all be top one percent, 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 one percent, 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 mis…

AI assessment note: “in K through 12 today, the best students, there's actually two... IQ and big five conscientiousness”

Q What's the TAM of the, of the larger side?

A I mean, near infinite in this world. Here's, here's the issue you have just glow, 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've all 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?

AI assessment note: “I mean, near infinite in this world.”

Q 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?

A 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 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 a 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, 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. Uh, 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, it, 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 manag…

AI assessment note: “sort of where Alpha came from was if you stepped back and said”

Q people, they're like, why not? Where are the Raris? 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? Wealth.

A 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 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 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, um, 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, um, that people need to have.

AI assessment note: “In, in our schools, we start teaching about money in kindergarten.”