In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Sal Khan CEO & Founder of Khan Academy: Personalized education, AI and the drive to learn

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

In this bonus episode, Sal talks about how he revolutionized global education with his innovative approach to learning. His videos have educated millions across the globe. Sal also shares his journey from hedge funds to educational philanthropy and discusses the transformative power of AI in education.The production team on this episode were PLAN-B's Pål Huuse and Niklas Figenschau Johansen. Background research were done by Sigurd Brekke and Isabelle Karlsson.Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone and welcome to In Good Company and today we are thrilled to have a bonus episode with Sal Khan, the visionary founder of Khan Academy. Now we are a lot of people who have to thank Khan for all his help with our homework and learning, including on behalf of my own children. So it's a pleasure to have you here. You have really revolutionized education. Thanks for having me. And also, Sal, it's kind of fun to have somebody else on the podcast who has a bit of a background in a hedge fund, because you're the first one, actually. Okay, we're hedge fund refugees. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Now, I just think it's such a lovely story, the way you went from a hedge fund to starting Khan Academy. Would you mind just recapping in a few words how you got started on this? Yeah, you go back to 2004. I was a year out of business school. My original background was in tech, but I go to business school. I end up at a very small hedge fund in Boston. A year out of business school. My original background was in tech, but I go to business school. I end up at a very small hedge fund in Boston. A year out of business school, I get married in New Jersey. I was born and raised in New Orleans.

My family comes from my wedding in New Jersey and then comes and spends time with me in Boston and just comes out of conversation that my 12-year-old cousin, Nadia, who was staying with us, was having trouble in math. So I offered to tutor her when she went back to New Orleans. She agreed. And the tutoring worked, long story short. And that same Nadia who was struggling with unit conversion in seventh grade by that summer was taking calculus classes at the University of New Orleans. So 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 after work every day. Obviously, this was just a hobby. And I saw a common pattern

that they were struggling because they had gaps in their knowledge. They needed to review things. They needed to refresh things. So in 2005, I started writing software for them. Once again, it's a family hobby, but I called it Khan Academy. And that software would give them practice problems. And for me as their tutor to keep track of it, I didn't have videos at the time. Then in 2006, a friend suggested that I make YouTube videos for my cousins to help scale my lessons.

Cause I actually was having trouble scheduling with 10, 15 cousins. And I felt like I was repeating the same thing over and over again. And so I started making those videos and my cousins famously told me that they liked me better on YouTube than in person. And what they were saying, I think, is they liked having an on-demand version.

There was no shame that they had to review something from a few years earlier. They could watch it in the middle of the night if that's when they were working on the problems. They still appreciated having me check in on them, et cetera. And by 2008, 2009, there were about 50 to 100,000 folks using the videos and the software. I actually had to turn off the access to the software because it was overwhelming my web hosting. And that's when I, in 2008, I set it up as a nonprofit. At the time, I didn't think I was going to quit my hedge fund job. I actually liked my hedge fund job, but I set it up as a nonprofit with a mission, free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

And then by 2009, I had trouble focusing on my hedge fund job because I was getting letters from all over the world. I was just waiting to get home to work on the next video or to write the next software module. And so that's when I quit my day job. My wife and I looked at our finances and we said, okay, maybe I could do this for a year, live off of savings a bit.

And that first year was tough. Whenever you try to start anything, you have a maybe delusionally optimistic view of maybe people will come and support it. But it took a little while. But by fall of 2010, we got our first significant philanthropic support. Amazing. And fast forward to now, how many people do you help? Oh, well, you know, it depends how you account for it.

I think our registered users is 160 or 170 million registered users now. I think if you counted it by lesson views, it's in the billions. If you count it by learning minutes per year, that's also in the, I think it's on the order of 10 billion. Per year, that's also in the, I think it's on the order of 10 billion. But in the beginning, when it was slower, what kept you motivated? Because I think it's interesting, you know, successful companies such as NVIDIA, you know, nearly went under a few times.

Spotify nearly went under a few times. What kept you motivated through all this? Just me being able to connect with my family and them being able to accelerate in math or make sure that they have confidence in science or whatever they're doing, that was worth it for me, very much worth it. And, but once it started to getting out there and people who are not my cousins started using it and they started sending me notes, that note was like my pick me up of the morning. It still is.

We still get letters at Khan Academy. And the thing that, you know, every, I love my job, but there's good days, bad days. And, but whenever I read those letters from people all over the world saying how, you know, some of them are just simple thank yous, like, hey, you helped me pass this exam or that exam. But some of them are pretty emotional where they're talking about how they had no self-esteem in some topic. They, you know, people thought that they were dumb their whole life. Then they went some other career track or they joined this or that. And then they found Khan Academy and then they started working at their own time and

pace. They discovered a love for this subject and then they go back to college or now they're getting a PhD in something. When you get letters like that from people you don't know all over the world, it's incredibly motivating. And so that, you know, the hardest point was probably that year from fall of 2009 to fall of 2010, where I had quit my day job. We were digging into our savings. My wife was still in training to be a doctor. Our first child had been born. You could imagine, I had given up a very good job that was paying very well.

That was, you know, three or four months into that, it was very stressful. And whenever I was tempted to refresh my resume and apply for another finance job, I would look at these letters. I was like, no, it's something here. And I did tell myself, if I didn't get any real philanthropic funding in the next year,

I wouldn't give up the project. I would go back to work so I could support myself and my family, but I would keep working on it as a hobby. And maybe the timing just wasn't right. So I did want to make it unkillable because I felt in my heart of hearts that there was something there. What went through your head when you were thinking, okay, I'm either going to work in a hedge fund, make a lot of money, or I'm going to start this philanthropic venture

and really help the world? What went through your head? It's interesting. When I came out of business, as I mentioned, business school was a little bit of like, what am I going to do with my lifetime? And while there, I had no experience in finance before that. And once I was there, I took a class in capital markets, which was pretty math heavy. But I was fascinated because it had a math aspect to it, but it also had a very historical, human psychological aspects to it. You really have to understand how the world works.

And I remember asking the professor there, hey, I love this class. What should I do? And he's like, oh, you should work at a hedge fund. And I said, well, that sounds great. What's a hedge fund? And we explained, it's an investment firm, but they have more flexibility and they can do more creative things than say a mutual fund. And so I was drawn to that career because of the intellectual journey that it seemed to have.

And I was so naive. I started asking some friends in finance. I said, hey, do hedge funds pay well? And they said, yeah. And I said, about how much? And once I learned that, I still had some debt from undergrad, and then I had about $120,000 of debt from business school. I said, I did not grow up, I think my family, I grew up in a single mother household at best,

I would call us a lower middle class at best. I was like, okay, I need to pay off this debt, save some money and, you know, getting a down payment on a house eventually help maybe help support family, et cetera. And it was intellectually stimulating. So that's what drove me down the hedge fund path. But my, my wife at that time, my fiance always used to give me a little bit of grief about it. She's like, you know, people like you, you have this education, you have all of these skills, and you're just using it to make investments. I was like, well, you know, the world needs hedge funds. It helps price discovery and liquidity and all of this kind of stuff. I'll tell you, Sal, I've heard exactly the same thing.

I'm really glad you saw the light. Now, when did you realize that this was really going to be big? We all remember, or many of us remember, what was happening in 2008 and 2009. You have the financial crisis. And I was already making videos for my cousins on algebra and physics and SAT prep. videos from my cousins on algebra and physics and SAT prep. And then I saw that people did not understand the difference between insolvency and illiquidity. They did not understand what a credit default swap is or what a mortgage-backed security. And these things that historically were kind of exotic things that people in high finance would know were now on the headlines in the newspaper

or on the news. And so I started making videos on how does the Federal Reserve work? What does a financial contagion look like? What's a mortgage-backed security, credit default swap, et cetera, et cetera. And it turns out that the mainstream press, I started getting letters from the mainstream outlets saying, hey, we're watching your videos before we're reporting on the financial crisis.

And then the first national publicity or international publicity that Khan Academy got had nothing to do with academic subjects. It was CNN brought me on to talk about the financial crisis for 15 minutes straight on the day that I think, you know, the market tanked by like 4% that day or 5%. But that was a signal that to me that, look, even though what I was, you know, now it's

become mainstream for people to do something on YouTube and to get a lot of attention and even make a living. In 2008, 2009, that was not a mainstream thing, especially because I wasn't doing dance videos. I was doing fairly, you know, I was explaining credit default swaps. But that, you know, when you get that type of attention for it, I was like, okay, there's something here. And then that helped bring even more attention and word of mouth to what was happening on the math and the science and all of the other subjects we were doing. I'm sorry, there's something with this tutoring, this kind of detail help that you talk about as the two sigma, well, two sigma problem, but also two sigma opportunity.

What exactly do you mean by that? opportunity. What exactly do you mean by that? Yeah. Well, I think people have always intuitively thought that, hey, the best education is going to come if you have a lot of attention, if you have a one-on-one tutor, or if you even have an army of tutors. If we think about throughout history, what princes and kings and future emperors got as their education, they did not sit in a class of 30 students and someone did not just lecture to them. And every now and then they took a test. And if they happened to fail the test, the class just moves on to the next subject. Young Alexander the Great, he wasn't Alexander the Great at that time. And I guess it's debatable whether he was great at this point, but young Alexander back, what, 300

something BC, his tutor was Aristotle. And I am guessing that if Aristotle said, okay, this kid's going to be emperor one day, if he's struggling with military strategy, I'm not just going to give him a C and move on. I'm going to work with him and make sure he with military strategy, I'm not just going to give him a C and move on. I'm going to work with him and make sure he understands military strategy. If he's struggling with the accounting for the nation or for the empire, he needs to understand that in order for him to govern for his future. So young Alexander was getting personalized tutoring, personalized teaching from Aristotle. You fast

forward to about, let's call it 300 years ago, a very utopian idea of mass public education. It started in some of these first countries to industrialize, you know, what is now Germany, the UK, the United States, Japan were the first countries to say, hey, we should have mass public education. But they had to make a compromise. They said, well, we can't afford to give everyone an Aristotle. We're going to use the tools of the industrial revolution. We're gonna batch students together,

move them at a set pace. We're gonna create some standards. We're gonna create assessments that measure. And we don't need everyone to master quantum physics or calculus, they didn't know about quantum physics back then. We don't need everyone to master quantum physics or calculus. They didn't know about quantum physics back then. We don't need everyone to be able to become a professor. So we'll just sort people. We'll just measure the product.

And at certain decision points, certain product is really retaining the knowledge. And those are the people who are going to go into the knowledge economy. And then certain people are in the middle. Well, those people can kind of be the managers of the factories. And then there's certain people who are struggling, and those could be the less skilled labor that we need for the industrial revolution.

And do you feel that's pretty much how society still works? Yeah. I mean, that's the system that we've taken for granted, that we just assume is how the world works for the last 300 years. But we know today that it's not okay for only 5% or 10% of folks to really be able to participate in the knowledge economy, that the knowledge economy is booming, and that because of AI and robotics, everything else actually might really shrink in the next, let's call it 10 or 20 years. And the good news is, is that we do now have tools that we don't have to make the same compromises

that we had in the industrial age. And you allude to the two sigma study, Benjamin Bloom, this is back in 1984. He wrote this paper. It's probably the most cited paper on tutoring and mastery learning. And mastery learning is just this idea. If you haven't learned it yet, keep working on it.

That's all mastery learning is. Don't move on. Or you can move on, but come back and fill in that gap. And he argues in that paper, and he has some data to back it up, that you could get a two standard deviation improvement by having one-on-one tutoring in a mastery framework. Now, since then, people have debated,

is it two standard deviations? Is it less? But generally speaking, there's a large evidence pool that more personalization one-on-one is good for students. It has an effect. But he framed that paper as a problem because he's like, well, this is nice, but how are you going to scale that?

Well, if you think about what Khan Academy has been doing, even before we talk about things like generative AI, I was trying to scale myself as a one-on-one tutor. And the first thing I did is I created some of those personalized exercises. Then I created dashboards for myself to monitor my students, my cousins, so that I could be more personalized with them when I got on the phone. I started making on-demand video.

It's not the same as a one-on-one tutor, but it has aspects of it. If my cousins were stuck in the middle of the night, they could get that on-demand video. It's not the same as a one-on-one tutor, but it has aspects of it. If my cousins were stuck in the middle of the night, they could get that on-demand help. And I was making these short five, 10 minute videos. So it was almost like, and there was a library of hundreds and now thousands of them that whatever your question is, you can click on that video. And now with AI, we can potentially go even further. So that's always been a little bit of the motivation in hindsight that how do we scale what a one-on-one tutor would do, what I was doing with Nadia. When we look at some of the progress that has happened, why hasn't high quality education worked out properly? I mean, there was a moment here where we had this Mongolian shepherd story, a 15-year-old aced the MIT entrance exam, and he

was just like, wow, everybody from the whole world can really make it. But we haven't got so many Mongolians, you know, at top universities as we had thought. So why has that not happened? So there's two narratives here. Actually, to some degree, it has happened. But the numbers aren't so large that you're seeing it move the entire distribution. One of the big changes, and we get letters to this effect

almost on a daily basis. In fact, another story from Mongolia, we had a young orphan girl, you know, she wrote me a letter. I didn't know who she was. I assume she's middle class. But then she says that some volunteers were set up computer lab in her orphanage in Mongolia, speaking of Mongolia, and she got hooked on Khan Academy. And then that allowed her not just only to get her degree,

but she then became the top creator of content in the Mongolian language for Khan Academy. Another young woman in Afghanistan, Taliban keeps her from going to school. She's actually, her name is Sola. She just wrote a book about it, but when she couldn't go to school, an uncle introduces her to Khan Academy. She was lucky enough to at least have an internet connection. She's

middle-class family. She uses that to self-educate herself, starting at age, I think she was about 12 years old, by 16 or 17. This is all she's doing for two hours a day when she's not doing her chores. And she decides she wants to become a quantum researcher in the United States. And so she lies to her parents to go to Pakistan to take the SAT because it wasn't administered in the US. She does shockingly well. She's, for the most part, educated only on Khan Academy. And that's when I found out about her.

I try to figure out what colleges will take her without any formal education. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times writes about her. And then she was able to get a visa. ASU takes her. She rocks the physics department there. Now she's actually a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University. So these stories are out there and we get a letter kind of like this on a weekly, monthly basis. I just, we just got one last week of a young person in the UK. They had a child at a young age, dropped out, ended up becoming a construction worker, found Khan Academy, got hooked on it, just started talking to everyone they could find about

physics and chemistry. And their manager said, hey, if you don't go to college, I'm going to fire you because you're just boring all of us talking about physics and chemistry all day. And this person is now, you know, first of all, met their life partner in college. They graduated, you know, it sounds like straight A's and now they're entering a PhD program in biochemistry. So this is out there. So that's one story that for those who are reasonably motivated, and I'm not necessarily high achieving

because this last example was someone that the system was telling was not achieving, but if they're motivated, and that motivation might kick in at different stages of life, but if they're motivated and they at least have access to a internet connection, a computer, an awareness of Khan Academy, and other tools, there's MOOCs and other things,

we are seeing a little bit of a mini revolution of these people who would have otherwise been lost. Now, for better or for worse, that group of people that I just described is a small minority of the broader population. And so I think there's two tasks. One is how do we lower, how do we make it even easier and easier to do what these people just did so that you don't have to have quite their determination to be able to pull it off?

And then I think the other element is there are just a lot of learners and I don't think they're inherently demotivated, but I think something has happened to them over the years where they have just given up. And so I think there needs to be systems to re-engage them. And I think that's primarily going to happen through the traditional school system. And so that's where we're working to do that. AI. You did a great TED Talk on how AI is going to change education. Tell us about it.

You know, AI has always been of interest to us at Khan Academy. Well before this latest generative AI revolution, obviously AI, we've thought about, hey, it could be used to inform recommended activities for students, et cetera, et cetera. And we have experimented with that at Khan Academy over the years. Summer of 2022, OpenAI, Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, they reach out to me. They say, hey, we're about to finish training our next generation model, which would end up being GPT-4. We think this is going to be really interesting for a lot of people, but it also might be a little bit jarring because it's going to be quite powerful. We want to launch with and partner with organizations that people trust that can show socially positive use cases of it. And by their own words, Khan Academy was the first organization they thought of.

And first time you saw it and saw what it could do, what did you think? Yeah, I went into that meeting very skeptical because I had kept track of GPT-2, GPT-3. I thought they were cool, super fascinating, but they were like, they were good at writing things that sounded thoughtful, but when you really tried to read it, you're like, this is meaningless, or it's really not, it doesn't really have a good handle on the information. It doesn't seem intelligent. But when that first, when they, you know, they essentially shared their screen with us, and this was months before ChatGPT existed. And ChatGPT, when it launched, was based on GPT 3.5. Here was GPT-4. And they showed me a biology question. And they said, Sal, what's the answer here? And I read it. I'm like, okay, the answer is C, osmosis. And they said, okay. And then they asked the AI.

The AI said, C. I'm like, okay, maybe it got lucky. I said, ask it to explain why. And explained it. Very good explanation. Perfect explanation. I'm like, okay, this is interesting. I said, explain why the other choices aren't right.

Very good explanations. Now I'm getting goosebumps. And I said, have it write another question like this. It did it. I'm like, uh-oh. And then I said, have it write 10 more questions like this. It did it. Now I'm like, okay, this is like the world. I'm in a science fiction book. Am I dreaming right now? And they said, hey, would you like access to it? I'm like, yes, please. access to it. I'm like, yes, please. And so, you know, we signed all the NDAs and everything. And so we got myself, our chief learning officer, our CTO got access to it that weekend. We couldn't sleep. And you could imagine it was, I have trouble keeping secrets. I'm like an open book on like everything. And like, I felt like the three of us had like the biggest secret on the planet no one else knew about, you know, those were. But now you're integrated in what you call Kanmigo, right? Which is like an AI-powered tutor.

So what can this do? Yeah, so as we started experimenting with it, we started realizing that especially this next generation of frontier model like GPT-4, they're capable of really taking on personas and roles in ways that no other previous model could. And it's not just pretend. They really could do the things that a strong tutor would do,

a strong teaching assistant, a strong coach or guidance counselor might do. And so we immediately saw the potential like, hey, this could be that tutor for every child and actually a teaching assistant for every teacher, helping them do things like develop lesson plans or understand what's going on with their students. But we also realize there's a lot of fears here. How do you have a 12-year-old use an AI?

And what if they have a weird conversation, inappropriate conversation, an unsafe conversation? What if they use it to cheat? What if, how do we make sure there's data privacy safeguards, et cetera? So we were having these debates and we decided, look, we can't shy away from this. Let's build this, but let's turn all of those fears and risks into features. So let's make it so it's transparent to teachers.

Let's make it so that another AI is monitoring. If it notices anything going funny, it'll shut down the conversation and actively notify teachers. We have all sorts of other guardrails on it. It won't cheat. It's more of a Socratic tutor, but it will nudge you forward with leading questions.

And so that's what we launched with Conmigo. We launched alongside the GPT-4 launch back in March of 2023. And we launched it as a pilot and it still in a lot of ways is a pilot, but the response has been more positive, and people are ramping into it much faster than I would have expected. I could speak for an hour about all the features we're hoping to add in the next year. But a lot's happening there.

Yeah, I would recommend everybody to listen to your TED Talk on AI in education. But in terms of the general educational system, how should they go about applying AI or not? Well, they definitely can't ignore it. This is going to be a key skill going forward already in almost every role. At the same time, I completely understand where educators, why they banned chat GPT, because it's not made for education. It can be used to cheat. It did not put as many safeguards. It's not even allowed for under 18 users, although I'm sure a lot of under 18 folks have said they're 18 and are using it.

And so the important thing is to use these tools in an environment that is one, has all the right guardrails for education. And you're not using a tool for the sake of it. If we want to save teachers time on grading, on lesson planning, et cetera, they should be using a tool like Conmigo. So it's really about embracing the underlying technology, but using it in a way that is thoughtful and purpose-built for education.

If you got $1 billion now, how would you spend it to improve education? If I had a billion dollars, it's a fun question. I would accelerate the, you know, right now Khan Academy's budget is around 75. It's probably going to be about $80 million next year. And every time I say that, because I have to raise a lot of that money philanthropically, I remind my, I tell donors, hey I have to raise a lot of that money philanthropically, I remind my, I tell donors, hey, that's just the budget of a large high school in the US. And, you know, we're educating a lot of folks

and reaching a lot of folks. But I would probably take another 30 to 40 million a year and further accelerate a lot of the content and software and product development we're doing. Our goal has always been, even before AI, to cover all of the core academic subjects and grades. We're close already, but I would go, and that's from pre-K through the core of college.

So I would use some of that to accelerate into even more subject areas. We already have math. We already have a pretty comprehensive. I would go even further into college. Science, we're quite comprehensive. I'd go even further into college. Science, we're quite comprehensive. I'd go even further into sophomore, junior level college. We're starting to have a pretty robust humanities

and English language arts offering. I would try to accelerate that. And then on the AI front, yeah, I would use a lot of those resources to just accelerate it that much more. But, you know, with that type of resources, I would also probably create national or international systems around credentialing where, you know, the tools exist now where you

can learn a lot on your own or with support and those tools. And then you can even prove that you know it, but the legacy systems don't fully recognize it yet. And so, you know, I've told people if I was secretary of education or minister of education for any country, the first thing I would do is create a competency-based set of assessments that if anyone did it, these count as good or better than any university,

any high school, any graduate program. And then you allow the world to create resources, organizations like Khan Academy to create resources to prepare people for those. Some people could use the Khan Academy, like if you think about this young Afghani girl, some people like her could use the Khan Academy resources alone to prepare and then take these assessments and then they have a degree that's better than any degree. But if a lot of students would need more supports, well, then that's where the traditional school system could use Khan

Academy plus all of the in-person supports to actually support these students more. So that's where I would put a lot of resources. I still don't think that would get us fully to a billion dollars, but then maybe I would create a new type of university that is much lower cost and much more hands-on and gives exposure to more kids. The credentials element you talked about, is anybody working on creating such a thing? You know, there's been, I would say, small-scale badging initiatives type of things, but I don't think anyone has yet tackled it from a, like, we don't want to make this like just a, you got, you know, you took a MOOC course and you got a badge and now you go from being a general computer scientist to

a data scientist. That exists already. And that's great that that exists, that pathway. But we don't have a pathway right now that says, hey, this is just as good as Harvard if you do this. You know, right now in the US, there's all of these debates about, you know, you have limited seats at these top universities. And so it's these debates between equity and merit. You know, do you just take the top 2,000 kids at Harvard every year,

or do you make sure it represents the population, et cetera, et cetera. But then there's questions about, is it merit-based or is it quota? So people are getting, they're politically charged. And, you know, I've told many university presidents, I was like, look, this is a false tension. The real issue why you're, why you're having to do this game is because you cost too much and you don't have enough capacity. If, if you could bring the cost down, so it's almost free, like the actual cost is almost free.

It doesn't have to have massive government subsidy. And you make it so that any student who's capable of doing the work can do the work. Then anyone who wants to do it at any age can do it. And I think, you know, if I had my druthers over the next 10 years, that will exist. And I am pitching that to folks every now and then. Do you think AI will increase or decrease inequality in the world? I'm not sure. I think there's two trends that are going to happen. I think from a developing your potential point of view, I do think AI is going to improve equality. And even though right now, like in Silicon Valley, in my friend circle, everyone I know is super AI savvy,

including their kids, including their seven-year-olds. They already know how to prompt and they already know how to use these tools. They're already creating videos on these generative AI apps and they're using them for their school projects. And so in the short term, these kids and these families have a huge advantage. But what's happening, I would say, in the medium to long-term

is that these families have always had a huge advantage. If their kids are struggling, they hire tutors for their kids and paid $50 an hour, $100 an hour. When their kids apply to college, they hire coaches for their kids. These families themselves are highly educated and oftentimes have more flexibility for travel and to tutor their kids themselves. They know how the system works. I mean, these are all things, you know, I know how the system works. And so my kids are going to have that advantage. Now, if you bring in an AI in, the AI overnight is not going to completely level

that playing field, but it's going to allow, let's call it the high school version of me that did not have those advantages to be able to tap in to more opportunity, to be able to learn things faster, to be able to have some, you know, my guidance counselor in high school was great, but he had no experience. There were 300 students for every guidance counselor. So I had like, you know, my guidance counselor in high school is great, but he had no experience. There were 300 students for every guidance counselor. So I had like, you know, half an hour with him once a month or something. And he had no experience with, you know, I wanted to apply to MIT. No one in my school had ever gotten into MIT. So he had no context there. Now we have an activity on Conmigo where you can talk to the AI and we've had some of the top

we have an activity on Conmigo where you can talk to the AI and we've had some of the top college coaches in the country help work with that AI to make sure that it's giving the best advice. It's really almost indistinguishable from what a top college advisor would now give. So that starts to level the playing field. And over time it's going to get better. In educated markets. In education. Yeah. And in markets which are pretty well off. What about then Africa and other less developed markets? Well, what happens is that, and it's not just AI, it's even if you think about tools like Khan Academy before AI with videos and exercises, it takes the problem of education and says, you know, before the inequalities like, okay,

if you're in this rural village in India or Africa, to have the same education as Sal's kids in Mountain View, California, all right, you're going to have to find a faculty. And is there anyone even in the village who can teach algebra or calculus or physics? You're going to have to find a facility. You're going to have to maybe be flexible around these kids might have other family responsibilities. Like it was an expensive proposition and the world has been trying to do it for hundreds of years and frankly, hasn't been able to pull it off. With tools like Khan Academy,

and especially as you start introducing the AI, the problem becomes much more of, hey, can we get people devices and internet access? At least to start. I'm not saying that that's equivalent to a full school, but at least it raises the floor pretty dramatically. And then if you wanna create a school, the problem is no longer you need to find someone who's a master of

physics. You just have to create a nice, safe environment, have access to resources. The adults in the room just have to motivate, keep the kids motivated and on task, but then they could use some of these tools for some of the content expertise. It's great if those adults have it, but they don't have to have it. So I think it starts to level the playing field there. Once again, not going to completely level it, but it's going to be more level than it is today. The place where I'm most worried about AI

unleveling the playing field, and we've to some degree seen this trend over the last 30, 40 years with technology generally, is for those who know how to use these tools, it massively improves productivity. But what it does is it concentrates that productivity in a smaller and smaller group of people. What used to take, you know, 50 years ago,

if I told you I have a, even if you adjust for inflation, if you have the equivalent of a billion dollar company today, people would assume that company must have a hundred thousand employees. When WhatsApp sold to Meta for $18 billion, it had 18 employees. And this is before AI.

They weren't even using, you know, coding co-pilots to write that code, but 18 employees were able to create an $18 billion company. I think over the next 10, 15 years, you're going to see five 10-person companies using AI create billions of dollars in value. Now that could be overall good for society.

It's going to create tools that increase productivity or entertainment or whatever, but a lot of that wealth's going to accrue to a very small concentrated people. And if it used to take 100,000 people to do it, and now you're able to do it with 10 people, well, what happens to the other 99,990 people in terms of work? Now, there are some good utopian scenarios where it frees up resources for more human-centered work, for nursing, healthcare,

education, teaching. But then there's dystopian scenarios where these people get marginalized, destabilizes countries. Maybe you have to do mass redistribution and even mass redistribution, whatever people's views are on that, I don't think it's good for the people who get it because they lose their sense of purpose. They're like, well, I don't know what I'm contributing.

So I think this is something we have to tackle. And honestly, the best way to tackle it is is to let as many of those people as possible learn how to use these technologies and learn how to leverage them. Absolutely. Talking about smallish companies which achieve amazing things. I know about this company called Khan Academy. They got roughly 200 people and they're educating millions of people. Unbelievable. Now, how do you run the organization? What are your leadership principles? You know, I've never written them down,

but if I were to say, you know, what I implicitly like to happen is, you know, try to be as close to the users as possible. This is something I still do. I still make videos. I still, you know, one reason why I started a school, the school my kids go to is so that I can be close to learners and understand what they're, and teachers, and understand what their lives are like. A flat organization as much as possible. a flat organization as much as possible.

Right now, you know, there's, you know, one, we have direct lines of communication between me and any member of the organization, but, you know, there's only two levels of management at most, but even then it's fairly porous. So we try to do that. We try to keep pushing ourselves to avoid bureaucracy. You do need some processes as you grow and you scale to have drive alignment

and make sure things are happening as they should. But we're always questioning it. We're trying to have first principles thinking around like, do we need that meeting? Does it need to be run in that way? Are there ways that we could do this different so that we can get more scale and leverage? And you know what? One of the things I found, a lot of times people think about the size of an organization and it is true.

The main cost in organizations these days is salaries. But one of the reasons to keep an organization as small as possible isn't necessarily like cost savings. It's actually communication and being able to be nimble. an organization, I don't think there was any way that I would have been able to make this move into AI that we did. Even with 250 people, it wasn't easy. It's still, you know, we're not a speedboat. We're kind of a, I don't know, like a catamaran, maybe, like, you know, but we're not a cruise ship either. And that cruise ship was very hard to change or turn around when you realize that there's an iceberg if you don't turn around.

So I think in, you know, going forward, that's going to be even more important. It's not about saving money. Obviously, we are limited by resources because we raise primarily through philanthropy, but it's more about being able to stay nimble. If you personally were to do another degree, what would you do? Oh, if I were to do another degree, that's a good question. oh if i were to do another degree that's a good question um part of me you know when i went into college i i thought i wanted to be a theoretical physicist because i just wanted to understand the nature of reality um now i've kind of reached the conclusion i should just meditate my way there but

the theoretical physics is still is is still um an area that, you know, my oldest son is kind of almost caught up with me in terms of his math and science. And I said, OK, when you catch up with me, we're going to start studying quantum physics together so that I can, you know, I want to understand the frontiers of reality, of how we understand reality. want to understand the frontiers of reality, of how we understand reality. Do you think it's better to have one PhD or two master degrees? It depends what you're trying to do in the world. You should be doing it because you have a clear idea of why you're doing it. Now, saying that, I was the guy who just said, I went to business school not knowing what to do. I used that as a reason to figure out. And I think there are some

degree programs like MBAs that are, are good for just kind of figuring out what you want to do. But I knew I wanted to do something in industry. At least I thought I did. It's funny. The only class I, HB, Harvard doesn't fail you and anyone in the business school, but they tell you internally that you would have failed. The only class that I was very cynical about that I kind of got the equivalent of a failing grade was called social entrepreneurship. And it was because I was such a cynic in that class. You know, a lot of the cases we studied were, you know, someone's organizing a bicycle ride to cure some disease. And I remember speaking up in class and saying, well, that's not gonna cure the disease.

It's just a bicycle ride. How is that gonna cure the disease? And most of the money is going to fund all of the pageantry around the ride. So you could, and I later realized the professor organized that charity. So it was not good. But the, and I now have come around.

I now see the importance of those types of things because they bring awareness to, to an effort, but it is, there is an irony here. I go to business school, fail social entrepreneurship, and that's what I do now. What do you, what do you read these days? Oh, I, you know, I, I, I, for the most part, flip flop between hard science fiction and Victorian era classics. And, you know, all those, I just read Great Expectations. The first time I read it was in seventh grade. I hated it when it was forced on me in seventh grade.

They should not make seventh graders read that, especially seventh grade boys read that, unless they really want to. They shouldn't force anyone to do it. Cause you don't appreciate it. I read it just now. I'm like, this is the most amazing book. There's like so much wisdom and wit and it's hilarious and it's modern in so many ways. So I, you know, I, I flip flop between revisiting the great classics that I was forced to read in school and now I have, I can read it properly. So I love doing that. And then I, you know, and I read a lot of hard science fiction. I've always been fans of Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. And now I'm just making sure I'm reading all of their books.

I've read their most notable books, but now I'm reading all of them. How do you encourage adults and grownups to continue to learn for the rest of their lives? What's the key to it? Is it innate or is it something that can be encouraged? We get letters. I mean, tens of letters a day we get from folks saying, I thought I was bad at math. I just started doing 30, 40 minutes a week

just to keep my brain fresh. And I realized I love it. And a lot of them are like angry because they're now 30 or 40 years old. And they're like, I wish someone exposed me, exposed this to me this way when I was 12. So I would just say, just start learning. And it doesn't have to be through Khan Academy.

Obviously Khan Academy is there, but just reading, exploring. You know, a lot of these AI tools are fascinating to have conversations with. A Khanmigo, you can have a Socratic dialogue. You can get into debates. I personally really enjoy it when I have time to dig into a debate

that I'm dying to have, but I can't find someone to have with me. Well, it's been amazing to have a dialogue with you, Sal. And I have to say, I can't think of anybody who's done more for learning in the whole world. So

a big thank you on behalf of everybody, really. And you'll for sure pass that class in social entrepreneurship. So big congratulations, the real life class. It's been tremendous. If it's mastery learning based, maybe. A big thank you.

Keep it up and look forward to staying in touch. Great. Thanks for having me.