Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - If You Want To Change the World, Educate the World | Sal Khan

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

This week’s conversation is with Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization on a mission to provide free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.Since its inception in 2008, Khan Academy has helped teach hundreds of millions of students around the world through their adaptive online learning platform.Sal has three degrees from MIT, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and most recently founded the Khan Lab School, a nonprofit brick-and-mortar private school in Mountain View, CA working to bring Sal’s vision of a mastery-based, blended learning system to life.Sal has an extraordinary mind and his purpose is clear – I really enjoyed taking a deep dive into his journey, and I can’t wait for you to learn from his unique approach to life, learning, entrepreneurship, and commitment to making the world a better place._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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heads. And okay. So then we've got to change what goes on in people's heads or improve or remodel it. Well, what does that, that's called education. Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, and I am excited to welcome Sal Khan as our guest on this week's episode. So if you were in school or if you have a kid in school, anytime in the last 14 years, chances are that you recognize Sal's name. He's the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. It's a nonprofit organization on a mission to provide free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. And since their inception in

2008, they have helped hundreds of millions of students around the world through their adaptive online learning platform. I mean, how good is that? Hundreds of millions. Sal has three degrees from MIT, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and most recently founded the Khan Lab School, a nonprofit brick and mortar private school in Mountain View, California. And that is in an effort to bring his vision of mastery-based blended learning

system to life. Sal, super excited to sit with you. How are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Oh, awesome. What a body of work that you bring into this conversation. And I was hoping if we could get into the origin story just a bit, and maybe we can

zoom in by, there was this moment that you shared in 2010, you had recently quit your job as a hedge fund analyst, and then you're at dinner with your wife and you bump into a couple and they ask, what do you do? Can you tell us the rest of that story? Oh, yeah. You know, it's, that's kind of like halfway into the origin story. You know, it all started in 2004, a tutor and cousins, 2005, 2006, I started making software for them so that they had a chance to practice. 2006 is when I made the first videos. 2009 was frankly where all of the stuff that I had created, including the videos were now reaching 50 to a hundred thousand folks. And it felt like there

was a there there. And I, you know, my wife and I looked at our finances. She was still in training to become a rheumatologist, but we're like, okay, maybe we could live on savings for a year. And that's when I quit my day job. And you can imagine I quit in fall of 2009. And anytime you do anything entrepreneurial, whether for profit or not for profit, you have to start with a little bit of optimism. Some would say delusional optimism. You'd think, okay, surely people will support this or this is going to get off the ground. But like a lot of entrepreneurs or social entrepreneurs, those first few months were really hard. I started getting a lot of rejections. People didn't really know what to make of Khan Academy as a not-for-profit. We

looked kind of like a tech startup, but we were not-for-profit and we had the social mission. And I was probably six, seven, eight months into it. It's now early 2010. And this situation that you're alluding to did happen where I was at a dinner party, and I'm sure it probably happened more times that I didn't notice, where, you know, I remember when I was a hedge fund analyst, and people say, oh, what do you do? I'm like, I work at a hedge fund, you can tell there's a little bit like, oh, you know, that's a good career, and he's probably making good money and all that type of thing. And I remember now, there was a couple that asked each of my wife and I, what do we do? My wife's training to be a rheumatologist.

So what do you do? And I was like, well, I used to be in finance. And before that, I used to be an engineer. I used to work in tech. But now, essentially, I quit my job to start this not-for-profit. And I make videos on YouTube. And I'm hacking away at some software. And as they were walking away, and they thought they were out of my earshot,

they said, well, lucky for him, his wife's studying to be a doctor. And that hits your fragile male ego a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So what was, when you heard that, it touched your ego in so many respects. What is what is your response to that? Like, how did you work with that? Well, it wasn't the first time that I knew that people thought that what I was doing was a little bit unusual. There was no, I live out here in Silicon Valley now, and I lived out here then. And if I had quit my day job to do a traditional venture backed startup, that is risky. And many times that also has its own delusions associated with it. But at least people understood that model.

And they knew people who went down that path who did really well. They also knew people who go down that path who don't do so well. But it wouldn't have been hard for people to process. But I think the combination of this being a not-for-profit, I think at that time, the idea of spending time making YouTube videos as a grown man wasn't legitimized yet. Now it's a very legitimate thing to do. But back in 2009, 2010, it wasn't something that you saw people do, especially people who had a family. My youngest child had just been born, had a very well-paying job, prestigious job, arguably. So I knew from, even from family members, there was a lot of discomfort with it. But what gave me confidence,

and I didn't have consistent confidence, definitely did Wayne every now and then, was I would look at the testimonials from folks. I saw how it was growing exponentially. I would get these letters from people saying how it had transformed their lives in certain cases. I'm like, there is a product market fit here. And it does need to have a social mission because I don't want to create a paywall, a freemium, whatever. I want these folks to use it. And I just have to get into the right philanthropist to see that the social return on investment here is almost unlimited. We're in a new phase of history where the ability to scale and reach and empower millions or tens of millions or hundreds

of millions. Back then, I would say these numbers as aspirations. They're now realities. And now we aspire for billions. We're there and we just have to make a little bit of an investment. Okay. The narrative is tight for you. You've said this a million times, I understand. And I do want to understand, though, how you went from an idea that had some traction, you had obviously some social, not pressure, but folks, you're bumping up some social barriers where people are like, that's not going to work out. And you had this deep want to create something with social goods. So how did you, maybe this is a mechanical question or it is a psychological, I'm not sure, mechanical in the sense that, no, I let go of the prestigious job to be able to start this because I saved a bunch of money. And it was rather mechanical. The leap was not very big. Or it's more psychological, which is like, no, I just kept telling myself. Or I kept finding ways that I could kind of slither through this dark forest of not knowing how to find the next, I don't know, feeding opportunity. Because in entrepreneurship, like early days,

if you're not doing venture backed, it's hard. So was this mechanical that you managed the risk taking or was it more psychological? It was both, but I think it's more psychological. Early on in the Khan Academy journey, even when, let's go back to 2004, 2005, I started tutoring my cousins. 2005, I started writing software for them. That's when I got the domain name Khan Academy. And I started, you know, I was writing software for my cousins. And I said, hey, if it's just my cousins who are using it, it's worth doing this. It's helping them. But obviously, as you start writing software, you're like, but maybe people who are not my cousins could use it. But I kept allowing, you know, I kept trying to keep myself from getting too attached to the big ambition.

Just saying, hey, just put one foot in front of the other. But keep the door open to the big ambition. So I didn't want to close that door either. The other thing that I was doing to protect it was in the late 90s, I had joined two different startups and especially the second one was, you know, it was doing great and I was counting how much my options would be worth and, you know, what kind of a house would I buy at, you know, the ripe age of 22 and all of these types of things. And then the NASDAQ collapsed. And, you know, for me, the hard part of that wasn't even just the loss of my, the potential wealth that I thought I

was going to have, but as I saw how emotionally toxic it got on the way down, actually, it was a little bit toxic on the way up because people were just counting their eggs before they hatched. But then when the eggs got broken, I saw what it was like and how bad it was. And it was ironic. I had kind of sworn off entrepreneurship because of that. And then I go to business school. I'm like, I'm going to figure out something else to do. I find out that I like finance and hedge fund. I kept getting drawn to entrepreneurial adventures.

The hedge fund I joined after business school, it was my boss and me. So it was still an entrepreneurial adventure of sorts, but it was a different kind. But when I was doing this thing, I was like, this is something that is very personal to me. I used to tell my friends, even when I worked at the hedge fund, that I wanted to work at a hedge fund long enough so that I could start a school on my own terms and be something of a Dumbledore figure. I always imagined that that would be the best last third of my life is to be Albus Dumbledore. And so that was always in the back of my mind that this project seemed like it could be a pathway to becoming a Dumbledore of sorts. And so it says, this cannot be a tech startup. This has got to be something that I do with my family. I didn't even know exactly what it meant

to be a not-for-profit then. But even before I had quit my job and I would show my friends, hey, I've got this hobby. I'm tutoring my cousins. My friends out here in Silicon Valley, their natural inclination is, why are you doing this? And I'm like, oh, because it's helping my cousins. They're like, but how are you going to monetize this? I don't see the business plan. Someone else says, are you doing it? I'm like, no, no, no, this isn't a business.

This isn't anything. I'm doing it because it's helping my cousins. And hey, if it helps other people, great. So that was one form of protection. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms,

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when you head to davidprotein.com slash findingmastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Did you have an emotional reaction when you were defending your position? Or was it just like you said it? Was it more matter of fact? I tried to make, I tried my, I wanted my affect to seem like I wasn't phased when people get cynical, but I still get phased. I thought I was hoping you'd say that because.

Sal, from from a distance, it's like it's a beautiful story, right? Like you've got it all put together. You you had this idea. You had all of the kind of momentum to go one way. It's the hero's journey. You zigged, you went and zagged, you went another way and it was for social good and you did it. And it was for social good and you did it. And it's, but it's those small little conversations where people are like, what are

you doing? That so many of us, and I recognize it myself, it's like, oh yeah, what am I doing? And then it's, there's, there's the cognitive and there's also the emotional part of it. So how did you do, how did you manage that emotional part when you're fronting one way? No, no, no, we're good. It's easy. I got this. It's a side hustle. But really, you had something underneath like, holy shit, what am I doing?

When I encountered cynics then, and even today when I encounter cynics, the first thing I say is, Sal, don't be defensive. There might be something in what they're saying. You don't want to be delusional and ignore good feedback. But at the same time, you also have to remind yourself, like, you don't have to convince this person. Like most of the time you don't, you know, most of these people were not philanthropists. I'm trying to convince they weren't investors. They weren't potential employees. They were just friends. And we always want to impress our friends and convince them that what we're doing is a good idea, but I don't have to convince them. And so that's the first

somewhat liberating thing. And then what made me not question myself too much is I said, okay, Sal, what evidence do you have? This is a friend who's smart. I respect their opinion, but what evidence do I have? And then I would go back to, it did transform several of my cousin's lives. I was already getting letters from people who I didn't know around the world about how it had transformed them in some way, shape or form or their children. And I kept going back to that. I was like, look, my well-intentioned friend is probably trying to save me from quote, wasting time or getting distracted, but they haven't even tried it out. They just did classic MBA thinking of like, well, I heard some other company

is also making educational videos and is also doing software that creates questions and allows, you're like the 10th person to do this. What makes you so, that's their natural competitive analysis type of thing. I think there is something where there's probably a lot of people who wanna do entrepreneurial things.

And they almost, when they meet a friend who's doing something entrepreneurial, part of their brain wants to help the friend and wants to be constructive for the friend. Part of their brain wants to help their friend. And if they think their friend is going down the wrong angle, maybe protecting them from that a little bit. But some of it is also protecting their choices. Where it's like, I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I've been afraid to, and now my friend is doing it. You know, it's maybe comfortable if I convince him to stop doing it and do what I'm doing again. There was, I think there's sometimes a little bit of that, but I think the main thing is just what, just keep reminding yourself, why are you doing it? What gives you confidence and remembering like, who do you really need to

convince and who do you not really have to convince? And I think you can keep going. The freedom from that inside alone is remarkable, right? Like I don't have to convince you. I don't have to convince anybody. I do need to have some evidence. I need to have some clarity. And if I have those two, which is like, I liked how you did convincing and, and evidence, you know, as, as part of the model there that you, if you can do that, you don't need to respond to everybody's kind of raised eyebrow. Where did you learn that? Probably as a coping mechanism for a bunch of things that happens in life.

So this wasn't mom, dad, this wasn't your fiance, your wife at the time. This was like, it was like on the fly, like, oh, I got to sort this out. I think, and I've been described by even some of our early board members as like a pleaser like I want people to say oh good job and like oh you and I I mean Eric Schmidt used to be on Khan Academy's board and this is obviously a little later down the journey once we had more validity and we had funders and all of that and and he had asked me to do something he had he was he's on the board of a museum and he's like oh there's a fundraiser and and uh he'd like me to speak at a fundraiser. And he'd like me to speak at this fundraiser about education. I was like, oh yeah, absolutely. And he's like,

Sal, I know you want to please me. I know you want, you don't have to do it. I can tell you're a pleaser. You don't have to do it. I was like, no, I definitely want to do it. And I didn't want to please him. He was a major funder. He's obviously someone that only a year or two ago, I had only read about, and now he was on my board. So it was, it was a natural inclination, but I think I realized in my life, as you, you're never going to win trying to please everybody. And it's so easy to get into these, like trying to convince people, getting defensive about things, and you just don't feel good about yourself usually after those interactions. And, and so, you know, I think our reason, I'm still working on it. I mean, I, I, I, I do have a lot of ideas and I do try to share

them with people who I really respect. And when they immediately get kind of the devil's advocate position or the cynical side, I do get a little defensive if I'm honest, but I, I, I, I've been working on myself as we've been talking about to just say, okay, I don't have to convince them. There's probably some truth in what they're saying, I should process it. And, you know, and it's also some of it's on me, I realized that when I get excited about an idea, I go into sell mode almost immediately, like, this is all the reasons why it's good. Isn't this exciting? And that almost automatically puts people into that devil's advocate position. But what about this? What about that? And so now I've realized I even try to even introduce ideas where I'm showing, I'm going against my stereotype,

where I'm showing that I'm also looking at the risks and how this could go wrong, but I'm thinking about it still. Oh, so you soften it a little bit. So you don't have that initial knee-jerk response to protect you or to make them feel better about their life choices by kind of tearing down your beautiful idea. That's a strike. I look at the time the next morning I wake up, I'm like, yeah, they were kind of right. But sometimes I'm like, no, I still have evidence that this is worth pursuing. Do you have a time that comes to mind where somebody's opinion about what you were doing, you listened to them and didn't listen to yourself and it either went well or didn't

go well? I'm thinking about ones that I could share. There's one comes up, but it's probably overly sensitive. So I won't share that one. But let me think about other it's sensitive because it's family or it's sensitive because it's a well-known person not a well-known person it's it was it was but it was it was it was something at at at um anyway yeah i won't talk about that one i'm just trying to think of other others where where i i didn't follow my conviction and I regret it is what you're really...

Either way. Yeah. You know, like I think that while you're maybe searching for something that it's one of the great constrictors for people is that, you know, the great threat nowadays is not necessarily, you know, the dangerous alley. Well, they are, can be dangerous, but it's what people are thinking about you. And it's a great threat to belonging. It's a great threat to, you know, be rejected. And so I just have seen it over and over again, that it's a really big deal for folks, but.

Yeah. Well, you know, I can give you the one example I was thinking of, but I'll speak it in generalities where there was someone that, you know, has really helped me in Khan Academy. And they are actually a well-known figure. And I was hoping to kind of, you know, do an interview with them and things like that. And they've done a lot of really, I thought good things in education. And when that got word, some people who I'm close to said, Oh no, you can't, you know, that person had, you know, 20 years ago had this view or that view. You can't, you can't do that Sal. And at my initial reaction, no, but this person is like,

that's a public persona that some people might have of this person. But I know this person, like this person has even been something of a mentor to me. This person has been done nothing but try to help Khan Academy. This person has done some really thoughtful things in the education realm. I want to do it. But then the pressure to like, no like no but Sal it's a risk for you you know Sal you have this really good public impression that you're above politics that you're and you know maybe if you do this with this person it might create something and I'm like oh it just doesn't feel good but all right I won't do it and I now regret that I regret not doing it because my convictions were that this person had something to give and I shouldn't allow other people's impressions to kind of control who I'm talking to or what ideas I can help surface.

Yeah. When you describe the story, does it still live in your body? Do you still feel it? I think the fact that I'm, you know, I'm bringing it up right now. And that was the first one that, that came up. That's the, you know, and most of my life, I feel like I've done what I have conviction around and, you know, probably to a fault, several family members, probably if you talk to my wife, they. And, you know, probably to a fault. Several family members, probably if you talk to my wife, they would say, you know,

once Sal gets an idea in his head, he's going to give it a shot. You're not going to dissuade him too easily. And that's a, you know, in my personality, that's a feature and a bug. But this was the only time where, you know, I probably took the expedient route and I don't feel good about it. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus.

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at FelixGray.com for 20% off. Regret, you know, is a really powerful thing. It can be a great teacher. It can also be a poison that we keep, you know, swallowing. It feels like to me that you work mostly in your head. But then when I was doing my research about kind of who you are, the way that you put together words about the vision that you hold, it feels like it's heart, like it's about, there's a soul and a spirit to it. How does it feel? What does it feel like to be inside you? Does it feel like you're kind of this big toddler, you know, like this huge brain and not really connected to the emotions? Or is it, is it more balanced? Is it more heart led and you just happen to have a big, you know, cognitive motor as well?

Good question. I've never had that question before. I'd like to think it's definitely both here. You know, even going back to the things of how I protected Khan Academy as an idea and how I was able to stay at, you know, the other thing is, yes, I mean, you mentioned like, did I save up enough money? Like just mechanically, did I do it? Yeah. And that's a head thing. how I was able to stay at, you know, the other thing is, yes. I mean, you mentioned like, did I save up enough money? Like just mechanically did I do it? Yeah. And that's a head thing. And, and I was an analyst at a hedge fund. I wasn't a hedge fund manager. So I was able to save up some money. We were trying to essentially a healthy down payment for a house in Silicon Valley. It was essentially what we were saving it up for. You know,

so like several hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it's not like, not like independently wealthy money. And, and so that's what my wife and I said, okay, but maybe we can live off of it. We don't have big expenses, our expenses, even with my mother-in-law had just moved in with us and our first son was born, but we, we, we lived, you know, both my wife and I grew up quite poor. So we, we know how to to we know how to economize. So we didn't have a lot of expenses. That was a mechanical thing. But then I also told myself, because even more than the living off of it was the career or the opportunity cost of the career not had.

Because as you can imagine, in a hedge fund, every year you can make every year your income is accelerating. And in five or six years, I could be making what my boss was making, which could have been in the millions of dollars every year. And that's a real big opportunity cost to give up for something that's unproven. And there, that's where a little bit of the heart came in, where I just told myself like, well, what is the life that you want, Sal? And the life that I want is healthy, happy family. But I really told myself, if I had a nice 2,000 square foot house, which was the house that we were renting and later were able to buy, 2,000 square foot, four bedroom house, two cars in the driveway, my healthy and happy family, we're able to go on vacations, go to restaurants every now and then.

I'm able to support my kids through college. That's all I want financially, really. And if I'm able to then also get to work on something that I've, every morning I wake up and I'm inspired to work on it, I get to work on an interesting problem. And I feel like I have a sense of purpose. I consider myself the luckiest person on the planet. And I, I wasn't, I'm not saying this now just to sound, you know, any, any, anything. That's literally what I told myself. I'm like, if you are able to have that lifestyle, that's a really good life. And so that liberated me a little bit from the gold and handcuffs of going down. And I liked my hedge fund job. It's not like I was, I hated it. And I was trying to figure out a new thing to do. I liked it. It was a good job and very, I can never say the word,

remunerative. It paid you a lot of money. It paid well. But that goes back to the heart aspect of it. Like a lot of times when I'm making some of these decisions, like even what Khan Academy should be, I do go a little bit into what inspires me. You know, we have one life to live. If you have a shot of being able to live your life as a protagonist in a movie, live your life as a protagonist in a science fiction book, go for it. So I remember even in the early days, there were a lot of several VCs who reached out and

want angel investors who wanted to write a check and have kind of me be a for-profit. And it was tempting. But then when we started talking about monetization and how you're going to exit and all that, I was like, oh, this isn't what I want to do. And then I thought about what is a home run as a for-profit? And then what's a home run as a not-for-profit? Home run as a for-profit, we all know those stories quite well. But I was also thinking, well, how's that going to change the world? And how's that going to change me? And then I thought about a home run as a not-for-profit.

I'm like, what if Khan Academy can be the next Smithsonian, the next Oxford, or the next whatever, or in some ways bigger than all of those? Because even in 2009, when I was thinking about these things, Khan Academy already had bigger reach than some of these hundreds of year old institutions. And we were, there's no reason why we couldn't grow another hundred fold or another thousand fold from there. So for me, it was like, wow, maybe it's worth swinging for the even higher fence of the, and that's a hard thing. Like that's not a,

then the head kicks in and says, okay, is that at all reasonable? Is that all? And it's like, as ridiculous as it sounds, it isn't unreasonable. If you just extrapolate the growth, if you just look at what internet technologies allow us to do, if you just think about the scale of other people on the internet for the most part for profits, you know. Google scale would have seemed like science fiction 30 years ago for what it does, but it's not. And so couldn't Khan Academy be that same thing, but as a social institution. And when you ask yourself the question, what do you want with your life? Was that a flashbang? It it just, it became apparent or did you like wrestle with that for a period of time? Did you write it down? Did you bounce it off of other people? Did you, did you meditate and listen? Like what was your process? Cause it's such a powerful question and look where it led you

to, to make all of those choices along the way, to stay nonprofit, to have clarity and purpose each day that you wake up to make the hard decisions, you know, along the way of entrepreneurship. Like, so how did you, what was your process to, to answer the question? How do you want to live your life? It was mostly internal. I didn't talk to a lot of people externally. I, you know, I, if I'm open, I'm not usually very open, like with friends and things like that. That's interesting. I would say that I am more open than most people, but I've realized going back to our earlier conversation that I've realized that there's certain contexts where this type of conversation is going to be welcomed. There's other conversations where,

you know, so when I'm talking to my friend who's talking about how you're going to monetize this, he's not going to be in a headspace where I'm like, well, what do you really want out of your life? And what do I really want in my life? And do I need his approval for me to be able to do it? Now, I did talk about this with my wife and and I kind of do need her approval, because this isn't how do I want to live my life, it's how do we want to live our life. So I did need her approval for this and say, hey, you know, I think we're very fortunate. And she agrees, because I think, you know, for both of us, she grew up sharing a room with four people, sharing a bed, in many cases with three or four people. I, you know, we both grew up below the poverty line for us to have, even at that state, you know, we were in our early thirties, a four bedroom house in a nice neighborhood. We had two cars. We had, we were on a track to have,

I was already had a job, you know, we were not, we had paid off our debt already. And it was significant debt. Like we had paid off our debt. We felt like we were living the dream and we were living the dream. Our first child was born. He, you know, he, he, well, he, he had, you know, knock on wood, he's outgrown it, but he had childhood epilepsy and that there's a way of putting your life in focus when you realize that you really don't give a crap about anything else, as long as your son can stop having seizures. Cause that just freaks you out every time it happens. And it has all sorts of implications. I think that type of thing wakes you up about about about what's what's important in life oh man i'm so stoked that you shared that because it helps to deep it helps to give some contour to the depth that you have like these were not this was not a 20 some year old making making the hard

choice in silicon valley you know and kind of pushing against that. This was like you understood what it's like to not have maybe food. You understood the hardships of not having anything. And then from that place, you even had a deeper hardship, which is like your son being sick or having an illness. I don't know what the technical term is for epilepsy. Yeah, dude. Okay. That matters in me understanding you. And maybe above all, the way that you said, I worked it out with my wife. People ask me all the time about like, what's the common threads for best in the world or whatever? And what I've started to realize is like, when I reflect on just my life, not their life, but my life, I go, you know, I wouldn't be the person I

am without a great partner. And I met my wife really early. You met super early. We've been married like 30 some years. And so I think what you're saying is not talked about enough. So what is your wife's name, if you don't mind? Umama. Umama. Umama. Umama. And so how do you do that with Umama? How do you sit down and say, what do you want our life to look like? Is that basically the essence of the question? Yeah. And, you know, we had obviously talked about it before. And, you know, I have this fun theory I talk about. I still talk about it with the Khan Academy team members that I feel like I've had so

many blessings in my life that, you know, benevolent aliens are helping me and Khan Academy prepare humanity for first contact. Because I remember we rented this house as soon as our son was born. And now we have three children. But as soon as our first child was born, mother-in-law comes and moves in with us to help out. And we needed to rent a house, we find a house for rent. And it was like the perfect house. And it was the last one we looked at. And it was like the price, you know, honestly, the landlord at the time was charging us below market, it was in our budget, we're like, Oh, this is great. Like, this seems too good to be true. And then I remember once we stayed there, both myself and my wife, we were like, only good one day have a house like this, like, great that we're renting

it. But we don't want to get used to this, because this is so nice. And we just moved out of a two bedroom apartment. This was a four bedroom house. It was so nice. And it had a really nice garden. And my wife loves gardening. And it was really interesting. About a year later, the landlord calls and says, hey, I'm sorry to do this to you, but I'm going to put the house for sale. So we're going to have to cancel the lease. And I'm like, oh my God, this is our dream house. We want to buy this house. And it was ironic because I had quit my day job. I didn't have a job. I had a down payment, but I didn't have a job. And then literally the next call after that was from this group that wanted me to consult for them a little bit. And I was like, I'm happy to do this if you can kind of help, you know, talk to the loan officers about this. And we were able to get a mortgage. And it was

funny as we started paying down the mortgage, you know, first the down payment, I used to joke with my wife. I used to like, we used to go out and look at the house. And, you know, when we paid off 30% of the house, I would say, all of this is ours. And I would point to 30% of the house. And, you know, when we paid off 30% of the house, I would say, all of this is ours. And I would point to 30% of the property. And I was like, we're still working on it, but all of this is ours. We got the big tree and the garage. Yeah. So, you know, I'm going to make a payment now and we're going to get another stone. And, but, you know, I think, look, one of the things that obviously why we, I think, get along really well together is that we have a very similar upbringing. We are very grateful for the things that we have. And yeah, I think there was

a joint recognition that we're really fortunate if we have our health. You know, we, my wife and I still feel like we're getting away with something if we buy like full priced organic blueberries. We're like, okay, life is feeling a little bit too good right now that we're just blowing money on blueberries. I still feel imposter syndrome when I go to a Whole Foods. Like, I'm like, can people tell that I, you know, or Nordstrom's, like, I feel serious imposter syndrome at Nordstrom's. Like, you know, like, is it okay if I can still look at the price tags? Is that, is that tacky? I'm hanging out at the sale rack. Oh, that is so good. All right. So I don't know your economic profile here. So that's not the

question. The question though is how do you work with... It doesn't matter if you can't afford the suit or the shoes. That's not what the issue is. Well, now I mean, you know, I'm very fairly, frankly, more than I expected when I first quit my job. But, you know, some of that conditioning from your youth is still there is the point. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day.

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calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B dot com slash finding mastery. So how do you work with that imposter syndrome? What do you do? Do you laugh at it? Like, look at me or you have a great laugh. And I think that that takes quite a bit of intensity off and you've used the word twice at least about being liberated, you know? And so I think your laugh is also liberating, but what do you do in those moments where you're feeling like, like, like I'm going to be found out here? Yeah. And I'm making me self-conscious. No, you know, I think some of that, some of that imposter syndrome, I actively want to retain.

I see. You know, I never want to forget how, like there, there, there was a time not too long ago that I would pass on the organic produce because it was twice, even still sometimes today it is. But because by retaining it, you appreciate the fact that, wow, I can go to a restaurant these days and for the most part order what I want on the menu and not care too much about the price. Although, once again, my conditioning is still there. So I think it lets you just appreciate the world a little bit. And we all know about the hedonic hedonic adaptation and the hedonic treadmill, you get used to the level you're at. And then all of a sudden, and look, I don't claim that I'm immune to that. I don't want to sound like I'm some guru here. I live in Silicon Valley. And, you know, we still live in that same house. And a lot of our friends have now moved into houses that are multiples of the size of our houses.

And every now and then it's, you know, you go there and it's like, maybe it would be nice to have two saunas in the house. Or, you know, a four four car garage or whatever but like um i i always remind myself you know like oh well imagine their electricity bill or like the gardening bill or the water bill whatever but um yeah i think it's it's it's i think there's healthy imposter syndrome and then there's unhealthy imposter okay a healthy one you grounded, allows you to enjoy it a little bit. Like, look at this. Every now and then I get invited to, let's say, meetings with people or conferences with people where both healthy and unhealthy imposter syndrome could be at play. The healthy imposter syndrome says like, wow, you get to meet your childhood hero or someone

that you thought you could only read books about and you're meeting this person and they're like interested in what you have to say and they're supporting Khan Academy that's kind of a fun I don't know if that's imposter syndrome or that's just remembering yourself when you're younger and you're like wow how is little Sal in this meeting right now that's that's kind of wild the little the less healthy imposter syndrome is that if that if that goes to an extreme where like let's say there's having there's a discussion i'm like who am i to say something does do i do should i should i contribute and i try to there i try to um remind myself that everyone here is literally just a person like everyone here and and that's another i guess you know coping mechanism sometimes i just remind i just try to treat everyone as if they're my childhood friend. And there's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy there. It's respectful, but even some,

some people who have been great supporters of Khan Academy, their, their household names, I've always said, Hey, I'm going to treat them as my friend. And I think they appreciate that too, because so many other people treat them with such reverence and I respect them a ton, but I get to joke around with them a little bit. And that's how I deal with that other potential imposter syndrome. I love that. I've never heard anyone say anything like that. Just last week, I was in Europe and there was a team that I was working with that they're responsible for their company for 50 billion. And it's a small team of 12 people. That's a big number, as you know. And so there was a moment in our discussion and I just looked around the room and I said,

anyone here have imposter syndrome? They all raised their hand. And these are some of the hardest chargers in business for this division. And so I just really appreciate that you're saying it's a scale. And one way to inoculate the imposter syndrome is to treat people like your childhood friend. That's cool, dude. And so can I read this back to you and tell me what you think? It's a quote of yours. If you believe in trying to make the best of the finite number of years we have on this planet, while not making anyone worse, think that pride and self-righteousness are the cause of most conflict and negativity, and are humbled by the vastness and mystery of the universe, then I'm the same religion as you. So what does that mean to you?

Yeah, I'm surprised you were able to dig that. You know, that's something I wrote a very, very, very long time ago, because when Khan Academy was just starting to get on the radar and we were getting a lot of press, you know, it's just these things. The Internet's an interesting place where, you know, my name, I grew up in a Muslim family and there started to be these debates online about like, is Sal a Muslim? How Muslim is he? Et cetera, et cetera. And that was my response. It's, it's, you know, I, I, I, I have a lot of pride and connection to my upbringing, to my culture, but I would say it's not even just me. My family has always been a little bit of beating to their own drum within that context. You know, when my grandfather on my mother's side was a poet, and when he died at his funeral, his wake, you know, we had a Muslimullah, we had a rabbi, we had a Hindu pundit there. And it was because my grandfather was very, you know, universalist in a lot of his views. And

like, this happened when I was a teenager. So this wasn't my influence. So I think I come from a family that, you know, we definitely grew up in a certain tradition, whether it's, you know, we're Bengali ethnicity, ethnically. And so I think Bengalis are very proud of their Bengali culture that transcends whether you're Hindu or Muslim. Roughly half of Bengalis in the world are Muslim. Half of them are Hindu. But the Bengaliness oftentimes transcends the religion there.

So I think my family has that. And then I grew up in a context in New Orleans where it was just a very diverse group of, you know, we, we mixed with everyone and you know, that's kind of how I form my, my worldview today. How would your parents or family members describe you as a kid? Would they have said anything close to like, Oh, Sal's going to do something. Like, did you have that thing early on? Or is this, were you a little bit of a sleeper? And people are like, you know, you kind of always had something, but we weren't quite sure.

Like, how would they describe, how would they describe you? You would have gotten different responses from different people at different times. I think there was definitely, I've said this openly before, my sister was the golden child in a lot of ways, and like, you know, academically, and, you know, she really did clear the path for me for a lot of teachers where, you know, when I entered third or fourth grade, I was Farrah's brother, and so people projected expectations, which were for the most part good, like, oh, you're going to be a good student, or maybe we should test you for the gifted program. Because it wasn't obvious without that, that it would happen. In second

grade, I was in speech therapy, I couldn't speak properly. While my sister, you know, so you don't normally take the kid in speech therapy. So maybe she's tested for the gifted program. It was because I was Farrah's brother that they did that. So there was always in my family, I think if you ask my mom or some of my uncles, when let's say I was 10 or 11 years old and my sister was a teenager, they're like, okay, Farrah, Sal, we're not so sure about. He seems to like to goof off, watch a lot of TV. He's always drawing. That was kind of the stereotype.

I was kind of a up to no good a lot, like in an innocent way. As a, as a young kid, I had, I had not great conduct grades in school in certain classes. So, you know, but I did have a few teachers that I think even at an early age, I'd like to think they at least made me believe that they saw something in me and that helped help, help give me, help give me some confidence. But then obviously when you, when you, when you start getting into, I mean, it's interesting in high school was probably the low point of some people's impressions of me where they might've thought that I was getting in with the wrong crowd and this and that, and not showing, but, but then, you know, by the end of high school and college, people probably started saying,

interestingly, I think they would have thought that I would have gone a very aggressively for-profit route. I think what most people would have thought, like if anyone is gonna try to become on the top 10, Fortune 500, Forbes 500 or something, Sal's gonna try to do that. And obviously all the way until I was working at the hedge fund,

it seemed like I was going on that path. So I probably had a little bit of that stereotype. I mean, Sal though, honestly, three degrees from MIT. What happened? Like why three degrees from MIT? Oh, well, this is, I think what happened when I went to MIT, first of all, MIT was like heaven for me. I think when you are in high school, in a fairly mainstream high school, you have to suppress certain instincts. You have to suppress how much you get excited about

learning certain things so you don't get beat up. So you don't get ostracized. And I had, you know, I had found my people I was on, you know, in high school, sometimes I was on the, I was on the state math team, and we would go to, you know, compete in national tournaments. So I've kind of found some, some, some other young people in the state who I could really, you know, be myself with, so to speak, but then to go to MIT and to have a whole community of people like that. I felt like I was in like Hogwarts or Disney, whatever, whatever metaphor you want to draw to it. And then once I was there, I, you know, I learned that they actually allow you to take as many

classes as you want to take. And they don't recommend you take more than four or five. But there was a certain element of like, you know, I'm a kid in a candy shop. And you pay a fixed amount of tuition, and you can get take as many classes as you want. And so I thought, well, this is like, you know, it's an all you can eat buffet. Let me, let me see how much food I can eat. Look, so you're, the way you lived actually set up your philosophy for Khan Academy, where, I mean, in some respects, because obviously you had to pay a lot or you had a donor that paid for you or there was academic scholarship or whatever, but it was like the buffet approach and that sets up mastery learning for you. Okay. So it's starting to draw a couple parallels to pull on. But why

teaching? Why learning? What is it about that that you wanted to dedicate your life? And I do want to get into mastery learning and I do want to get into what makes a great online educational experience. But first let's start. Why learning? Why teaching? I think there's a couple of threads here. I think one, I've always enjoyed it. Multiple times in my life, either informally, even when I was very young, I found that one, I had a knack for it in a lot of cases where a classmate might be struggling understanding what's in a textbook or they had trouble understanding what the teacher said. And I'm like, oh, this is how I think about it. And my friend was like, oh, man, that's so cool. Yeah, that makes all the sense in the world. I'm like, oh, I guess I have a knack for this thing. So that kind of built confidence in my ability to do that. And then I think that led me in high school, especially,

I was the president of the math clubs called Moolah Theta. It was like a math honor society. And one of the things we did is math tutoring. And we created like, I would say such a legitimate program that the school then made it a formal part of the school and made anyone who had a below a certain grade in any of their math classes go to this math tutoring that I was essentially running with a bunch of other, with 20 or 30 other students who are in this club. And I saw time and time again, a lot of students who were struggling, barely passing a course, thought they hated math. If they just had the opportunity, the incentive to fill in gaps, had things explained to them the right way,

chance to practice. And that's all about mastery learning, opportunity, incentive to fill in any gaps, to finish in any unfinished learning, so to speak. They were off to the races. Some of them joined the Math Honors Society, kids that you thought a month ago were about to fail their algebra class were now going to math competitions with us because they started to get excited about it. So that also gave me confidence. The other thread is I think every young person who's even vaguely idealistic, and I think this is all young people, I think, try to be somewhat idealistic. You look at the world, you try to say, oh, wow, there's so much, so many problems in the world. How do you solve it? And you think about climate, you think about inequality, you think about whatever, you pick, you pick the issue, Conflicts.

When you really keep peeling the onion, it's just what's going on in people's heads. Everything else is almost just a side effect of what's going on in people's heads. Okay, so then we've got to change what goes on in people's heads or improve or remodel. Well, what does that? That's called education. And so my head told me that education is the single highest leverage point like if you can try to cure cancer which by itself is a very strong leverage point i encourage people who are inclined to to try to cure cancer but what if you can educate a million people and some

subset of them can then go on and help cure cancer and then some of them will solve this and that some of them will create the next this and that that, and write the next great novel. That's even a higher point of leverage. So that's what, you know, those two threads of, I felt like I had a knack for it, a huge high leverage point. Yeah. And it felt like there were opportunities to do it in better ways. Kept pulling me into it. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset.

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dot com. The promo code is finding mastery for 25% off and then plus an extra $50 on us because quality sleep is just too important to leave to chance. What do you think? This is like a state of the union question. What do you think the State of the Union is for the education system today? And, you know, I don't know if you're going to get into this part, but there's like the, maybe let's bifurcate it into the college system as well as the K-12 system. I can, well, I think there's two lenses to take. If I compare the state of the Union of Education, in either case, to say what it was 250 years ago, it's awesome. 250 years ago, even in more literate countries,

30, 40% of the population was functionally illiterate. Free public school, or at least a high quality public school was not a mainstream thing. As recent as even 30 or 40, 50 years ago, obviously, because of things like, like segregation, etc, even places like the US, you did not have respectable access to education. I think it's still not perfect. And there's still a lot of inequality, but for the most literacy rates are much, much better than they were for most of human history, etc, etc. So there's a lot that a lot of inequality, but for the most literacy rates are much, much better than they were for most of human history, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of good in the world. And even in the last 10 years, as I've been on this journey, 15 years, things like access to technology, to the internet, to high quality instructional materials, et cetera, that's all actually gotten is even in affluent neighborhoods or fancy prep schools you still have a model where a lot of kids are still falling through the cracks and those are

the places where they're not resource constrained imagine the places where they are resource constrained I mean there's still schools my school in Metairie which is a suburb of New Orleans it was pretty mainstream it wasn't like a gold-plated school by any stretch of the imagination. It was a normal Louisiana public school. But I remember even when I was growing up, there were schools in New Orleans, kind of the urban core of New Orleans that didn't have air conditioning. And you can imagine not having air conditioning in New Orleans. Like that's unusual. That's harsh. So imagine some of the fancy schools, kids are still falling cracks. Imagine those schools without air conditioning. But let's just assume that you have all the resources,

but the model of education that's there where it's not mastery-based, kids are moved ahead at a fixed pace. They cover some material, they get a test. Some kids get a hundred on it. Some kids get a 90, some kids get a 70 on it. Even though that student didn't know 30% of the material that happened to be on the test, the whole class will move on to the next concept and then build on those gaps. And then the next concepts are going to be that much harder to learn. And then those gaps just keep accumulating. And at some point kids hit a wall and they also, it hits their self-esteem. They're not able to move any, any further. And this isn't theoretical. You just look at the, you can look at the graduates of a fancy prep school that's happening. And it's definitely happening on a nationwide basis. So I think that is the

biggest problem. If I think nationwide, roughly 60% of all kids who go to the two-year college system and about a third to a fourth of the kids who go into the four-year college system. So these are the kids who graduate from high school and they're in the top, they're the half who decide to keep going. Roughly a good chunk of them, almost a majority, when they get to college, the colleges say, wait, you have so many gaps in your learning. You're not even ready to learn algebra yet. Even though algebra is a ninth grade course, you have to go back to middle school. That's happening for a majority of kids who try to go to college. So that seems broken to me. You go into higher education, American higher education, you know, a lot of people say it's the envy of the world. And it is true. The research that we have is, you know, the best in the world. And the facilities, American universities are,

they have very nice facilities, and they have very, very nice programs. The problem with them is they're very expensive and they're very partially because of the landscaping and the facilities and the programs that they have. And they are, they can not always, but they can sometimes be rigid. I've always said like, what's magical about four years, whether you're going to be a software engineer or an art historian, it's always four years. Like it's like, clearly no one has said like, let me just work on the stuff that you need to learn and not just to learn to be that career, but like learn to be a human being or participate in democracy, et cetera. So I think, I think, and you know, the opportunity cost isn't just in dollars, although those are significant, it's also in lost time. The fact that in the U S to become a,

you know, a working doctor doctor and i observed this with my wife and she's not even one of the she didn't become a surgeon or you have to keep going but even as a rheumatologist you know she wasn't she she was 32 before she was really a rheumatologist and she never took a break but from kindergarten until she was that opportunity cost is also significant and you're losing a lot of talent and you're probably losing a lot of a talent that help serve a more diverse community because they were the ones that said, hey, wait, I got to get a job fast. I can't sit in school until I'm 32 years old or 35 years old to become a surgeon or a professor or whatever else. So I think those are the problems that I think we need to address. When it comes to the university system,

what are we paying for now? Are we paying for a brand? Are we paying for a community? Are we paying for knowledge? Because you can get Khan Academy as, you know, point in an example, you can get free learning or low-cost learning that is really good. What do you think we're paying for at the university level? You know, my kids at a college, or I'm sorry, at a high school right now that it's like parents

are crazy right now. Or they always have been, but I'm just, I'm new to it. And so what, what are we paying for? Yeah. And actually, before I answer that, you made me realize the other problem is this, the chronic stress and anxiety and mental health issues that are going on. I actually think our system is culturally broken in a lot of ways. I mean, there's always been, I mean, you read Lord of the Flies in middle school and I remember reading in middle school, I'm like, okay, yeah, you just described like the locker room to me. Like the playground, the playground that is Lord of the Flies. Like, it's like, you know, bully or be bullied or, you know, it's like, you're, you're that, that, that is a lot, a lot of times, unfortunately, the, the, the, the, the, the culture. And then as you get into many cases, it's even more, it happens more at

some of the more affluent neighborhoods, the, the stress and anxiety, you know, here in Silicon Valley, some of the local high schools, Palo Alto high school, gun high school, I can't afford to live in those neighborhoods that go into those high schools. They have the highest suicide rates in the country. I talked to educators there, the stress, the anxiety, the depression there is off the charts. So that's another thing. And we talked to anyone in higher education, roughly a third of all students are in some way dealing with some of these things. So anyway, there's that. And to your point about like, what are you paying for? I've always said, you know, universities, they study everything except some very obvious questions like what you just asked. What are you paying for? And you can conduct a very simple study here. Go to this

upcoming Harvard graduation and go to some kids who have some debt, you know, and say, Hey, Hey, graduate, I will pay your $200,000 right now, whatever debt, however much debt you have, you know, but, and you get, you get to keep all the knowledge you got from Harvard and all of the experiences, but you can never tell anyone again that you went to Harvard university. Will you take it? I'm guessing very few people will. On the other hand, if I were to go to a lot of people and I say, you can pay $200,000 right now. And the whole world will think that you have gone to Harvard for the rest of your life. There's no way of disproving it. I think a lot of people will take that, take you up on that. So I think that tells you something about what people might be paying for. But I think there's other things like, hey,

I'll pay you $200,000, but all your memories of like the great conversations and the friendships, those are going to go away. I think that also would be hard for people to take. And look, I think the knowledge, of course, matters as well. But I do think the credential and the brand and the halo is a big, big, big piece of it. Because you absolutely can learn some of the more tangible skills for sure at a lower cost alternative or even online in many cases, not always. And the experiential, maybe the less tangible skills, you also could learn through, you know, some people say, oh, well, it's just an important coming of age experience. You learn how to learn. And I'm like, I don't disagree with that. That happened to me in college. I had a great college experience.

I had the best friends, some of the best friends in my life. I met my wife in college. But I could imagine other coming-of-age experiences that are just as powerful. The military is one. I could imagine traveling through Europe with a cohort of students while we get jobs and while we do online learning at the same time. That could be a pretty cool coming-of-age experience. I imagine doing internships and co-ops the entire time while I'm learning whether it's in person or online and getting work experience. I imagine doing internships and co-ops the entire time while I'm learning, whether it's in person or online and getting work experience. And if I'm able to have a cohort of people my own age, that could be a great coming of age experience. So, and you know, a not so

great coming of age experience that I've seen happen, including people in my own family is you have this great experience and then you hit reality. And then you're 21 years old. You're no longer living on the well-groomed country club of the fancy university you attended. You have $200,000 of debt or more. And you realize that when you're in that economic seminar at the Ivy League school, and they treat you like you're going to be the Federal Reserve Chairman, that's not how the world is treating you now. You're having trouble getting that job in economics, or if you are, it's not paying you enough to pontificate about interest rates and things like that. So, you know, I think we have to think a little bit more holistically outside of even just those four years.

So why did you build a brick and mortar school? You're making such a massive difference across the planet. And before, one more question about, before we move on to that is that is more flattering is that there's a professional surfer and the family that I was spending some time with, it was about eight years ago. And, um, they just had their newborn. I said, you know, what are you going to do? Because they travel all over the world for competitions. And they said, we're not doing school. Our kids are going to be on our hips. We're going to travel the world.

And I don't know, Mike, have you heard of this thing called Khan Academy? It's pretty cool. And so I don't know if you would have that feedback that elite athletes are making that choice to kind of substitute traditional education for, you know, for your resource. But all that being said is why did you want to go brick and mortar? Khan Academy and other sister organizations and partners, we have another thing called schoolhouse.world, which gives people free tutoring. It's another not-for-profit. But can we create all the pieces where your surfer friend actually can do what they just described, like travel the world, but all of, there's essentially the components of school are available on demand in the cloud, so to speak. But that, I don't think we're going to be a mainstream use case and, you know, I'm doing what I'm doing because I want, I want the whole world to change. I want the people who have access to school for that school to be that much better and

personalized and actually not for kids not to fall through the cracks and all the associated stress and mental health issues and self-esteem issues. And I also want, I want Khan Academy and the, the related organizations to be kind of like the shadow school system, the strategic education reserve, the shadow safety net for the world, where if you don't have school, or if your school's crappy, you have, you have a safety net. But with all of that said, the reason why I want to start a physical school is I, I wanted to show how these pieces could be put into place holistically to create a new type of schooling. I wrote a book, One World Schoolhouse, back in 2012. The last third of the

book was, hey, given what we know about the world and mastery learning and personalization, what should the ideal school look like? And so it's one thing to write about. It's a whole other thing to put it into practice. And my oldest at that time was going to be a rising kindergartner. So I was a little bit, Hey, I can't preach all this stuff about mastery learning and personalization and kids being able to plot their own plat path and have autonomy and then not have my own child do that. And I generally believe it would be better for them. So I wanted my, my son to have that in my, all my kids to have that. And so, yeah, we, we started to school and I I've always told the team at the school, I don't, I don't work there day to day, but I'm the chair of the school and it's downstairs from my office.

You know, this school has a, it has a double, you know, most people talk about double bottom line. They talk about a for-profit bottom line and a social one, but this one has a double social bottom line. One is, obviously, you have to serve the students and the families who have had the confidence to try an experimental school. You have to make sure they have a great experience and are prepared for the world more than most students anywhere. And the second one is we have to show that there's another way of doing things that will, over time, change the way everyone does things. So that's why we started Khan Lab School. Well, how can people find out about it? Where can they go? And where would you want to direct people to? Would you want to direct them to the online resource? Or would you want to direct them

to the in-person school right now? Well, everyone should check out the online resources because it's accessible and useful for everyone. Most people or their children are going to a traditional school, but to have Khan Academy, to fill in any gaps, to be that on-demand personal tutor. And now we actually offer free tutoring at schoolhouse.world as well. And the way we do it is we leverage volunteerships, but these are high quality vetted tutors. There's on-demand homework help,

live homework help from real human beings on places like schoolhouse.world. I think this is useful for anyone, but obviously this is also useful for people who need to learn whole subjects on their own. People like your surfer friend, homeschoolers, kids who want to do credit recovery, kids, you know, people who are going back to college and forgot some stuff. There's a lot of people in the military using us in that way. But, but, you know, what above and beyond that, if people are really interested in going a little bit deeper than leveraging Khan Academy and schoolhouse.world, if they don't live in near Mountain View, California, we just started a virtual high school in partnership

with Arizona State University called the Khan World School. It's free actually to anyone in the state of Arizona because it's leveraging, uh, Arizona State University has a online charter. So it's a free school to anyone in Arizona and it is relatively low cost compared to similar alternatives. It's $9,000, $10,000 a year if you're outside of Arizona to go there. If you live in Mountain View, yeah, check out Con Lab School. And this is a small school where it's actually i i felt bad

because we've had to stop you know it's eight years ago it was a powerpoint presentation i was convincing people to come now we're unfortunately we're turning a lot of people away because we're trying to stay pretty small and pretty nimble but we are trying to share our methods our processes there might be more con labs within other cities we're looking at you know people are listening, want to be that social entrepreneur, want to start either a con lab school or a school based on the similar principles. We'd be happy to talk to you. Sal, I love this conversation. Thank you for what you've created in the world, your commitment to leading with passion and purpose and kindness and benevolence. And I think that you have made the world a better place. So thank you for, you know, this conversation, what you've done across the planet.

No, thanks so much. Thanks for having me, Michael. Yeah. Okay. All the best to you. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're

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