Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Khan Academy CEO: The Real AI Opportunity Is in Boring Industries

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Sal Khan built Khan Academy into a free education platform used by over 200 million people worldwide. Now he's writing a book called Job Shock, arguing AI could disrupt jobs faster than his own past predictions accounted for.Which jobs are already disappearing. Which ones are safe. What Khan Academy is doing internally with AI, including a $1.2M/year Anthropic bill.And Sal's new venture with TED and ETS: a $10,000, accreditation-pending degree built around durable skills — the kind AI still can't replicate.

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and all of these tech firms, including at Khan Academy, are changing fundamentally. This is Sal Khan. He runs Khan Academy. A hundred million people learn on it every year. He built one of the first AI tutors in the world. Excellent work. No one has spent more time on how people reskill for AI. If we could do three times more with the same resources, we will do three times more.

So that would never be the catalyst for layoffs. If you can automate yourself out of a job, we're going to give you a better job with better pay. What are you thinking about the next factors? Don't run to where everyone else is running. Try to find the lanes that are most empty. And I would say... And we're in this interesting phase where AI is changing everything. And your previous book was called Brave New Words.

And now you're writing a book called Job Shock. So what has changed in the past two years? Wow, what has changed? So much has changed. You know, what I wrote? wrote in my last book, Brave New Words, about AI and education. When I was writing this in 2023, I was afraid that as soon as I write it, it would be obsolete because things are changing so fast. But I keep looking at it, and it's still, I feel very relevant. I write about things

like how AI will broaden the aperture of how we assess people, how, you know, people have talked a lot about AI tutors, but there's other forms of assessment, interviews, oral exams, and you actually are starting to see some of that. So we could talk a lot of, you know, some of those things that were just ideas three years ago. We're now seeing in reality. I just talked to head of admissions at Caltech. And a lot of students who apply, they give these research papers they've done. And the admissions officer says some of these are real and some of them not clear if the student did the work, et cetera. And so they're already using AI to essentially do oral exams with these students to evaluate if they understand. And this is pretty high stakes. This is for admissions to top

universities. So you're already seeing AI in that part. We've launched Conmigo out into classrooms. We've learned a lot. For a lot of students, it's been super useful, but we've also learned that AI 101 or the first 1.0 AI, it's waiting to be asked to do something. And some students know how to know how to do it. A lot of them didn't. So now we're in the process of launching a new version. It's more proactive. And it isn't AI for AI's sake. It's how do we get AI to motivate students, give them more practice, have the teacher in the loop, et cetera. In terms of why I'm now writing Job Shock, which is some people are surprised because most of not just my books, but most of the things I've ever said tend to be pretty optimistic.

But I am increasingly worried, you know, not too far from, this was about, I don't know, I want to say about three or four months ago, maybe a little longer. I have a good friend from college who's now a prominent VC and he said, hey, Sal, I want to talk about reskilling. And so I remember I drove over to his place, not too far from here in Los Altos. And while I was driving, you see the Waymos, like you see everywhere here. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. This is cool. Look, I live in the future. Then I go over to his office. And he was telling me that one of his portfolio companies has a call center that they've just automated 80% of their workforce with a with a general AI solution. I don't know the exact number,

but it sounded like it was in the hundreds, if not thousands of people for that one call center based in the Philippines. And this is why he said, maybe I want to take 1% of my firm's profits and put it into reskilling sometime and we started brainstorming. And we appreciated that, especially in an economy like the Philippines,

where depending on how you measure it, 5, 6, 7% of their GDP is directly related to business process outsourcing, mostly call centers. If this becomes a trend and there's a lot of reason to think it will over the next three to five years, what are all those people going to do?

And then when we see a Waymo, it's awesome. I was at TED a couple of weeks ago, and I interviewed to Kidra, Maukana, who's a co-CEO. I'm a big fan of Waymo's. I think it's going to save a lot of lives. It's super convenient. But my uncle's also an Uber driver in New Orleans. What's he going to do? That's not people's first choice job.

It's usually their last choice job in a lot of cases. And if ride chair goes away, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Out here in Silicon Valley, everyone's talking about what's happening to software engineering. product management, design, are those roles going to merge, or we're going to hire more or less, etc. But it is crazy times. And I wrote a job shock Genesis was I wrote a New York Times op-ed a piece in December where I made this argument that like we have to take this a lot more seriously. We can't just be like, oh, the Industrial Revolution turned out okay, more jobs. First of all, the Industrial Revolution also had many wars. The 20th century was the bloodiest.

We experimented with communism. We experimented with everything. everything. A lot of these things didn't go so well. And so we should have a plan. And that's what Job Shock is about. How will it possibly transform? What are the types of things people need to learn? My son, my oldest son is a junior in high school. What should he be caring about to be relevant in four or five years? But also how do we as a society adapt? How much time do you think we have for someone who's an Uber driver watching right now? Because I feel like with Waymos, it took them still, it took them 10 years to roll out the operation that we're seeing now and we're only seeing it in San Francisco. I think you're going to start seeing a real dent in this in five or ten years.

And that's slower than what a lot of the AI optimist evangelists are saying, but that's also pretty fast. That's our lifetime. That's before your kids go to high school. Yeah, exactly. Or when they go to high school or before they go to college. And driving a vehicle is the largest employer, one of the largest employers of men. I mean, women, obviously, my Uber driver just now was a woman, but like disproportionately men globally. if you have a lot of men who can't find a job who are angry, and women, that's going to lead

into politics, polarization, people are going to move towards extremes. So I suspect that you're going to see in the next four or five years, the dislocations start to happen for real. And we're going to struggle as a society on how, how do we reskill people? I'm not a fan of things like universal basic income. I think it, you know, like universal basic work, people need to feel like a sense of contribution. But these are big questions that we have to be creative about. Yeah, and it's not just Uber drivers, right? You mentioned call centers. What are other jobs that are in danger? I think the writing is on the wall that software engineering, design, product management, these product jobs and all of these tech firms, including at Khan Academy, are changing

fundamentally. But are they endangered? Like, are these people going to end up in the street? Because I don't think so. I think they're... I'm not sure. I'm generally not sure. You know, what I've told our Khan Academy team, because you could imagine, the employees are very worried. And they're saying, we have 350 people on our team. And we're two-thirds product people. And so they're asking, and we're saying, hey, use more AI. Use more AI.

And Anthropic just gave us report that we're at the top of the stack, apparently, on organizations that are leaning into these tools. But you can imagine the team sometimes feels insecure about this. They say, hey, if we can be three times more productive, that means you're going to lay off two-thirds of us. And what we've said very clearly to our team, and it's what we've said very clearly to our team, is what we believe is, look, the reason for us, we have so much to do. Khan Academy is the budget of a large high school. If we could do three times more with the same resources, we will do three times more. If we could do 30, so that would never be the catalyst for layoffs.

Catalyst for layoffs is if we don't bring in enough philanthropy, if we don't bring enough earned revenue, then just money will force us to it, you know. But it's not going to be AI. AI will allow us to do more. But we have also said that people's jobs are evolving. And people really need to learn how to keep. up with the times and we've put on our career rubric like learning new tools and adapting or we're actually putting it into our our career rubric so I suspect that

many of our team members are already there a lot of them are very willing and are gonna get there but I do sense that there's some people who are like ah I don't know if I like this I don't know if I want to do this and I think that that might be a more a bigger struggle if folks don't want to aren't aren't in a position to adapt or change And you think they're going to be at risk in the next five years? I think, yeah. I think, you know, we don't know exactly what these titles are going to be,

but this designer, product manager, engineer division, it's really... It's kind of blending. Yes, exactly. And the current framework came mostly out of the late 90s into the early 2000s of, okay, how do you build web apps? And it's that model. But the new world, and not only are those roles, people who used to be designers or product managers

are now not just prototyping anymore. You know, last year, I met some heads of product. They're like, oh, I'm forcing all my product managers to create a prototype. And I'm like, wow, that's really bold. Well, now at Khan Academy, we're taking our designers and our product managers, and we're giving them full dev environments so that they can actually do pull requests and do full, you know, deploying of code. Now, it's still leaning on more of the prototype, proof of concept, but it's blending.

And similarly, because engineers can do so much more. I think there will always be value of that engineers who could be super deep. but they're going to be much more productive. But I think you're also going to see a breed of engineer that can go more customer-facing, et cetera. So yes, these things are all blending. And just the development cycle speeding up, too. So people have to feel comfortable with that.

Going back to the jobs that are endangered, drivers, call center, customer support, people who work in product slash designer, software engineer and don't want to adapt anyone else. The people I think are safe are the people who really lean into the human element of it. So I've said, I think teachers are one of the safest jobs. But once again, even before AI, I don't view that the role of the teacher is to be the sage on the stage and to just disseminate information.

We've had textbooks for now centuries. We have videos on demand. We have other places to get information. I think the teachers, and we've seen teachers do this, good, great teachers have been doing this for decades, move up the value. chain. And they're the planners, the architects, the coaches. They're able to form, you know, have eye contact with students and be their motivators. I can't speak for you, but for myself, when I think about the great teachers in my life, some of them were like, wow, they used to give a good performance. But most of them were the ones that ran a Socratic dialogue with all

of us, really made us dream or do things we never thought about. Or say, hey, Sal, can you see me after class? Say, Sal, I really liked what you did that time. You know, you have a knack for that. Or Sal, I didn't like what you did. Stop it. If you did that in the real world, someone's going to be really annoyed with you. That's what I remember. So teaching, I think, nursing, hospitality, sales, anything that has a huge. Oh, absolutely. I don't think you're just, I mean, maybe telesales and things like that, AI. And I know there's been companies for a while that I can be the salesperson. Yes, some of these sales agents, are they're going to get better and better, but their cost of deploying is so low that we're all just going to get spammed unbelievably by it.

And so they'll probably all cancel each other out in terms of efficacy. But the ability to actually form a relationship with someone be a convincing advisor. And the best salespeople aren't like salespeople. They're actually smart, thoughtful people where you actually respect their opinion and you want their advice. And you know, they're a straight shooter. And they'll say, you know, our product isn't best for that. you might want to use that and you're like oh i trust you let me use you next time and so i think that human connection anything that can be purely done on a computer and you're not interfacing with other

human beings you're not having to build some of these durable skills of communication and persuasion and listening and collaboration those will change or or they might be under threat okay let's talk about adopting those AI tools you just mentioned you use anthropic a lot can you talk about the processes in your company that seem absolutely mind-blown that would have seemed absolutely mind-blowing two years ago and now they're part of your process. Oh, well, I think engineering is where we're seeing it the most. And that is where we also, and I think you've heard many people say, some of the engineers who are really leaning into this.

They're running five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten agents simultaneously, writing code, reviewing code. The anthropic folks told us that we were one of the biggest users of actually the agents for reviewing code. Interesting. And, you know, we, we, I've gotten a little sticker shock for how expensive this stuff is. Our run rate on our, on our, our anthropic bill is about $1.2 million right now. Wow.

And it's growing fast. That's a year or a month. A year, a year, a year. But it's still a lot for, you know, 200 or so engineers. It's mostly engineers. And we're looking on a daily basis. And our CTO was saying, yeah, we just saw one of our engineers spent $3,000 in a day. I think that was the number of compute costs.

I'm like, oh, my God, what is... Are you trying to push them to use even more? Because you see some companies try to do that. I was like, what are they doing? And then he's like, then we talked to them. And they actually, in a few hours, were able to do something that would have normally taken them three or four months. It's like, okay, that was a great use of $3,000.

Go spend more. But just today we had a company meeting where I said, you know, make sure you're not using the Opus model for just everyday tasks. Use Gemini and use your chat GPT account. if you're trying to figure out the local restaurant to go to. So we are trying to get there. But I had the same answer to our team. I was like, look, if we're using $1 million, $2 million, $3 million of tokens every year,

but if we look at what we're producing and that would have cost us $20, $30 million in the past to produce, yeah, we should keep doing it. But anyway, the engineering is the most. I think the rapid prototyping, we just launched a feature a few months ago that in the old days, it would have been like maybe we can fit it by next school year. And this is one of the engineers at a hackathon, vibe coded it in a day. And then on a weekend, he said, you know, he's an engineer. So he had the full development environment, but he was able to create working on our real data.

And it's a very front-end kind of game thing. So it didn't have a lot of implications to what might happen to the back end. He's like, I think we could ship this thing. And got some designers involved, made it a little bit nicer. And we were able to ship it in about a month. something that would have taken. And so that is a thing that's really, before people said, engineering is hard.

So do as much time as possible on design so that you don't build things that aren't going to be valuable. But now that model is changing. You should say, no, let's build stuff fast, put it out there. Not always. Certain things you have to really make sure work before they go out there, but certain things you can try out, test your thesis fast. So I think the velocity of the organization is much faster than I would have imagined. a year or two ago. Do you think 2x, 3x? What's your estimation? If I'm honest, as we grew,

10 years ago, we were very fast, we started up, you know, 20, 30 people. And as we grew to 200, 300 people, from my point of view, it started to feel slower because you have coordination, costs, et cetera. And I think relative to where we were two or three years ago, it does actually feel, and this is, this is a feeling. We haven't have a have a, have a, haven't nailed this down. But to me, it feels at least 50% faster, maybe 100% faster than we were. That's awesome for us. Such a large organization. Yeah. Yeah. And it's accelerating. Yeah. What about operational stuff? Have you tried automating that for yourself maybe? What are you using? You know, we just approved all the connectors with the various AI. So now our AIs can access our Slack and our

Gmail and our docs and all of that kind of stuff. And we are learning and encouraging people how to use it, how not to use it. Don't have to do things without you being in the loop. Don't let it post on social media. Don't let it send the email. Maybe let it draft the email and then you check on it. But I am on a daily basis. I talk to one or more of these of these AIs and I say, what's falling through the cracks?

And it's acting like a little bit of a chief of staff for me. And it's going to my Slack. It's going to my Gmail. It's going that. It's like, oh, I've drafted something for you. Is this good? So I'm already using that. And I'm finding that's super useful for just,

there's always people who are asking me, hey, can you do this? Can you do that? And I typically probably 20 or 30 percent did fall through the cracks. And only when people keep bugging me, do I, not bugging me, reminding me. Does it, does it, does it actually happen? You know, there's just a lot of paperwork type stuff that we has dramatically accelerated. Totally. We have to write a lot of proposals to people for philanthropic or even school, you know, earned revenue type stuff. And now you can have a meeting, keep all the notes, have a first draft of a proposal. We won't just send that. but now within 10 minutes of the meeting you have a first draft,

and then that's a good catalyst for everyone to now start weighing in. That would have taken a week before, two weeks before. Content creation. When I make a video, I always try to, like, what about this edge case? What about that edge case? I've been making financial literacy videos lately, and financial literacy is full of edge cases. Like, what if I'm 55 and a half, but I've done this in this Senate,

and I'm in this tax bracket? And that is dramatically shortened the research time for me. Because I am literally, once again, I don't just go to the AI and accept its answer. I look at it. I'm like, oh, show me a source that validates that before I make a video on it. And I'm like, oh, it's from IRS.gov. All right. I will now make that video.

So that's dramatically shortened. As I said, our content creators are able to scale much faster. They're still reviewing all the questions tweaking it, but they are definitely getting all the research, of course. Quick pause here. If you're enjoying this podcast, you will absolutely love my In A Circle newsletter. So what I basically do is I take all the tips from these podcasts and I apply them to my personal life, to my investment portfolio, and to my businesses, this media company and my language teaching business. Sometimes we get amazing results and I share our real tactics.

Sometimes we don't and I share that too. Think of it as an insider version of this podcast. The link is in the description. Join my free newsletter to stay ahead. Does it ever make you scared? Because when you're seeing this progress, are you ever thinking like, oh, in three years, AI is able to develop another kind of academy just by itself, just because, like, why I wouldn't need humans?

Yeah. And I have two responses to that. One is my emotional ego response to that, and then one is my more higher-minded, correct response to it. Thank you. My emotional ego response to is, yeah, I do worry about that. And one could imagine, I think it's very hard right now to vibe code something as like the same fidelity and quality. You could make something that looks kind of like Khan Academy, but not have

the rigor, et cetera. I think it's quite plausible that in three or four or five years, people could maybe start to develop these things. There, I think there still will be the burden to how do you have the efficacy data that it really works? How do you make sure that you're working with school systems in a way that meets all of their data privacy agreements? Talk to their agents. Yes, exactly. There will still be some. There will still be some. some of those frictions. It won't be as simple as vibe coding. So I think there will still be some advantages of already having something out there that's already being used by millions and that you have real data on, real efficacy on. You're able to work with the system. The correct answer,

which I tell the team all the time, is if we or someone else can create a solution that's as good as us or better and actually show that they're doing it, it just doesn't feel that way, as a nonprofit, we should be happy about that. We should say good. One of the many problems in the world has now been solved. What other problems are there to be solved? And, you know, for better or for worse, in the education space, there are many problems to, to solve here. And, you know, one of the things we're thinking about at Khan Academy is assessment. So standardized assessment, historically, it's multiple choice, et cetera. That's why a lot of people don't like it. It's very narrow. But we're working on real standardized assessment with real psychometrics

that has some of the traditional, but also starts broadening the aperture, asking students to explain their reasoning, giving teachers not just the what percentile their kids are in, but what, giving a narrative. And those things like that are also very hard to just vibe code in a garage. Totally. Because you're doing all the psychometric data. You have to get it out there with millions of people to use it. And I think that's an area where very few VCs or frankly even private equity firms are

like, let's create a new standardized test leveraging AI because it's a lot of work. And it'll take years to get the right psychometric validation and to go out there. into schools and other places. But that's where I think we as a nonprofit that's tech-focused can be valuable. We're thinking a lot about credentials, high school credentials, high school diplomas, credit recovery, college degrees, pathways into jobs. And those are the places where I hope AI gets better. I hope it can create a lot of solutions.

But I would be surprised if markets on their own are able to solve a lot of these problems. Yeah. But someone who's listening and thinking, okay, he's positive. about being likely replaced in three years? I'm not. So for someone who has these thoughts, can you talk more about your new initiative? Because when I heard that at TED Vancouver

that you're partnering with TED and ETS, for me was another full circle moment because I also took TOEFL and we partner with ETS from my other channel where I talk about learning English. And you're doing this $10,000. Is it a bachelor's degree? How long does it last? And this is going to the whole job shock thing.

I think we need new systems of skilling people. Yeah. And this started with a conversation with Chris Anderson, who's the outgoing steward at TED. And I've taken on this new role as vision steward there. And the reason why he wanted me to take on this role, he says, you know, we should do this, Sal. The future is all going to be about human purpose, human meaning, and human connection. It's almost hard to focus on meaning and connection if you don't have a job. Totally.

If you don't have a meaningful job, if you can't put food on the table. And so we're launching. We announced it at TED, Cont-Ted Institute. It's intended to be accredited. We're pursuing accreditation. We're likely to do both four years degree and master's degree. And the idea is it would be essentially three components. There will be an academic component.

We still think, especially for the bachelors, you should learn your history, your civics, your accounting, your statistics. But most of the program that makes it really differentiated, it will be online. but we're going to be putting students of all ages. We've already gotten in the last two or three weeks, 3,000 people interested in being students. Congratulations. And it's amazing.

Most of them have bachelor's degrees. Many of them have master's degrees. And you can sense the fear that they have around. They need to requalify. Exactly. Being relevant. And what we are going to be doing is putting people into group simulations, projects, likely leveraging another platform.

We have schoolhouse or something similar, where you're on Zoom, you're on a video conference together. You have four hours. You have to build a business, which means create a prototype, maybe make an ad, do the business plan,

survey customers, whatever it might do, do competitive research. And then afterwards, the outcome of that, maybe other teams peer review you, but also you are going to review each other on your communication,

your collaboration, your creativity, all of these things that we know really matter, and we believe are going to matter people calling them durable skills now. They're going to matter even in an AI world. They might matter more in an AI world, how well you can sell and listen and inform connections. How many are there those durable skills? Can you name them? Oh, the ETS framework?

There's the main framework. There's five. Communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking. ETS has a whole framework around this. And then there's sub frameworks. Like, oh, leadership is one of them. I think it was in leadership. Is there evidence in that meeting that you had with the person? Did they seek out other people's opinions. In communication, were they able to build off of other people's thoughts as opposed to just talking past them, things like that? And so you can imagine when you're in many, many sessions like this, where you're doing real work that you would need to do in an AI workplace. And as you know, we've launched this with initially six corporate partners, McKinsey, Bain, Google, Microsoft, Replit, and Accenture. And I expect we're going to have many more in the next

couple of months. We're co-designing with them to say, like, what are the types of work? What do you need now? Yeah, what do you expect people to be able to do next year? And it might change the year after. And we're going to create those real simulations so that these people, not just young people, can have practice doing that, create portfolios and artifacts of doing that. But also start to surface these durable skills of communication, creativity, leadership, collaboration, et cetera. But that's what we're going to do in the master's program. And that's what we're going to do in the Bachelors.

Are those companies going to be hiring graduates? You know, no one can commit that like, oh, yes. When you have your first graduates in two years, we're definitely going to hire 20 of them. But this is definitely designed and they definitely have a seat at the table because they too, just like Khan Academy, are reimagining how their roles change. They too are reimagining how they do interviews. And they are completely aligned that right now, if you do an interview, I have a family member who's interviewing at a startup here in Silicon Valley and she's in the third round and she has to

vibe code a solution for a hospital. and then they're going to have a panel interview. That's the way that interviews are going. But that's just one project that she's going to do. It's a little bit of an arbitrary one that this company just invented for her. And if she gets the job awesome, if she doesn't get the job,

it kind of just goes away, that artifact. What we're telling these employers is we're going to make people do 20, 30, 40, 50 of these projects and they're going to be more rigorously designed. They're going to have the portfolios. actually going to be rated, and we're going to get clear skills that when you do interviews, how one interviewer does it versus another, it can be. But here you can get feedback from 50, 60, 70, 100 people. So they're going to graduate with a different type of resume, basically. A very different

resume. Imagine this. Someone today graduates from Stanford, pick your major, good major, with a 3.9 GPA. When I look at that resume, I say, okay, probably smart, got into Stanford, good GPA. I don't know if those skills they learned are going to be directly transferable, but there's probably someone I can work with. Leadership skills, I don't know, looking at their GPA, maybe, oh, yeah, okay, maybe they're the class vice president or if they were the co-captain of the lacrosse. Okay, maybe they have leadership skills.

I don't know. But that's only you're kind of reading. There's signals, not evaluation. And what I normally do now when I see a resume, even someone who's been working, no matter what they write, I look for YouTube videos of them. I look for some evidence of like, how do they communicate? How do they?

And then you try to do it in an interview, which is just you only have a few hours to do it. So our case to the employers, and I think they believe this, is you're going to co-design these things. When we show you these different projects and simulations, you Google, Microsoft McKinsey, Bain, should say, oh, yeah, wow, we wish we could do that with people in interviews. But you're able to do it and you're able to get that signal. And that if I were to show you, here's a Stanford student with a 3.9 GPA. That's kind of the student that, say, McKinsey would interview, top 10% graduate of Stanford. here's another student from the Content Institute who is in the top 10% of communication skills,

collaboration skills, critical thinking skills. Here are the points of evidence. Here are video artifacts of them doing it. Our intent is that the employer says, oh yeah, we'll treat them at least as much of a priority as the top 10% from an elite university. So you're comparing this to elite universities. What about other universities?

Are they losing value in this new age? Yeah, and it's a good point because our intent, intent isn't to just only tackle the very cream of students, only for these very aspirational employers. But there is an intention behind partnering with these aspirational employers because the higher education world is very polar in certain ways. On one extreme, you have the elite institutions where some of these employers try to focus their recruiting, but they're super inaccessible, very low capacity. Any of these elite universities, Harvard would tell you, of the, I don't know how many students, 70, 80,000 students that must apply, 50,000 actually

could handle Harvard do well there, but they're only going to accept 2,000 of them. And, you know, maybe some of those other students go to another good university, but a lot of them won't. And then they won't go to a place where Google or Bain or whoever might recruit. So we wanted to show, and then the other extreme, you have online programs. And online programs have been, there's some good, high-quality ones. And I would say the good ones are places like Western Governors University or Southern New Hampshire University. those are very good for the person who maybe didn't go down a traditional route. They need to complete their college degree in order to enter.

But it's very seldom that those people are getting the same signal of the person who just graduated from a well-known university, a well-known four-year program. So the reason why we wanted to at least show that Content Institute can be a pathway is to get rid of the stigma around online, that you can actually create online that is highly interactive. highly human to human and also creates a great signal. If you do very good, that is as good as any university. We also want to be able to serve students that maybe they're not going to end up as a elite programmer at Google, but they can still create signals that they can get a great job at a regional firm or things like that, comparable to still a very strong college degree at a top 50 type of university. That's where we're starting.

But then as we scale, I hope we can add more and more programs. Looking ahead, like let's look 10 years ahead, should I be saving for my kids' college, or you think higher education will be similar to what you're building, which is like $40,000 for four years versus $400,000 standard? What we're building is maximum $10,000 for the degree. Oh, for the whole degree, not... And we said $10,000 to be careful. We actually intend to be a good bit less than that.

But yes, it's for the whole degree. And also in terms of opportunity costs, because it's competency. base, it won't necessarily take four years. So you might be able to do it in two years, and then you get two more years of earning, and instead of $400,000, you spent $5,000 or whatever it might be to get your degree. My answer to your question, and we're facing this myself, my son is a junior in high school. He's going to start applying to colleges. I, as a father, and I think he wants this to, you know, I met my wife at MIT, a lot of my closest friends. I still have dreams about college on a regular basis for getting to drop classes.

It was a great time, right? It was a great time. But that is, I hate to say this way, but it's a luxury experience. And as a parent, yes, I would love my children to have that. And my son will be applying to schools like that. And I'm hoping he gets in so that we have the privilege of spending probably half a million dollars for him to go. But I think from that he's going to get great experiences, great friendships, hopefully some great skills. he'll have a coming of age experience.

But I see, I could imagine he too might want to still do Content Institute on top of his degree at whatever university goes, because that might have a more direct link to some of these job-ready skills. Content Institute, we plan on adapting much faster to wherever the tools are. And we are also seeing, even a lot of kids at some of the top universities, they're dropping out right now because they're entrepreneurial. And they see, wow, AI's changing so fast. Moving so fast. This is the window. If I don't get in now, who knows if Kemp is.

Capitalism existed for years, much less, you know. So I think for those types of students, this is going to be very interesting. And then the reality is most students who are going to college aren't getting to go and throw frisbees on the quad and look at the IV on the walls and, you know, and have Socratic discussion with world leaders. They're going pretty transactionally to get a job. They're going to commuter college. They're starting at their local community college. And so I see things like Content Institute or maybe Content Institute. coupled with their local regional college or their local community college could be a very

viable solution. One of the main reasons you can get a great education at your local community college or at your local, let's say at the Cal State system here in California, you could get a great education at these places. But a lot of students who are high capable or high ambition might say, oh, well, I got a full ride at San Jose State, but I'm going to get my family to pay half a million dollars to go to Stanford because I'm not going to get, you know, McKinsey's not going to recruit at San Jose State. Now they could say, hey, I'm going to go to San Jose State. I'm going to get that full ride. It's going to be free. And I'm also going to do Contet Institute for 5K. For 5K. And then I'm in, and then I'm in good shape. So your answer to answer your question, if you're in a position to do so,

I think it's a gift that you can give your kids if they can go to a great college and have that experience. But I think as a society. It's becoming unnecessary, right? Yeah. There's other luxury experiences I could give my child too. Travel more. Yeah, exactly. Imagine if I spent half a million dollars or my child and I said, go travel the world with your friends and read great books while you're doing it.

That's also pretty awesome. That might be better than... Or even give them a fraction of that money and say start a business. Start a business. Spend that on tokens. Down payment on a house. Yeah. There's so many things that that could be... I give another... I have a friend out, and this is very Silicon Valley in the bubble type thing,

but I have a friend who... And this is, this is, this is artifact of privilege. But we were all talking about these like, oh, what are our kids going to do in four or five years? Like, who knows what jobs are? And he was saying, yeah, you know, I was looking at it for like two or three hundred thousand dollars. There are these like mom and pop businesses you can buy that are like completely unautomated. They're, you know, but they have good contracts with the government or whatever else. Or, you know, there's part of the supply chain.

You know, it could be fun to buy one of those for two or three hundred thousand dollars and have our kids go and automa, you know, and turn it into a, you know, essentially be private equity, turnaround. It might be interesting use of money versus college to wrap up this topic. Are you more on a positive side? Like in five years, the world's still, because I feel like we still take time to adopt. I don't think we're going to go through dramatic change. Yes, things are speeding up, but I don't think we're going to have mass layoffs like 90% of people gone. What are you thinking about the next five years? I hope you're right. I I think you're right.

Things normally don't change quite as fast. But this is a different type of technology than what we've seen. I mean, you are seeing this kind of exponential curve. We've been seeing that in software engineering. People for the last two or three years have been talking like, yeah, AI is pretty good at coding. Maybe it'll affect. And last year, if you asked software, it's like, yeah, it's helping me 20, 30%. And then there was this Claude Code moment about four or five years ago where it just hit a certain threshold.

Four months. And then everyone's like, oh, this is how you code now. And it's getting into knowledge work. That's what I'm seeing of the trend. More than 50% of queries, I think, is now coming from non-technical people. Exactly. So my sense is, even if we start seeing four or five percent unemployment in certain sectors in the next three or four years, that will be very painful. And I think it will start to affect our politics.

It will affect just how we think about things. So, yeah, I don't think you're going to see mass unemployment in the next three or four years, but I think you're going to start seeing some of these pockets in three or four years. It's going to be scary. And if we don't start, and the AI is accelerating. Yeah. So if we don't, as industry, government, nonprofit sector, start having some solutions to scale at that point, we're going to be in trouble. Okay.

What can an individual person do today to not get replaced? I think the best, the most important skill is this people, you know, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, just being willing to try things out. Even for myself, I'm always preaching on this, sometimes I'm like,

oh, I heard about some, you know, I heard about Open Claw and this and that. I'm like, I should try it out. And I'm like, oh, be a little bit of, but just getting over that activation energy

and trying it out and fiddling with it and seeing if you can get it to do something, if you have that mindset, and you'll be fine. And if you look at your different workflows that you have in your life, personally or that you have at work.

And you're like, let me see if I can take that output. And maybe initially I just have to copy and paste it and put it here. And then I can generate this. Oh, I find that I'm doing that a lot. Let me create an agent that can do that. Or let me just instruct Claude coworker or OpenClaude to do that. Oh, let me be careful. Let me put it in a separate device or let me put it in a sandbox someplace.

But I think it's that very incremental. None of this stuff is rocket science. And you don't have to... And even easier. Like perplexity computer is so easy. Or like hyperagents. But there is a little. of an activation energy, it's like, let me try to install it. Let me play around with it a little bit.

Let me not be afraid to press some buttons and see what happens. You have to be careful sometimes. But I think anyone who has that mindset, I think is going to be fine. Give them a prompt that has transformed how you work. I can, while you think I could give mine, that was super transformational this week. I talked to my chat, GPT, and I said, give me top five things that I'm repetitively doing by analyzing my Gmail calendar and whatever you have access to and tell me, what should I have vibe code. And it came up with a really cool thing. Like, I'm repurposing a lot of content. So it's like, let's start repurposing your newsletter to your LinkedIn. But I'm like, oh, thank you. Yeah,

this is a manual process where I'm a manager communicating with different teams. And like, this is such a cool prompt. I should run it every week or maybe every day, like as an agent. Yeah, you know, the ones that I, like, something that I use, use the same prompt, I've, I mean, this is just, I've replaced what, like, reading the news. and I just have a bunch of threads about the topics I'm interested in. And like at night, I'm like, what's the latest? Yeah. But one thing I found, and I think this is important to build AI skills,

I've been fascinated by what's going on in the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz and the game of chicken and the gamesmanship that's going on there and how the market seems to be ignoring it and ignoring the fact that we have $100 plus oil prices and, you know, $20 shipping rate. So it's essentially... I just saw $9 per gallon yesterday in near Atherton. Yeah. I was like, what?

Well, that's, they're the foreboding of the future. But a lot of the times when I was asking, like, what about this? I think this is going to happen. We've all, like, the AI is like, Sal, you're a genius. You're spotting what other people aren't spotting. And it is very seductive. Because sometimes it'll do it very. And so I have learned to say, be critical of me.

Like really pushed back. And even then sometimes it won't. Like I'll say, you're so humble for wanting to be pushed back. Okay. If you were a 22 today, MIT grad, what would you? you do differently. The first ever all-electric 2026 Subaru Trail Seeker is the

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EV Subaru has ever built. Test drive it at your local Subaru dealer or visit Subaru.ca. You know, when I was 22, I did try to do some startups. This was the late 90s. Dot com boom. I think the same Sal now would probably be trying to do some startups. And my advice would be don't run to where everyone else is running.

Try to find the lanes that are most empty. Try to find the most boring industries that are most ripe for applying some of these technologies. And I would say, yeah, make sure you invest in your. durable skills in your communication, your collaboration, seek out feedback, seek out mentors, build human connections with people, those are truly going to be durable. If your kids come to you today and say, hey, dad, I'm afraid I won't be able to find a job. What would you tell them? I've had my kids haven't said that quite yet, but I've had, we have Khan Lab School and we

have some kids who have said that to me. And I say, you know, I honestly don't know exactly what the answer is. And I actually have some people in my family who are older who are having trouble finding jobs right now. And, but what I'm telling them is be up to date on the technologies. This is a moment in time where even though in some ways it's hard to get a job, it's also a place, it's, we're in a moment where it's actually still easy to differentiate yourself. Yeah. Like today, if I put on a job application that I have a web page, people are like, big deal. But in 1996, if you said, I have a web page, people like, ooh, let's hire this person.

They know what's about to happen. I come with 100 agents. I come with 100 agents. Or why don't you interview my agents first? Or do you have an agent that would like to talk to mine? Or here's my portfolio of AI generated art. Or here are my workflows that I've automated. Or here's a loom video I created a day in my life where I have automated my life with agents.

If you know anyone like that, I would be interested in hiring them for Khan Academy tomorrow. So that's what I would tell them. You know, my son is, he's likely to be a computer science major. Five years ago, I was like, oh, that's great. you know, Imran's going to go work in tech and I chose a nonprofit route. He'll go for profit. We'll retire off of his equity, you know, whatever. Now I'm like, oh, computer science, I don't know, maybe, but you should do it because

it's interesting. It's intellectually challenging. It'll be a signal to the world that you can do hard things. Yeah. You're bright. You're hardworking. But also do all these other things that we just talked about. Yeah, because 75% of Google's code is now AI.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Sal. This is an amazing conversation. and thank you for sharing your wisdom, and thank you for inspiring everyone across the world to learn. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.