Reinventing School for the AI Era | Joe Liemandt, Gagan Biyani & Erik Torenberg

Are you willing to redesign your school day so kids love it more than vacation? With cognitive science and learning science, plus the advent of LLMs, you can build a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. The shift that I think you've been able to make is the believability of it. Pretty soon people are gonna ask, why would we ever do it any other way? I want this next generation to be the ones who are optimistically capable with AI and saying, we're gonna build an awesome future. That's what our job as educators are, is to go build that world. What would you say to the parent who's saying, I'm sending my kid to Ivy League school. I know it's not perfect, but this is a new institution. Why should I take a risk? So if AI can help students learn the traditional curriculum dramatically faster, what should they do with the rest of their education? In this episode, I sit down with Alpha School founder Joe Lamont and Horowitz and Andreessen Academy co founder Gagan Biani to talk about what school should look like in the AI era. Joe has spent years building Alpha around a radically different model. Students spend roughly two hours a day on core academics, then use the rest of their time developing skills like teamwork, entrepreneurship, communication, and leadership through real world projects. We talk about what Alpha has learned from K through 12 education and how those lessons change when applied to college age students at That includes why motivation matters so much, why students should be building alongside people operating at the frontier, and why learning can increasingly happen in service of solving a real world problem rather than simply passing a test. And ultimately, we make the case for a different way of preparing young people for AI, not by trying to predict which careers will survive, but by giving them the agency, relationships, and tools to help build what comes next. Joe, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much. So, we've had the luxury of spending some time together this year and touring the schools, and what you've built with Alpha is just incredible, and it's inspired us at We're grateful to have your involvement. And for people who are unfamiliar, why don't you just briefly describe what you think of as the essential innovations or what you've really brung to the space with Alpha. Sure. So, we're reinventing how K-twelve school is the school day, right? How kids spend their six or seven hours that they're in class or in a school building, what is that like? And sort of the first part that you have to understand and buy into is that instructional design and delivery hasn't changed for a hundred years. You throw a teacher in front of the classroom and what's the right way to do this? And now if you look over the last couple decades with cognitive science and …