Education is one of those subjects everybody has an opinion about, mostly because most of us have survived it. Some people think our schools are fundamentally broken. Others think the system works - it just needs more money, more quality teachers, and fewer politicians.

Then along comes Mackenzie Price, who says the whole thing has been built on the wrong foundation from the start. Mackenzie is the founder of Alpha School, where students spend about two hours a day on academics, AI does much of the tutoring, teachers become guides instead of lecturers, homework practically disappears, and the results are...well, hard to ignore.

Naturally, I had questions. A lot of them.

Is AI about to make teachers obsolete? Is our education system actually broken—or are we just nostalgic for something that never worked as well as we remember? What happens when kids learn at their own pace instead of the speed of the classroom? Is failure really the fuel we've been trying so hard to protect our children from?

What followed was one of the more surprising conversations I've had in a while. We talked about a lot of things, like why so many kids are either bored or lost in the classroom, silent lunch (yes, that's apparently a thing), and why some of the smartest people in America believe the biggest disruption AI will bring won't happen in the workplace—it'll happen in the classroom.

I found myself agreeing with things I didn't expect to agree with, questioning things I'd always taken for granted, and wondering if the most important innovation in education might have less to do with technology than with finally admitting the system we've inherited isn't serving the people it was built to help. I'm still not sure I agree with everything Mackenzie says, but I left the conversation convinced that she's asking questions the rest of us probably should have started asking a long time ago.

Have a listen. Chances are you'll have an opinion by the end.