NEW: Lazy Money Issue 31

Happy Sunday!

Wanna know why you sat in rows for 12 years staring at a chalkboard? Blame a random Prussian general who thought children were tiny soldiers.

The Story

In 1806, Napoleon absolutely demolished Prussia at the Battle of Jena. Killed 25,000 Prussians in six hours.

The surviving generals had a meeting. "Why did we lose?"

"Our soldiers think too much."

So they rebuilt their entire education system to fix that problem. Kids stood in rows. Moved on bells. Forty-five minute periods - the exact time a soldier could stay alert on watch. No questions, only memorization. They called it Volksschule. The people's school.

And….it kinda worked. So much so that by 1870, Prussia conquered most of France.

Here's where it gets weird.

Horace Mann, secretary of education for Massachusetts, visits Prussia in 1843. He's supposed to be studying their philosophy programs. Instead, he becomes obsessed with their elementary schools. Watches six-year-olds marching in formation and has what he later called "a revelation from God."

American factory owners had been bitching to Mann for years. Their workers showed up drunk, quit randomly, took breaks whenever they felt like it. They needed workers who would stand at a loom for 14 hours without complaining.

Mann returns to America. "I've seen the future of education!"

He copies everything. The bells (factory shift training). The rows (assembly line prep). The punishment for talking (workplace silence). Permission to use the bathroom (teaching bodily submission to authority).

One textile magnate wrote in his diary: "Mann's schools will give us workers who arrive on time, do what they're told, and believe it's for their own good."

By 1918, every American school looked like a Prussian military academy. The system designed to create soldiers for a dead empire became the system creating workers for Carnegie and Rockefeller.

In a wild twist of fate, Prussia abandoned this system after World War I. They realized it created perfect Nazis.

We still use it. Unless you do something about it.

How To Profit

• The Tamagotchi of Learning 🐉📚

Remember when kids carried those digital pets that died if you didn't feed them?

Build an AI pet that grows when kids feed it knowledge. Math homework? It grows calculator claws. History report? Unlocks time-travel skin. But here's the fun part: make the pet PUBLIC. Other parents see whose kid has the saddest, most neglected learning creature and they’ll panic-buy premium features to boost their kids and avoid judgment at school pickup.

Can also be used as a productivity tool for adults, with an AI pet that feeds off your progress and texts when you skip your habits to emotionaly manipulate you into action.

• TextbookGPT 📖🎛️

Publishers write one textbook for 30 million different brains and wonder why kids hate reading.

Your AI digests any textbook and customizes it per kid. Short attention span? Breaks chapters into bite-sized pieces. Kid obsessed with anime? World War II explained through Attack on Titan parallels. Into basketball? Statistics becomes shooting percentages, probability through free-throw scenarios etc.

Parents desperate for their kid to read ANYTHING will pay $30/month versus $200 textbooks that collect dust.

• The Anti-Transcript 🌐📊

Transcripts show what teachers forced kids to memorize. Build a platform that shows what kids chose to learn.

Your platform becomes the real academic record - every passion project, every rabbit hole explored, every skill self-taught. Kids install a browser extension that tracks their learning footprint and compete on learning streaks like Snapchat. Everything gets points: 10 XP for completing a lesson, 50 XP for building something, 100 XP for teaching others etc.

Learning becomes visible and competitive. Kids see daily leaderboards for their grade level. Streaks for consistent learning. Skill trees that unlock (master algebra to unlock calculus). Public profiles they customize and share. Think Xbox achievements but for education.

Parents pay a subscription for premium analytics. Kids get the free version that finally makes learning feel like leveling up instead of failing forward.

The Ace Toolkit

Ace's notebook, 1921: "Schools mass-produce answers to questions nobody's asking. Sell solutions to problems nobody's solving."

Alpha School (alpha.school) - kids spending 2 hours on academics, rest of day building actual startups. Crushing everyone else by most metrics. This is what happens when you delete Prussia from education.

Google's Learn Your Way (learnyourway.withgoogle.com) - Google quietly built personalized learning paths that adapt to how your brain actually works. They're giving away what universities charge $50K for. Very underrated feature.

Study both. Alpha shows education's future, Google's already distributing it for free. The opportunity is connecting parents who'll pay premium to what already exists for nothing.

Until next time,

Alex

Founder //LZY MNY CLB