Sal Khan: Innovative Educator and Founder of Khan Academy

Here's something remarkable and not in a good way. Disengaged employees cost US companies almost $1.9 trillion a year. That's a lot of zeros. Why? Because when teams lack the right skills, productivity declines, turnover increases and strategies stagnate. But it doesn't have to be that way. At Project Management Institute, home of the PMP and globally recognized certifications, your people can learn to collaborate, deliver on time, and actually get things the cost of not upskilling way higher than the investment Project Management Institute. Find the answers@pmi.org.

I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. This episode's guest is Sal Khan. He's the founder of the Khan Academy. He attended the University of New Orleans and MIT. In 2012, Time magazine named Sal one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Khan Academy is a non profit educational institution that provides free courses in math, science and the humanities. The Khan Academy courses are available in 46 languages and used in more than 190 countries. There are approximately 7,000 videos and 70,000 practice problems. These videos have been watched 1.7 billion times. There are more than 110 million registered users and nearly 20 million active learners per month. Two of the surprising parts of this interview are his opinion of SAT testing and the security risk of discouraging foreign students from coming to the United States. I truly believe that Khan Academy is one of the Internet's greatest success stories. Listen to this episode and I think you'll see why the can do empathetic and intelligent Sal Khan made it happen. This episode of Remarkable People is brought to you by Remarkable, the paper tablet company. Yes, you got that right. Remarkable is sponsored by Remarkable. I have version two in my hot little hands and it's so good. A very impressive upgrade. Here's how I use 1. Taking notes while I'm interviewing a podcast guest. 2. Taking notes while being briefed about a speaking gig. 3. Drafting the structure of keynote speeches. 4. Storing manuals for all the gizmos that I buy. 5. Roughing out drawings for things like surfboards, surfboard sheds.

6.

Wrapping my head around complex ideas with diagrams and flowcharts. This is a remarkably well thought out production. It doesn't try to be all things to all people, but it takes notes better than anything I've used. Check out the recent reviews of the latest version. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. Preparation for this interview I took the Algebra 1 test and I scored seven out of nine on the quiz, so I was actually quite happy because it's yeah, it's been probably 50 years since I took algebra. So my parents discipline paid off at some level. My first question is, what is Nadia doing now?

She is in New York. She lives in Brooklyn. She is doing grad school in clinical psychology at the New School in New York. She wants to be a clinical psychologist. So I think she's on track.

So she has not matriculated into a mathematics curriculum though. If you told me she was a Ph.D. of math and teaching at MIT, I would be blown away.

I tried. I tried that. This has nothing to do with me. Nadia is actually an incredible writer. So out of high school, I'd like to take a little bit of credit for helping her on the mat side of things. But because of her passion for writing, she went to Sarah Lawrence and then later realized that she would want to get into kind of healthcare, especially around psychology. So that's what she's doing.

Now, since we alluded to Nadia, and I know you must have been asked this a hundred times or a thousand times, because I've been asked what was it like to work for Steve jobs at least 10,000 times. So there may be people who are wondering, who the hell is Nadia? Why did he even ask that? So maybe give your quickest explanation of the genesis of Khan Academy.

So if you REWIND Back to 2004, I was a year out of business school. My original background was in tech and in math. And I just got married. And it just came out of conversation. My family was visiting me from New Orleans, which is where I was born and raised, visiting me in Boston. And it came out of conversation. Actually, my aunt told me, Nadia's mother, that Nadia was having trouble with math in school. So when Nadia comes into the room, she's 12 years old, I say, hey, Nadia, what's going on? She said, yeah, I can't get unit conversion. Math's not my thing. I took a placement test last year and I didn't do well. So I'm dealing with being kind of in a slower math class right now. And so I told Nadia, I'm 100% sure you can learn unit conversion. How about when you go back to New Orleans, I'm happy to get on the phone with you and be your personal tutor. And she agreed. And the first few weeks were tough. I had to kind of deprogram her lack of self esteem in math. But slowly but surely, she got unit conversion. She got caught up with her class. She even got ahead of her class. And at that point I became what I call a tiger cousin. And I called, I called her school up and this is true. And I said, you know, I really think Nadia Rehman should be able to retake that placement exam from last year. And they said, who are you? I said, I'm her cousin. And they let her the same. Nadia was put into a slower math track, was put into an advanced math track. So I was kind of hooked. It was a little intervention that I did on the part of a family member, and it was a way of connecting with her, and it was a way. And obviously it seemed to have helped her a little bit. So then I decided I'll start working with her younger brothers. And then over the next year and a half or so, word spreads in my family that free tutoring is going on. And before I knew it, I'm working with about 10 or 15 cousins, family, friends from around the country. The first pattern I noticed was that they just had a lot of gaps in their knowledge. And so I started writing software for them to fill in those gaps that would generate practice and that I, as their teacher, could keep track of it.

It's always a good idea to check both sides of a story. So I'm taking you down a little side trip. I tracked down Nadia, the Nadia, and this is what she said. Is this Nadia Rahman?

This is she.

This is Guy Kawasaki. I'm the creator of a podcast called Remarkable People, and I want to do a reference check. Is that okay?

Absolutely.

So the person's name is Sal Khan, and he says that he was your tutor. So how was he as your tutor?

I think I always thought of Sal as a kind of goofy older brother. I very much did not know him as a super genius that I think he is known as today. But, you know, I was kind of a grumpy middle schooler. I had very low self esteem. For whatever reason, in my lifetime, I had come to think of myself as goofy, someone who wasn't capable of excelling in the way of math and science. And Sal came along and he saw that I hadn't gotten into the accelerated track at my school. And as a concerned tiger cousin, he offered my mom to help tutor me. That was the beginning of it. And at first we did it over the phone and he noticed that I kind of often trailed off and I would nod my head and say that I would get things when I wouldn't. And eventually started recording his sessions and doing it on. It was a thing called Yahoo Doodle. And that allowed me to pause and to rewind and to review things that I needed to. And he Noticed that I learned a lot better when there wasn't this kind of social pressure, when there wasn't the pressure to look like you're paying attention and look like you're getting it. And very much helped me and I was able to get into the accelerated track in my school. Yeah. So it was great.

And where are you now?

I am in New York. I am at the New School for Social Research. I'm getting my master's right now in clinical psychology and I'm applying for my PhD this year.

And where did you do your undergraduate work?

I actually did my undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence, which is. It's funny, it's a liberal arts school, but I think it very much allowed me to. To have this integrated education that allowed me the freedom to take philosophy and literature and science. I was pre med, but I was able to integrate these things in a really cool way. And I think that was very much influenced by Sal. He was a money man. He was a hedge fund manager. Great at. He was a sci fi nerd. He was great at art. I have these paintings in my house in New Orleans that he painted and they're just incredible. Very much this kind of right brained, left brain kind of guy. And he integrates science and math and philosophy and English in a really cool way. That has always inspired me. So I think, yeah, my decision was in part based on his tutelage.

Do people around you know that you are the genesis of Khan Academy?

Yeah, my friends do. And they make fun of me that I'm the most famous bad person that's bad at math in the world. I'm. I'm the. My claim to fame in this world is that I'm a dummy in some ways. But no, I, it's, it's funny. I feel like I have this cachet whenever I'm in a math or science or psychology class. When anyone seems to catch wind that I'm his cousin, it's. I'm this nerd superstar even. Even by proximity to him, which I think is very funny. Yeah, so that's.

He has been interviewed dozens, if not hundreds of times. And has anybody ever done what I just did, which is seek you out and try to get your side of the story?

You know, people haven't interviewed me. You're the first person to ever interview me, actually. But a lot of people ask what I'm up to these days. So from a young age, I felt a lot of pressure to succeed because how would it look if the first people of the Khan Academy ended up doing something that, let's say that Asian moms and dads wouldn't be proud of.

In my fantasy, I would have found out that you are now a PhD in mathematics at MIT, but doing what you're doing is arguably cooler. So thank you very much.

Thank you so much for interviewing. This is so fun.

I would really be disappointed if you told me. Well, yeah, no, he really didn't help me with math. He just made that whole story. He was such.

He was instrumental in my success even today. And it's funny, he's now taken on a new role. He loves to matchmake. So for the last three years, he's been very involved in finding me a perfect suitor. He very much become like an Indian uncle.

There we have it. Sal Khan, overachiever in everything he does, huh?

Yes, sir. Absolutely.

And that was the first Khan Academy. It was just a little app I'd made. And then I was showing this off at a dinner party and the host of the dinner party, I give him full credit, his name, Zuli Ramzan, said, this is all cool, Sal, but how are you actually scaling up your lessons? And I said, yeah, it's hard. And he said, well, why don't you make some videos and upload them onto YouTube for your family? I initially thought it was a horrible idea. Told them YouTube's for cats playing piano. Got over the idea that it wasn't my idea, and I gave it a shot. And any long story short, after about a month of that, I told my cousins, look, this is. Watch this stuff at your own time and pace. After a while of this, I asked them for feedback and they famously told me that they liked me better on YouTube than in person. And so I took that as positive feedback and kept going. And soon became clear people who are not my cousins were watching. And by 2009, this is about five years after I started tutoring Nadia, I started, frankly having trouble focusing on my day job. I was reading letters from folks around the world saying how it was helping them. And I started thinking maybe this project, which I never imagined to be any type of a business, but maybe I could set it up as a not for profit and hopefully the universe will conspire to support it and it could one day reach millions or billions of people. And so that's when I took the plunge. Set up Khan Academy as a not for profit with a mission of free world class education for anyone anywhere. Quit my day job and started, hat in hand, looking for funding while, you know, coding the software and continuing to make videos.

If you had not had a large family with a lot of cousins, maybe Khan Academy wouldn't exist.

Right? That's true. I think there's two kind of precursor ingredients for Khan Academy exist that were somewhat counter that wouldn't always be there. One is a large family of, in this case, cousins who are at the appropriate age. I was in my mid late 20s, but I had a lot of cousins who are between 8 and 15 years old. And so I had a bunch of guinea pigs to work with. The other person I have to give a lot of credit for is I worked at a hedge fund. And the stereotype in hedge funds or in finance is that you work day and night, you do nothing but work. And frankly, I was ready to do that when I had my job at Wool Capital. My boss's name was Dan Wohl. It was just me and him at the time. And he actually was a strong believer that our job as investors, which makes all the sense in the world, is not to make. To not work ourselves to death and then make a bunch of bad decisions. It's to make a few good decisions every year and to avoid making bad decisions. And he was actually fairly strongly believe that we had to leave work and have other interests and other passions. It would give us a broader view, recharge us for the day. So he actually forced me to stop working to some degree so that I had time in the afternoons so that when a cousin needed help, I was in a position to do that.

That's the only hedge fund manager has that attitude.

Very successful. If Dan wanted to, he could have been the next Warren Buffett. But he was very kind of balanced and he wanted to. He kind of retired early to focus on his family.

Have you come to believe that Khan Academy is core or supplemental?

Yeah, that's one of those debates, these semantic debates we've had from the beginning. Depends on the use case. You know, there's kids out there that have very little in the way of a formal education or even if they do nominally have a school, their school might not be at the level of rigor that they really need. And so we have examples of there's a young girl in Afghanistan, Sultana, who when the Taliban took over her town, forbade all the young girls from going to school. Khan Academy became her lifeline, became core for her. And she goes from essentially elementary school math on to algebra, trig, physics, chemistry, bio on Khan Academy, decides she wants to become a theoretical physicist in the us, smuggles herself into Pakistan to take the sat. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times writes an op ed about her Meet Sultana, the Taliban's worst fear that gives her political asylum. And last I checked on her, she was doing quantum computing research at Caltech. So for the Sultanas of the world, that's where we're core. But obviously that is those are kind of the edge cases for most of our users. We're a supplement and the supplement can be with the capital S. There's a lot of our users, depending on the month, 20 to 30 million coming every month who are trying to get unblocked on something that is likely happening in their formal school setting that they just don't understand. They want more practice. And so in that world, we're the tutor for a lot of kids. You know, a large chunk of all kids in America use Khan Academy at least once a month or once a year, much less the world. But increasingly in classrooms we are also seeing very heavy usage of Khan Academy and that's where we still are supplement to whatever curriculum the school might have adopted or the teacher might have adopted. But we are an obvious place to go for regular practice. So teachers can assign things on Khan Academy and kids can get immediate feedback. Teachers get a lot more data than they ever had before and we try to bring them to kind of a personalized practice use case where they can start to learn at their own time and pace. And we have a bunch of efficacy studies that point to that accelerating kids.

A lot more for something like algebra, where there is a right answer, I can understand that. But what do you do with something like history?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think in all subjects there are a core content base that there's usually pretty good agreement on, one should know these things. And then there's a bunch of other things that might get more into the subjective. So to your point, math, there's a lot of right answer stuff in math and so we can give a lot of practice a lot of feedback. But history, which is a topic that we've only begun to go and we don't have the same depth as we have in math. But even in history there's definitely some must knows that one could argue some key, whether it's events, ways that things are connected with each other, how things happened. But then there's a lot of the more subjective, how do you view something? The analysis and some of that should definitely be learned as well. So our view is over time we definitely want to get all of that basal skills and knowledge and intuitions. And then if we do have to go or if we can go into this objective, we are able to give some reasonable, well thought out voices that are adjacent to, to, to the middle. I would say that can give a reasonable narrative, but that is going to be a lot harder and I think it's going to be especially hard as we go internationally. So this is something that I do think about over the long run. Right now with math and for the most part science, it's pretty easy to go into another country or go into another state. Not a lot of debate there. But yeah, I suspect history will get a little bit messier.

In one sense, a thermometer is not liberal or conservative, but even something like climate change, right? I mean, even that's politicized now.

And that's where something like climate change for us, it's never about, hey, you should believe climate change. Because 99 out of 100 scientists believe that we say, look at the data yourself and we're going to give you the skills so that you yourself don't have to defer to experts, so that you yourself can say, what is the probability of the following data points happening? How likely is this due to random chance or due to the natural changes of the earth versus man made climate change? And so I think that's all we can do. And it's very hard to disagree with those critical thinking skills that give kids the skills to judge for themselves. And I think when they can judge for themselves, then it's transcended politics and then it's now I am projecting, it's pretty obvious that climate change is not politics, it's science.

How do you enforce quality standards for the courses?

Yeah, you know, the early days of Khan Academy was me kind of introspecting on what quality looks like. And there's quality of are you true to the standards, is it factually correct, et cetera. And then there's quality in terms of is it interesting? Would it, does it capture the passion, the intuition? Is it the best way to approach something? Does it visualize it in a useful way? As we've grown and scaled, I still make a lot of the content, but we now have a team of experts who internally will look at the standards, who will interpret the standards, who will create video requests for me or for others who will create items. And then they get that vetted by third parties. Oftentimes these are the people who create the standards. And so that's kind of an advantage that Khan Academy has. A teacher doesn't have the luxury of being able to go to the standards authors and say, is this what you meant when you said this standard. And also frankly, a lot of the for profits, the standards agencies aren't as sympathetic to them as they are to Khan Academy because we have such reach and obviously what we're doing is a social effort, it's not a business. So we get a lot of really positive stakeholders helping us ensure that we are truly world class.

I was on the board of trustees of Wikipedia, so I know that it's not true that anybody can edit anything. And so a lot of teachers believe that and that's why they say students can't cite it. But, but you definitely have a small cadre of people who are recording the videos. It's not anybody can submit. Here's calculus according to Guy.

Yeah, although I think calculus according to Guy would be quite interesting. So think about that. It would be short. Think about that. No, this was an interesting decision in the early years of Khan Academy for a lot of folks. I live out here in Silicon Valley now, world capital. Dan's wife Allison became a professor at Stanford, so we moved the firm out to Silicon Valley. Out here, people always think in terms of platform scale, leverage the crowd, all of these things. And so when Khan Academy was starting, I too actually thought, okay, what I'm doing with my cousins and the software and the video, this is a proof of concept. But the real power is I could create a generalizable platform with ratings and create and then crowdsource a lot of this content. But part of the realization was there's a couple of things. Academic content actually is quite evergreen and even one or two or three people in a focused way, making this content can actually cover a lot of territory. To date, I've made about 7,000 videos that cover 14 or 15 years of learning, so to speak.

You have single handedly made 7,000 videos.

Yeah, it's one of those things you do five, six a day. It adds up. Over 14 years. I still do them. I made three this morning. There are these little six minute, seven minute, eight minute things, but they add up and you can cover a lot. And we also realized that I think there's a power. No one in Silicon Valley talks about it that much, but there's a really power of the brand, of the content. Silicon Valley is all about the platform, but the brand really matters. Inadvertently, in those early years with me just making content for my family, people felt like, wow, this is unusually approachable. This is quirky, this is eccentric, this is easy to understand. That became our brand. We did try some experiments in crowdsourcing and we realized this is potentially undermining the brand and it's not giving the same quality of content that we would like. And frankly, just even the coordination cost of crowdsourcing and sometimes is harder than just insourcing it, doing it ourselves. And so now I view Khan Academy. It is a platform and we are trying to bring other voices, other forms of content there. But it's not about you don't need 5,000 content creators. You can cover most academic subjects with one or two content creators. And that also creates continuity. You know, you don't want to attend a class where every 10 minutes a different teacher is walking in, no matter how good they are. You need to build some trust with the teacher, learn how they think, and then you're more likely to engage.

Well, arguably you're maybe the world's leading expert in online education and now that's the de facto for everybody. Do you have some insights into how we can avoid a catastrophe in education as we deal with the pandemic?

I've talked pre pandemic about a slow motion catastrophe that was happening. And now the pandemic might be a relatively fast catastrophe if we're not careful. The slow motion catastrophe that was already happening is in the US 70%, 70% of all kids who go to community college have to take remedial math. And for a lot of us you might say, oh, remedial math, maybe it's algebra, maybe it's pre calculus. No, remedial math in a community college setting is sixth or seventh grade math. And so the majority of kids in America, they're going through the motions of seventh grade, eighth grade algebra, geometry, on and on and on. And then they get to the community college and they say you're not even ready to learn algebra yet. And they have to go back. So to me that's a massive catastrophe. It's not only are the time and the money time for the students and the system and then the resources put in into it, but then these are the kids that when they get to college are the least likely to graduate, the most likely to have debt, the most likely to be underemployed or not employed. And they come from some of the most kind of vulnerable communities to begin with. So that was pre Covid, now Covid that just got that much worse because now on top of the fact that kids were accumulating these gaps that were becoming debilitating, a large chunk of the population wasn't even able to engage. 20, 30, 40% depending on the school district, didn't have Adequate access to the Internet or devices at home. Even when school districts have done heroic efforts to get devices to them for various reasons, the kids aren't engaging with it. There's no one, maybe they don't have the supports at home. Maybe people have to share the device. And so the catastrophe is we could have a year or longer where not only the kids not learning, but they're actively atrophying. And if it goes long enough, they could completely disengage from the process of school altogether, which leads to all sorts of negative outcomes. I mean, there's good evidence that in fact it's really kind of a dark statistic that some communities have because there's such a lead time to build prisons. They look at 4th grade test scores as a leading indicator to figure out what the prison needs are going to be in 10 or 15 years. And so this is a very serious thing. But it obviously doesn't have the same urgency of a war or people protesting on the streets or whatever else. But it's just as serious and in some ways might underlie all of it. Now, the way to address it, you need access is a first layer and we're seeing a really good movement there. But the other layer is make sure that it's as engaging as possible. And I would say that whether we're doing it during COVID distance learning or whether we're in a classroom, engagement, to me, and there's a lot of evidence behind this, is not just talking to students, lecturing them. If they get a 80% saying you're a C student, move on now kind of branding them. Engagement is meeting them where they are. If they have gaps in their knowledge, give them the incentives and the opportunity to fill in those gaps. Learn at their own time and pace. When they get into a room with other human beings, I guess whether they get into a room or a zoom or whatever, Google Meet with other human beings, that they're mainly interacting with them. So the teacher is facilitating that interaction. They're asking questions, they're cold calling them, they're pulling them out of the screen, they're putting them into breakout sessions so that they have a chance to really engage. Three weeks ago I wrote an op ed in the New York Times which was we can't let this crisis become a catastrophe. And it's exactly that. You know, Khan Academy is one piece of the distance learning equation, which is we can let kids practice and get feedback at their own time and pace. Teachers can monitor that. But there's this other piece of the distance Learning equation, which is the live synchronous interactions on video conference and how do we do that? Well, and then there's questions about once everyone comes back that we've had the suboptimal year, how do we get people back on track and not just back to the status quo of what we were doing before because I said that was a slow motion catastrophe. How do we maybe use this crisis to catapult us to a better place so that we allow all kids all the time to have a better chance at engaging and not having these debilitating g.

Much of the advice from people like you educators is for the teacher. Do you have any advice for the student? This is how to make the the most of your zoom call algebra class, your zoom call biology class.

My number one tip for a student, and to some degree I could say this for parents, but for students for sure is you've got to take ownership. You can't just sit and wait for other people to spoon feed things to you. That might kind of work while you're in middle school or high school, but as you get into later high school and college and for sure once you work, the kids who are used to things getting spoon fed to them, those are the kids who really struggle while the kids who are used to pulling information, pulling knowledge, taking ownership of their own journey, they do just fine. And Khan Academy is a tool for you to do this with. If you spend even 20, 30 minutes a day on Khan Academy, regardless of whether your teacher or your parents are asking you to, you find your kind of learning edge. And there's ways to do that. On Khan Academy you can start at your grade level. If you have trouble with that, you can start at the get ready for grade level course. If you do 20, 30 minutes a day, you know, money back guarantee. I say that somewhat jokingly. If you were paying, I would still give a money back guarantee. But if you do that religiously for two or three months, you will go from potentially struggling in math to being strong in math, very much like many of my cousins experienced when I was tutoring them. And that will have huge implications for your trajectory in life, your earnings capability, etc. My other advice is when you're doing something, you know, I remember when my first job, I was at a very big tech company and there's some days that you, when you work at a big company that you kind of feel like just a, a cog and you're like, does it really matter what I'm doing? And I remember my boss kind of Gave me a pep talk, and it was a really good one. It lasted with me. He's like, look, yes, everything you're saying from a cynical lens might be true, but all you have to do is you have a finite amount of time. How do you make this day have its impact? How do you become better because of this day? And how does the world become better than this day? And arguably, how does the organization you're part of become better because of that day's work? And I would take that same mindset for any student. Some things you might not find optimally engaging or a little bit boring, but use that as a learning lesson that's going to grow you. If you can learn to deal with that adversity. If you don't do as well as you'd like, take that as a learning lesson. And then when you have the opportunity to engage, whether it's in person, in a classroom, or on video conference, make use of it. I remember I was a kid in school that I was like, oh, the teacher doesn't want to hear from me, or I don't want to be the kid that's like asking, asking questions, or I want to be the cool kid in the back. Doesn't serve you that well. Definitely have the teachers love the kids that engage. And don't do it to brown nose or just to be teacher's pet, but do it because it's going to make you a better person.

Do you think that a Harvard or Stanford education via Zoom is worth $60,000 a year?

Well, there's different ways that you could account for it. I think what's interesting right now is people are finally unbundling or decoupling the various pieces of an education. We've always said education, but it's really at least three different things. There is a piece where you need to learn skills, accounting or calculus, or improving your reading comprehension. There's a piece around credentialing. I want a signal that's going to carry currency in the broader world. And then there's a piece around socialization and community and friendships. A little thought experiment pre Covid. If you went 10 years ago to Harvard graduation and you meet some kid, you're like, okay, how much did you pay for this education? They say, oh, $200,000. Okay, we're going to write you a check right now for $200,000. But you can never tell anyone that you went to Harvard. You can't write it in your resume. It's no evidence. I don't think a lot of kids are Going to take you on that you get everything else. You get the experiences, you get the memories, you get the community, the friendship, everything else you get. You're just not allowed to tell anyone that you went to Harvard and got this diploma. I don't think you'll have money takers. That's a signal that just being able to say that has a lot of value to folks. Now we can debate whether it has true value or just perceived value, but I do think that's there big picture. Covid is putting an even bigger spotlight and frankly just the rising costs of college education pre Covid have put even a bigger and bigger spotlight on what is the actual return on investment of the four years of opportunity cost. Plus, depending where you go, it could be $150,000, $200,000 of debt or more in certain cases. And I think you're seeing people start to ask that. So to answer your question, I think if you go to some of these places and you take advantage of it, and there's ways to take advantage of it, even in distance learning world, distance learning might be a great time to try to get a research internship once again. Working on zoom with a professor or get advice from them or things like that, or leverage the community, even if it's a virtual community for now, to build a network that you can use to do other things in your life. It could be very valuable and that signal could be very valuable. But if you're just viewing it as a place to learn accounting and calculus. Yeah, you can do that for free other places.

Well, you could do that on Khan Academy.

Yes, you can.

And you could be in Afghanistan.

And you could be in Afghanistan. That's right.

I think it's pretty clear that based on that experiment and my own feelings that yeah, it's probably worth a quarter million bucks even if it's a Zoom. Just to say you went to Stanford or Harvard or one of the Ivy Leagues. If you're the president of a second tier school, what the hell do you do right now? I mean your entire thinking is geared towards tuition butts in seats asking alumni to make more buildings and all of a sudden that comes crashing and burning down. What do you do?

It's a tough situation and sorry, I'm actually I realized my son needs to be picked up and I thought my mother in law was going to do it and no problem. Believe me, I've been on both sides. I'll be right back. I'll be right back. Okay. Okay.

So cell just left the conference and now I can look at all the books on his bookshelf. And let me just look here. So it's a lot of science fiction. There's a book about piano know.

All right. No, she. So I can answer your question.

I'm checking all your books.

Oh, good. Yeah, I'm looking for any of mine. Oh.

That'S okay.

They're there, they're there someplace. But to your question, yeah, yeah, no, I think even pre Covid, if you're a university president of a university that has a high cost structure, a high cost per student per year, even pre Covid, I think you have some very serious questions to ask because people are kind of looking at what's the economic roi, not social roi, what's the return on investment from getting a diploma, what percentage are able to pay back their debts, get employed at a level that they would have expected, et cetera. And now these questions have gotten even harder because a lot of people are pushing back whether they even need to come back to campus. You know, this coming school year, we've obviously seen some of the elite universities, 20% of the students have decided to defer for a year. And for a lot of the lesser elite schools, they might instead of defer, say, I'll just go to my local community college. It's functionally equivalent right now because it's happening over zoom and it's going to be a lot cheaper and then that's going to hurt already very delicate finances for these schools. But you know, I think there's a. As painful as it is, I don't envy these university presidents, but I think that form of scarcity of resources actually can drive innovation. I think for a long time universities have been kind of the gatekeeper to a middle class or upper middle class life. And so that's put them in a position where they could kind of just name their price. And when you can just name your price, it creates bloat, it creates inefficiencies, it doesn't create a lot of accountability. And so I think over the next five or 10 years, most universities, a lot of them are going to figure out ways to unbundle what they provide, make a clearer value proposition and become more efficient. And the ones that do, I think are going to do just fine while others are going to suffer. That's how the world, that's how the world works.

Do you know about the Google certificate program that they just introduced where it's like a six month course in data analytics and Google says that we'll just consider this the equivalent to a BS or BA when we view you as a candidate because we've trained you in what we need to train you. So I mean to me that's an earth shattering piece of news that Google is going to train you and recruit you at that level. So do you?

Yeah, I think it's, I think this is the tip of the iceberg. Google's doing that. Amazon has been doing these coding tests because they're just not getting enough where if you do well on it, they'll put you in the same bucket as a Stanford and MIT computer science major. And so what I think you're going to have happening is a lot of kids, they're going to realize that hey, I can go straight to that. While a lot of other kids, they might go through traditional college experience but then realize that oh, I should do this on top of it as well. But that'll also put some pressures on this kind of the cost and the value proposition of college for a lot of kids. I think it's just the tip of the iceberg. More and more corporations are realizing that they're going after a very limited pool. And even when they do do that, the signal that even being a major in whatever major it is or having a high GPA doesn't correlate as strongly as you would like. And then especially if you're trying to diversify your pipeline, going to the same places that already have an undiverse pipeline aren't going to help your situation much. So if you can make pathways in terms of opportunity cost and actual dollars cost to attain are easier. But if, but it's still just as rigorous in terms of someone's work ethic they need to achieve or their intellect that they need to achieve. Yeah, it makes, makes all the sense in the, in the world to me. And that's going to help catalyze some, accelerate some of this change.

You have expanded into some SAT coursework. What does that mean? Does that mean you support standardized testing? It means that it's a necessary evil.

Yeah. The College Board reached out to us back in 2013, 2014 and said look, we're going to revamp the SAT and we want to address this decades low old at least perception of inequity and probably real inequity around this test prep industry. But we want to work with Khan Academy because everything you all talk about isn't how do you game a test, it's about actually learning the material. Everything I talk about is in traditional academic model, kids accrue gaps. Those gaps over time become Debilitating. What you need is a way for kids to fill in those gaps, truly be college ready, and then they'll do fine on anything, the SAT or any other course. So we launched official SAT practice on Khan Academy back in 2015. Since then, a majority of all kids who take the SAT use it. And what we always highlight is, yes, it's officially test prep, but it's really kind of college prep. It makes you more college ready, and then as a byproduct, you will do better on the sat. My view on the SAT itself, I try to look at everything from first principles. It's very fashionable these days to kind of beat up on the SAT or to be beat up on the notion of standardized tests. But I'm like, well, what would you prefer, unstandardized test or no test at all? And I've met people who maybe do, but they don't realize that the more subjective you make the process, it actually benefits the affluent more, because then you start leaning on institutional knowledge and connections. And the whole reason why the College Board even came into existence and the SAT came into existence was because 100 years ago, probably you or I wouldn't have gone to the colleges we did, because we didn't come from families that had the right connections. We didn't probably go to the right schools that were already were pipelines into those colleges. And then the SAT actually helped level the playing field for us. Where regardless of where, it's kind of like that Google test you just brought out. Regardless of where you're coming from, regardless of how you got there, you get to take this test. It's truly standardized. So that that Stanford can say, yeah, wow, that kid from Appalachia is just as good as this kid from Harker from the Bay Area whose parents are tech executives. So there's a value to it. Now, the negative of it is when people overweight it. When people view their SAT score as all encompassing of who they are, or even parents try to project that onto kids. And college admissions officers and the College Board will always say, this is only one data point of many that we use in making a decision. They do look at other things, but our society sometimes overweights them. But once again, they get overweighted because they provide in some degrees, a clearer signal because they are standardized. Everything else is really muddy. Grades, super subjective essays. We know people can get help. That's super subjective. You need something. Now, I think there's other modalities. I'm working on a project called Schoolhouse World where we're we're on. This is a platform separate from Khan Academy. It's a separate nonprofit. We're just starting it. But part of it is a place for people to get live tutoring help from volunteer tutors. So there's that aspect. But another is how does someone validate what they know? And we're coming up with a system where they can video, they can record them getting questions right, getting unit tests right on Khan Academy. And then other people will review and say, yeah, that's definitely Guy's work. He knows his derivatives in calculus. But then the ultimate credential will be how good of a tutor you are, because that's very hard to fake. So if you are a highly reviewed tutor in a domain, then we can send that signal to colleges or to even employers. And saying, this person clearly knows their stuff. They're tutoring that. And by the way, that also tells you that they have good communication skills and that they have empathy and that they're willing to do community service.

That is fascinating. I never thought about that. Being a good tutor is a pretty good acid test of, as you say, not only the education, but the social skills. Unless people get tutored in how to be a tutor, that's still not bad.

At the end of the day if they become a good tutor.

But going back to the sat, you could make the case that the kid in Appalachia is not getting tutored in the sat. So it's not fair.

Yeah, well, that's where we come into the picture, and that's why we did this official SAT practice for free, is we try to level that playing field so it is more fair. But I completely agree with you. There's no delusions that the more fluent, the more savvy we'll go to schools with more institutional knowledge, etc. But, you know, I'll stress again, if we were to take the SAT away, that kid in Appalachia is going to have even fewer tools at their disposal to be able to compete, because their guidance counselor doesn't know how to write a recommendation. The same way that the guidance counselor at a fancy prep school at Phillips Andover Exeter knows how their teachers don't know the universities are going to look at their grades and say, well, I don't really know how that compares to some of the schools we're used to seeing. So you need some form of signal. Now, maybe the schoolhouse world could be another signal. If the kid in Appalachia can become an awesome tutor, a highly rated tutor that is a standardized benchmark that now the Stanfords or whatever school can start to judge. Hey, this kid is actually interesting. So I think there's no perfect instrument and everything can get misused in its own way. But you do need some form of measurement and ideally it's standardized. And ideally the activation energy, the ability to engage is as little correlated with wealth or family education as possible.

There could be a very ironic situation where someone goes through the Google or Amazon certificate program and use that as data for their college application or your tutoring program, like, I'm a highly respected tutor at Khan ACAD or your other organization and so you should admit me to Stanford. I mean, my heads would explode if now the tail is wagging the dog.

Right?

And I think that would be a great outcome.

No, it'd be exciting. I mean, look, there could be a world where you could be a great tutor of coding, you could be a great tutor of managerial skills. Well, that's the manager I want to hire. That's the coder I want to hire. If they're good enough to be able to explain to other people, they must know the intricacies and they have good communication skills, etc. That feels compelling to me.

I read something about some people have criticized you because you're such an icon of education and yet you have no formal training or education in education. So does that ever like piss you off or does, I mean, how do you react when somebody says, who? How can he tell me how to teach? He's not a teacher.

Yeah, well, you know, I think there's, there's a lot in that. I think there's different, I would say cultures in, in any society, especially in our society, you know, there's a more traditionalist where, you know, before you need to be a manager, you need an mba. Before you are, you need to be certified by some authority. And then there's another kind of school of thought that, look, if there, if you can provide evidence that you're able to do something, hey, that's all we need to see. And I, you know, that actually I think gets to the crux of our conversation is to what degree do we rely on traditional pathways versus new pathways? 1. 1. Putting me aside, one thing that I find really interesting is pretty much every university that has a school of education does not make getting an education diploma as a requirement for teaching at that university. So if you look at pick your university, what percentage of your faculty had a degree in education? The people teaching the big Now, I think there's an argument that some of them needed it. So I'm not. This isn't to disparage the value of a credential to get a master's in education. I actually think there's some very valuable things that someone could learn from, from these things. But it's to show that there's correlations and some people can do well with it and some people can do well without it. And these universities that research everything, they don't do a lot of research on what is the actual correlation between these signals that they're trying to put out called diplomas and actual efficacy of those people skills. So they should be able to, they run tests on the viscosity of ketchup and things like that. They should be able to do control tests. Hey, we're asking you for $60,000 to get a master's in and whatever. Well, let's do a control study. People who didn't get it, what are they able to do versus people who did get it? And do we see a statistically significant outcome? But I think that's the kind of research that would be great if universities could start to understand the actual signaling value or the actual impact of the training that they're trying to provide.

Well, I mean that might happen because universities will have to differentiate themselves. I mean the fact that they're under such pressure may force that kind of thinking as opposed to, well, we'll just run another capital campaign and up tuition 8% next year because we accept only 5% of our applicants. So it's a seller's market, right? It's not going to be a seller's market after a while.

Yeah, we'll see. I mean there's a lot of driving forces there. We could talk economics. I do fear that, that we're getting more divergence and people are always predicting this because of automation and puts more, more value in capital than in labor and all of this and Covid is seeming to making that even more extreme. So there might be an argument that some of these name brand places might always have a willing, willing base of people with a high capacity to pay. But our hope is that doesn't become the world we're in, that it becomes a world where the universities become a lot more efficient and thoughtful about what is a good use of resources and time and they're able to create the value proposition for families and a world where it's not based on ability to pay or resources at your high school that mean.

But even if you are a Harvard or a Stanford, if all the students from China can no longer attend, it's kind Of a game changer right there in terms of revenue too. If these people are not allowed to get visas to come here.

Oh yeah. I mean, the immigrant, that's a whole other thing. But you're right. And you know, the reality is that those places like the Harvard and Stanfords of the world, the full paying tuition, oftentimes the international students are subsidizing, allows them to give very generous financial. I was a financial aid kid in college, so I give MIT and a lot of schools like it, a lot of credit. There's no way I could have even thought about going to mit. My mom was making minimum wage in Louisiana. I think at the time it was like 550 an hour. She made $16,000 the year that I applied to college. So there's no way I could have thought about going to mit, which even back then room and board plus tuition was approaching $30,000. I couldn't have gone if not for a kind of very generous financial aid. But yeah, you're right, the international issue, it's not just kind of a finances issue and it's not just a, you know, getting diverse perspectives at a campus issue. I actually view it as a national security issue. And this is why I really don't understand some, like, you know, if we are lucky to be in a position where the best minds on the planet are eager to come here, like the same person who's sitting in Shanghai, they can come to the US and develop the state of the art weapon system or the state of the art computer or the state of the art whatever, or they can sit in Shanghai and do it and we have a chance of poaching them. That will undermine their ability to compete even from a national security point of view, much less a economic point of view. So it feels like you're really undermining that power that the US has historically had by having some of these policies.

A lot of it is the mindset of the person, right? So if the mindset is this is a zero sum game, if we admit this student from Shanghai, it's one less American who's going to get this opportunity. And that student from Shanghai is probably a spy. There's a lot of racism and stuff involved in that kind of thinking. I think there is.

Well, I've seen that argument more on the jobs side of things where we're talking about visas for work. And I actually do some of the thing of not being a lottery because the argument behind some of these, the H1B visa program and things like that, it is that we're not able to find enough Americans for this work. While the counter argument is no, you're just looking for low skill labor that is a little bit more attached to you because they have to go through the H1B process with you as the employer. So some of the potential reforms that we've even heard from this administration are like, okay, well, it shouldn't be a lottery, it shouldn't be random. It should be stack random ranked. The people who are getting the highest job offers should get the highest likelihood of getting a visa. And the logic there is, yeah, those employers are not hiring them because they're low cost labor. They're hiring them because, you know, they're giving them a $200,000 a year salary because they literally couldn't find someone with that same skill set. So I can buy that. But at the same time, trying to narrow it makes no sense because these global companies, the Googles, Microsofts, the apples of the world, they want that person. They want that person wherever they're going to get them. So they're either going to be able to bring them to the US and hire them in Mountain View or Cupertino and then that $200,000 a year salary, that person's going to become part of the economy. And that money's going to flow into the local economy and pay federal taxes, or they're going to pay that person $200,000 in Shanghai or $200,000 in Dublin or $200,000 in Bangalore, and then that $200,000 is going to flow into that country's tax base and so on and so forth. So it also doesn't make a lot of sense from that point of view.

So let's pretend that Betsy DeVos calls you up, or let's pretend that Joe Biden wins the election and he calls you up and either of them say to you, we want you to be Secretary of Education. We love what you did with Khan Academy. You've democratized education. You've shown us the next curve of education. Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris. Somebody calls you up and says, sal, would you be the Secretary of Education? What would you say?

I'd say thank you. And I would like to work very closely with whomever you appoint Secretary of Education. There's, there's certain aspects of that job that I probably would not be good at, which is kind of the, I would say the politicking side of it. But we do have a lot of ideas and we do think there's an opportunity right now. To transform the country in ways that'll accelerate education outcomes, create economic opportunity. If we're going to put more people to work as part of the COVID crisis, there's ways to do it that's going to improve our overall human capital. So I would love to work on a project with whoever the next administration is to drive that, But I would convince them that I would be more useful to them kind of doing a lot of the making in the building and a lot of the innovation versus maybe some of the just giving speeches and visiting schools and fighting with Congress over money.

So let's say you have the ear of the Secretary of Education. What's the first thing you tell him or her?

Let's create a nationwide competency based system so that if you can prove these artifacts that counts for credit in high school or college anywhere in the country, these are signals that you have a nationally recognized transcript that can also be used as a signal for employment akin to what we just talked about. And we're going to create a pathway, arguably Khan Academy could do this, where any student, maybe in the world, but for sure in the country, can learn whatever they need at their own time and pace to get to those outcomes. And ideally they'd be able to do that in conjunction with their school system. So then the school systems would all kind of rally around. Okay, that's our true north. I would use Schoolhouse World as a national tutoring program. Now every kid in America will have access to at least group tutoring at a rigorous world class level. And your ability to be a tutor is going to be the ultimate signal on this nationwide. On this nationwide transcript, which all of a sudden you created a national kind of public works force out of our young people and even some older people. And they're all working to improve each other's actual potential and human capital. And I do think it's going to be the best signal of capability in the 21st century. And we could extend that across every major domain. Well, that's just getting started, but there's more.

I keep coming back to this tutor idea because it is, in a sense, a way to institutionalize helping others. I mean, you cannot be a good tutor if you're not helping others. Right?

That's right. That's right. And it's hard to fake that. I've always said the best way to look like you care about others is to actually care about others.

Okay, it's review time. Steve A. In Hawaii, have you ever listened to a podcast and when it's over, you forget where you are what day it is and you lose track of time because you are so captivated. This is easy when watching a good movie or reading a great book, however, not so often when listening to a podcast. Well, I've listened to many podcasts and just recently started tuning into Guy's Remarkable People Podcasts. I am thoroughly enjoying my way through his diverse lineup of guests. Every episode transports me and leaves me wanting to learn even more. Speaking of more, check out his conversation with Julie Packard, ocean lover, philanthropist and conservationist, where he interviews Julie to learn more about her work in Healthy Oceans and how her father, David Packard, was an amazing dad, leader and innovator. She also shares the importance of MBWA managed by walking around as part of the HP way. Then in episode 11 where Guy chats with Steve Wozniak about his experiences working working at Apple and hp.

Wow.

Great stuff. I just finished listening to his podcast with Lisa Leopold entitled Professor Education Apology Speaking Storytelling and inspired me to write in and share how Guy's podcast is a must listen for all. More specifically, Lisa's story left me with insightful tools and resources such as fully understanding the importance importance that the messenger and not just the message needs to be credible. Guy has an amazing gift of identifying remarkable people, building connections with listeners, piquing our curiosity, engaging with us, and leaving us wondering what's up next. Here's a secret tip. Sign up for his slick email feature where Guy emails you when a new episode is live. Mahalo. Steve A. From Hawaii that was a great. I hope you'll review my podcast too. Go to the Apple podcast app and have at it. Use of Khan Academy is exploding during the pandemic, to put it mildly. Lots of students and parents are looking for education resources. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. Thank you to Jeff C. And Peg Fitzpatrick who educate me in the ways of sound design and social media with every episode until next week, wash your hands, wear a mask, avoid large crowds and listen to Dr. Tony Fauci. Mahalo and Aloha. This episode of Remarkable People is brought to you by Remarkable, the paper tablet company. This is remarkable people.