Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Sal Khan, Founder and CEO of Khan Academy

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, joins Behind the Tech to discuss his journey from a curious child fascinated by science and technology to a global leader in education innovation. Sal shares his early inspirations that led him to pursue a career in engineering and a degree at MIT, and outlines his lifelong passion for education rooted in the belief that all students have the potential to excel in subjects like math and science with the right tools and encouragement.  In this episode, Kevin and Sal explore Sal's vision for Khan Academy, his insights on the intersection of technology and education, and the launch of Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI-powered personal tutor. They discuss the challenges of teaching to diverse learning styles and the importance of building confidence and curiosity in students.  Sal Khan | Khan Academy | Khanmigo  Kevin Scott    Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott    Discover and listen to other Microsoft podcasts.    

Let's make it so the teacher can see what the students are doing if they're under 18. Let's make it so our AI doesn't cheat. Let's make it so that we can support students in, say, writing an essay, making the student do the work, but acting as an ethical writing coach. And if the student goes to chat GPT or someplace else to get their essay written for them and brings it into our system, then our system, when it talks to the teacher, is going to say, well, you know, Kevin and I didn't work on this essay together. And by the way, it's not consistent with his other writing.

We should double click on whether Kevin really did this work. So I actually think the AI can actually be used to undermine AI cheating itself. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer and EVP of AI at Microsoft. Today, tech is a part of nearly every aspect of our lives. We're in the early days of an AI revolution promising to transform our lived experiences as much as any technology ever has.

On this podcast, we'll talk with the folks behind the technology and explore the motivations, passion, and curiosity driving them to create the tech shaping our world. Let's get started. Hello, and welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm co-host Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub. And I'm Kevin Scott. And I'm super, super excited for our interview today. We're going to be talking with Sal Khan, who is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, and he's a major leader in education access. He just published a book called Brave New Words, How AI Will Revolutionize Education and Why That's a Good Thing.

Yeah, you know, Sal is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. You know, like. I don't even know whether Sal would characterize himself as an entrepreneur, like maybe more as an educator, someone who really cares about equity and the overall social good. But he has, as an entrepreneur, done this extraordinary thing, which is over the course of, I guess, it's got to be close to 20 years at this point, really building this amazing education brand, Khan Academy, and doing really incredible work to try to get high-quality education into the hands of every learner in the world who wants access to it. And I think about growing up as a kid in rural Central Virginia. And, you know, like I had this real thirst for knowledge and it was a real struggle to get your hands on it, you know, back in the 1970s and early 80s.

And, you know, I just think about all of the kids in the world who have been benefited by Khan Academy and it's just tremendous, you know, thinking about the positive impact that has had. No, I completely agree. I remember when I first heard about Khan Academy and, you know, I was kind of, I think I was probably kind of skeptical about the idea, right? Like, okay, well, how good could this be? And then you, you know, look at the content and I started to meet people who worked there and who were instructors and also meet people who learn things from it. And just from my own perspective, this was before I even moved into tech, I was so impressed, as you said, because A, the ambition is huge. But I think B, even more importantly,

it's one of those rare cases where you see something that has really achieved a lot of what it set out to achieve in providing access to everyone. And it's great that the situation that you had when you were a kid is not the case for kids today, right? That because of technology and access and because of people like Saul, more of that is available than ever. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation between the two of you. Yeah, for sure.

Sal Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit educational organization that offers free lessons in math, science, humanities and SAT prep, as well as tools for parents, teachers and districts to track student progress. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Today, Khan Academy has more than 165 million registered users, is used in more than 190 countries, and is available in over 50 languages. Last year, Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, an AI-powered personal tutor and teaching assistant powered by GPT-4. This school year, 65,000 students and teachers piloted Conmigo across school districts in the U.S. Sal, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Kevin.

So we always kick these episodes off by starting with people's early years. So when did you realize that you were interested in science and technology and engineering? Oh, it goes back pretty far. The earliest memory I have, you know, I was always, I liked Legos and I liked building stuff. And I had a fascination with transformers and cars and drawing robots all day. I remember even when I was very young, I used to, you know, in the 80s, they called us latchkey kids. You know, my mom would be at work and I would, my sister and I would come on the school bus and, you know, we just watched the afternoon cartoons. And I remember just having stacks of pieces of paper and I would, I would draw some, some combination of bridges, cities, cars, and robots.

So maybe that was an early, I used to like to draw though too. Um, and then I remember when I was seven, my uncle doesn't remember this, but he was very young at the time we were living with them. And he, um, he, he was doing some math and I said, oh, what is this? And he says, oh, this is calculus. And I'm like, oh, could you teach it to me? And he said, no, no, you're only seven, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, it looks interesting. What do you need this for? I remember this conversation clearly.

I remember it was right in his bedroom. And he says, oh, well, I want to be an engineer. And this is really important. And I said, well, what do engineers do? And he said, well, you know, everything around you had an engineer had a handle, had a influence on or built it and designed it. And I said, well, then I want to be an engineer. And then, and I actually, I still, he doesn't remember any of this. He said, well, if you want to be an engineer, you should go to MIT. He just said that randomly in like whatever, 1983 to me, I had no idea what it stood for, where it was. But I remember that's when it got into my head

that that's where I wanted to go to school. That's awesome. And you were seven? I was seven. I didn't know what I was thinking, but it kind of, you know, manifested itself. That's awesome. And so other than your uncle, like were your parents, engineers or mathematicians or scientists? No, not really. Not at all. My family had a little bit of a tough start. It started very traditional.

My dad had come in 1968. He was a physician, comes to New Orleans, does his residency at Charity Hospital. 1971, he goes back to bengal to get an arranged marriage to my mother they come 72 they have my sister i'm sorry 73 they have my sister and then 76 they have me and then they get divorced and you know so it's kind of out of the picture um and so my mom was not into math or science at all um You know, I had this one uncle that I, you know, he was probably the only person in the family that was all at all inclined in this in this direction. Well, it's one of the interesting things, the theme across all of these conversations

that we've had on the podcast over the years that uh like the power that those influential um people in their lives uh have um you know whether it's an uncle or a teacher and you know i think you know i wonder yeah part of the story that probably everyone knows about you at this point is like you started Khan Academy because you had like a younger relative who was looking for some help with math tutoring. And I like wonder how much your impulse to help him would have been different if you hadn't had that seminal moment with your uncle when you were young. Yeah. You never know. I think that was probably most influenced, if I have to guess. And I forgot this, but some classmates from college, they had some time capsule from our dorm and they just unearthed it. And I didn't realize, but I guess I was talking about education even then, because I predicted about myself and some people independently predicted about me that

Sal will have started a school because he's always talking about that there's a better way to teach people. So apparently I was talking about that in the nineties. And if I were to trace the roots of that, if you go all the way back to high school, I was maybe not a surprise to a lot of folks, the president of the math club. And we used to run this tutoring sessions and they became pretty large scale. And the school actually made them a formal part of the school where any student in our high school who had a C or lower in their math class had to go to the student run tutoring that I ran with the other members of the math club. And I remember seeing that, that just when I was able to give one-on-one tutoring or some of my other peers were able to give

one-on-one tutoring to some of these students, most of them started racing ahead. Some of them joined the math club, even though they were a few weeks before about to fail. And so that only reinforced my belief that maybe there's a better way of doing things. And so even when it was my fiancee at the time, and then we got my now wife,

she used to sometimes complain like, you know, people like you, you have such this education, you have this passion for learning, but you're working at a hedge fund. How are you helping people? How are you? And I always used to tell her,

I was like, well, I'm going to do this as long as I enjoy the hedge fund job. It's intellectually interesting, but I'm going to do this until I can afford to start a school on my own terms. That was what I used to tell myself as my way of giving back. So it was always in the back of my mind. So when my cousin needed help, or at least I thought she needed help, a little part of me wanted to help her and another part of me wanted to start testing some of these ideas that I had kind of tested in the past to see if it would work again. But I want to go back to your, uh, like high school math tutoring experience. So like this super, super interesting to me. So I was,

uh, uh, like when I was a PhD student, I taught computer science to, uh, college kids. So I, uh, I was the TA for, you know, university TA for University of Virginia's sophomore computer science course. I taught a graduate seminar, and I was an instructor at the University of Göttingen in Germany and taught a couple of classes there. Teaching is really hard, really, really difficult. And I think, you know, folks in engineering and science, like we don't always even do a great job preparing teachers for teaching, you know, those materials.

And part of what makes it hard is like it's really different teaching, you know, like a super highly motivated, super well prepared A student versus, you know, a C student. And like, it's not because one is smarter than the other. It's like, it's just a different bag of tools that you have to go deploy to like, get someone to learn the way they need to learn. Like how on God's earth did, and yeah, sometimes like the harder thing is like not teaching the A student, it's teaching the C student. So how did you figure this out when you were a high school student? Like that seems extraordinary. Well, you know, who knows, who knows how good I may or may not have been.

But yeah, if you think about it, I think to become a really good tutor, and it's a little bit different if you're running a large class versus tutoring, but there's really two skills ideally that you have, and they're somewhat orthogonal. And that's maybe why some people, you know forwards and backwards that you're excited about it that you have a conceptually deep understanding um and then the other one is that you you have a good sense of modeling what's going on in the other person's mind it's called almost like a intellectual empathy i guess you could you could you could you could you could call it And those are two different things. And I think especially when you go into some math topics, you oftentimes might, well, sometimes there are people who are really good at one, like they're really good at the pedagogy and the modeling and the empathy, but they don't have, to your point, like a PhD level of the understanding of the math, et cetera, et cetera. And so there's only so far they could go in like saying why this

is cool or how it connects to other things or why this formula is really just a repackaging of this other formula. So I think, you know, for just random flukes of, I was the kid growing up, I'm sure you were too, that when a formula was given, you're like, well, why does that make sense? Let me prove it to myself. You know, wait, that seems pretty similar to this other formula I saw in my chemistry class. Is that the same formula? You know, PV equals NRT. Why does that make sense? Instead of just me memorizing, oh, it makes a ton of sense. Like, why don't they just tell us that? It's just, you know, pressure times volume is going to be the number of molecules times some constant times the, like, okay, that makes intuitive sense to me. So, um, I think you do that.

And at the same time you, you know, try your best to listen and empathize and understand what's going on in someone else's mind. And you have a, you have a good shot. Yeah. I mean, for me, like, I, I think, you know, you, you and I were probably, uh, like a little bit alike, at least. Um, the thing I will say is like, I was always pathologically contrary. So like I had this relatively narrow set of things that I just wanted to know everything possible to know about the things. And so it was super easy, you know, like you were just, you threw anything into that funnel and it was going to get digested. And then I had things that I wasn't interested in. If you couldn't very clearly explain to me why the concept you were teaching me mattered, like what, what reason do I have for internalizing this, I would just completely ignore it. I was super contrary about chemistry, for instance,

which I wish I hadn't been. But I do think it's really interesting to me, even watching my kids, they learn differently than I learn. Figuring out how to adapt your teaching style to like this, you know, real diversity of learning styles that people have is, it just seems hard. Yeah. Although, you know, I've obviously tutored many cousins and, you know, now we have a school out here and I'm, I don't, you know, teach daily, but I observe a lot and I'm also a parent now.

Yeah, I think the motivation one is definitely a big one. And I think especially with parent-child dynamics, there's all sorts of baggage that gets involved there. But generally speaking, yes, for that student that you kind of described as like the C student, there's usually – and Navia was in that category in 2004, there is a lot more foundation of rebuilding someone's confidence. I, you know, I, I fundamentally think the reason why most people say, why do I have to learn this? This doesn't matter to me. It's really to protect their self-esteem. It's usually because there's something a little bit frustrating about that subject matter. And they're saying, well, I don't need to learn this anyway. But, you know, like, you know, many of us, I, I, I used to enjoy playing basketball when I was in PE, but I never said, why am I putting an orange ball through a hoop 10 foot

in the air? You know, I'm a five foot nine Indian kid. I'm not, you know, I don't see, I don't see a lot of kids like me in the NBA, but I, I, I, I, I, um, but I, I was interested because I could engage even though I was, you know, usually the last or second to last person to be picked. Um, so I think the same thing is true in most, in most topics, like kids disengage because to protect their self-esteem. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I'd love to get your perspective on this.

So I, I think one of the common things that I see or have seen with the students that I've taught over the years, and the same is true with engineers and I see it with my children, is it's very easy to believe that when you encounter something hard where you're not immediately good at the thing or you don't immediately, you know, just get it, that you can tell yourself a story that, oh, I'm bad at this thing. And it's usually nonsense. Like I saw it with my my oldest daughter, like she for reasons I just don't even understand, like the child is super bright. When she was in the fifth or sixth grade, she had like convinced herself that she wasn't good at math. And like, clearly it was incorrect. I mean, it was hard because like she was in advanced math classes and it was difficult. And like she had other things that she took that didn't seem as difficult to her, like that she learned more quickly.

And now she's like, you know, two years ahead, a great level in advanced math and like just super excited about it. And like math is her favorite subject, math and, you know, chemistry. And part of that is like her just overcoming this story that she was telling herself that like, hey, I'm not good at this. And like, you know, flipping the narrative in her head. Like, I don't know, like how often you encounter this and the students that you teach. Yeah, I mean, that was going on for sure in Nadia's head. And she was about 12 years old at the time. And, you know, I've read some research about this, and it fits what I observe is that most people's identities or perceptions of themselves tends to start to become more rigid around middle school at age 10, 12, well, more like 12, 13 years old.

And unfortunately, I think for, you know, probably a lot of just societal, cultural reasons, things associated with gender, whether or not it's true or not, a lot of young women,, even the most basic question that she clearly knew how to do, she would always answer it with a question. It was like, what's two to the third power? Eight? I'm like, are you sure? And then I just taught her to just have more conviction, to be more confident, to just be a little bit more like, okay, I'm sure. Or if even, you know, I either know the answer, here it is, or I don't know the answer. And just say that confidently. I don't know the answer. Let's understand this. And that made a huge difference. And then when she started to see that as we worked and gave her more practice and she was able to fill in her gaps. And frankly, one of the things I did, and I find this is useful even with my own kids

when they were all kids, when they, they're feeling underconfident because the students who are struggling, they're always feeling like they're behind. It's very hard when you're always feeling like you're behind is I teach them something that their peers haven't learned yet. So I remember I forgot what the subject was, but, you know, Nadia, she was learning unit conversion, et cetera, et cetera. She was struggling. But I started teaching her a little bit of algebra. I taught her a little bit of negative exponents, which her class had not seen yet. And then that one, that actually came to her quite intuitively. And I said, you know, by the way, you're not even supposed to learn this till algebra two. And she's like, really?

And I'm like, yeah, like your classmates don't know this stuff yet. And that kind of changes. Okay, so maybe it's just the unit conversion, which was, you know, causing her to, um, underestimate herself. Yeah. That's super interesting. I, I did a similar thing with my kids, like my, uh, my favorite thing to do, uh, uh, to do with them. And I started this when they were really young is like, I would drop little nuggets of number theory, uh, on them, uh, just because it's beautiful. Right. And like, you know, I've, again, it's one of these subjects, you know, that most people, you know, like they, you know, they only take if they're a math major. And, you know, like they tell themselves, oh, this is hard.

Like, I don't think number theory is hard at all. Like and it's like one of the most beautiful branches of mathematics. So, like, I would explain these things to my kids and they would get them. Then I would tell them, it's like, yeah, this is like junior level college math major stuff. They would just be shocked that they got this thing that was like, quote unquote unquote advanced. And so like, you know, it always made me wonder, like, you know, pedagogically with, you know,

with mathematics, like, you know, there's this routine that we run kids through and like, I don't necessarily know if it's even the right routine. Like I, you know, just me, for instance, like I never loved analysis. So like all of the calculus and, for instance, I never loved analysis. So all of the calculus and complex numbers, and I took it all, but it just wasn't my thing.

Whereas all of the discrete math, and I really didn't love differential equations until I took numerical optimization. And so if I can write programs about like calculus, like I love it. But like if I'm sitting down and, you know, trying to remember my integration formulas, like I don't love it. But like I love, you know, graph theory and combinatorics and number theory and like all like abstract algebra um and like i just wish we had a richer repertoire that we uh you know we we gave we opened up for kids you know because wherever you can find beauty and like this abstract thinking i think is like you just latch on to that and let people go couldn't agree more yeah get people into it before you and i was just talking earlier today to our team about you know they asked about,

is there some other countries that you've observed that do things well? And one realization that I didn't know going through the US system, but the US system has only gotten, I would say, worse since you and I went through it, which is there's been a bloat of standards. And what happens, like you go into the minutiae of every possible way of, let's say, in seventh grade, understanding proportional relationships. And you spend, you know, a month on every way that with story problems, not story problems, tabular data, this and that. And so what it creates a lot of standards. You don't get this sense of progression. If proportional relationships isn't your thing, you're kind of stuck in that desert for a very long time where you could get discouraged. And I was talking to one of the

teachers I know, and she was saying how in Russia, they have about half the standards. And it's almost a strict subset of the US standards. So it actually, one, it allows more people to master the concepts that they are learning. I talk a lot about it in my various books and when I give talks. You can give people all these standards, but the reality is the majority of kids in America, when they go to college, these are the kids who graduate from high school and then go to college, they place into remedial math, which is essentially seventh grade math. So what good were those hundreds of standards in algebra and geometry and pre-calc and calculus? No one was learning any of it. While in places like Russia, places like Singapore, they have a smaller set of standards,

but they really make sure that people master those standards and those students do a lot better on average. And it also gives you a sense of velocity. Like you're not in this like never ending, we're just doing proportional relationships until, you know, some imagine, you know, for the next three months that you get to survey some things, some of which not only do you get a sense of progress, but some of the things that you might take interest in, like you mentioned. If I had my druthers, I absolutely would bring the beautiful stuff much faster into early. Some of the algebra stuff could be very beautiful.

And I've seen kindergartenners can understand the idea of a of an unknown like they have problems with blanks and you're saying instead of using a blank just use x and like oh like i've done it my own kids or negative numbers or uh you know they love or even like oh i is the square root of negative one that's wacky like they love, they love stuff like that, but we don't expose it to them. But, yeah, especially like things like number theory, et cetera. That gets really cool. It's super cool. And, yeah, just beautiful ways to explain this stuff as well.

So let's, you know, back to you in high school. So you obviously were, you know, a math enthusiast in high school. You're tutoring math like your uncle planted this seed that, you know, you're going to go to MIT, which you took. When you got to MIT, like what did you decide to major in and why? When I applied, I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. I was one of those kids, like, I want to understand the big questions. Why are we, you know, what is the nature of reality? And I'm still interested in those big questions. But once I got there, you know, this was 94 that I started my freshman year.

Obviously, computers were already a thing. When I was in high school, I took some dual enrollment courses at the University of New Orleans. And there was a professor, Dr. Santania. This was the summer before I went to MIT. He saw that my family, we couldn't afford a computer. And I was interested in computing. And so he gave me a research fellowship, essentially, so I could get access to his computers. He actually paid me a little bit too.

But that's the first time that I really had full access to good, powerful computers. And I taught some more powerful programming techniques, et cetera. And so by the time I got to college, I started to get really enamored with, well, instead of being a theoretical physicist and all of what that entails, what if I could, there were two areas of computing that were really interesting to me at the time. This notion that you could create a reality versus just study a reality. And the idea of perhaps even a bigger question than the nature of reality is the nature of consciousness or intelligence. And obviously that's becoming a very big question, even more so these days, but I got really interested in artificial intelligence back then. And this is 94, you said?

This is 94, 95. And so I switched to be a computer science and math major. And I mean, it's almost both directions. Math is even purer than physics. Physics to some degree is based on our perceptions of things, although not fully, obviously at some point it just boils down to math and, you know, we conceptualize it with our perceptions. And then, but I said, you know, computer science seems like a lot of interesting things in it these days. And so what, so you just mentioned uh you know something that sounded like computer graphics and virtual reality and like you mentioned ai so like what what what in particular in computer science like when you were an undergraduate and then like through the rest of your education like

were you really focused on like what were you drawn to i mean just right at the beginning i remember there was this like lottery system where you could pick your freshman advisor. And I, I saw who was there. And I saw that Henry Patrick Winston, who's head of the MIT AI laboratory at the time. And one of the, you know, his advisors was Marvin Minsky. And, you know, they were kind of like the, the, the, the founders of the field to some degree of AI.

So I actually sought him out and he was my freshman advisor. Uh, and he taught the class, you know, intro to artificial intelligence. So I, that was definitely, that was a pretty big draw, but I was also really drawn to these ideas of, uh, you know, that first summer after my freshman year, I got a, an internship at the media lab to, um, kind of create like an image processing library, which at the time I thought was like the coolest thing in the world. Obviously, we take all this stuff for granted. Now our phones can, you know, edit, edit images way better than anything we could have done back in, in 1995. But, you know, both of those were really interesting to me.

And so you you're going through MIT. So at some point, you're having to think about, all right, I'm getting this computer science degree. What am I going to go do with it? So how did you think about managing your career? Yeah. And I had a lot of, if I'm honest, I probably looked kind of relaxed from the outside. But by the time junior, senior year came around, I was pretty angsty around this. Like, what am I going to do with my life?

And on one side, there was definitely a financial consideration. My mom, I remember filling out her taxes the year before I went to college to get financial aid, and she made like $16,000 a year. She was essentially working like pretty hourly you know, hourly, you know, manager at a convenience store or, or cashier type of, of job. So I was like, it'd be pretty irresponsible for me to like, not help the family in some way. And, you know, but I did say, well, maybe I want to do a PhD, but I wasn't personally, I was, I used to tell people if there was like a PhD in everything, that's the one I would want to do. Cause you know,, you realize that, or if there was one that was more focused on maybe education and less

focused on, not education in the sense of you can get obviously a PhD in education, but one more focused on the learning of computer science or the learning of mathematics in particular, that could have been interesting. But I was, and people will tell you, I, I've, I was, uh, I thought it was going to be pre-law for a little bit. I thought I was going to go to med school for a little bit. I was an MCAT instructor for the Princeton review in 1997. Like I had no idea what I was going to do. And then I thought I was just going to stick around and get my master's. They had this like five-year program where you can just do another year. And this was 1997, 98, my senior year. And I, I learned of a few people who graduated the previous year who came out to Silicon Valley and, you know, we're getting paid 70, $75,000 a year, which back then seemed like a ton.

And which it actually was pretty good back then in the late nineties. And I was like, that's like five times what my mom is making. Maybe I should, maybe I should do that. So I accelerated, I was like, oh, I could just jam some more courses in the next two terms, finish the master's. And then, and then I, I applied out of cycle and I ended up, you know, moving out to Silicon Valley to be a product manager at Oracle.

Nice. And how And how was that? How did you, and that's an interesting time. This is internet boom, so it is all good times in 98 and the world is changing and everything's growing fast. So what was that like? Yeah, it was. One, it was a bit of a, if, if I'm honest, a little bit of a culture shock going from a university environment to a large corporation, a large corporate environment. You know, things don't move quite as fast as you hope for them to move. There's a lot more of like getting by and et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, and at the same

time, to your point, there was all this sexy stuff going on with startups and people my age were, you know, becoming millionaires overnight, seemingly. So yes, I, I lasted there about 13 months. And then I worked at one startup for three months. And then I ended up working at another startup for the next 13, 14 months until the NASDAQ collapsed. And then I said, maybe I should go to business school. Which I think is what a lot of people did. Like a ton of people who like went to B school or went back to get their PhD when the stock market collapsed and the air went out of the bubble. I mean, did you enjoy B-School?

Yeah, you know, it's fascinating because I think I was a little bit of an intellectual snob coming out of undergrad at a place like MIT where they really pride themselves on like, you know, it's really intellectually intense and not everyone's going to make it type of thing. And, you know, you show up at business school and when I went there, there was no grades. They would grade you, but they'll kind of tell you what you would have gotten, but everyone essentially will graduate.

And, you know, I used to joke that MIT's, MIT's motto was mens imanus, which means hand in mind or mind in hand. And I used to joke that Harvard Business School's motto should be mind and mouth. And I say that actually in a nice way because everything is case-based. They're religious about case-based. So it's all about talking. It's all about you show up and for three hours that day, you're just talking to each other. And coming and, you know, coming from a more like intellectually, let's call it hardcore engineering environment, like, Oh, what is this? This is easy. But once I left there, I realized how much a lot of that stuck with me, that I remember a lot more of those conversations than I do. I can't even tell you all the courses I took in undergrad, much less what was in them. But I can, I remember a lot of conversations even now in, you know, my job at Khan Academy. I, there's a moment I'm like, oh,

wait, this is just like that one case I saw 20 years ago. So I thought it was a great experience. And, and I, and I liked the way they did it. It was, you know, I call it high school done right. Like, especially at HBS, it was, everyone had assigned seats. It had mandatory attendance. There was actually even a little bit of an implicit dress code. You don't dress like a typical college or grad student. You have to show up and dress decently. The professors all wore suit and tie. There's something about that I kind of enjoyed.

And it forces you to build a community. It forces you to interact with people that would have been otherwise different than you. You know, I met and became very close friends with people who are very different than me. People who are, you know, Navy SEALs. I did not know any Navy SEALs. Now I was becoming good friends with Navy SEALs or, you know, people who are, you know, there was a gentleman in my section who was a Catholic priest. He ended up marrying, getting my, performing the ceremony for my wife and I.

I think it's the first time in world history that a Catholic priest married a Shia and a Sunni, at least nominally. But, you know, it's just that exposure and that, you know, being able to talk through a lot of scenarios. I actually thought it was a very, I really enjoyed the experience. And so after B-School thought it was a very, I really enjoyed the experience. And so after B-School, it was Wall Street? Yeah. I remember I was in this class second year called Capital Markets. And once again, you know, B-School is not famous, especially HBS isn't known for being particularly quantitative. And Capital Markets was known as the most quantitative class that they had there.

And I did become a little bit of a closer in that class where the professor who actually had a similar background, he, you know, his undergraduate was in engineering. He was a former engineer. And then he went and got a PhD in business. I remember his name, Professor George Chaco. And I remember one day after class, I said, Professor Chaco, I love this class. What should I do with my life that does this? And he said, yo, you should work at a hedge fund. And I said, oh, that sounds good. What's a hedge fund? He explained it to me. And a little bit was the financial. I had another set of whatever, $100,000-something of debt coming out of business school on top of the $40,000 or $50,000 of debt of undergrad. And I learned that one could

make decent money at a hedge fund. So I said, okay, I'm going to work at a hedge fund. And then it was a horrible job market. This was, you know, 2003. And I probably got rejected 40 or 50 times by different, I had no background. My resume looked good to be a product manager. It looked at a tech company. My resume looked good to maybe even be a tech vc uh my resume did not look good to be a hedge fund analyst but eventually this one guy dan wool who was starting he was just creating his fund he was just one guy he actually liked my resume because i had no background in finance he was a little bit of a contrarian that you know he thinks the best investors are not thinking like all the other investors. So he gave me a shot. That's awesome. And let's, you know, get to, you know, Khan Academy now. So like at some point, like you're doing this job for a little while, like you have this

experience with your, you know, with your, your, is it your niece or your cousin? Cousin. So you have this experience with your cousin. Like, how do you go from like a job on wall street to like wanting to do something that's very, very different. And like, you know, the thing that I will say to all of our listeners, building businesses and education is really super hard. It, on the one hand, is one of the most noble things that you could aspire to go do. And on the other hand, it is just an incredibly difficult market to be successful in. So talk a little bit about that decision and like how it went in the early days. Yeah. As you know, it was 2004, a year out of business school. I'd just gotten married. Family from New Orleans was visiting me up in Boston and I learned about

Nadia needing help or I thought she needed help. I tutor her remotely. That starts to work out. As I often joke, I became a tiger cousin. I called up her school. I really think Nadia should be able to retake that placement exam that was putting her into a slower math track. They let her take it. She was then able to place into an advanced math track. I was hooked. I started tutoring her younger brothers. Word spreads in my family, free tutoring is going on. Before I know it, I'm tutoring 10, 15 cousins, family, friends. And I was enjoying this, you know, and once again, this wasn't the first time we talked about me tutoring in a high school and et cetera. But having a background in tech, and I think, you know, I'm sure you do this all

the time. You're always like, okay, I think I'm adding value now, if only there were ways to scale or automate parts of this. And back then I used to look for practice problems for my cousins and there were random websites that had a few here, there, but not a lot. And so I said, well, I can create something that generates problems for my cousins and that a way for me to keep track of them so I can see how they're doing. So I created that. That was the first Khan Academy. And it's funny because after my experience at a startup in the late 90s, I had convinced myself, talk about talk tracks, that I am not an questions. I was like, nope, this is a family passion project. This is just a fun little piece of software that I'm making. Stop asking me questions about the business model. Like stop being such a cynic. And then one of the friends said, well, this is cool, but why don't

you, how are you scaling your lessons? I said, I'm not. He said, why don't you make them as YouTube videos? I said, that's a, that's a dumb idea. YouTube's for dogs on skateboards, cats playing piano. But I gave it a shot. And my cousins famously told me they liked me better on YouTube than in person. So I kept going. And they liked the pause, the repeat. I think hopefully they liked me in person, but that's coaching them and mentoring them. But they liked the on-demand version. And so I kept going. And still, psychologically, I'm saying, this is just my hobby. My day job is the hedge fund. I enjoyed it. This is my hobby. One day, I might start a school or something, and maybe that school could leverage this software that I'm making for my family.

But the more that I started getting feedback from my family, and then the more that other people started using it, discovering it on YouTube or discovering the software, I naturally did say, well, maybe, maybe this could be for millions of people one day, billions of people one day. And you fast forward to 2008, that's when I incorporated Khan Academy and I set it up as a nonprofit. And part of it was almost just to protect it from what I had seen, like the excesses of the dot-com boom and even my own mental. I was like, you know, this is a project that is, I don't care whether how much money I make, as long as I can keep doing this thing. And I was thinking about all the people who are using it and getting value from it and that they wouldn't have gotten value from it if I at some point tried to monetize them or do a freemium offering or something like that, or at least that's

how I thought about it. And so, yeah, I set it up, nonprofit, mission-free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. And there's an irony here in business school. The only class that I think I would have failed if they had grades was a class called social entrepreneurship, where I was super cynical about it. I was just like, you know, most of these nonprofits, it's more about PR. I remember writing that a whole essay about some, you know, bike ride that, you know, for some cure some disease. And I'm like, is this really going to cure the disease? And I didn't realize that the professor had actually created

that nonprofit. So anyway, that whoops. And now I actually see that even if even if the money raised from that bike ride really isn't going to cure the disease, it does build awareness for the for the disease. So I I'm much less of a cynic now than I used to. But it's an irony. It's an irony that I am now a nonprofit founder. That's that's my that's my life. But but yes. And starting a nonprofit is you're talking about starting a business. It's starting a nonprofit in any space is actually harder in many cases.

There isn't a, if I wanted to be for profit, I was living out in Silicon Valley at that point. There were VCs that were already coming to me. It's like, oh, I found your stuff. Pretty good. I'll write a check right now. You can go start the business. It was tempting. There was no model really for a tech-focused nonprofit.

In fact, the few foundations I would talk to really didn't understand it well. But anyway, I took the plunge in 2009, quit my day job because I frankly couldn't focus on anything else and tried to see if we could get at least some philanthropic support to get off the ground. So, I mean, in retrospect, incredibly good decision. I mean, the amount of impact that Khan really big deal in the, you know, in the world versus just, you know, being in the grind of like, oh my God, like I got to figure out how to raise money to like hire employees and, you know, like doing this as a nonprofit, like I can't issue equity to, you know, engineers, like in the same, so like,

I mean, it's, it's sort of a, I'm guessing it felt very challenging to go do. Yeah. That first year I can laugh about it now makes for a good story, but it was, it sucked. It was, it was, you know, I was, our first child had been born. My, my wife, who's a physician was going through fellowship. So she was making a little bit of money, but we were out living out here in Silicon Valley. We were renting a larger house. My mother-in-law had moved in money, but we were out living out here in Silicon Valley. We were renting a larger house. My mother-in-law had moved in too, so we needed more space. And so we were digging into our savings about $5,000 a month. Those savings were supposed to be for a down payment on a house, which as many folks know out here in Northern California, even in 2009, was not an easy proposition.

And four or five months into that, I literally wasn't sleeping. I was super stressed. I was crabby all the time. Um, I, I, I was, I was, I was not in a good place. Um, honestly, because of stress, I was like, what have I done to my family? Like I would look at my child and I'm like, what have I done? Like I gave up and, you know, even at dinner parties, if I, if it was a venture backed entrepreneur, like people kind of understood that in Silicon Valley, it was like, well,

you know, I started a nonprofit and I'm doing these videos and people just give you a look like this guy's the most irresponsible husband and father that I've ever met. Like this guy's, you know, and you can tell when people are thinking that about you and it doesn't feel good. Let me just say it, put it that way. But at the same time, and a bunch of people listening to this podcast may think that you're exaggerating, but like, I, I assure you, uh, uh, everyone, like you're, you're not, uh, like that there is like this very weird hierarchy thing that goes on in, in Silicon Valley. And like, it just does not make, uh, make things easier at all.

Oh yeah. I mean, you notice, you know, a year ago, you went to HBS, you're working at a hedge fund. There's a certain energy you get from people where they're interested in you in certain ways. All of a sudden, you're some guy making YouTube videos. And this was well before, you know, anyone knew about people making money on YouTube or any kind of celebrity of being a YouTube influencer. Now you're popular if you're doing something on YouTube. But back then, and you're a husband and you're a father, and people look at you like you are an irresponsible person.

I was telling myself, I am an irresponsible person. Like, what have I done? And as I mentioned, I grew up with not a lot of resources. So one one of my, I never wanted to be in the situation, especially my family to be in the situation that we are, you know, we, we, we, we had to deal with the scarcity that I had to deal with when I was a kid. But the only thing that kept me going, frankly, was, you know, my wife and I, we looked at our finances. Okay. I can do this for maybe a year max, and maybe I could go back if they'll take me. But I would also get these letters from people all over the world saying how it helped them.

And that's the thing, I was like, but this thing is scaling. There's people who are getting real benefit from it. And then it was about 10 months in that I started to get, I would say, real... And we got some national publicity. So that was a shot in the arm. It was ironically about the financial crisis, because I'd made a bunch of videos about credit default swaps and mortgage-backed security. So they started putting me on national television to explain these things. But it was in May of 2010 that we got our first real donation. It was from $10,000 from Ann and John Doerr,

a name some folks might recognize. And I had lunch with ann and she was shocked to find out that that was the largest donation she was like how are you supporting your family and i was like i'm not and then when i went home i remember she her texting me you know you really should should support your family i've just wired you a hundred thousand dollars and so that was a huge you know obviously the money mattered uh i could start paying myself a small salary, but the real, you know, Ann and John, you know, they are serious people who wouldn't just write a check willy-nilly. So that was a shot in the arm. And then, you know, connecting it to your world, a couple of months later, I was running a little, I ran a little summer camp just because I was all, I never thought online learning is a replacement for physical. I always thought it was a compliment. So I was running a physical in-person summer camp. I was doing a stock market simulation with a bunch of middle schoolers

and I get text messages from Anne, which you can imagine I now take very seriously. And she wrote, I'm at the Aspen Ideas Festival in the main pavilion, Bill Gates being interviewed by Walter Isaacson, Bill Gates talking about Khan Academy last five minutes. And I'm like, what is this? And I boot the nearest seventh grader off of a computer. I actually was able to find the footage of Walter Isaacson interviewing Bill Gates. Walter just randomly asks Bill, what are you excited about? Open question. And Bill says, and people can look up that video, Aspen Ideas Festival, Bill Gates, Khan Academy, you'll find it. And Bill just says, well, you know, there's a site called Khan Academy.

I've been using it with my kids. I've been using it myself. There's this guy, Sal Khan, his wife let him quit his job. He creates these great videos. And I was like, wow, like Bill Gates is like not only using it, he's actively using it. He's like a super user of this. He knows who I am. And that I remember showing that video to my wife and I was like, is this happening? Like, what do I do? Do I call him? How do I call him?

Like, what's the protocol here? And then it was two weeks later, Larry, who's, you know, is, you know, runs Bill's office, called and, you know, I was about to record a video. I see it's a Seattle number. I go, hello. He's like, oh, this is Larry. Larry Cohen. I work with Bill Gates. You might have heard that he's a fan. I'm like, yeah, I heard that. We'd love to fly you up in the next few weeks if you have a chance to learn how we might work together. I was looking at my calendar for the month, and it was completely blank. I said, know, I think I can make time to fly up and meet with Bill. And, you know, we had, obviously you could imagine it was ultra surreal experience for

me, but that obviously just the fact that a very serious person like Bill took this seriously and found value in it was a shot in the arm. And then obviously it was both the Gates Foundation and google in the fall of 2010 that each gave on the order of about two million dollars each um over a two-year period to you know allow us to become a real organization it's it's really incredible um i mean incredible that startups have this in general, like I call it, time on the runway. make your first version of your product and to launch it and to learn from it and get, you know, things into a state where they can be like a really scalable product. And like you spent a while on the runway, like, you know, in sort of harsh conditions. I like I think it's like really, really amazing and commendable.

So once you had more resources, because I think the really extraordinary thing about Khan Academy is how effective you all have been at getting leverage, like using the assets that you had access to to very effectively get more learning into the hands of more learners. And like, I do want to actually get to AI here in a minute, but yeah, 2010 is sort of, you know, well, well, well, pre generative AI, or even the beginnings of the deep learning boom that, you know, sort of happened in 2012 or so. So, like, what were you using those resources to help scale back then?

Yeah, you know, my view was, you know, I was able to see what I was when I tutored my cousins, what it really helped. Even going back to those high school tutoring sessions, that really helped. And so the idea is, could we use technology to scale up that type of personalization and mastery learning? I didn't have that word in my vocabulary at the time, but that's what we were doing. Mastery learning, which was coined by Benjamin Bloom in 1984. It really is this notion of if you haven't learned something well yet, especially if it's something foundational, you should have the opportunity learned something well yet, especially if it's something

foundational, you should have the opportunity and incentive to learn it well. It's that simple. And that's what a tutor can do. If you're a teacher with a class of 30, it's very hard if Kevin has a gap to stop the whole class to teach Kevin. So the whole true north of Khan Academy has always been and continues to be, all right, our mission is free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. The free anyone, anywhere part that speaks to scale, that speaks to low cost, low marginal cost. But then I intentionally, or at least subconsciously intentionally put that world-class in there. I did not want that to be a trade-off between low cost and scale and world-class. And what does world-class look like? Well, it's personalized.

It meets you where you are. You know, I write in my book, Brave New Words, like Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander. That's what world-class looks like. You have Aristotle as your tutor. And so the idea was always, could you approximate that and scale it and make the marginal cost close to zero

so that you can give it hopefully away for free. And we did that with videos and exercises and even early forms of AI with things like recommendations and teacher tools. We think teachers are a very important part of this. Ideally, some places kids don't have teachers, so we still want to support them. But ideally, the teacher is very involved in this. But then obviously when we first saw, especially this is summer of 2022, OpenAI reaches out to us and shows us. It's probably around the same time that you saw it. We were probably one of the few people in the world to see that level of generative AI, to see GPT-4 months before even chat GPT existed. I was like, wow, this could get us that much further to this ideal of scalable

world-class. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit before we run out of time about what your vision is for generative AI. And you know, this book, Brave New Words, you know, people should go buy a copy. Like it's a tremendously good book. But, you know, I think one of the, you know, interesting things about generative AI and education is some people's knee-jerk reaction to it has been, oh my God, like this thing is bad. Like, let's get it out of the classrooms. It's just going to help students cheat. And you've got a very different take on it. I think informed by all of the leverage work that you've been trying to do over the years with the core of Khan Academy. So talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, big picture, even broader than education, technology just amplifies human intent. And if your intent is to be evil, you'll find ways to make the technology evil. If your intent is to be lazy, you'll find ways that technology can empower your laziness. But if you want to learn, or if you want to help people learn, there's always ways that technology can be valuable. You know, the same video technology that might, you know, have people watch not so great stuff, we can also use to teach them. And so it's all about how do you mitigate the harms and maximize the benefits. And I tell everyone who is a well-intentioned person, just checking out and running the other way, that just means only the bad folks or the lazy folks are going to be using technology,

especially now these very powerful technologies like generative AI. And so it's obvious things like cheating and then there's issues sometimes with AI potentially around maybe bias, errors, hallucinations. What if students want to use it for unproductive ends? They want to help making a bomb or something like that, or they want to harm themselves. So what I told our team at Khan Academy is like, look, those aren't reasons not to work with generative AI. Those are reasons to just

put guardrails around it and turn those into features. Let's make it so the teacher can see what the students are doing if they're under 18. Let's make it so our AI doesn't cheat, but it can Socratically nudge you in the right direction. Let's make it so that we can support students in say, writing an essay, making the student do the work, but acting as an ethical writing coach. And if the student goes to chat GPT or someplace else to get their essay written for them and brings it into our system, then our system, when it talks to the teacher, is going to say, well, you know, Kevin and I didn't work on this essay together. And by the way, it's not consistent with his other writing. we should double click on whether Kevin really did this work. So I actually think the AI can actually

be used to undermine AI cheating itself. So any tool can be used for good or for bad. And so that's kind of like the big theme of the book. Here's all of the ways that can be used well. Here's all of the fears and risks that people have, but here's how we should mitigate those and actually turn them into turn them into benefits. So, you know, maybe last couple of questions here. So, what is your advice for people as they're sort of thinking about maybe not even just AI, but we have an interesting future headed our way because some technologies like AI are developing really, really quickly. You have done a really tremendous job in your career using technology to help yourself. So computer science was your gateway into big Silicon Valley companies and startups and eventually into a hedge fund. Technology is sitting at the center of this nonprofit

that you've created that's having big impact. What's your advice to people for the future? My advice is, and I write about this in the book, there's people who think, oh, well, calculator exists, kids don't need to know arithmetic, or computers exist. There's one less thing that you have to learn how to do, oh, well, calculator exists. Kids don't need to know arithmetic. Or computers exist. You know, there's one less thing that you have to learn how to do. The internet exists.

Search exists. You don't have to learn knowledge anymore. And now with AI, people are like, well, do people even learn how to write, et cetera? But I always point out, if you look at any of these inflection points of technology, it has accrued the most benefit to the people with the deepest skills. And so I think the answer is this is a reason to double down on, for sure, the traditional skills, the math, the reading, and the writing, but also now augment that so that you learn how to creatively use these tools that can really amplify you. I mean, giving you almost godlike powers to do things that would have looked like science fiction even five, 10 years ago. And I also write in the book, this isn't a nice to have, it's an imperative now because the status quo, unfortunately, most people aren't going to be

in a position to leverage the AI because the AI is better than... We're already seeing the AI is operating at the 80th percentile of the LSAT. Like, I would be worried if I was a 50th percentile lawyer of where this is going. Now, if I'm a one percentile lawyer, I know that there's certain things. Yeah, the AI can help me draft a contract, et cetera. But I have certain expertise. I've fought certain cases. I know the nuances that no AI can have.

You're going to be superpowered. You're going to be able to get the AI to write your contracts. Maybe you'll hire fewer paralegals or whatever, but your expertise is going to be magnified even more. While if all you could do is draft a boiler point contract, you're going to be in trouble. So more people, I think the job market is going to broadly become kind of bipolar. The knowledge economy, if you want to be in the knowledge economy, and that's probably where the bulk of the value of AI is going to accrue, you need to upskill even more. And hopefully, maybe you can use AI to help you get there.

Use Conmigo, use Khan Academy. I think there's also, people shouldn't panic. I think even if you can't be a 1% lawyer, I also think there's going to be a lot of, let's call it very human work that as we get, we have a more abundant society, we should have more resources so that we can have, you know, more caregivers, more people to fight loneliness, more people to, you know, provide health, help to the sick or to the elderly, whatever. So I think there's actually going to probably be work there, too. Yeah, cool. Well, last question that I ask everyone is,

you know, you have super interesting work that you're doing in your day job. Like, what do you do for fun? Like what? You know, what's what's what's your recreational activity um some combination watch it you know hanging out with the kids and the family you know dinner with the family uh and you know hiking maybe most people not might might have a mixed view of whether this is fun or not but meditating i always look forward to getting a good 20 30 minutes in it tends to clear my mind i always end up in a better mood after that and and bonus question like this really is the last one so you mentioned uh like

when you're a kid like you spent a bunch of time drawing trucks and robots and uh you know like watching afternoon cartoons in the 80s so So what was your favorite afternoon cartoon? Oh, I mean, I think it's probably either Transformers or He-Man. I mean, the number of times that I've stood on top of a table with a broomstick saying, I have the power and, you know, hoping that something would happen to my body. Excellent.

All right. I think that's just as good a closing point as any. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. And more importantly, thanks for doing the work that you're doing. It's just super important. Great. Thanks so much, Kevin. What a great conversation with Sal Khan. So, you know, kind of there were so many great aspects of that. I mean, I think kind of at the beginning, just and you talked about this with him, but just the fact that and you've talked about this with other people over the years, we've done this podcast too. But as you said, that kind of the importance of having that one person in your life who can kind of help unlock or put an idea in your head of maybe what's possible or what you can do. I think that can be so powerful. And I think that's especially powerful when we think about education. Do you want to talk more about that? Yeah. I mean, I think we touched on it in a bunch of different ways in the conversation. So there's, you know, his uncle, who was obviously such a big influence on him, you know, but both in terms of being that role model, like doing this interesting thing that, you know, that he was able to attach interest to when he was such a little kid.

And like, also at the same time, who wasn't dismissive about, uh, like a seven-year-old's interest in this thing. Um, you know, like nothing saying, you know, this isn't for you or this is too hard. It's just sort of patiently explaining things to him in the way that, you know, he can understand as a seven-year-old and then planting that seed that, you know, okay, well, you know, you want to be an engineer. You know, it's very easy to like look at a seven-year-old and laugh at that. Right. Like even well-intentioned people like to like, you know, hear, you know, what for the

seven-year-old is a very earnest expression of interest and laugh at it. And like, you know, that can leave as much an indelible mark on how you think about yourself and your future as encouragement does. And so he was lucky enough to get the encouragement. Um, and so like, I think that's just, uh, you know, a beautiful gift to get and And just to think about what he's created, it's almost like paying that forward to tens or hundreds of millions of kids in the world. Khan Academy is basically saying to every child, this is not too hard for you. We're going to help you understand.

No, I think you nailed it. I think you're right. Like it, that is, it is kind of the perfect, you know, payment forward gift. Right. And, and I think it's, it's a reminder, I think for all of us, A, not to immediately kind of diminish or dismiss, you know, kids' earnestness or anyone's earnestness, but also to, you know, it's not too hard for you to understand. I think that's especially important as we do move into, you know, new worlds with AI, to borrow the pun from his book. Speaking about AI, which was part of the conversation towards the end of your conversation, one of the things that I was really impressed with what he said was about how when we look at the power of these tools, and obviously there's a lot of concerns and many of them are valid and we need to be careful about how things are being used. But the fact is that throughout history, these tools have accrued the most benefit for people who have the deepest skill sets. And him saying that, I think, as a way to reinforce the importance of learning basics and learning fundamentals. And that, yes,

just because we can do things faster and maybe we can do things at another level doesn't mean that we don't need those other skills too. I thought that was really, really profound. And I think a really good way of framing how this is not an either or situation. This is something where the people who, I've seen this myself just in the last couple of years with gendered AI, where genuinely the people who get the most out of it are the people who are already very good at what the tool is being used for. But I really liked that frame and I really liked thinking about thinking, this isn't a replacement. If anything, this is more of an opportunity for why you need those

fundamentals and to get people excited about learning to begin with. Yeah, 100%. I mean, look, this has been, as you pointed out, true for a very, very long time. And you can go back into the historical record and sample any other technological revolution. One of the things that's true about technology revolutions is people who lean into them, who try to learn as much as possible about them and try to unleash their imagination about how this technology could be used to do useful things for other people,

really have tremendous benefits accrued to them. And by the same token, you know, folks who are hesitant and resistant and who like try to shove the, you know, these breakthrough things into a bucket and like ignore them or make them go away, like sometimes are ones who, you know, struggle a little bit. And so I think it's actually the way that he framed it is beautiful. Like, AI, if anything, like, means that there's even a bigger need for learning than there was before. It's not a thing that says, okay, well, like, now this thing knows everything and I don't

have to learn anything because it's going to do all of my thinking for me. Like, no, no, no, no. Right. Not at all. No, not even close. And in fact, it's one of those things that's like really to get the benefits. I think many times you really do need to have

an interest in knowledge about what the AI is helping you with. I mean, it's obviously, it's great if you're new at something. It can be really useful in a learning context. But just in terms of an automation context, that's going to be most useful for people who can really get the benefits of what that's, what that's doing. We've talked about that before on this podcast, but kind of even opening up

people to do, then solve, you know, harder problems or different problems. But no, I really, I really like that approach and I look forward to, I ordered his book while, while your conversation was taking place. So, you know, everybody out there should, should definitely be checking that out because I think there's a lot of people who are very, I think, quickly to dismiss the role that, that AI can have in, in improving education. And I don't think that's necessarily true. Yeah. I'll tell the story here that I've told, I think on stage at our big developer conference when Sal was there with me, but my 15-year-old daughter is using the free version of

ChatGPT to take these biochemistry papers that she otherwise wouldn't be able to understand because she's in the ninth grade, dumping them into chat GPT and then asking the AI to explain some of the concepts in there that she doesn't understand yet. And I have watched and pay very close attention to people who are trying to learn, both as a teacher and as someone who hires a lot of people at a bunch of different stages of their career where learning is very important to their job. I have rarely seen such acceleration in learning.

Honestly, the fearlessness that it's given this kid that like, she doesn't have these arbitrary barriers standing in between her and a thing that she's trying to understand. Like, you know, the AI doesn't make fun of her. Like it doesn't tell her to go away when her questions are incessant. Like it doesn't make her feel bad because she doesn't understand some jargon that she hasn't learned about yet. And she just sort of feels empowered by it. And like the thing that I tell to everyone is every student can have that because like she didn't ask anyone's permission to go do any of this. She signed up for the account, like the tool is free. Like all you need is an internet connection. And like, granted,

not everybody has an internet connection, but if you have an internet connection and like at least a, you know, mobile phone or a tablet, you know, you can do exactly the same type of learning acceleration as my 15 year old daughter. And so the thing that you really need is just awareness. And so, you know, and a willingness to go use these tools in an ambitious way. And so like that, that's the encouragement I think I would go give everyone. It's like, just be curious about what's possible and like, let yourself use these things and see, you know, how they're going to help you. No, I think you nailed it. I was, I was going to say curiosity, right? Like having awareness, having a curiosity and being

willing to do that. I think, I think you nailed it. And, and that can unlock so many things for so many different types of people, but especially for, for kids, especially for anyone who's learning, let's not even, let's not even limit it to kids, right? Anyone who's wanting to learn anything, um, being able to kind of unlock that and, and to your point, yeah, not have to be afraid. Oh, will I be made fun of? Am I asking this in a weird way? Am I being annoying? I don't understand this enough. Or what time in the world is it? Do I have someone who I can ask these things to, right? It's great to have access to that and that can unlock other things. Okay, well, now that I know this, well, what about this other

thing? And what could these two things do together? Unlocking curiosity, I think, is one of the, that's why people learn, right, is why people are continuing to go through that process. And anything we can do to lower those barriers, I think, is great. And obviously, I think that aligns super well with the work that the Khan Academy is doing and is going to continue to do. And I'm grateful that people like Saul, you know, did all the work that he did and shifted his mindset to saying, okay, is there a better way? And is there a more accessible way to start giving access to more people, you know, more content and more learning resources? And here we are, you know,

like you said, almost 20 years later, and it's really fantastic to see. Awesome. Well, that is all the time that we have for today. Thank you so much to Sal Khan for joining us. If you have anything that you want to share with us, you can email us anytime at behindthetech at microsoft.com.

And you can follow Behind the Tech on your favorite podcast platform, or you can check out our full video episodes over on YouTube. Thanks for listening. See you next time.