Transforming education with AI and an individualized, mastery-based education model | Joe Liemandt

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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My guest this week is Joe Liemandt. Joe's a software entrepreneur turned education reformer. As we discussed in the podcast, he dropped out of Stanford in about 1989, started a company called Trilogy that's gone on to become one of the most profitable software companies in the world that you've probably never heard of because it's remained private this entire time. Joe basically left Trilogy three years ago to become the principal of Alpha School, and his passion today and as he discusses for the next couple of decades of his life is going to be on transforming K-12 education. Now, of course, this is something that many people have thought about before, but I think what is really remarkable about the way Joe tells the story is that all previous efforts to transform K-12 have been missing a critical piece of infrastructure. That infrastructure is indeed AI. Now, you may be asking why we're going to have a discussion about education on the Drive, but of course, as I state to Joe at the outset of this podcast, you can't really care about science and medicine if you don't care about education. All of us listening today are one day going to be cared for by people who are in K-12 today, who are going to have to learn STEM and hopefully be interested enough to choose a career in medicine. I think we all have a very vested interest in this, not just for the health of our country and our economy, but also on a very deep and personal level. We talk a lot in this episode about what it is that education research has been saying for the past 40 or 50 years that has been unimplementable because of scale. We talk, of course, in this episode about his path from software engineer to education, why that pivot. We talk about what's wrong in K-12 education and the forces behind it. In fact, just as an anecdote, today, this morning in the newspaper, I was reading something before recording this intro, which I'm recording about a week after the podcast. They just came out with a national assessment of education progress tests, which are tests that are done across the country. We continue to be in a state of decline. For mathematics, only 55 percent of 12th graders were able to meet the basic level, and only 67 percent of 12th graders were able to hit that level in reading. Again, these scores represent the lowest scores we've had in over 20 years. So, this downhill trend of basic math and reading skills continues. We talk about the case for mastery-based individual learning that's grounded in learning science. Again, I can't say enough about this, and it's something I don't think I really understood until maybe the past year, based on my very limited insight and interaction on the fronts of education. But again, this is such a core idea that it's essential to this. We talk about how Alpha Schools actually run day to day, including replacing seat time with roughly two hours of focused academics daily, and how kids make up a grade in as little as 20 to 30 hours. We talk about where AI tutors help most, and where human coaches are essential. Talk about building core skills and fluency without killing curiosity. Talk about creating motivation systems, goals, time back, and incentives. Talk about how Alpha Schools track progress and use data to guide learning. Talk about early outcomes limitations and what still needs proving. And of course, the roadmap to scale, the costs, the constraints. And how do you bring this to Joe's ultimate goal, which is at least one billion kids within 20 years. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Joe Liemandt.
Joe, thank you so much for making time to come over today. It's nice once in a while to have a guest who is local and doesn't have to travel so far.