The Vergecast - Decoder: The future of remote learning with Sal Khan of Khan Academy

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

For the next few Tuesday's, we'll be sharing Nilay Patel's new podcast Decoder, an interview show that puts a spotlight on how innovators and policymakers at the frontiers of business and technology are navigating an ever-changing landscape. On this week’s episode of Decoder, Nilay Patel talks with Sal Khan, the co-founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit online learning platform for students in kindergarten through high school. Khan Academy is an organization that exists because of technology. What started with Sal tutoring his niece in math over video using off the shelf cameras and software, has grown into an organization with nearly 20 million users per month, available in 46 languages and used in more than 190 countries. And online learning has gotten even more vital with the pandemic. In this conversation, Nilay and Sal discuss the future of learning, what online education is good at and where it struggles, how Khan Academy is growing, and how Sal’s thinking about handling trickier subjects like history and social studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everybody, it's Nealai from the Vergecast. For the next little bit, we're running episodes of my new podcast Decoder with Nilai Patel in the Vergecast feed, just to give you all a little taste of it. On this episode, I interviewed Sal Khan. He's the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. That's the online learning platform. A super interesting conversation. If you're missing the Tuesday interview episodes, they're moving over to Decoder.

We just want to put them here now, give you a taste of them. Without further ado, here's Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical. operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prom's something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data.

And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star,

Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neely Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my new podcast about big ideas and other problems. On this week's episode, I'm talking to Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit online learning platform

for students in kindergarten through high school. Welcome to Introduction to Economics. Here are my tips for reducing stress around taking important tests. Welcome to foundations of American democracy. What I want to do in this video is think about the origins of algebra. Khan Academy is one of those organizations that can only exist because of technology. Sal started tutoring his niece in math over video using off-the-shelf cameras and software,

and that has grown into an organization with 20 million students a month in 46 languages in over 190 countries. And online learning has gotten even more vital with the pandemic. In this conversation, Sal and I touched on the future of learning what online education is good at and where it struggles, how Khan Academy. is growing and how he's thinking about handling trickier subjects like history and social studies. After all, math is mostly just math, but school districts around the country and the world have very different views on how to handle the humanities. That's a hard problem for a nonprofit

to solve in a deeply polarized world. One thing you should pay attention to here is how Sal is thinking about what online learning is good at and how to lean into that. His goal isn't to replace schools, but to build something else that works with him. That balance is tricky to find, And I tried to push him on what technology can and cannot do here. All right, Sal Khan, CEO of Khan Academy. Here we go. Sal Khan, you're the founder of Khan Academy. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me. A lot to talk to you about. I always want to ask people how they make decisions. I feel like your decision set with Khan Academy has gotten ever more complicated because of the pandemic. A lot of kids are experiencing school in something that looks like Khan Academy every day now. That's their primary form of learning. How has that changed for you in Khan Academy now? Yeah, you're absolutely right.

You know, when the pandemic hit in mid-March, we first caught wind of it in February, or it might have even been late January. I got a letter from a teacher in South Korea saying how he was leaning on Khan Academy during their nationwide school closures. And I'm like, how wild is that? A whole country shut down physical schooling.

And then a few weeks later, early March, you know, I live in Northern California and actually the local private school had to shut down. That was, maybe it was the first U.S. shutdown in the country. And then it started to dawn on us. You know, and I'm on the board of my children's school that I started a few years ago. And they started talking about, well, we have to have some plans if we shut down. And that's when it started dawned me.

Well, if people shut down, a lot of people are going to lean on Khan Academy. We could have never foreseen this, but, you know, we're accessible, we're free. We're proven, et cetera, et cetera. We cover multiple subjects in grades. But, yeah, we saw our usage go through the roof as soon as the school's closed. was about 250 to 300% of normal. And to be clear, I view only Khan Academy as a suboptimal situation. You always want the Khan Academy where you can get your practice, your feedback,

learn it your own time and pace, adapts to you. You want that in conjunction with ideally a great physical experience. You know, I make it very clear if I had to pick between an amazing teacher or amazing technology for myself or my own kids or anyone's kids, I'd pick the amazing teacher in person any day. The technology has to be in service to how do we, take that to another level. And, you know, Khan Academy has always been around all about, hey, you're one teacher. How do you meet the individual needs of 30 kids? How do you give them practice

at their learning edge? And that's where Khan Academy is. Or you're a student in a class, but you're little confused. You need some gaps filled at night. It's 11 p.m. How do you get help? Con Academy's there for that. But as soon as the pandemic hit, people started leaning much, much heavier on Khan Academy. Then, you know, the thing that I observed was huge inconsistency in the synchronous part of distance learning that was happening. My kid's school actually did a very good job. Within three days, they were up and running. Once again, it wasn't as good as being in the classroom together, but they got, I would say, 80% there, 90% there. Were they just on video conference? Like, give me a specific example, what they did well. Well, you know, the school, I started where my kids go.

I have three kids now. They're 11, 9, and 6, the younger one just turned 6. It's called Khan Lab School. It's always, the school was formed based on an idea of, okay, let's assume things like Khan Academy exist in the world, what could schooling then be like? Well, then the teacher shouldn't be about giving the lecture and you don't have to move all the kids' lockstep. When people get together, the teacher should act as more of an advisor or how do you unblock kids or even how do you be the conductor so that you can get kids to help each other. So the school has always been about student agency and kind of the students being at the center of their learning and that the adults are there to always help and unblock. And, you know, that might seem like a small thing,

but it's actually a huge thing. It's much harder, and it takes a lot more sophistication than, you know, just going through the same lectures year after year. And so that's always been the core principles of the school. And, you know, there's other principles, everyone, a student, everyone, a teacher. Learning should not be bound by time or space. You know, we have a couple of kids at the school who are, like, Olympic-level athletes. And if they have to go practice skiing in Tahoe, they should be able to keep learning.

And so the school already had a lot of those muscles that as soon as distance learning happened, they just kept doing what they were doing. It's just people weren't able to come physically to the school as much. And what I was really impressed is, especially for my older kids, my 11-year-old and 9-year-old, because the school had been investing so much in student autonomy and students being accountable and setting their own goals and reviewing their goals with their advisor, my 11- and 9-year-old really didn't miss a beat. I mean, my 11-year-old is, you know, on the other side of the house right now, cranking through his goals

better than I do. You know, my 5-slash-6-year-old was a little difficult at first. But he actually eventually got it as well. You know, one thing I've been thinking about a lot is we've written stories about this at The Verge where you just see an entire generation of kids grow up. They've already got sort of like corporate management muscles. We just ran a story about a TikTok creator who makes all the most viral beats on TikTok. And he literally talked about getting views as a KPI. And when I was a 22-year-old kid making music, like KPI's are not part of it.

do you worry that kids who sort of, you know, you're saying cranking through goals, like, that's a very management approach to learning, right? You're going to set some goals. You're going to hit him. You're going to move on to the exit of goals. Do you worry that kind of these software tools end up teaching kids to be, to think in that more rigorous corporate way? Or is that actually a good thing? Yeah, I mean, there's certain aspects of corporate thinking that, yeah, definitely wouldn't want to kind of, you know, imprint on everyone in the world. But there's some things that I think are reasonably good, which is, you know, if you think about the alternative, the alternative when you and I were in school, it was kind of like, teacher, what do I do next? All right, now what do I do? Is that going to be on the test? You know, we all remember some kids would raise their hand. Is that going to be on the test? Which is a very passive mentality. You're really not taking ownership.

You're letting stuff happen to you. you're kind of doing what you need to do. You're not really very driven yourself. But I think what you're seeing, that student that you're talking about, what I'm seeing in kids at Con Lab School, is they're saying, okay, I want to learn something or I want to be something by a certain date. I think that goal setting muscle is a very healthy thing. They're able to, if they're a little bit younger, with the help of peers or with the

help of an adult, break those bigger goals down into smaller goals that are more attainable in, you know, a month or week or even a day. That, I think, is a universally very helpful capability. And then they learn to organize around it, which I think is very helpful. I mean, it sounds maybe corporate, but my kids are better, like, they have Google calendars with their friends and they schedule calls. And, but it's all, like, it's actually in a very healthy way because they're also doing it, like, we're going to play a role playing game together.

And this is how we're going to organize. And you can imagine it's even been more important during COVID when, you know, they're not able to just, like, go to each other's houses in the same way. So I think all of those muscles, if anything, not only are they not negative, but I actually think those are the muscles more kids need. Because you have this, I don't want to, you know, impedance mismatch or some type of distance that kids get. Usually when they go from high school to college or from college to the workplace where this like, hey, tell me what to do next model goes to like, no, you figure out what you need to do you next. And if you're not good at it, you're going to have trouble in the workplace. And these kids are able to develop it early on, but they're able to develop it with support.

of adults. And they're also, and this is something that adults don't have, they're able to develop in the support of teachers and parents that also know what healthy looks like. So if I see my 11-year-old, and I have seen my 11-year-old get too caught up with his goals and like too stressed out about like not hitting all of his, he doesn't use the word KPIs, but essentially his KPI's, that like, I'm like, no, look, this isn't a big deal, Imran. Like you can, and we talk, you know, the teacher talks to him. It's like, no, no, you got to make sure you do this and he's being reflective about it. But you know the reality, you know, We know people in their 20s, 30s, 30s and 40s who don't know how, they don't have someone else coaching them. Like, hey, you've got to live your life. You're getting unbalanced. Your marriage is going to get destroyed if you don't put some KPI's there as well. So, yeah, I think it's a healthy thing. But like everything, it has to be in moderation and put in context. Yeah.

One of the most interesting aspects of this, right, is you obviously started making videos. You put them on YouTube, very democratic in terms of your ability to create and distribute. Now you have a platform and you can take it other places. that is the story of the tech industry is making creation and distribution so much easier over time. What we're finding the pandemic, though, is actually consuming it for many children is very hard, right? They don't have broadband. There's a Chromebook shortage in this country. Do you think of that is a limiter, like a market limiter? Do you think of that is something that you need to go advocate for? Is it something you've seen the government step into, state, local, federal? How has that been playing out? right? It just, it seems like you must have a very clear view on how some kids have all of the resources and some kids don't even have a Chromebook and a broadband connection.

Yeah, I mean, simply sure, you know, the last three sub-questions were yes, yes, and yes. It is a delimiter. It's always been a delimiter, the digital divide. You know, I would say over the last 10 years, the U.S., at least has done a good job of closing the digital divide in schools. It's still not completely closed, but the whole E-Rate program got a lot of devices and internet access into classrooms. But COVID's put a big spot. spotlight on the digital divide at home, which is dramatic. And obviously, if you don't, you know, it's not just accessing Khan Academy, but you're not going to be able to access your classrooms, Zoom calls, you're not going to be able to connect with family members. Your parents aren't going to be able to do remote work or even look for a job unless they have reasonable Internet access at home.

We've seen heroic efforts on the part of school districts. New York City distributed 300,000 laptops and got the local telecom carriers to give free internet. LA did 200,000. Miami did on the same order of magnitude. So that's great. and we are doing whatever we can to facilitate that, advocate for that. We're part of this Connect All Students' campaign from Common Sense Media. I've been telling everyone who would listen, like, you know, every, we're doing a trillion here, a trillion there in these stimulus rounds, and I'm guessing we're probably going to have

a few more trillions of stimulus put into the economy. To close the digital divide, my back of the envelope at home, you know, really make internet connection and devices like clean drinking water or heating or electricity, it's going to cost about $10 or $20 billion. So it's like 1% of one round of stimulus. And you think about all of the things where the government's trying to figure out, how do we empower people? How do we build infrastructure? How do we build human capital?

This seems like the no-brainer. Because once you have that, then things like Khan Academy and can kick in. Do you think that the government has to play a significant role there? And I ask you specifically because you started a school, right, to try new ways of learning. And when I say the government should play a significant role in building this infrastructure, I'm often told by telecom companies or lobbyists that let the free market do it. Right? But it sounds like you think the government should have a pretty significant, direct role in building that

infrastructure. Yeah. You know, I have a view on, it's funny. When I was in business school, I took a course in the first year on social entrepreneurship. And it was the only course that I effectively, you know, the business school I went to, they didn't really fail people, but they would have failed me if they feel, I got the, they give a one, two, or three, and I got a three, which means. you got the lowest, you know, you were like the lowest eight in a class of 80, you know, on that.

And that's because when I took that course, I remember the final exam, I was very skeptical of, not even just government, but I was very skeptical at the time of even the not-for-profit sector, ironically. I said, you know, this just feels good, but is, you know, is that really going to cure AIDS by raising some money and getting people going to hike or bike? You know, I was very skeptical. I was very cynical about it. But then when Khan Academy started and, you know, my day job, I was an analyst at hedge fund, I was doing nothing but talking to CEOs, CFOs of publicly traded companies.

And I saw, you know, how incentives were driven, frankly, by folks like myself, public equity investors who are trying to, you know, hold management accountable to next quarter's earnings or next year's earnings. And I also, you know, simultaneously I was doing this thing for my cousins. And I did appreciate that, look, there are certain parts of society. Like, I am a capitalist at heart. I believe the free market, innovate. it allocates resources effectively as long as, you know, there aren't distortions in it. But there's at least two clear places where markets in our society don't work well,

or even when they do work, they don't lead to outcomes that are consistent with our values. And I would argue that probably health care and education. And it's not that every health care, every education company has to be a not-for-profit or has to be in the government. There's a lot that you could do that can still be for-profit. But when you think about the fundamental task of making sure that everyone has access, to education, which I think is consistent with our values. You know, a system where the payer, the decision maker, and the beneficiary are all three different parties, which is the case in actually both education and in health care,

you're not, the markets aren't going to naturally lead to efficient outcomes and they might not be consistent with your values. Now, you could argue maybe that's the area for government to kind of step in, and that arguably, you know, a free world class education for anyone anywhere is arguably the mission statement of the public education system. but we know that government can sometimes be a little bit slower. It's got a lot of resources, but, you know, once it starts moving in a direction, it's very hard for it to change that direction.

And that's where I think the not-for-profit sector is really powerful. The not-for-profit sector is where you can go in there and address places where markets alone won't lead to outcomes we'd want, where philanthropy can fuel it. You can show that things can scale, that they can have high impact, and that in some cases you can prototype things for government. So, you know, Khan Academy itself, we're the budget of a large high school. We're about $60 million a year,

but we reach over $100 million a year. I would like to think that, you know, I'm hoping that government looks like that eventually. We're primarily philanthropically funded and says, yeah, that's a good idea. And, you know, those folks are good at doing it. Better than we would.

Let's make sure that that can actually scale in an unfettered way. And similar things with the digital divide. You know, I don't think the government has to get into the business of making devices or being the person you call if your internet goes down. but I think they definitely could be the person or the entity that puts resources or the incentives in place so that these things get closed.

I mean, you're seeing it with the pandemic, right? As soon as COVID hit, they said, all right, there's a bunch of people who are trying to come up with vaccines. But as soon as you get through phase three trials, you then have to go through the, you have to start manufacturing and distributing. We don't have the luxury of waiting. So we're just going to look at the top three or four candidate vaccines. And as soon as they go through phase two, we're going to say, we'll buy them. And if they don't pass phase three, we'll just throw it away. But if they pass phase three, we just save three months or four months of manufacturing time.

That's what government can do with its size. And I think they could do something very similar with the digital divide. It's interesting. You said you'd prototype for the government. That's obviously one, potentially every school that's different country. I don't know if you think of them as customers, but customers for a Khan Academy. Right now, though, you're primarily philanthropically funded. Tell me how that works.

Do you, most CEOs, I know, they spend 60% of their time on the road raising money or talking about deals. You are in front of the camera a lot. You still make a lot of the videos. How do you manage that time? How much time do you spend actually fundraising and doing that work of a not-per-profit, which is, from what I understand,

more significant at not-per-profits than even at publicly traded or for-profit companies? Yeah, I know it's a constant tension. I would say on one level, I mean, given the examples you just talked to, I think I've been fortunate from the get-go in that Khan Academies, you know, if I was running some type of a not-for-profit that was like delivering mosquito nets in Africa, the benefit is, you know, random people in the U.S. wouldn't know about the benefit unless I'm, like, in front of them, like showing them and giving them the numbers. But inherently in Khan Academy's model,

people experience it. I mean, everyone who's donated Khan Academy, usually they or their children were the first beneficiary. And it clicks in their head, wait, this was really useful for my middle-class child. Wow, this could be useful for every child on the planet. Wow. Let me give some money to this. And it is true. I mean, even some of our very biggest donors, you know, the Gates Foundation is a supporter, Google's a supporter, and I don't want to make it sound like we're flush with cash, because we aren't. I'm, you know, anyone listening, please donate to Khan Academy. There's a lot that we want to do that we can't because of lack of resources. But, you know, the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates was using it with his son, and that he told the foundation about it. Several Google execs were using it with their children, and then they told

Google.org, hey, maybe we should partner with these guys. It seems pretty cool. So I think that's been one advantage we've had, and just the scalability of it. I think people grok that like this, okay, wow, this budget of large high school, but you could, you can scale to one day billions of folks. But in terms of my day, I spend, or my time, I spend about, I would call it a third, a third, a third, a third. I spend about a third of my time doing what I would say, still individual contributor creative work. That's me making videos for the most part. Sometimes it's me. Sometimes it's me like brainstorming whatever strategy or something or starting new ventures like like this tutoring thing. A third of my time, I would say, is kind of classical management stuff. But I have a really,

you know, we have a president and CEO who's very capable and, you know, she has a very strong team. So that gives me a lot of leverage, but I still am about a third of my time in that. And about a third of my time, I would just frame as external. So we're in that third right now where, you know, I'll talk to press, you know, but I'm also talking to potential. philanthropist. But yeah, it's a constant tension of, you know, how much to put into one of those three buckets. But the third, third, third feels about right. How do you manage the context switch from each one? I personally find it very difficult to go from an individual contributor to management and back in the space of a single day. Is that something that you think about managing as well? Or do you

just, is it literally two hours, two hours, two hours? It's hard. You're absolutely right. But to your point, like, you definitely can't, you know, you can't have a third or third, third, but if it was like every half an hour at switching, there's no way you're going to be able to do that. My ideal days, the ones I'm pretty creative and productive is, you know, roughly from like eight in the morning till about 11 in the morning, I have like a good three hour block of creative time. I can be usually pretty productive there. Then I kind of get into management type stuff or a mixture, you know, between the management

and the external stuff, that is easy to contact switch. So you can almost view it as like a third or half your day gets to be reasonably creative, or at least you're in control of your time. And then another two thirds to half of your day, you know, the calendar is in control of your time where you're speaking to folks or you're either internal folks or external folks. And it works for me. I mean, I have been thinking about trying to carve out like a Friday that's like a pure creative Friday, you know, at least once every other week or something like that, I think would be pretty

cool. So I'm working on it. It's constant optimization. I'm trying to do. I mean, I'm always tweaking. Does that have to be an hour meeting? Maybe it can be 30 minutes. Maybe it can be 15 minutes. I'm constantly trying to push the envelope. I think particularly now is the executives I talk to are all more public. They all have Twitter personas or Instagram profile. That balance is really shifting how everybody runs their business. Everyone seems to be much more keenly aware of it. But if you ever figure it out, please let me know, because I certainly have not. You said you spent a lot of time in that creative process. Take me into that. How do you decide? How do you decide? side, okay, this is the next thing Khan Academy is going to do. This is the next subject area we're going to cover. This is how we're going to do it? Or is there a body of experts that you talk to? Just walk me through the sort of creative process of making new stuff for Khan Academy. In the early days, it was me, you know, just getting letters from people asking for stuff,

me introspecting. I used to have a stack of textbooks and I'd look at the standards. Like, yeah, we kind of haven't done that yet. Let me do that. But over the last five or six years, we do have a team now, both internal and external experts that are, you know, they like literally this couple hours ago, I got a email from the project manager saying, all right, Sal, this is, this is your cue, this is what you need to work on for videos. And, you know, there was like three chem videos. One is a new video that I hadn't covered yet on distillation. So I did one on distillation. And then there were two videos that they thought needed redoing because, you know, modern chemistry standards They're now using different terminology than I used back when I recorded the first version in 2011.

So I get that. I'm making some stats videos on geometric random variables. So they queue up what they want, like the standards, and then maybe they might queue up a worked example if it is a worked example video. And then for me, it's really like, you know, for some of this stuff, I have to spend a little bit of time re-immersing myself in the topic. Usually I'll just watch all the videos that I had made in the past. Okay, yeah, yeah, I get it. Okay, I'm ready to do it. And then, you know, depending on the video, there might be a little bit of research that I do.

There might be a little bit of looking for, you know, creative commons or public domain graphics. But I, one thing I have learned is over preparation can be a bad thing. One, it wastes time when you're, quote, overpreparing. And then when you get into it, you almost overcomplicate it because you want to throw out all the stuff that you prepared on all together. And so when I feel like I'm like somewhat uncomfortable, I just press record and I go. And anyone who's watched a kind of kind of video, you can tell. That's me talking and thinking in real time. I'm not reading a script.

I talk the way I talk right now, which is I think is part of the appeal. People know, okay, this isn't some like paid voice actor to read a script. This is a guy who's thinking it through with me and being very transparent of his thoughts. And, you know, I usually find that when I do that, when I, it comes out quite good, that I'm more prepared than I think. And your brain is really good at filling in the gaps. You don't have to script every word. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I'll ask Sal about some of the criticisms of Khan Academy, specifically the problems that arise when teaching qualitative subjects like history and social studies versus quantitative subjects like math and science. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster.

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while you're trying to scale instead you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across more than 125 categories so you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount. And finding the right talent is easy. You can browse profiles, review passwork, and get help scoping the role so you can get started quickly. Seriously, you could connect with the right freelancer in just a few hours, especially when you sign up with Business Plus. Their AI-powered shortlisting pairs you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours.

No endless searcher required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-R-K.com. Upwork.com. Okay, we're back. So one criticism of Khan Academy is it's very strong for quantitative. subject, stats, chemistry, basic mathematics. And then as you go into other qualitative subjects,

history, social sciences, English, there are just necessarily landmines there that many teachers approach in many different ways and many school districts themselves have heavily politicized in many different ways. So the one that comes to mind for me, policymakers like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas have railed against the teaching of the New York Times 1619 project in schools. Senator Cotton wants to defund the 1619 project curriculum, a New York Times program with the goal of reexamining the legacy of slavery in our country. He says the curriculum is racially divisive. How do you approach a problem like that?

Is Khan Academy going to have a 1619 project course? Is the New York Times talk to you? Are you worried that all of Texas will just, like, ban you from their ISPs? Those are like loaded issues in a way that changing the terms of a chemistry problem set maybe aren't. Yeah, no, it's a real thing. And, you know, Khan Academy does have humanity. It has American history content. It has world history content on it today.

Most of our resources have been on the STEM side to date, but we've already taken, you know, you can go learn American history right now on Khan Academy. And I think there's two things. I mean, actually, even as much as it sounds like America's super polarized, America is actually easier. I mean, if you start going into Turkey and, you know, the Armenian genocide or, you know, other countries are actually much harder. You know, they're in, like, absolute denial of some things that have happened.

happened, while in the U.S. it is much more of like a matter of emphasis. You know, the 1619 project, I think if you, you know, I interviewed the lady who wrote that first article with the New York Times on our live stream. And I think if you go to the Khan Academy's content, you know, we had a Jeffrey Rosen, who's the head of the National Constitution Center. We've done some stuff with him. And, you know, we've had both conservatives and liberals be suspicious of us when they found out that we were doing content on American history. And then, you know, we said, take a look at it and then they come back to it was like, yeah, that was pretty good. That was, and, you know, I think there is a way, I mean, just on this one issue of the 1619 project

versus more of a like, you know, let's be proud proud of our history type of narrative, which was kind of the one that most of us grew up with. I think there's a way to do both where there were horrors of slavery and it's well documented. And if those horrors are age appropriate, like not going to cause trauma for kids, the kids should know about it. With that said, there's a lot. that is very positive and powerful about this country, however imperfect it was, and it started. No country has ever been perfect. And so I think there's ways to do both. That's not to say that I'm sure we're going to face some hard things over time as we go deeper into the histories.

Or I would say it gets even tougher once you get more formally adopted in a school system, then, you know, kind of the things get more tense. But maybe, you know, I run optimistic. I think there's ways to do this reasonably well. You know, we've been writing our content principles, what we've said is we will always, we want to cover the standards, whatever the standards are, but truth is always what we're in service to. So if we feel like the way that the standard is missing the truth, we will put, you know, we will go to what the truth is. But we hold a very high academic standard for what truth is. It isn't just like we're feeling there's a movement and we've got to really push this or create an impression.

It's, we really, you know, we want to go to scholars say, okay, give us, you know, in some cases, it might not even be our own voice. We'll interview people and say, well, you know, we're hearing both sides. Like, what do you think is the right narrative here? I ask this question because it's loaded across so many different fields of what I think of as a core education. When you say both sides, to me as a journalist that like it triggers a bunch of media criticism in me that maybe is misplaced when it comes to, you know, middle and high school education. But there sometimes aren't both sides, right? And as you get more and more enmeshed into school districts, that are becoming more and more political.

How do you balance what you want Khan Academy to be with what the school districts might want with what you personally or what your organization might think of as the truth? Yeah, I'll give an example. And, you know, humanities isn't something we're doing deep dive yet, but it'll come up so we think a lot about this.

And I agree with you saying about both sides. Like if one side is saying the truth, you don't have to get both sides. I 100% agree with that. By the way, I encourage you not to fall into the rabbit. of like media people criticizing themselves. Like it's very different, but it is to me a very, it's a loaded term right now because of how we perceive the media. Right. I mean, the way I have view it is maybe not both sides. It's like both affects of, you know, like,

I think American history is a good example. I think there are folks like we, we need to really underline the horrors of slavery and racism in our country. That's become more obvious than ever. And, you know, even, you know, when I read about the 1619, I was like, wow, I didn't, I didn't fully realize that. I didn't fully realize that Abraham Lincoln, who we consider as the, like, you know, the most enlightened. And he probably was one of the more enlightened people of his time. You know, he brought some black leaders into the White House and says, okay, you're going to be liberated. Now, I'm not sure if our people can get along with each other. So we're going to try to, like, settle you someplace.

Like, that was Abraham Lincoln. Now, you know, it was in the time, et cetera, or that, you know, Thomas Jefferson, you know, while he was right. the Declaration of Independence, he was literally being weighted on by one of his slaves, right? Like there's deep irony there. And I think these stories are really powerful stories for kids to learn. At the same time, it isn't to say that, you know, our country is somehow this fundamentally, you know, that we've been told lies our whole life. Like there are very powerful things in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. There are aspects of Thomas Jefferson and many aspects of Abraham Lincoln that are very aspirational, especially for the

time and context in which they lived in. And so I don't, you know, that's what I feel that there's kind of a nuance there that some of our current debate sometimes loses, that you can serve the truth, but that doesn't mean that you have to not still take pride in your countries, in aspects of your country's history. There should be shame and guilt in some aspects, but there should be pride in others. Do you think the online learning model has made this conversation more difficult for students, for educators? This is one where I think that sort of soft experience of being in the classroom. And maybe I'm thinking more from the college perspective, where what I experience in college is a lot of just overt challenge from my classmates and my teachers.

But even in sort of the middle and high school in the humanity zone, right, this is where a lot of that soft conversation, that disagreement, it's much harder to do over Zoom. or over asynchronous videos. It seems much more difficult and much more uncomfortable. Is that something you're trying to solve? Yeah. Well, you know, I wouldn't claim that with, you know, Khan Academy's current modalities, we could do all of, you know, of complete, you know, liberal education or humanities education or something like that.

What I think we can do, you know, I think in math, even in math, we don't even, we say, look, math, you can get practice, you can get feedback, you can understand what you've mastered. And then ideally, when you come into the classroom, you're able to have more peer-to-peer interaction. Either, you know, your friends can help you, you can have discussions about things, or if everyone's mastered a concept, the teacher can then do a simulation or a game that helps you really understand it. It's really the same idea if you think about the humanities. There's some things. There's some, there's a fact base, there's a causality base that it's good

to have. And I think you can do that through asynchronous or digital means. I mean, it's what textbooks do. And I think you can do a better job than textbooks because you can give tone, you can give, you can interview people, you can give a little bit more nuance to it. then that opens up the classroom to have exactly the types of experiences that you just talked about, to have like a meaningful conversation about these things, which some of these things you can do over Zoom, you know, maybe in schoolhouse.comworld eventually we'll have humanities study group seminars where, you know, here's the question that you all have to ponder over the course of the next half hour. But I think that's where these things can be complementary. It's not either or.

It's funny because we're having this conversation over Zoom. I'm realizing just the fact of this conversation is sort of undoing my claim. But It's easier to do it one-on-one. I just think as the group size gets larger in every Zoom call, your rate of participation goes to zero for every sort of individual in the room. When I hear about the pandemic accelerating trends in a way that they might never come back from, the notion that you will never again participate in a meeting or in a classroom because they're all virtual, seems like the one that it's most likely to regress back to where

it was because it feels untenable. It might, and you're probably right. But, you know, there are aspects of it. Once again, I don't want to be like the person who, you know, the techno optimist, whatever, utopian person because I actually, you know, people who know me in my daily life, like I'm just like not on the phone. I'm hard to reach. I'm usually like wandering through the woods.

Like, that's me. But there are interesting things about these modalities, especially these video conferencing modalities, where, you know, if you're in a large freshman class in college, there's 100, 200, 300, 300 kids in the classroom, very dehumanizing experience. If you're in a large Zoom, that's also dehumanizing to your, point, but the professor with a click of a button, one can poll everyone, and then based on your poll results, put you into breakouts of groups of five or six kids, literally with a snap of a finger or, you know, a click of a button. And that type of interaction is actually very, very,

very, very powerful. And you can, in theory, do that in person as well, but the logistics of it, like, you're going to spend 10, 15 minutes just putting people, sorting people into different groups and things like that. And so, you know, I've seen that done. I've seen that even in our own internal meetings, where if we had a larger meeting of 20, but we're a lot of, We said, here are the four questions. We're going to randomly put you into breakouts. That group of four, five, much more productive, much easier to talk, much easier to participate.

And I think we're just learning. Like, everyone's still getting their sea legs around this. So there's going to be some interesting. I mean, who knows, there might be a world where, you know, classrooms of the future, you're there in person, but then, you know, you're actually hybrid while you're there in person. Because it might even be too much time to walk across the other side of the lecture hall. You go onto your laptop and you start talking.

But then you get the benefit when you leave the, you met each other, and then when you leave the lecture hall, you're like, hey, that was a really cool point. You want to go grab lunch? Stuff like that. I can't decide if that is an optimistic or pessimistic vision of the future. I don't know either. That's a lot of kids with AirPods talking to themselves in luxury halls. Well, I'll make the optimistic argument, although I'm not 100% sure, is think about how many times you sat, you know, when you were in college and you were in these large classes, 100, even 50 people, but 100, 200, 200 people, how many people in that classroom did you really know? And, you know, I would argue in college, you know, my college had a class

about a thousand kids, there was about 10 close friends. And then I had probably orbit of about like 20 or the 30 kids that we kind of knew reasonably well in my class. The other like 900 something, I knew their faces. I knew I took, you know, freshman whatever with them, but I really didn't know them. But if there was like these kind of breakouts that I was able to have regularly in all my classes, I would have had an interaction with almost every one of my classmates by the end of freshman year. And I would have been more likely, I think, to sit down next to them at lunch or say, hey, what are you doing tonight? We can go, you know, there's a concert or whatever.

I think it would have been, it would have been positive for the human interaction. So we've been talking about college. Is that a place you're thinking about expanding into, I mean, it seems like the core platform is there, the technology is there, that sort of curriculum building skills are there for the organization. Do you think about expanding into collegiate subjects into, I mean, do you ever think, like, we could just run masterclass out of town and just do cooking videos? Like, is that, how do you think about expansion?

Or is that not something that's on your mind? Yeah. Well, first of all, a master class, I know the founder quite well. And I think what they're doing is great. And they do what they do excellent. And I think we'll do we're not going to do the, you know, how to train like Steph Curry type of thing, which is quite cool. You know, we already go into the, I would say, the college general ed courses, your first two years of, you know, we already have most of, frankly, the math and science courses. And probably we'll have a lot of the humanities courses over the next couple of years as well.

what I would love to do, I mean, that's the kind of that third pillar of Khan Academy's vision of like, can we connect what you've learned to opportunities? And I've always thought that this whole notion of, you know, these bundled diplomas, they don't need to be the only path. In fact, already with COVID, you're kind of seeing an unbundling of these things, you know, these diplomas are, they're credential, they're an experience, there's some socialization in there. Clearly the people who run universities or the original architects of university said, regardless of whether you need to become a computer scientist or an art history major, we're just going to keep you here for. for four years and fill it up because everyone's got four years of work to do. So clearly, you don't actually need four years to, and, you know, we also know people sometimes spend the four years or oftentimes spend the four years, and they still don't have quite the skills they need to actually do what they want to do. So I see parallel tracks forming, and they don't have to be

mutually exclusive, where students are able to show competency in some core things, that they're going to get opportunities, whether or not they're at college. You know, and even things like a biology major, if you really know your first year or even your first two years of college level chemistry and biology really well, like you've really mastered it, you're kind of unstoppable. I can't tell you how many people with even master's degrees, you know, if I were to show them the Krebs cycle or, you know, they're blown away that I still know, like, you know, photosynthesis, the steps of photosynthesis, because I teach it. But that's really a first year college biology concept. But, you know, we know the university system. And people don't retain most of this stuff. And so I think there's ways that if you could show someone really has mastered this,

maybe even that they tutor it on something like schoolhouse. World, that, yeah, you'd give them a biotech job or you'll put them into your corporate training program or they're ready for grad school, I think is the type of thing I want to experiment with in the coming years. That's straight credentialing, right? You take a test. Khan Academy gives you a certificate that says, you know this material. You're ready for X career.

is that's really what you're thinking of straight offering credentials like that. It could be exactly what you just described. It could be some type of performance task where you film yourself and then a peer community validates that, yeah, you did what you, you know, you ran that lab or you wrote that piece of code the way you said you were and you would be able to explain it and it's peer reviewed. And then the ultimate performance task is can you teach it? That's why that's coolhouse. World program of like peer-to-peer tutoring.

You know, if you are a tutor of calculus, you know your calculus. If you're well regarded, if you're a highly rated tutor of calculus, You know your calculus, more than any test corps can ever approve. And not only do you know that, but you can communicate, you have empathy. That's the kid I want to hire. That's the kid I want to bring to my campus or that's the kid I want to, you know, bring to my organization. So yeah, I mean, it is certification, credentialing, whatever you want to call it. But I want to, you know, we need to think about it in a first principles way instead of just trying to map the physical versions of these things to the digital world.

Is somebody who was ruthlessly weeded out by a college okay class? I'd both feel this and I have many feelings about. it. But let me push back just a little bit. The value of the four-year college experience, and maybe everyone's paying too much for it now, but the value that it's supposed to give you is a holistic, sort of well-rounded approach to higher schooling. So you're going to learn your technical skills that might serve you in your career, you're pre-med, your pre-law, whatever it is. But we're also going to make you take the humanities classes and make you rigorously understand how the world is constructed. my school had a super hardcore core curriculum.

So that's how my frame. But most colleges approach it that way. Do you think that a more credential-based approach or more skill-based approach takes you away from that? Or is that in service to it? Well, you know, every college will say exactly what you just said. Oh, college is much more than just, you know, the skills to get a job. There's, you know, we're teaching you how to think. We're teaching you how to learn.

You're going to build friendship. Like all this stuff. And I actually buy all of those. Like, I agree with those. Like, you know, when I think about my own college, I'm like, that's right. I had great friendships. I really grew as a human being.

I was able to, but the issue here is, I mean, it's ironic that it comes from universities that are literally researching everything. And they are trying to rigorously put a framework around everything, except their own efficacy, except their own ability. You know, like if you're Harvard and you really think you're that much better than Foothill Community College or nothing, you know, find groups of kids that looked similar.

beforehand and track them. I mean, this isn't some large, you know, 30-year longitudinal nursing study that they've had to do. This is like you could probably do like a six-year study and get a pretty good sense of what the outcomes are. So I think sometimes colleges use that as a bit of a cop. But I think they are doing that. But then they are also sticking you in 300-person lecture halls that aren't building connection and all of this. And the connections are really happening because they took a lot of really, you know, especially the selective schools, a lot of really motivated kids. that they've kind of socially engineered onto a campus together, and then they've put them into dorms,

and they have these interesting conversations, and all this other stuff that happens and these well-manicured lawns and all of that. But I don't think the colleges have really thought about, where were we putting resources and how much value are they really creating? You know, a fun thought experiment, if you were to go to Harvard's graduation, and you go up to a random family, a random kid,

holding a diploma, very excited, and you said, all right, we will pay you $200,000, whatever it cost you to go to Harvard, We'll write you that check right now, but you are not allowed to tell anyone that you ever went to Harvard. How many people will take you up on that? I suspect like no one. And then I think if you went to other folks and if you said, you could pay $200,000, you don't get to go to Harvard. But the world will think you went to Harvard. Probably a lot of people you might know. So the credential is clearly what a lot of the value that probably a lot of the families are putting. And look, that's a very

a mercenary. I think it's important to note right now that you have a degree from Harvard. Yeah, so I pick on them. I'm picking on them. I'm picking on them. I just, I think the audience shouldn't be aware that it's MIT and Harvard, right? My undergradors at MIT have more. You got a lot of Boston area sort of animosity. I have a lot of Boston. But I reserve the right to pick on

them a little bit. Because first of all, I think those are probably two of the, those schools are going to do just fine. There's always going to be a ton of, like, everything we've talked about about being able to go to a community, having really amazing peers and facilities and nice dorms. Like, those two, there's many schools, but the ones I experience, they're great at that. They're probably as good as it gets at that aspect.

But they're still very expensive. And, you know, I could imagine other pathways that are just as interesting. I mean, imagine getting together. And there are programs that already kind of do this. But like, you get together with 100 peers and you travel the world together, you know, every six months you're in a different place. And you're able to do your core academic. you know, learn how to factor a polynomial, whatever, you take a derivative of a function,

you do that through some form of distance learning and in-person study groups, but you're also working in different countries and experiencing it. That's also an amazing experience. And it might actually be cheaper than what I just described. You know, there's schools like Waterloo in Canada where the kids spend about two-thirds of their time in internships, but they do them together oftentimes. So those kids get hands-on learning, and those kids actually end up saving money and actually end up being more employable when they get out. So I'm not saying that one of these is better than the others, but I'm saying is there should be multiple pathways.

There could be pathways for a lot of kids. And that's the other thing. Those of us who have been fortunate to go to a school that has a quad and people are throwing frisbees, that's not the norm for most kids. Most kids are going to commuter college. They ideally would be able to support their families in some way, shape, or form. They're not having this kind of high-minded debates about philosophy

and ivy-colored dorm rooms type of thing. They're just trying to get through their college algebra so they can get their associate's degree and hopefully, you know, get a job. And so I think there needs to be new pathways. Once again, you could do both either or that matter. And we also know there's a lot of Harvard and Stanford grads that come out and still feel underemployed. And if they can have some way to prove what they know so that they can get not underemployed, that would be good for them as well. I went to the U.S.C. So I also pick on Harvard all the time, but I'll leave that.

I think it's fair game. We're going to take one more break, but when we come back, I'll ask Sal about his experience as the leader of an organization during the pandemic and the problems that come with it. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job.

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I wanted to spend the rest of my conversation with Sal talking about the future of running Khan Academy and his role as a leader. Something I find really hard to do during the pandemic as the editor-in-chief of the verge is keeping everyone focused on our mission, The amount of distraction in the world and in our personal lives is higher than ever. And we have to go and attract and retain talent during this time as well.

So I asked Sal about how he manages those problems while running a nonprofit with a mission as big as Khan Academies in a market where he's competing for talent with Google and Facebook. Yeah, this has always been the central question. One of the central questions of Khan Academy, which is, you know, we're based in Silicon Valley. No one owns Khan Academy. There's no ownership. I don't own Khan Academy. It's a not-for-profit. so we can't get people stock.

But we have found that, you know, we pay better than most nonprofits. We try to be market, you know, actually even a little bit above market salary for Silicon Valley, for tech workers, when is tech workers, or whatever the function folks have. But we don't give stock. So, you know, in theory, people could still go, like, literally a couple of miles down the road and work for Google and get at least that much cash comp. And then they could get, you know, at least that much again in stock compensation and go work at Facebook or Apple.

But what I've found pretty consistently, as long as you pay people, people enough that they can, you know, live reasonably well, eventually buy a house, go on vacation, send their kids to college, et cetera, et cetera. If you give them intellectually challenging work, an important mission to work on, and good people to work with that are, that are invested in each other, you get the best people on the planet. You know, some of the, many of the people we get at Khan Academy, I think could work at any of the top places in the world.

In fact, almost all of them have had offers or came from places like that. And some of the folks we have on the team are actually like, you know, world renowned in what they do. And, you know, Google or Facebook or Apple would kill to have them. But these people have just like transcended caring about that. They just want to do, they have like off the charts talents and they want to do it for the good of the world. Is that something you have to say out loud over and over again? Is that something you have to say out loud more at the beginning? Or is it something that is now just assumed as part of your pitch?

It's assumed. I mean, what's interesting is I think when people even just, you know, see a job posting and they, submit a resume to Khan Academy, there's already been a bit that's flipped in their head where they're like, you know what, I'm on this planet for a finite number of years? Like, what am I going to do with that? And really do I need to get like a second Tesla? And, you know, really do I need to get and I think as soon as that bit flips, and once again, it doesn't have to flip for like, we're not hiring tens of thousands of people. We're hiring like in a given year like 10 people. It just has to flip for like, you know, a reasonable number of people. And once it flips, when they,

you know, they go through our interview process and then they get the job offer. they're actually usually pleased with how much we're paying them because they had somehow thought it was going to be way less. But I was like, no, we're still going to pay you what you're like a good salary. So yeah, we haven't felt like we've had to like really, you know, the most important thing we can do is just keep reminding folks of the mission because obviously and our ability to execute it, this isn't utopian. Like we can literally reach billions of folks after keep repeating that for philanthropists. That hopefully gets them realizing, yeah, wow, the social return on investments off the charts. And I would say that the people who work at Khan Academy, that you could view them as philanthropists of sorts because they are not, you know, philanthropy just means a lover of man of your fellow human being because they're not optimizing for money anymore. You know, if, you know, they could maybe go work across the street and get total compensation twice as much and donate half of it.

That's one method of philanthropy. Or they could just come straight to Khan Academy and leverage their skills to do real good for the world, but not taking a vow of poverty, you know, making enough money to do to do just. just fine. Do you let the entire organization into the actual content? So we spent a lot of time talking about 1619 project, but just in general, right? Every company that makes or distributes content on the internet has had or has had to consider a content moderation dilemma, right? What are we making? What are we distributing? Who gets to control it? Who gets to edit it? Is that something that's wide open? Do you have a wall between engineering and teaching? How do you have? How do you? does that work? Yeah, I mean, you can imagine, especially in the last few months, it's been a deep

conversation in our organization of how we handle these things. And so, you know, we definitely want every member of the organization to have a voice and to be able to hear, and not, you know, not just internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, too. Obviously, we have funders, we have volunteers, we have, you know, 46 translation projects around the world. But, you know, we do have a core content team, and they're actually in the process of refining their content principles. and then we try to lean on those principles with a relatively small team to make the best content that we can

and to focus it on what we think is the highest yield. Are their decisions final? I act as a kind of the, any organization that's developing some form of content needs kind of an editor-in-chief at the end of the day. Someone's got to make the call, and I play that role. And I'm a little bit unique as a CEO

or executive director of an organization is that not only do I kind of operate at the, I guess, I guess the high level of like, what's our big strategy, but I'm also a deep member of the content creator. I still produce the majority of our videos directly. And, you know, and I'm, I weigh in on things like our exercises and stuff like that. So, yeah, I play a, you know, we try, it should be principals during it.

It can't just be Sal issuing edicts based on what he had for lunch. But yeah, I work deeply with the team on principles. And when there's edge cases, you know, at the end of the day, it's going to be me. But I definitely don't want it to be just like willy-nilly. It's got to be, you know, the team has got to be. feel bought in and that they understand where these decisions are come from and that they're the decisions that they can believe in and stand behind. I'm trying to think of another edge case.

We'll have a few minutes, but let me give you one. Off the top of my head, you decide to do a history of trust busting in America, which is basically we're going to do American history. We're going to talk about Teddy Roosevelt and, you know, breaking up standard oil. And Google says, hey, calm down. We're a big funder of yours. Calm down on the antitrust stuff. Is that a note that you would take?

The only thing I would say is if you have evidence that what we're saying is inaccurate, we always want to hear it. And we don't care who you are. If you could be some 13-year-old who's dug up some contrary evidence, then we would hear it for sure. But if what we're saying is fundamentally accurate, no, we wouldn't take it down. If someone's making a solid academic argument that maybe, you know, our tone is skewed one way or the other and that we, like, there's actually good evidence that you could view, you know, that, that there's a counter, counter facts there, then we would probably say, okay, yeah, you're right. Those are important counterfactuals.

Let's put those in as well. But once again, it's all in service of our reteaching this well. I will say to, you know, corporate America's credit before Khan Academy, I would have thought that there would have been a lot of those pressures. We haven't seen it from corporate America. We do have corporate funders, corporate sponsors. And sometimes we've gone into kind of, you know, we've had a longstanding partnership with Bank for America around financial literacy.

And, you know, I had content. I still have it up there. around explaining the financial crisis. And I'm very open filter about all the parties, what they could have done better. Never has Bank of America or anyone said, hey, Sal, you know, that makes us look a little bit this or that way in 2008.

No, if it's correct content, they've been, in fact, that's why they wanted to partner with us because they said, look, if we try to do financial literacy content, people are going to think it's just Bank of America propaganda or marketing, but we do it with y'all, people will trust it. And so the last thing we want to do is undermine folks trust in you by us somehow trying to micromanage. And they also know that we're pretty pure about that.

Like we would be like, you know, the whistles would blow. Yeah. If they were. But I don't think they even want to do that. So we're running out of time, but I want to ask everybody this question. There's a lot of change in the world. There's a lot of problems to be solved. What keeps you up at night both in terms of Khan Academy and then the broader landscape that the organization sits in?

The thing that keeps me up at night is a fear that we don't care. capture the moment of what can be done right now. You know, everything that we talk about at Khan Academy, providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere, and this project schoolhouse of anyone getting free tutoring in the world or being able to prove what they know so they can get jobs, this all in theory can exist. There's, you know, nothing that I said is based on some type of, you know, new discovery that's needed in Cold Fusion or AI. It can all exist.

And it's just about kind of putting people together in the right way and convincing them, that one, convincing the students that if they do these things that they will benefit, but also convincing the systems that this can work. So my biggest fear is, you know, that we blow it somehow. You know, I think, you know, I often think that if 2010 Sal saw 2020 Sal, he'd be like, oh, wow, Khan Academy way bigger than I could have ever imagined. That's amazing. A 2020 Sal must be all relaxed. But 2020 Sal is, you know, if I wasn't meditating, maybe even more stressed than I meditate, so I'm handling it all. But now

I think the opportunity we've shown that Khan Academy can scale, we can reach millions, and we're at like the precipice of all of these really big ideas. I mean, a lot of what we talked about, these are like systemic plate tectonics that can shift literally over the next five to ten years. And I think Khan Academy can be one of those catalysts

that can make it happen. But if we don't, I am afraid that the plates are going to just move to where they were before. And because of it, a lot of people aren't going to be able to reach their potential. So that's, you know, the stakes are high. That's what keeps me up. Well, Sal, thank you so much. You've given us so much time. I really appreciate the conversation. We'll have to have you back soon to talk about what happens next. Thanks for having me. It's a lot of fun.

Thank you again to Sal Khan for taking the time to talk today. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, I'd love to hear what you think of the show. I'm at Reckless on Twitter and you can email us at decoder at theverge.com. If you like this, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. It is produced by Sophie Erickson, our audio engineers, Andrew Marino. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll be back next Tuesday with another episode.

I'll see you then.