Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Sal Khan: Emotional Stress, Standardized Tests, & A New Approach to Education

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Salman “Sal” Khan, acclaimed educator and philanthropist describes his journey through the educational system and his plans to change it for the better. Originally an analyst at a hedge fund, Sal decided to leave his cushioned career in order to focus on his true passion, education. This is when https://www.khanacademy.org/ was born. Mayim and Sal discuss his vision of a world where everyone has the opportunity to receive individualized, compassionate education without the fear, stress, and anxiety of standardized tests and ranking systems. Mayim shares about her own experiences in the education system as a student and as a teacher to her children. Sal and Mayim discuss the “natural curiosity” of all human beings and comment on how the traditional education system has failed many students in many ways.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you really start peeling the onion, it's really what's going on in people's heads. The best way that I can think of, and I still can think of, that affects what goes on in people's heads is education. And education isn't just about learning how to factor quadratic or learning. Negative B plus or minus the square root of B squared minus four I see all over 2A. Exactly. I don't know what quadratics are. I got an MFA. Hi, I'm Ambialic, and welcome to my breakdown.

This is the place where I break things down so you don't have to. It's my ambiolic. We have a very down, she's going to break it down for you. Because you know she knows a thing or two. So now she's going to break down. We have a very exciting guest today. Today we're going to be breaking down, I guess education. We're talking to Sal Khan, the man who founded the Khan Academy.

I'll tell you about that in a minute. But first, my favorite solution to the quadratic equation, Jonathan Cohen. Hello, ma'am. Hello. Let's address the elephant in the room for those people. who are watching on Mime's YouTube channel. What?

We are not in matching outfits. We're not. Wait, that's not true. That's not true. We are, it is hoodie day. We are in parallel outfits.

Ooh. Not matching. We're drifting apart. No, parallel lines don't drift apart. Slowly. It starts with overlapping lines that become parallel and then they slowly drift apart.

That's not math. As Sal Khan could tell you. As we established later in this episode, I don't do math, So I get to make it up as I go. You do plenty of math. You're actually very good with numbers for someone who says that they're not good at math. I mean, I just never took calculus and sort of advanced.

How high did you get in math? 12th grade. Okay. Do you remember algebra? No. Yeah, well, yes, I do. Okay. Do you remember geometry?

Yep. Okay. Shapes. Yes, shapes. High school was not, we're not my best years. Oh, tell me what was going on in high school. A lot of family drama was happening in high school. I never fit into the school system at all.

I was diagnosed with a learning disability in second grade, which was a generalized learning disability. So I didn't think I was very good at school. I was always had a propensity to write, although I was fairly illiterate in that I, like, could speak stories. But if you, like, looked at my grammar or sentence structure, it was all over the place. My spelling was atrocious. And so I just kind of like went through school trying to do the creative things. I had a very good auditory memory. So anyone who spoke, like I could repeat and regurgitate any information that I heard auditorily.

But I couldn't break down text. I couldn't read through text. Math I was really actually quite good at until about grade nine. Then my brother had a crazy accident. My entire family was traumatized. And school just felt completely irrelevant. So I just didn't pay any attention. to it and I don't think I learned anything throughout high school.

That sounds like its own episode. A little random introduction to the education episode. I'm super into it. Usually you say like, you can go to our website at biallicbreakdown.com, but instead we got that. 20 episodes in. Before I follow up about everything, Jonathan just said, you can ask me anything. We answer questions here. And usually what I say when Miami kicks it to me is if you haven't already signed up and

subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcasting outlet, please do so and give us a five-star review because it helps us make more of these. Let's get back to your education. That's fascinating. One of the things that I've noticed about also you're highly articulate and you're very intelligent. You're very well-spoken and because you're Canadian, you're very calm. That's just masking all the anxiety inside.

It's funny because my mother, who mostly gets to know you just because of COVID, my mother mostly gets to know you through our podcast, so she always has questions, you know, about my co-pilot. And he seems so calm. He seems so even tempered. That's not how she talks. He seems so calm. That's how she talks.

He's so even tempered. Why can't you be more like him? I'm starting a Cod Academy class to how to be more like me. That would be more like Jonathan. No, what a lot of people don't know about you is you bounce around a lot. I do. Was this something you remember when you were a kid? I could not sit still at any age.

I had a very intense sugar habit from the time I was about, we'd have to call my parents to check. but I think it's like five or six. I remember Halloween was not a fun activity. It was like a day to work. Yeah. And you work to like fill multiple pillowcases with candy so that you could section them out over the rest of the year and keep your stash going.

This is actually a subject that I can't wait to get into here on the breakdown. Not today, but another day, you know, sugar addiction is a real problem for certain kids and certain adults. They're absolutely a science around it, but it's not like there's one sugar gene. but sugar is one thing that some people use. Other people use, I mean, they use it like a drug. Well, Eric Clapton said the first time he got high was five years old when he recognized that sugar could change the way he felt.

It is a drug, yeah. And to clarify, I don't think it's the sugar only that made me bounce around. I have very little sugar now. I still bounce around. I still like to pace and think. I like to be in a state of almost constant movement despite the fact that I do a ton of computer work and I have to sit in this chair.

even in this podcast I tried to get like a rocking chair which got vetoed it's too distracting I mean you're distracting enough as it is just swiveling here just swiveling well that's kind of one of the things that we're going to talk to um to sal about you know the differences in how we learn and for young people listening they might not be able to imagine that there was a time when there wasn't really a conversation about different kinds of learners so what happened for me was that my learning changed drastically when I got assistive technology that I could listen to books. Correct. Even now, the way you...

I consume everything through auditory mechanisms. Before there was audio books, because I'm old enough when, you know, audiobooks weren't really a thing. We used to subscribe to the Braille library, which would send us cassette tapes. After that, we graduated to a computer system that you could scan pages of books. We would cut the bindings off the back of the books, feed them into a scanner, and then we'd have a computer system read it to. Who's we?

Like me and the school that I went to that helped kids like me. And so there was a whole collection of kids who just needed different sets of tools. Fascinating. And we went there and I spent a year and a half there learning how to learn. I worked with a tutor who I worked with twice, three times a week, where I learned how to spell and how to write properly, which then led me to a graduate graduate degree in writing. And, you know, 10 years of writing, you know. 10 years of writing workshops, but, you know, I literally was, I left high school and I got into university and I have no idea how.

That's what they call it in Canada. We do call it that. We're going to be talking to Sal Khan. He is the founder and the chief executive officer of Khan Academy. Now, Khan Academy, wait for it. If you don't know what it is, and even if you are a person who's like, I don't need to know about education, you need to know about Sal Khan because he created a non-profit, a nonprofit. It's a non-profit. They provide free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

It started as a online math program, which my kids have used really their whole lives that they've been learning math. He's been profiled by 60 Minutes. He was on the cover of Forbes. He was recognized as one of times 100 most influential people in the world. He wrote a book called The One World Schoolhouse, Education Reimagined, and he outlined. his vision for the future of education. He also hosts a podcast, Home Room, which features interviews with notable folks from education, technology, finance, entertainment, and more. He holds three degrees from MIT. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School. What school was that again?

Harvard? I'd just like to hear you say it. Harvard. Harvard. One of the things that I really love about, Sal, is that when you hear these things, you'd think, like, oh, this is like a fancy, I'm sorry, this a fancy rich guy who, like, I'm going to start this. I'm going to start this. I'm going to do that. This is a person who literally, I mean, his story is really, it is a beautiful American immigrant story. And he literally started this as him and his cousin. Like, it started as him tutoring someone. He's literally the world's most famous tutor. And he just let it, he let it grow and continued to grow it. But a really fascinating story. We're not even going to do a word of the day. The word of the day is Sal Khan. Let's talk to Sal.

Thank you so much for being here. Hello. Hello, hello. It's really an honor to have you here and to get to speak to you again. I feel like we're old friends, you and me. We're old friends. And it's an honor to be here. And, you know, I definitely, I don't want to give away too much of, you know, how much I enjoyed blossom back in the day. I'll try to play it. I'm going to play it cool. It's still strange to me that the person who has essentially been, you know, honestly, responsible for the math education that my children have been able to receive is a Blossom fan. That's just never going to feel normal to me. You know, there's something about these characters that you grow up with.

You and Fred Savage were roughly all the same age. And, you know, you're going to be part of my persona, my existence. Is that why you created Khan Academy? Because you were like, Miami Alic, who played Blossom is going to have children and they need to learn math. Pretty much. I mean, I don't want to say that openly. It would look kind of weird, but yeah. It would contradict some other interviews.

It would contradicts the other interviews. You've been one of the people, I think, who has most successfully attempted to not only kind of transform the way we think about education, but speak so freely and openly about why and how that works. The reason that Jonathan and I thought it would be great to talk to you is because, you know, this is a podcast about mental health and mental wellness. And what we try and do is we try and take really every topic and find the mental health angle. And, you know, I was raised in the public school system of Los Angeles in the 70s. I'm part of the busing program of the 70s and 80s. Jonathan had a bit more of a private school flare to him. He's from Toronto.

Only because I just couldn't function in the public school system and that I didn't think I was getting any education whatsoever. So I went for little periods of time, tried to get catch up, went back into the public school system, again fell through the cracks. in any event, you know, we both feel that our education is linked to our mental wellness and always has been. My parents also were public school teachers for a combined 70 years. So I was raised with parents who were civil rights activists and, you know, the only white teachers in the schools that they taught in in Harlem and in the Bronx. And so I was raised that the education system really is an extension of the home.

and the wellness of children is determined not just by what access they have to academics, but the way that we care about their wellness and education is a component of that. So that's sort of what I'd love to really pick your brain about, but maybe you could tell us a little bit just about your story. You know, you very famously have three degrees from MIT, I believe. But maybe tell us a little bit about how you sort of, you know, got to the person we know of, know, when you entered, let's say, college or grad school. Yeah.

And, you know, I'm just on the point on mental health and education, it's amazing where people don't view them as almost the same thing. These are obviously both things that are concerned with the human mind. And we can talk a lot more about that. But, you know, to answer your question, I was born in Metery, Louisiana, which is the closest suburb of New Orleans. If you go to New Orleans and between the airport and the French quarter is Metery, you know, I ended up there.

A lot of people are surprised to see someone of South Asian descent. My family is Bengali, ethnically, which kind of straddles both the West Bengal and India and the country of Bangladesh. And, you know, it's U.S. immigration policy in 1965. There was a shortage of health care workers. And so there's actually the first time that the U.S. allowed immigration in significant amounts from non-European countries. And so my father, who did his med school in Bangladesh, was part of that first wave. You know, if you meet anyone in the U.S., who's roughly my age, who's South Asian. Probably their parents are doctors if they were born here.

And so he came to do his residency at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. And then in 71, he went back to South Asia, got my mom in an arranged marriage. They came back. In 73, my sister was born, 76, I was born. My parents ended up separating, which is actually very unusual for especially South Asians of that generation. So by the time I was two, my dad. And, you know, actually, I mean, going into the whole mental help, he was going through things. And, you know, so we never got to really know him.

I mean, my sister got to know him a little bit better, you know, but I never really did. So, you know, it was a very unusual situation where my mother was a, you know, raised us as a single mother, you know, but she was new to the country and, you know, trying to make ends meet in Metro Louisiana. And, you know, she did random things, a cashier at a convenience store. She used to be the woman that would release the chains from the vending machine, actually in the hospital where I was born at East Jefferson Hospital in Metery. So, you know, she just did a bunch of things like that. But, you know, I think for the most part I had a pretty interesting upbringing. Several of my mother's brothers ended up moving to New Orleans in their 20s. And, you know, the South Asian stereotype, at least of that generation, is like very serious people who are doctors and want to, and engineers and want to, you know, put a down payment on a house.

My uncles went to New Orleans because of the liberty, the liberation that was available in the 70s in New Orleans, especially compared to places where they grew up like India and Bangladesh and Pakistan and even Afghanistan, which was my grandfather was in the Foreign Service. So, you know, I had a very colorful childhood that you really can't pattern match almost to anyone. You know, in some ways I had a South Asian childhood. We would go to the gatherings and, you know, and say, and people would sing, you know, Indian music, but then we knew all of the diversity that New Orleans has. And, you know, some of my uncle started restaurants, other started, you know, food stores. And yeah, it's just been,

it was just a good upbringing. And, you know, to kind of get a little bit closer to, I guess, how I'm perceived, if you're talking about my degrees or what I do now is by high school, I started to get reasonably serious about my studies. My sister was always the precocious one, the quote, the smart one. That always gave me the benefit of the doubt with teachers. They're like, well, she's Farah's brother. There must be something there. And, you know, I joke about it, but early on I was in speech therapy, no one could understand what I was saying.

But because I was Farah's brother, they keep giving me shots. You know, we didn't have a lot of money. But my sister, after graduating from high school, got into Brown. And I remember saying, like, you're going to go to Brown? Have you seen the tuition there? And she's like, no, there's this thing called financial aid. And she explained the whole process. I'm like, wow, that's incredible.

And so that gave me the confidence to apply to MIT and finding a way that we we could afford it. And MIT was very generous there on financial aid. But yeah, I mean, that was kind of my journey at a headline, at a headline level. What's your sister's story? I'm just curious. Did she stay in academia or? Yeah. So, you know, this goes into a whole other narrative. I'm already fascinated by you. I want to know it all. It's, it's my sister was, you know, as I said, she was always like the star student. And in classic South Asian way, my mother projected a lot onto her.

And I remember when she graduated from high school, she applied to Brown, which is where she wanted to go. But, you know, almost through family pressure, there was a six-year medical program at LSU. And so she applied and she got in. And so my mom's like, you're going. Like, this is an opportunity you're going to take it. It caused tension. And then my sister went to Brown and she decided she did not want to become a doctor. And actually, she ended up going into alternative medicine.

And she became an acupuncture. Oh. Oh. But this whole, and then since then, she's, she's had some career transitions, but this is, this has been a, you know, a rift in the family. I'll just leave it there. Well, you showed her. As the younger sibling, I totally get it. Did you have a particular proficiency for math? Like, that was your thing? I would say I was a reasonably good student, always interested in math and elementary school. I would say by middle school, I started to appreciate that, hey, maybe I have some spikes here. You know, I used to, I, there were these things. things called academic games and these different math competitions, math counts. And I used to show up and, you know, I would do well. And I would do well.

You know, our school was not an academic powerhouse school. It was a decent school, but it was not an academic powerhouse school. And in Louisiana, there were a few academic powerhouse schools. And when I found myself for our team, you know, holding our own versus these, you know, the fancy academic powerhouse schools are in many cases starting to beat them, I started to say, hey, this is interesting. I also remember, you know, one of my mother's young. youngest brothers, he was studying at the University of New Orleans. And we were actually briefly

living with them after my parents separated. And I remember seeing him do his homework. And I was seven or eight years old. And I asked him, his name is Delshad Mamu means uncle. So I said, Delshad Mamu, what are you doing? And he's like, oh, this is my homework. I was like, what homework is this? What kind of math is this? And he said, this is calculus. I was like, well, what's calculus? He's like, well, I got to do it to become an engineer. And I was like, can you teach me calculus? And he's like, no, you're a little bit young to learn calculus right now. But I was like, but I want to become an engineer because he described what it meant. You build stuff.

You know, and he's like, well, look, you're going to learn calculus one day. But if you're going to become an engineer, you should go to MIT. And he just said it. He doesn't remember that moment, but it was like seared into my brain when I was eight seven. I didn't know what the M, the I or the T stood for. I didn't know where it was. But I remember thinking at that time, I wanted to do that. And so in middle school, high school, everyone goes through, you know, maybe I want to be a physicist.

Maybe I want to be an architect. If there was a brief time, I wanted to be a cartoonist. But that the thing that Dilshadman would always told me, plus the confidence that I was building going to these math competitions, started to make me think, hey, I want to do something that can leverage this, probably some kind of engineering. Or physics, I'm still fascinated by, but I always thought like, hey, that's the way to understand reality.

You're speaking to a neuroscientist. We think that's the way to understand reality. My MBELX breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine. Drink more water. There's no real data. There's no game plan. This has happened to me many, many times, especially on the perimenopause journey. That's why we're fascinated by what superpower is doing. They send a licensed professional to your

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help support the show. So you go to MIT. Were you then kind of hatching what became Khan Academy? Or were you kind of going about your business and your life thinking like, I'm going to be a professor. I'm going to be an engineer. What was kind of that phase of life like? I had always been drawn to both the subject matter, you know, and not just in math, but, you know, I've always been curious about a lot of things. And I did find myself even in high school enjoying peer tutoring other people, teaching other people things. You know, I remember my senior year, sometimes the teacher would allow me to be the teaching assistant. Oh, you were that guy. I was that guy, you know, and for certain teachers, they didn't, they probably found me annoying because I would like, well, there's another way to do that. But certain. teachers who I remember very fondly really embraced that. I remember Mr. Hernandez, Ms. Kennedy, who kind of started treating me as almost a colleague and giving me responsibility. And I always really enjoyed that. And so when I went to college, I continued to always be fascinated by this notion of education. I think everyone goes through

this existential, like, what's my purpose in life? And you look at the problems in the world, and you're like, maybe I need to solve one of these problems. And then no matter what problem I looked at, I would always say, well, at the end of the day, you know, whether you're looking at poverty, whether you're looking at, you know, equity issues, if you really start peeling the onion, it's really what's going on in people's heads. And the best way that I can think of, and I still can think of, that affects what goes on in people's heads is education. And education isn't just about learning how to factor quadratic or learning, you know,

how to have a interesting. Negative B plus or minus the square of B squared minus four I see all over two A. Exactly. It's not just. I don't know what quadratics are. I'm an arts degree kid. I got an MFA. We moved away from quadratics as quickly as possible.

I encourage you to a Khan Academy and learn it this evening. I would love that so much. You will feel empowered. I would. I would 100% would. Math is a language. I would like to learn that language. One, I'm serious about it.

Because the point I was making is when you learn that, it doesn't just give you that skill of a factoring of quadratic. It builds your critical thinking. it builds your, you know, it's not just on math, it's on the humanities as well. The more that you can read great books, have debates, it just improves your worldview, critical thinking. And then you're more likely to be a sound participant in a democracy, more empathetic with other people, more willing to, you know, since you feel purpose, pay it forward to other people. So I've always been fascinated by this.

Many times in college, I got drawn to this intersection of technology and education where I was like, you know, I remember one summer I got a job. Actually, my first job in college was, you know, I just went to, as part of my financial aid, I had to find a job. And so I went to the career office and, you know, I was looking at different stuff. Like, you know, you could be the person that like the cashier at the dining hall. And I was like, that's not that interesting. But there was this one job that was reading textbooks onto tape for other students on campus who had like, who were visually impaired. And I was like, that's a cool job.

And so I applied for that job. So actually a good chunk of my freshman year when I wasn't, you know, doing my regular school work, I would like open. up random people's textbooks and I would read the pages they told me to read onto cassette tapes. And then I would go to their dorm room and I would drop off their cassette tapes. So that was kind of my first, you know, Khan Academy-like thing. And then I got, you know, my second job there, there was actually the foreign language department at MIT was working on technology to help people learn German, which I don't know, but they needed someone to help them write the software.

So I ended up working with this German language group to write that. And then my fourth job is part of this work study. I was working on, on, actually I got a fellowship to work on math to help people teach, especially students with attention deficit disorder, ADHD to learn math. So I kept getting gravitated to this. And, you know, I remember thinking when I was like, what do I do with my life? Like, maybe I want to do a PhD, but I was never really attracted to how narrow sometimes PhDs can get. And I was like, if there's a such thing as a PhD in everything, you know, that's what I would want to do.

I had looked at becoming a school teacher and, you know, honestly just kind of South Asian, pragmatic, like, how are I going to pay off the debt? You know, especially in the late 90s when you could go work in tech and make six figures right out of college. So that's where I went. And then, you know, on my journey, whether I was working in tech, went to business school, ended up working as an analyst at a hedge fund, I would always tell my friends that I was pursuing this fairly, you know, practical tracks, which I was enjoying. I found it interesting. But my dream was one day if I can get the resources to start my own school. I always imagine how cool would it be to be a Dumbledore and kind of, you know, in my later half of my career, do that type of thing. And obviously, you know, things happened that I couldn't have predicted to fall into Khan Academy.

So when did Khan Academy actually start? When did you start it? Yeah, you know, this is the part. I mean, y'all are asking, some of the questions y'all asked, I hadn't, I had completely forgotten about that job. That's what we're here for. We will dredge up the things that you hadn't thought about and make you think about it. That's right. But, you know, this is the part of the story that is a lot of people know about. You know, in 2004, I was a year out of business school. I was just getting married. And my cousin, Nadia, from New Orleans, they were visiting me in Boston, came out of conversation.

She was being placed into a slower math track. I offered to tutor her remotely when she went back to New Orleans. She agreed. So I started tutoring her. And it worked well for her. Frankly, it was hard initially. She'd kind of given up on herself, especially her perception was that she's just not good at math. We got over that. She learned unit conversion, which was holding her back. Then, you know, I said I became something of a tiger cousin where I called her school. And I said, you know, I really think Nadia Ramon should be able to retake that placement exam from last year. They said, who are you?

I said, I'm her cousin. And surprisingly, that was kind of, it worked. And they led her. And then the same Nadia, who was put into kind of a slower math class, would then put into an advanced math track. And so I was hooked. I started tutoring her younger brothers. Word spreads in my family free tutoring is going on. And before I knew it, there were about 10, 15 cousins, family friends that I was working with every day after work for me.

And in the back of my mind, I was enjoying working with my family, connecting with them over distances. But in the back of my mind, I was like, you know, there could be something interesting here, right? You know, there's a methodology that seems to be working. So I started writing software where they can get practice, feedback, eyes or tutor, could keep track of it. That was the first Khan Academy in 2005, had no videos. then in 2006, you know, I was showing this off at a dinner party. I'm a super fun dinner party guest. And a friend, his name is Zuli Ramzan, give him credit.

The dinner was at his house. He's like, Sal, this is cool. This project you have with their cousins. How are you scaling your lessons? And I said, well, it's hard to do, Zuli, with 15 cousins, what I was doing with Just Nadia. And he said, why don't you record some of them as videos? You could use YouTube.

And I thought it was a horrible idea. I said YouTube is cats playing piano. It's not like real learning. But then, you know, I went home. that weekend and I kind of, you know, I got over the idea that it was his idea, not mine, and I gave it a shot. And, you know, I started telling my cousins, what would you want? I started making kind of worked examples for them, explaining things that I found myself having to repeat a lot when we got on the phone. And my cousins, after a few months,

said that they liked me better on YouTube than in person. And they were still enjoying having me in their lives and being able to dig deeper, but they were also enjoying having me on demand in the middle of the night, pause, repeat, no statement. if you have to review something from three years ago. And it was on YouTube. And I just happened to make it public and other people were using it. And so, you know, as that started to grow, and I had a day job the whole time. This was 2006 now.

Over the next three years or so, it just more and more people started to use it. It started to get a little bit of publicity. And I frankly just had trouble focusing on my day job. So it was 2009. 2008 I incorporated it as a nonprofit. And then 2009, I quit my J job in the hope that, you know, surely the world will recognize the social return of something like this. But obviously, you know, it took a year, a very hard year. We were living off a savings. Our first child had been born. But by 2010,

some, you know, serious people, real foundations had stepped up to allow us to become a real organization. What I love is that it was born out of your cousin having given up on herself. And someone who didn't believe that they were capable of learning something about developing a new skill, all of a sudden, Khan Academy stepped in. And that's for me what a huge component of the mental health aspect of learning is, is that when we don't have the ability to have it explain to us the way we need to, when it's not on call, when you have to track down an answer that you can't find, that frustration, then gets internalized. And it's not the system that's the problem. It's us. It's the student. And how many students have experienced that.

I know I have. I see it in my son. And being able to give people the resources, how they need it, when they need it can have such a monumental impact on not only their self-esteem, but their trajectory of learning throughout their entire life. Couldn't agree more. You know, today, even to, you know, we get letters every day, but the letters that we get the most from people are people in that category where they have given up on themselves. They thought they were dumb. And when they were given an opportunity at their own time and pace, sometimes in their

30s or 40s, to revisit those concepts like quadratics, it's on my list now. They realized that they're not dumb. They realize it's very, not only understandable and doable, but beautiful. And they realize that they're, that it's interesting. And then, you know, when they write the letters, it's a combination of the say, thank you, this was awesome. It helped me do it. But they're also a little angry.

They're like, I can't believe I was made to believe when I was 13 or 14 or 15 that I'm not smart, that I'm not capable. And, you know, I always cringe when even today, some people say like, oh, well, there's motivated kids and there's unmotivated kids. And what I always point out is like there's not a four-year-old on the planet who's not deeply curious. Like you put an interesting thing on the table in front of a four-year-old, they will start crying if they're not allowed to explore it, if they're not allowed to ask questions about it. But then we know over time, you know, some kids do well in the traditional system or they do well enough so that their self-esteem isn't hit. But as you just

moved lockstep through a system and you have a gap here, a gap there, you're something's going on at home one week, and then you get a C, you know, you get a D. The system kind of says you are a C student. It says you are, it doesn't say, hey, you're at 80%, let's keep working on it because you really are fully capable. You can master it. There's no time. And you can't catch up. That's right.

The system keeps going and you don't have those lessons to like, hey, let me go back and figure out that thing that I lost or that week that I wasn't feeling well or there was a fight going on or whatever is happening. And you just get lost in the system. That's right. And it's not to blame the system. The teachers, if you have one teacher with 30 kids, what do you do? How can you meet every kid where they are? And, you know, mass public education was a, I mean, we take it for granted now, but it was a utopian idea, 200, 300 years ago. Well, I mean, it's also designed, you know, based on a military system. The notion that we line up when they ring a bell is actually, I mean, that's how I was raised. But it's actually quite disturbing, you know, when you think about it, because,

so much of our mental health is oriented around the proportion of hours that were not in our homes, you know? And when you think about it, like, and that's how, you know, my parents explained why they were teachers. They were the usherers of their kids that they taught for all of those hours that these kids' parents were outworking or whatever they were doing. And in that sense, that school system is an extension of not just the home, but how you organize your place in the world. And while many kids wouldn't think twice or many adults wouldn't think twice about lining up when they ring a bell, that's also how we organize animals in a laboratory, you know? And I don't think you need to be a parent to realize that there is an organic nature to learning that we have lost in the name of efficiency.

Couldn't agree more. The system is called the Prussian education system because it really originates in 18th and 19th century Prussia. And as we know, Prussia was a fairly militaristic society. But it was also, it was one of the first parts to industrialize. You know, now Prussia is kind of encapsulated in modern Germany. And, you know, these notions of bells ringing, kind of doing things in batches, sifting and sorting. These are both military ideas, but also industrial revolution ideas. And once again, it was, if we're a hundred years ago, if we, given.

the economic constraints, I don't know if I could have come up with a dramatically better system. Maybe I would have had like birds chirping instead of a bell or something. Well, honestly, I'm a Waldorf person. So, you know, Rudolph Steiner, who a lot of people have a lot of issues with Waldorf education. But yeah, they ring a little bell. They ring a pretty little bell when it's time to transition from one activity to the next. And I, we did parent and me, you know, classes. Our kids have always been homeschooled, but we did parent and me in the Waldorf system. And that was one of the things that appealed to us was the gentleman. And I think especially in this country when we are, you know, dealing with a mental health epidemic,

we're dealing with a system of racial injustice, which is absolutely, you know, seen in particular at the educational level, really as early as you can track it, it would behoove us, you know, to introduce gentleness. And I think that's part of my particular interest and affection for Khan Academy is that it's not for homeschoolers, Obviously, many homeschoolers, pretty much every homeschooler I know, does use Khan Academy. But the notion is that this is the kind of access we all deserve to education. I mean, I'm sure I'm not the first person to suggest this. Like, I want Khan Academy for everything. I want Khan Academy for sociology and for economics and for literature.

You know, like, to me, that's the notion that I believe we should have of education. It should be that level of access. I mean, I'd like to believe it's possible. That is what we're trying to do. And others, you know, we want to build out literature and the humanities and all the rest. And, you know, the modalities might be a little bit different. But, you know, I haven't heard it describe that way. But you're right.

It's that gentleness. You know, a lot of folks sometimes ask why it was kind of kind of kind of even successful in the beginning. I wasn't the first person to put education content out on the Internet. I think it was a blessing that it started off as a project for my family. And so, you know, and I think we've hopefully retained some of that ethos even as we've grown and scaled, is that when you experience either video and hopefully even the software of Khan Academy, it feels like it's made by someone who cares about you. Like I tell our team, if you're not excited about the material, how can you expect the student to be?

And even if you're writing software, even if you're writing an article, especially if you're making a video, if you don't feel genuine affection and respect for the person that you were talking to, human beings are great at reading between the lines, understanding tone, they're going to sense it. And so if there is a secret sauce to Khan Academy, I think it might be that or I hope it is that, and I hope we can retain that. Absolutely. I would like to hear you speak a little bit to how you see education tied, you know, to mental health, especially when we talk about communities that are, you know,

typically underserved, not just in the educational realms, but in access to mental health care as well. I'm curious, you know, what kind of either feedback or research or perspective you have on that. Yeah, take anything I have to see with a grain of salt. I'm not an expert here, but, you know, I do observe closely the things that are going around in the world and in my family and in my own life. And clearly, you know, in any stage of human existence, there's always been people who might have felt more anxious than others, might have felt more depressed than others. But something is going on here that is more than just kind of the natural variance that you might see over history. And my best guess, it is because it comes from loneliness and isolation, that we are fundamentally communal creatures that for most of the 300,000 years of modern humans existing, we lived in clans and tribes,

and it was a village. And, you know, there's negative stuff about it. Everyone's getting into everyone else's business. And, you know, when I go back to Bangladesh or India, you see that and you're like, oh, let me just go back to the states and get out of this, you know, this, everyone's in everyone's business. But there's some really good things where also everyone is in everyone's business and everyone is supporting each other and everyone is asking each other very frank questions. Hey, come on. And they're helping each other with each other's children and the children are kind of are able to be around 20 or 30 other kids in a mixed age environment and show leadership

and give leadership and get leadership. And I think, you know, over the years, we've developed a culture, which is now almost a global culture, but someone would describe it as a Western culture, which is, you know, it's all about your direct family, you know, in the 70s and 80s, when we all grew up, people started getting really worried about things like abduction and this and that. So even people stopped letting their kids just kind of roam free in the neighborhood with the other kids. And, you know, I'm not even sure if that even helps on some of the safety issues, but it has

the effect of giving kids a lot less autonomy, feeling more isolated, having less opportunities for leadership. And then when you go into a school system, if you're getting a lot of positive feedback, and I think I was lucky. It wasn't all rosy, but I had a lot of opportunities where I saw people believe in me and I was getting a lot of positive feedback

that helped my self-esteem, et cetera, et cetera. But I saw what was happening with Nadia and which is why I wanted to intervene. And I see it all the time with kids, even when I visit classrooms today, where, you know, kids are not getting necessarily that message as much as they need to. And you check out, you feel isolated.

The classroom environment is oftentimes, you're penalized for trying to interact with each other. which is dehumanizing. And then you have this other dynamic, which is social media, which is, you know, it's taken even some of that energy where outside of formal school time you would meet with your friends and chat and all that. It's gone into this weird dystopian, you know, filtered view of reality,

which is probably making people even more insecure. I think this has turned into a bit of a toxic cocktail. So, yeah, a lot of what I debate with my friends and I talk about is like, it feels like there's opportunity to use technology to undo some of the other things that technology is doing, or even to undo some of the things that we did even before technology, in a good way. Well, and let's just go ahead and, you know, let's add COVID to this cocktail because that, you know, sure is the umbrella that no one wants in their drink.

The notion that we have literally been removed from interaction for the most part. And in addition, you know, the impact on children in particular is, I think it's devastating, you know, where I was just looking this morning at the stats of, you know, racial despair. and who has access to the vaccine, for example. And I think about, you know, this pandemic has, it's shined a light on some of the ugliest parts of disparity. We see that also when we think about education during COVID and then mental health during COVID.

And, you know, it's like, I always want to find, like, you know, I want the theory of everything for everything. So, you know, I love that you've kind of touched on isolation. that puts a damper really on on everything that you can have access to, right, in terms of education, in terms of mental health, you know, in terms of interacting with other people. So, you know, I definitely have recommended Khan Academy in particular to people, you know, during this time. And I think also, you know, when you try and see what are some of the bright spots that we can start to see, possibly coming out of this pandemic or at least, you know, the initial kind of impact in

these first waves, I would like to think that. that more people are seeing the importance of being able to have the things that they deserve, you know, having access to those things. Can you speak a little bit to sort of the COVID of it all in terms of isolation and education in particular? COVID hasn't been easy on anyone, but when I think about my own circumstances, you know, I have a backyard. I have, you know, 2,500 square foot house.

My mother-in-all lives with us. We have three kids. So, you know, my job has flexibility. I can do it from home. My wife is a physician, but she's able to do some patients now via telemedicine. So between three adults in the house, we have a backyard, we're in a very safe neighborhood. We have a little bit of space, a reasonable amount of space in the house for the kids to do what they're doing.

Plus the school that my kids go to, which I helped start, Con Lab School, was always kind of leaning in, not just on the student agency side of things, but also, frankly, on the social emotional learning, students being able to set their own goals, work collaboratively. So the transition to the COVID world, it was suboptimal for everyone. But, you know, in the whole scheme of things, my family had it about as good as you can get it. And when I imagine, you know, I live in California, we have a fire pit outside. So even in the heart of winter, we can, you know, socially distance have another close friend outside with the fire pit on and still feel connected to folks. When I think of- You're making me feel bad about my life.

Like, keep talking about your life. This is getting worse and worse. This is called COVID showing off. First, I was like, wow, he's so humble. But when you got to the fire pit, I was like, no, he's going to be toasting marshmallows in a minute. Built in, built in fire pit. Yeah, I don't even have to go get a separate propane tank. It's just right plugged in.

But what I think of other, especially kids, but frankly, people of all ages, if you live, even where, you know, the environment where I grew up, you know, the environment where I grew up, you know, the winters are reasonable. what if you're doing that in a high-rise tenement in Harlem or in Chicago, you can't even go outside and you don't have a reasonable internet connection at home. And there's five people who are in a 800-square-foot apartment with one or two bedrooms. That, you know, I can't, I get anxious even thinking about that circumstance, much less if I actually had to live it. So I think that is one of these things where, you know, we don't know it's hard to measure what it's doing to people.

But it's got to have a really horrible effect on a lot of these young people. And, you know, we're going to see it in terms of outcomes and education. We're going to see it in terms of dropout rates. We're going to see it maybe in terms of mental health issues later on. But it's something that we have to take very seriously. This woman I work with, her son is of PSAT age. And one of the things that she was talking about, especially during COVID, is for many students who would be going to, I mean, I used Kaplan. for the GRE. Like, I don't even know if that exists anymore. But, you know, there's already a disproportionate kind of amount of access to these prep schools, you know, these kind of like these prep programs for the things that typically get you into college, right? And I was raised with a brother who got a 1,500 on his SAT.

Back then, you could get 1600 was the top. And he got 1, you know. And it was harder then. Okay, so he was really smart. I know. I felt it then. And I'm, I am not a good. standardized test taker. And, you know, having a PhD in neuroscience, it does not make me smart,

per se. It makes me persistent and consistent in my studies. But I had a very hard time with standardized tests and always had to, you know, pray and hope that the other things about my academic history and my social history and my parents' history as teachers, I always had to hope that that would, you know, have some impact. Since I was a public person in my teacher, years. It was also very awkward. A lot of celebrities were going to Ivy Leagues because that was a thing to do. And I went to a very, very rigorously academic junior high and high school where we were all supposed to go to Ivy Leagues. And I was, you know, one of the least intelligent people, I would say, literally, because I went to school with kids who finished their math requirements in eighth grade.

Like these were savants, you know. The notion of standardized testing is in many cases a source of tremendous, tremendous anxiety. And in some way, you know, I always understood, well, they have to have some way, you know, to decide who gets in. But as someone who went to UCLA, I went to a public university for my undergrad and grad, I went in the era of something called affirmative action, which helped students like me, who did not have a strong grounding in particular in math and science, get on a more of a level playing field with the kids who came in at the top of their class. And it became very unpopular to talk about affirmative action because it became very politicized.

but so many of the people that I took those remedial classes with, you know, they are people's doctors now, you know, and were it not for those kinds of programs, they would not have been able to be at that playing field. And a lot of us did come in as poor standardized test takers. And I guess, you know, the free-spirited hippie in me wants to believe that we shouldn't have any standardized tests. Everyone can be taught everything. We just all need to have equal access. But I also know that there is importance to that level of achievement. And as someone who homeschools kids, you know, we do have to say we want our kids prepared to take a standardized test if that's what it takes to get in. But a lot of schools are now also especially in COVID times sort of rethinking this process of standardized testing. And not just because of the enormous anxiety that those tests produce. and, you know, now that we understand more about different styles of learning, so many children do need extra time because they can't take the pressure. And is the idea that if you can't take the pressure of the SAT, you shouldn't be a doctor because then you can't take the pressure of the emergency room?

I don't know, but I'm asking you because I think you might. What kind of what is this system? Is it worth what we sort of put ourselves through? How many allowances can we make for students who don't do well on? standardized tests in many cases because of anxiety. And does that mean that we shouldn't get to go to college like the rest of us? She's asking if you should be taking her doctorate away from her. I think that was the baseline. My thesis is there. I will set it on fire in your fire pit. I know standardized testing is a, it's a hot topic. It always has been and people have strong

feelings. And I always say, you know, it's, you either have problems. If for people have trouble with it, it's either they have trouble with the standardized part or the testing part. And then we have to think about, you know, there are better ways to do it. And, you know, I think we all believe to get better at least dimensions of things. We need some way to measure it. And so some form of testing is reasonable. Now, what you do with that, that becomes a whole other conversation. And that standardized is better than non-standardized.

That it's if you can, you know, you can kind of benchmark it, understand where you are, where you need to get better at. That's a positive, too. And I also, you know, it's not a popular thing to be a defender of standardized tests, but I'm at least defending the abstract notion of it for a second before I get into how we can reform. The college board, which administers the SAT, it came about about 100 years ago because if you go 100 years ago, Ivy League schools, pretty much any selective schools, the way you got in is you knew somebody or you went to an elite school that had a really good pipeline into these elite colleges.

and it was in the name of equity, or at least equality, that they said, no, look, we got to take it out of this who's meeting whom at the country club. We got to make it a test that anyone can take in the country. Also, maybe women should be allowed to vote. Can we work on that 100 years ago? Also, women, well, there's a lot, you know, women should be allowed to vote. We should have an interstate highway system. We should, you know, hey, look, we figured out what DNA is. So there's a lot that has happened.

The Federal Reserve, maybe. People debate whether it's a good idea. But a lot of this happened in the last 100 years. But it was a powerful idea. And, you know, in fairness, I don't think I would have had a shot going to MIT had there not been some way for me to show that, hey, me coming from Grace King High School, I can, quote, hang with the kids from Exeter, Andover, or Stuyvesant or wherever else. So it has its value.

Now, I 100% agree with you. It's created all this weird stress, all this weird anxiety because, you know, admissions officers will say, well, it's part of a broader package. But they also in their back of their heads, they kind of do have a little bit of a cutoff score that they fudge around with if someone's a star quarterback or if someone is, you know, someone's family just donated a building

or something like that. Or look, they are trying to socially engineer these communities on campus. Make sure we have enough people for the drama club. Make sure that we're going to have people who are going to major in this or that. And so it's this really complex thing that they're trying to optimize for.

But the side effect is you have all these young people who are stressed out for all the reason you just mentioned. For some it works, but for some, especially with the time pressure and the high stakes of it, they just kind of shut down. And so I think there's kind of a two-pronged, at least the way I approach it, or we try to approach it, is we partner with the college board. For most of those 70 or 80 or 90 years that the college board's around, this whole test prep industry came about with Kaplan, Princeton Review. And the college board never really wanted to validate that industry. So they just never talked about them. But everyone knew, hey, you could take a class for $2,000, $5,000. And at least there was a perception

that it could help. About six, seven years ago, David Coleman, who's the new president of the college board, he reached out to us. And this was when Khan Academy was kind of still in a startupy phase, saying, hey, Sal, we like what you're doing. We like this focus on mastery-based learning, this accessibility of it.

What if we work together to make the world's best SAT prep that happens to be free? And I was like, sign us up. Let's do it. And so now we are the official practice for the SAT, but we're slowly trying to change some of these mental models. Like the PSAT, used to be this random test you take in 10th or 11th grade.

Most kids, like, say, why am I doing this? If you happen to be in the top whatever 5% or 1% you could get some scholarships, national program. But it was this random thing. And it was just another reinforcement of a fixed mindset that like you're either smarter or not. Now when kids take the PSAT, they're encouraged to sync that score with their Khan Academy accounts.

And so it acts as the beginning, the starting point for their journey to fill in those gaps. I feel positive about this now. It's not a perfect solution because it still, you know, it still leads to a pretty high-stakes test. And, you know, and for some kids, that's going to work in some kids there aren't. What I'm fascinated by is I think we're going to keep these mechanisms, but can there be also alternative mechanisms to show? And, you know, there's one that I started as kind of a COVID response, but I think it might have follow on repercussions where, you know, when COVID hit, a lot of people started leaning on Khan Academy. We saw our usage, you know, spike by a factor of three.

and that was asynchronous learning, but we're like, well, how are people going to connect with each other? And, you know, whether it's on Zoom or whatever else. And so I started a new not-for-profit, separate from kind of company called Schoolhouse.world, which is about students being able to tutor each other or get tutors from adult volunteers anywhere in the world. And that's actually been a really cool experiment,

and it's started to show that you can actually use the internet to build connections and make people feel less lonely, using education as the context. But what's also interesting there is, we've created mechanisms like the universe Chicago reached out to I'm good friends with the head of admissions there and he said look this is a hard year for kids grades are random some people went past fail SAT administrations might not be happening in someone's state they get canceled everything is weird can't we use Khan academy in some way shape or form to find interesting kids or to validate their knowledge and so I said well you know Jim there's there's an opportunity here where we have this tutor community we've created which is hopefully also helping level the playing field but what we What if a student were to go on to Khan Academy, take an assessment on Khan Academy while they record their face and their screen while they explain their reasoning out loud?

If they get to a certain threshold, 90% say, they can submit that to the schoolhouse community. It gets peer reviewed. If it looks like it's their work and they were able to explain their reasoning, there's no weird edits in it and they got to the 90%. Then we give them credit for it. That like you now know the first unit of calculus. And Jim was like, this is perfect.

We would love to look at this for this current. admission cycle for University of Chicago. And they did it, and it's been really beautiful. Like, there's kids who would not have had access. They live in, you know, in Mexico or Hong Kong or, you know, Idaho who have been able to do this at their own time. They might as well be in Hong Kong if they live in Idaho. But they might as well.

High as per capita usage of Khan Academy in the world is Idaho. Say more. Well, it's the rural nature of it. You know, I think it's, Idaho is wealthy enough that a lot of people have Internet at access. Still a lot don't, but it's not, you know, it's not sub-Saharan Africa, but it's rural enough that a lot of people don't have access to a lot at their local school. So I think that's kind of the combination that makes, you know, the high usage of Khan Academy. But what it does is, you know, if you do well, and there's no time pressure on it, it's making you explain your reasoning.

If you do well, submit it. If you don't, try again tomorrow. It costs you nothing. And then it starts you on this journey to becoming a tutor. And what I'm hoping is your ability to tutor others across many domains actually becomes the ultimate standardized test. If you're a highly rated tutor in sociology or math or whatever it might be, that's the person I want to hire. That's the person I want to bring to my campus. Clearly they know the material, but they also have communication skills, empathy.

They're trying to do good for others. So yeah, I think we're on the cusp of like, you know, a Cambrian explosion of new ways. to look at how to evaluate people. I think that's beautiful because it does go into the future of education where we're using technology to solve some of these limits and ways that people are either having enormous amount of pressure or have felt excluded from the current system. You mentioned that you have an academy or a lab school,

and on the lab school website, it talks about social emotional learning and executive skills, which I think we should take just a moment to talk about and for people listening at home or watching, it says here, social and emotional learning refers to the process through which children and adults understand, manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others,

establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions. And I'll pause for a second there, because no school that I've ever gone to has taught that. I think it came out a couple years ago where there was a longevity study at Google that evaluated, the top performers across the entire business and tried to map what type of skills they had

that allowed them to be so successful. And they were not engineering skills. They were all interpersonal, social, emotional skills. And I'd go out on a limb and say our school system just fails in that department repeatedly. You know, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you're pursuing that and how you see that as a key role in education moving forward. And any other thoughts you have on the future of how we can use technology to transform the way that we're helping kids learn and helping adults learn as well. Yeah, you know, the whole notion of me of all people starting a physical school kind of, you know, was a curveball for a lot of folks. They're like, wait, you're doing all this online learning. You're showing that people can learn

how to factor quadratic at their own time and pace, you know, from the comforts of their home. We were doing the stuff with the college board and other things like that. But that was the whole point is that I never viewed that. You know, there's definitely parts of it. of the world where they have access to nothing and we want to raise the floor through Khan Academy, but we've always viewed what if Khan Academy can unlock the human to human aspects, allow the actual, when you get in a room with each other, to go higher up the value chain. It isn't like some Vulcan or Borg reality where everyone's just doing exercises on a computer all day. It should be, look, where inappropriate, you're able to leverage those types of tools

to build your skill set and also to exercise some of these social emotional metacognitive traits of being able to learn to learn, et cetera, et cetera. But then when you're in a setting with peers and adults or mentors, you can build these other things. And I can't take a lot of credit for it, but I knew that there was an opportunity for it.

And we brought on some really amazing administrators and faculty. All three of my kids go there. And you see what a difference it makes. I mean, most of our memories of, say, middle school was kind of, you know, like Lord of the Flies. Mine was like Lord of the Rings.

Yours was Lord of the Rings? I told you. It depends what part. That could be very good. I think most middle, I mean, or maybe a combination. I mean, middle school is a tough time. But what I find nice and I don't want to jinx our school, it's a small school. And I'm not saying that all schools can immediately replicate it.

There's a lot that is going for this school that it would be hard to snap your fingers and do in a lot of other settings. But when you do really invest in kids being able to reflect, set their own goals, they start viewing the teacher not as someone who's a gatekeeper, but someone who's truly a coach. You know, one thing I've always wondered about, you know, the same kids that when the math teacher says, hey, we got to do every other problem tonight, you know, there's 10 problems like, oh, man, you're so mean. Like, why? And then they go to, you know, I was on the wrestling team for a year.

My only wrestling trophy was, um, was highest GPA on the restaurant. Stop it. But the, that's true. But the, the, the, but, you know, when I went to wrestling practice, the coach would say, all right, I want you guys to run, you know, laps, drop, do 50. shops, run up and down the stairs for like half an hour. And people like, yes, sir. And they're like, and you're like, well, why do you have this difference? Is it because when you're on a team in athletics, you perceive your coach who's making you go through hell as someone who's preparing you for battle, so to speak, with the outside world. Well, too often kids in schools, in the,

academic part, view, and the teachers don't want this, but the way the system is set up, they view the teacher as the gatekeeper. They view them as the person that they're trying to game around. And so when you create an academic context where the teacher and the student are on the same side in service to preparation for the world and the student really feels that it completely changes everything. The coaching that goes on at the school, I see even my kids when they're, my youngest is still six, but when there's six or seven, it's not a parent teacher conference. It's a student-driven conference where the student reflects on what they've been doing well, what they haven't been doing well. I mean, it's hilarious and cute, but also eerie to see a seven-year-old say, you know what? I thought I was going to be able to accomplish this last term. I realize now I've been sitting next to so-and-so and they're my best friend,

but maybe they're not, I'm not as productive as I should be when I'm next to them. That's our story. That's our story. Exactly. But it's great because that's, you know, in the work environment, when I see the people who succeed at Khan Academy or any other, it's the people who always want to, you know, they know how to invest in others, and they're always asking for feedback. They don't get defensive.

And we're seeing there is a. to making kids feel better about that as they're growing up. So fingers crossed, you know, it's a, I don't want to jinx the school, but it is a promising. And the whole point of it as a lab school, there's only 200 kids in the school right now, but we want to make transparent what it's doing so that parts of it can be adopted by other places saying, look, this isn't crazy stuff. It's very doable and it has real, real impact. You know, I'm very inspired by you, and I'm inspired especially by how young you are. I mean, you are a year younger than me. And the amount that you've been able to accomplish really by identifying a problem, as it were,

and applying your best brain, you know, to that problem and being able to see the fruits of it is just something that many people do not get to experience, you know, especially at your young age, like to consider us young. But just as a final question, you know, I just think about what you said about your story and, you know, you know, your parents and your dad's journey and your sister and all these things. And I wonder kind of what your perception is of sort of where you've gotten to. You know, if I could achieve the things that you have gotten to achieve, like, I would feel amazing, right? But I am curious because I think a lot of people might hear your story and be like, well, that sounds like a really

great life. Like, he did it. He's got nothing to worry about. But I'd love for you to also express, like, you're a human person. And I'm sure that there are things that are challenging and hard and you know people who are close to me knows that i can get very obsessed with things like if i get obsessed with an idea i get you know even in the early days when i was touring my cousins or like you know my wife was like come on you have other things that you need to do and you know that's a blessing and occur people forget the word passion the root actually comes from the word suffering i remember when you know those tv shows in the 80s used to come out the passion of the christ i'm like what you're getting crucified what does this passion means suffering and i think

even today when you really have passion for something, you can suffer a lot. And I found myself having a lot of passion and, you know, wake up in the middle of the night. You can't sleep because your brain is cycling on this thing. And, you know, we probably don't call that a mental health issue because it sometimes can lead to things that our society has learned to say, oh, that's a good outcome. It's a couple red flags for me as a neuroscientist here. Right, exactly. You know, at every stage of my life, I've always been constantly in this kind of existential

angst. Like, I got one life as far as I know. How do I make it, quote, count? I think in the early phases of my life, I was very much caught up with like, you know, how do I make sure that me and my family don't have to go through some of the scarcity issues that we might have faced when I was younger? You know, and I'm still probably cheaper than I should be when I'm buying blueberries at Whole Foods. I mean, just the fact that you've got a Whole Foods. No, it is. It is. I mean, my, like, young Sal would be like, oh, you are really laying it on things. that you buy blueberries from whole booths. To eat beside the fireplace.

That's right. To eat beside the fireplace. That's right. And I actually do think I'm blessed on so many levels. But most of it isn't the things that you just listed. It's, you know, I have a healthy and happy family, wonderful wife, great friendships over many, many years. You know, and once I have financial, I think I have financial security, but I still get paranoid about that sometimes.

Like, what if this would happen and that? And then this would happen, you know, because when you see that when you're young, people get into real, it's hard to escape from that fear that, well, what if this happened and you're not able to do this and your kids go hungry? You know, like, it's not a good, but I think I'm beyond that kind of stuff. And then I fell into Khan Academy somewhat intentionally, somewhat serendipitously. And I'm like, this is so fortunate I get to work on something that I feel has purpose, that is able to help people. I get the psychic reward of other people saying that it benefited them. So that's great.

And I think, you know, the last five, ten years, I've been in a, A bit of a transition where I'm saying, like, this is great and Khan Academy is great, but oftentimes because you work on a mission that you feel is so important, that can lead to its own stresses and anxieties of itself. You know, I've been pretty open about this. Four or five years ago, I was starting, I started getting super claustrophobic on planes. And it was because I was probably waking up in the night too obsessed with some idea or something I wanted to do.

So I wasn't sleeping enough. I was stressed at work because there's, there's been time, you know, I'm, I have to fundraise for Khan Academy all the time. time. So I'm always like, what if we don't raise enough money? Will we have to do layoffs? Will we have to do this? We're never going to be able to fulfill. So that whole thing, I started getting anxious, claustrophobic. It got serious. And so that's when I said, look, Sal, you got to take the mental health aspect real, real seriously. And so I really, out of almost emergency, started meditating very seriously. And that has completely transformed my life

where, you know, I now meditate 30 minutes a day. I actually take cold showers and I actually He's a cold shower. He's a cold shower guy. He's a windhoff method. I had a feeling. I do a little bit of Wimhoff every now and then too. But the cold shower, I'm sure you all have seen the literature. It's actually more effective than any antidepressant.

It's kind of a control all the lead on your brain every morning. And so, you know, it's things like especially the meditation and then, you know, making a point to invest in relationships, community. My friends will tell you now, I've now become the, you know, 10, 15 years ago was the weird guy who was trying to tutor. his family. Now I'm the weird guy. Now that the whole education side thing, I look socially validated. I actually run this thing on Sundays. It's now over Zoom, but we used to meet in parks where we talk about how do we live better lives. We read philosophy. It's kind of like our own version of church that is more, you know, you could be anything. You could be an atheist. You could be deeply religious. But you joined, a lot of what I try to optimize for is how do I form deeper connections with people? Because I see it

makes me feel better. We have a group of friends of ours. just actually during COVID, and this shows how lucky and privileges are, where we have like a small-scale mini-farm that we're trying to work on together because it just builds this sense of community. And those are the reasons why, you know, the meditation, which came out of an emergency, it gave me empathy for people who have much more serious things. Was it proper claustrophobia in any enclosed space, or was it specifically planes? Plains are where it hit initially, like where I'm like,

I am in a capsule for the next five hours. It looks like it's closing in on you. horrible. But then when it got bad, it started happening everywhere. Like, I'd be in a movie theater. I mean, even today I still look at like my wife, like I should be like a fire marshal or something. Like I look for escape routes.

You know, if I'm going to, I'm like, okay, make sure there's enough escape routes. Okay, I'm good. I'll enter the room. I still do that. But there was a point where I couldn't even go to a movie theater because, or if I did, I would have to sit next to the exit because I was getting so claustrophobic. I'm beyond that now. And it's really the meditation, maybe the cold showers.

and then also just lowering the stress level at work so that you don't feel it's all on your shoulders all the time. All right, he's a normal person. We can end the interview. I mean, that last piece is quite beautiful. It's fascinating. What kind of meditation do you do? Just curious.

Oh, you know, I started initially on Headspace. Right. Like guided meditations. Is that what you do? Yeah, now I just do my own thing where I sit 30 minutes every. I try to do mornings. Sometimes it ends up being evenings. and, you know, I just try to still my mind, be curious, have a sense of humor about it,

actually force a smile because sometimes people get stressed about meditation, like that's wrong idea. And you still your mind, you remind yourself that you're nothing but this awareness, this kind of this temporary pause of entropy that exists in the universe. After that 30 minutes, I'm like, I go give my wife a hug. I'm like, you know, I become a different person. I've become, I've become a lot more fun. Well, we think you're fun just as you are, but I'm all for you becoming even more fun. Thank you so much for your time. Really, really appreciate it. And when you want a new teacher, Miami happens to hold the Guinness Book of World Records for largest online class if you're looking to hire. She teaches neuroscience. If she wants to work on

a Tudor on schoolhouse, co-teach the thing. I mean, either, you know, we're talking about. And often she's free Sundays and loves philosophy, just saying. I do. That's right. Our Sabbath is Saturday. I'm free on Sundays. Actually, I'll put you on the list if you all are serious about that. It's actually been pretty cool. Thank you so much. Yeah, this was fantastic. Thank you so much. Thanks, guys. This is a lot of fun. I like talking to him. We got educated on education. He, I get very emotional when I talked to him. I've spoken to him before and also have done his podcast, but I get very emotional talking to him because it's like I get emotional just thinking about it. He makes me believe that anything's possible. You know, if you take something like the educational system,

Like he literally, in one generation in this country, was like, this is a problem. And I have skills. And oh my gosh, look what's happening. It literally started with him tutoring someone who was told she was dumb, you know. And I just like, how does that? In the course of, you know, 20 years, he's created something that is so meaningful, so significant, and has rippled out beyond, quote, quote, just a math tutoring program. If all he did was create Khan Academy,

I would be in awe of him. He's got a lot more going on than just that. Oh, he's, yeah, but it's like, I just can't imagine what it would feel like to be him. I'm just going to say it. I can't imagine what it would feel like to be like, oh, you know that thing, that enormous problem about children's self-worth and ability to learn?

I fix that. If not fixed, fixing. Okay, but I... I'm working. on it. Yeah, but it's also a lot of pressure, though, when he talked about needing to fundraise for Khan Academy and he has all these people working and you never know how much money you're going to bring in in this. It's a nonprofit and it's having been and being in the startup life, I can relate to the level of stress and anxiety at a much smaller scale than what he's operating at.

So amazing that he's able to keep going. Yeah, it's amazing. I'm like, oh, let's start a lab school. Oh, okay. I kind of want to go to the lab. Me too. I mean, I think of how your life would have been different. I mean, I know. It's very emotional. I mean, I think of my, especially think of my younger one, Fred.

You know, my older son, I think literally you could drop him in any school. And he'd like, he'd like figure it out. I don't mean he's like so brilliant. So whatever. No, he's highly adaptable. He's a very adaptable child. He's like a true chameleon, which he gets from his father, not me. But yeah, like, Miles, you could like drop him anywhere and he'd be like, I'll figure that out.

Or like, oh, I need a tutor. Can someone help me? Whereas like if I put Fred, you know, in that kind of situation, Fred, he would, in many cases, he might be like, what's happening. This is upsetting. I don't want to learn it. I don't know what to do. And like that's, you know, we homeschooled both of our kids because they were both late developers and we believe that they had a right to do that without being placed in all the therapies that public school, you know, would have required even from them at a very young age. Yeah, that's how he best learns math is from Khan Academy. And it's something that he does with his dad. But it suits him. so well. It's so helpful to him. You can also check out Maim on his podcast, Home Room, which sounds very exciting.

Sal and I actually met, because we were both on a panel about education, the future of education, COVID and education. And I literally, like, off air, I just said to him, I just want to say hello to you. My children have used Khan Academy for years when people thought we were nuts to be homeschooling

and to be using this program. And he's like, oh, I grew up on you. And I was like, oh, there's my inn. I want to talk to you. I want to Pick your brain. Speaking of picking your brain. Uh-oh. Ask my am anything. Yeah.

The Ask My Am Anything comes from Anna and she wants to know about highly sensitive people. Oh. How do you deal with being a highly sensitive person? Not well. Is there a way for me to learn how to lessen it? Yes. Or should I just accept being one? Oh.

And does it affect my health or my brain if I try to fight my emotions? I wasn't aware of HSP. as a term until I heard you mention it on the podcast. Well, Anna, welcome to the club of HSPs. I honestly hadn't heard of it by that name. HSP kind of sounds like a tax in Canada. Or a drug. HST, which is...

Only to Canadians, Jonathan. Okay. You know, I use the phrase, highly sensitive person, because it makes it, it makes it more palatable to people because I've been called like oversensitive, hypersensitive, annoying for being myself for so long that I've just kind of gotten used to all those things about me. But it's kind of nice knowing that there is a classification for people like me, not for being annoying, although that's a separate classification, which you're not asking about. Let's go through that question by question. First question.

I want to ask you about how you deal with being an HSP. Okay. And is there a way for me to learn how to lessen it? There are ways to lessen your sensitivity. It's a little bit of a case-by-case basis. So one of the things that helps is something called desensitization, where you effectively expose yourself to certain aspects of a stimulus so that individual stimuli are not as alarming.

I mean, because that's really what's happening, you know, to your body and to your brain when you're that sensitive to things. for example, like if I have to, my younger son is also an HSP, and he really hates, like, having his toenails trimmed, for example, or even having his fingernails trimmed. And it's something that he doesn't have the dexterity yet to be able to do on his own. What is true is that I can desensitize him to that stimulus by touching his shoulder, you know, giving his head a little pat or, you know, being gentle on his arm, literally just right before I do it.

And what that means is that his body is not taking the first stimulus as the one that is most hard to handle. I'm starting by touching a part of his body that's not as sensitive because it's more exposed to the world more. So that's just one small example of a desensitization. With things like sound, like sensitivity to sound, that's very, very hard. The best way that I have found to lower that sensitivity is to meditate because meditation is lowering your baseline for anxiety.

And for me, there's a huge component of a vigilance in my body and in my system, which can be calmed down by things like breathing properly, breathing deeply. I remember the first time my healer of Blessed Memory, Vera, told me when I inhale that I should feel it all the way up to my shoulders. And I was like, what's she talking about? You just like breathe. She's like, nope, that's not a proper inhale, right? the notion of learning how to breathe where you're getting correct oxygenation to your body and your brain makes a huge difference in the regulation of things like sensitivity. What else did Anna ask?

Did I just cover them all in one? You really did because she asked, does it affect my health or my brain if I try to fight my emotions? But in that moment, you're not fighting your emotions. You're finding strategies to not be as activated in the moment. But I will say that there are oftentimes when I feel very, when I feel very embarrassed, certain sounds will make me cry and I do try and like hold it in in certain situations. It's never a good idea. I have learned to excuse myself. Like if I'm at a table and something happens, I've learned to excuse myself so that I can allow my nervous system to calm down. But it can be very, it can be very embarrassing. This happened at work the other day. Something was very, very loud and startling. And I don't want to say it's, it's not controllable, but my body's reaction to that often feels very uncontrollable.

So I have learned to excuse myself so that I'm not trying to shove it down. Anna, thank you so much for your question. Anyone else who has a question can go to Bialikbreakdown.com. That's B-I-A-L-I-K. Breakdown.com where you can ask maim anything. Thank you for joining us on this really interesting exploration of really the intersection of, you know, kind of education and access and mental health. A little bit all over the place.

I take responsibility for that. But also really interesting how it came together talking to Sal. So from my breakdown to the one I hope you never have, we'll see you next time.