Khan Academy CEO: How to Re-Skill for the AI Economy in the Next 3 Years | Sal Khan

Sal Khan built Khan Academy into a free education platform used by over 200 million people worldwide. Now he's writing a book called Job Shock, arguing AI could disrupt jobs faster than his own past predictions accounted for. Which jobs are already disappearing. Which ones are safe. What Khan Academy is doing internally with AI, including a $1.2M/year Anthropic bill. And Sal's new venture with TED and ETS: a $10,000, accreditation-pending degree built around durable skills — the kind AI still can't replicate. Links: 📌 Subscribe to my free newsletter where I go deeper on AI tools, career strategies, and building with AI: ⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=SalKhan https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=SalKhan ⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/𝕏 : ⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠ https://x.com/siliconvalleymm 🔗 Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ 💼 LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko 📌 My Companies & Products: ⁠https://Marinamogilko.co https://Marinamogilko.co

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:29Speaker 01

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• 0:39Speaker 00

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• 0:44Speaker 02

  And so they're asking, and we're saying, hey, use more AI, use more AI. Software engineering, design, product management in all of these tech firms, including at Khan Academy are changing fundamentally.

• 0:55Marina Mogilko?

  This is Sal Khan. He runs Khan Academy. A hundred million people learn on it every year. He built one of the first AI tutors in the world.

• 1:04Speaker 04

  Excellent work.

• 1:05Marina Mogilko?

  No one has spent more time on how people reskill for AI.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  If we could do three times more with the same resources, we will do three times more. So that would never be the catalyst for layoffs. If you can automate yourself out of a job, we're going to give you a better job with better pay. What are you thinking about the next package? Don't run to where everyone else is running. Try to find the lanes that are most empty. And I would say.

• 1:28Marina Mogilko?

  And we're in this interesting phase where AI is changing everything. And your previous book was called Brave New Words. And now you're writing a book called Job Shock. So what has changed in the past two years?

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Um, wow, what has changed? So much has changed. You know, when I wrote in my last book, Brave New Words about AI and education, I, when I was writing this in 2023, I was afraid that as soon as I write it, it would be obsolete because things are changing so fast. But I keep looking at it and it's, it's still, I feel very relevant. I write about things like how AI will broaden the aperture of how we assess people, how, you know, people have talked a lot about AI tutors, but. There's other forms of assessment, interviews, oral exams, and you actually are starting to see some of that. So we could talk a lot of, you know, some of those things that were just ideas. Three years ago, we're now seeing in reality, I just talked to head of admissions at Caltech. And a lot of students who apply, they they give these.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Research papers they've done and the admissions officer says, some of these are real and some of them. Not clear if the student did the work, etc. And so they're already using AI to essentially do oral exams with these students to evaluate if they understand. And this is pretty high stakes. This is for admissions to to top universities. So you're already seeing AI in that part. We've launched Conmigo out into classrooms. We've learned a lot. There's for a lot of students, it's been super useful, but we've also learned that. AI one O one or the first one point O AI. It it's waiting to be asked to do something. And some students know how to do it. A lot of them didn't. So what we're now, we're in the process of launching a new version. It's more proactive.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  And it isn't AI for AI sake. It's how do we get AI to motivate students, give them more practice? Have the teacher in the loop, etc. In terms of why I'm now writing Job Shock, which is some people are surprised because most of not just my books, but most of the things I've ever said tend to be pretty optimistic. But I'm I am increasingly worried, you know, not too far from this was about. I don't want to say about three or four months ago, maybe a little longer. I have a good friend from college who's now a prominent VC and. He said, hey, Sal, I want to talk about reskilling. And so I took, I remember I drove over to his place, not too far from here in Los Altos. And while I was driving, you see the Waymos like you see everywhere here. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. This is cool. Look, I live in the future.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Then I go over to his his office and he was telling me that one of his portfolio companies. Has a call center that they've they've just automated eighty percent of their workforce with a with a generator AI solution. I don't know the exact number, but it sounded like it was in the hundreds, if not thousands of people for that one call center. And based in the Philippines. And this is why he said, well, maybe I want to take one percent of my firm's profits and. And put it into reskilling sometime and we started brainstorming. And and we appreciated that. Especially in an economy like the Philippines where depending on how you measure it, five, six, seven percent of their GDP is directly related. To business process outsourcing, mostly call centers. Yeah. If this becomes a trend and there's a lot of reason to think it will over the next three to five years.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  What are all those people going to do? And then. When we see a Waymo, it's awesome. I was at TED a couple of weeks ago and I interviewed Tekeidra Malkana, who's a co-CEO. I'm a big fan of Waymos. I think it's going to save a lot of lives. It's super convenient. But my uncle's also an Uber driver in New Orleans. What's he going to do? That's not people's first choice job. It's usually their last choice job in a lot of cases. And if Rideshare goes away, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Out here in Silicon Valley, everyone's talking about what's happening to software engineering, product management, design. Are those roles going to merge? Are we going to hire more, less, etc.? But it is crazy times. And I wrote, the job shocks genesis was I wrote

• 5:17Speaker 02

  a New York Times op-ed piece in December, where I made this argument that like, we have to take this a lot more seriously. We can't just be like, oh, the industrial revolution turned out okay, more jobs. First of all, the industrial revolution also had many wars. The 20th century was the bloodiest. We experimented with communism. We experimented with everything. A lot of these things didn't go so well. And so, we should have a plan. And that's what job shock is about. How will it possibly transform? What are the types of things people need to learn? My son, my oldest son, is a junior in high school. What should he be caring about to be relevant in four, five years? But also, how do we as a society adapt?

• 5:55Marina Mogilko?

  How much time do you think we have for someone who's an Uber driver watching right now? Because I feel like with Waymos, it took them still, it took them 10 years to roll out the operation that we're seeing now and we're only seeing it in San Francisco.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  I think you're going to start seeing a real dent in this in five or 10 years. And that's slower than what a lot of the AI optimist evangelists are saying, but that's also pretty fast.

• 6:17Marina Mogilko?

  That's our lifetime.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  That's, that's before your kids go to high school, or when they go to high school, or when they, before they go to college. And driving a vehicle is the largest employer, one of the largest employers of men. I mean, women, obviously, my Uber driver just now was a woman, but like disproportionately men globally. If you have a lot of men who can't find a job, who are angry, that's, and women, that's going to lead into politics, polarization, people are going to move towards extremes. So I suspect that you're going to see in the next four or five years, the dislocations start to happen for real. And

• 6:58Speaker 02

  We're going to struggle as a society on how, what, how do we reskill people? I'm not a fan of things like universal basic income. I think, you know, like universal basic work. People need to feel like a sense of contribution. But these are big questions that we have to be creative about.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 7:44Speaker 05

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 8:13Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, and it's not just Uber drivers, right? You mentioned call centers. What are other jobs that are in danger?

• 8:19Speaker 02

  I think the writing is on the wall that software engineering, design, product management, these product jobs in all of these tech firms, including at Khan Academy are changing fundamentally.

• 8:28Marina Mogilko?

  But are they in danger? Like, are they, are these people going to end up in the street? Because I don't think so. I think they're-

• 8:33Speaker 02

  I'm not sure. I'm generally not sure. You know, what I've told our Khan Academy team, because you could imagine the employees are very worried and they're saying-

• 8:39Marina Mogilko?

  How many people do you have?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  We have 350 people on our team and we're two thirds product people. And so they're asking, and we're saying, hey, use more AI, use more AI. And Anthropic just gave us a report that we're the top of the stack apparently on organizations that are leaning into these tools. But you could imagine the team sometimes feels insecure about this. They say, hey-

• 8:57Marina Mogilko?

  Totally.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  If we can be three times more productive, that means you're going to lay off two thirds of us. And what we've said very clearly to our team, and it's what we believe is, look- The reason for us, we have so much to do. Khan Academy is the budget of a large high school. If we could do three times more with the same resources, we will do three times more. If we could do thirty. So that would never be the catalyst for layoffs. Catalyst for layoffs is if we don't bring in enough philanthropy, if we don't bring in enough earned revenue, then just money will will force us to it, you know. But it's not going to be AI. AI will allow us to do more. But we have also said that people's jobs are evolving and people really need to learn how to keep up with the times. And we've put on our career rubric, like learning new tools and adapting, or we're actually putting it into our our career rubric.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  So I suspect that many of our team members are already there. A lot of them are very willing and are going to get there. But I do sense that there are some people who are like, ah, I don't know if I like this. I don't know if I want to do this. And I think that that might be a more a bigger struggle if if folks don't want to aren't aren't in a position to adapt or change.

• 10:04Marina Mogilko?

  And you think they're going to be at risk in the next five years?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  I think some, yeah. I I I think, you know, we don't know exactly what these titles are going to be. But this designer, product manager, engineer division, it's really

• 10:16Marina Mogilko?

  It's kind of blending.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. And the current framework came mostly out of the late 90s into the early 2000s of, okay, how do you build web apps? And it's that model. But the new world, and not only are those roles, people who used to be designers or or product managers are now not just prototyping anymore. You know, last year I met some heads of product. They're like, oh, I'm forcing all my product managers to create a prototype. And I'm like, wow, that's really bold. Well, now at Khan Academy, we're taking our designers and our product managers and we're giving them full dev environments so that they can actually do full requests and do full, you know, deploying deploying of code. Now, it's still leaning on more of the prototype proof of concept, but it's blending. And similarly, because engineers can do so much more. I think there will always be value of that engineer who could be super deep.

• 11:01Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  But they're going to be much more productive. But I think you're also going to see a breed of engineer that can go more customer facing, et cetera. So yes, these things are all all all blending. And just the development cycle speeding up too. So people have to feel comfortable with that.

• 11:15Marina Mogilko?

  Back to the jobs that are endangered, drivers, call center, customer support, people who work in product slash designer, software engineer, and don't want to adapt. Anyone else?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  The people I think are safe are the people who really lean into the human element of it. So I've said, I think teachers are one of the safest jobs. But once again, even before AI, I don't view that the role of the teacher is to be the sage on the stage and to just disseminate information. We've had textbooks for now centuries. We have videos on demand. We have other places to get information.

• 11:52Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  I think the teachers, and we've seen teachers do this. Good, great teachers have been doing this for decades, move up the value chain. And they're the planners, the architects, the coaches. They're able to form, you know, have eye contact with students and be their motivators. I can't speak for you, but for myself, when I think about the great teachers in my life, some of them were like, wow, they used to give a good performance on the call. But most of them were the ones that ran a Socratic dialogue with all of us, really made us dream or do things we never thought about. Or say, hey, Sal, can you see me after class? Hey, Sal, I really liked what you did that time. You know, you have a knack for that. Or Sal, I didn't like what you did. Stop it. If you did that in the real world, someone's gonna, you know, be really annoyed with you. That's, that's what I remember.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  So teaching, I think nursing, hospitality, sales, anything that has a huge.

• 12:45Marina Mogilko?

  Sales.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. I don't think you're just, I mean, maybe telesales and things like that, AI. And I know there's, there's been companies for a while that I can be the salesperson. Yes, some of these sales agents are, they're going to get better and better, but their cost of deploying is so low that we're all just going to get spammed unbelievably by it. And so they're probably all cancel each other out in terms of efficacy. But the, the ability to actually form a relationship with someone, be a convincing advisor. And you know, the best salespeople aren't like salespeople. They're, they're actually smart, thoughtful people where you actually respect their opinion.

• 13:21Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  And, and you want their advice.

• 13:24Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  And you know, they're a straight shooter. And they'll say, you know, our product isn't best for that. You might want to use that and you're like, oh, I trust you. Let me use you next time. And so I think that human connection, anything that can be purely done on a computer and you're not interfacing with other human beings, you're not having to build some of these durable skills of communication and persuasion and listening and collaboration. Those will change or or they might be under threat.

• 13:47Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, let's talk about adopting those AI tools. You just mentioned you use Anthropic a lot. Can you talk about the processes in your company that seem absolutely mind blowing? That would have seemed absolutely mind blowing two years ago and now they're part of your process.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Oh, um.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think engineering is where we're seeing it the most. And that is where we also, and I think you've heard many people say, you know, some of the engineers are really leaning into this. They're running five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 agents simultaneously, writing code, reviewing code. The Anthropic folks told us that we were one of the biggest users of actually the agents for reviewing code.

• 14:28Marina Mogilko?

  Interesting.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  And, and you know, we, we, I've gotten a little sticker shock for how expensive this stuff is. Our, our run rate on, on our, our Anthropic bill is about 1.2 million dollars right now.

• 14:40Marina Mogilko?

  Wow.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  And it's growing fast.

• 14:41Marina Mogilko?

  That's a year or a month?

• 14:43Speaker 02

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

• 15:00Marina Mogilko?

  Are you trying to push them to use even more? Cause you see some companies try to do that.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  I was like, what are they doing? And then he's like, then we talked to them and they actually in a few hours were able to do something that would have normally taken them three or four months. It's like, okay, that was a great use of $3,000. Go, go spend more. But just today we had a company meeting where I said, you know, make sure you're not using the OPUS model for just everyday tasks. Use Gemini and use your chat GPT accounts if you're trying to figure out the local restaurant to go to. So we are trying to get there, but I had the same answer to our team. I, I was like, look. If we're using one million, two million, three million dollars of tokens every year, but if we look at what we're producing and that would have cost us 20, 30 million dollars in the past to produce, yeah, we should, we should keep doing it. But anyway, the engineering is, is the most.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  I think the rapid prototyping, um, we, we just launched a feature a few months ago that in the old days, it would have been like, maybe we can fit it by next school year. And this is one of the engineers at a hackathon vibe coded it in a day. And then on a weekend, he said, you know, he's an engineer, so he had the full development environment, but he was able to create, working on our real data. And it's a very front end kind of game thing. So it didn't have a lot of implications to what might happen to the backend. He's like, I think we could ship this thing and got some designers involved, made it, made it a little bit nicer and we were able to ship it in about a month, something that would have

• 16:26Marina Mogilko?

  Would have taken.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  And so that is the thing that's really, before people said, engineering is hard. So do as much time as possible on design so that you, you don't build things that aren't, aren't, aren't going to be valuable. But now that, that model is changing. You should say, no, let's build stuff fast, put it out there. Not always, certain things you have to really make sure work before they go out there, but certain things you can try out, test your thesis fast. So I think the velocity of the organization is, is much faster than I would have imagined a year or two ago.

• 16:55Marina Mogilko?

  Do you think 2X, 3X? What's your estimation?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  If I'm honest, as we grew, 10 years ago, we were very fast. We start up, you know, 20, 30 people. And as we grew to 200, 300 people, from my point of view, it started to feel slower because you have coordination costs, et cetera. And I think relative to where we were two or three years ago, it does actually feel, and this is, this is a feeling, we haven't, have, have, haven't nailed this down, but to me, it feels at least 50% faster, maybe a hundred percent faster than we, than we were.

• 17:29Marina Mogilko?

  That's awesome for such a large organization.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I, and it's accelerating.

• 17:33Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah. What about, uh, operational stuff? Have you tried automating that for yourself, maybe? What are you using?

• 17:40Speaker 02

  You know, we just approved all the connectors with the various AIs. So now our AIs can access our Slack and our Gmail and our docs and all of that kind of stuff. And we are learning and encouraging people how to use it, how not to use it. Don't let it do things without you being in the loop. Don't let it post on social media. Don't let it send the email. Maybe let it draft the email and then you you check on it. But I am on a daily basis. You know, I talk to one or more of these of these AIs. And I say, what what's falling through the cracks? And it's acting like a little bit of a chief of staff for me. And it's going to my Slack. It's going to my Gmail. It's going that it's like, oh, I've drafted something for you. Is this good? So I'm already using that. And I'm finding that's super useful for just. There's always people who are asking me, hey, can you do this? Can you do that?

• 18:25Speaker 02

  And and I typically probably 20 or 30% did fall through the cracks. And I would it's only when people keep bugging me. Do I not bugging me, reminding me, does it? Does it? Does it? Does it actually happen? You know, there's just a lot of paperwork type stuff that we has dramatically accelerated. Totally. We have to write a lot of proposals to people for philanthropic or even school, you know, earned revenue type stuff. And now you can have a meeting, keep all the notes, have a first draft of a proposal. We won't just send that. But now, within 10 minutes of the meeting, you have a first draft. And then that's a good catalyst for everyone to now start weighing in. That would have taken a week before, two weeks before. Content creation. I'm when I make a video, I always try to like, what about this edge case?

• 19:10Speaker 02

  What about that edge case? I've been making financial literacy videos lately. And financial literacy is full of edge cases. Yeah. Like, what if I'm 55 and a half, but I've done this and this and I'm in this tax bracket? And that has dramatically shortened the research time for me. Because I am literally, once again, I don't just go to the AI and accept its answer. I look at it. I'm like, oh, show me a source that validates that before I make a video on it. And I'm like, oh, it's from IRS.gov. All right, I will. I will now make make that video. So that's dramatically shortened. As I said, our content creators. Are able to scale much faster. They're still reviewing all the questions, tweaking it, but they're definitely getting.

• 19:46Marina Mogilko?

  All the research, of course. Quick pause here. If you're enjoying this podcast, you will absolutely love my inner circle newsletter. So what I basically do is I take all the tips from these podcasts and I apply them to my personal life, to my investment portfolio and to my businesses, this media company and my language teaching business. Sometimes we get amazing results and I share our real tactics. Sometimes we don't and I share that too. Think of it as an insider version of this podcast. The link is in the description. Join my free newsletter to stay ahead. Does it ever make you scared? Cause when you're seeing this progress, are you ever thinking like, oh, in three years, AI is able to develop another Khan Academy just by itself? Just because like, why would it need humans?

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I have two responses to that. One is my, um, my emotional ego response to that. And then one is my more higher minded, correct response to it.

• 20:40Marina Mogilko?

  Thank you both.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  My emotional ego response to is, yeah, I do worry about that. And, uh, one could imagine, I, I think it's very hard right now to vibe code something as, as like the same fidelity and quality. You could make something that looks kind of like Khan Academy, but not have the rigor, et cetera. I, I think in, it's quite plausible that in three or four or five years, people could maybe start to develop these things. There, I think there still will be the burden to how do you have the efficacy data that it really works? How do you make sure that you're working with school systems in a way that meets all of their data privacy agreements?

• 21:16Marina Mogilko?

  Talk to their agents.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. But there, there will still be some of those frictions. It won't be as simple as, as vibe coding. So I think there will still be some advantages of already having something out there that's already being used by millions and that you have real data on, real efficacy on, you, you're able to work with the, the, the system. The correct answer, which I tell the team all the time is. If we or someone else can create a solution that's as good as us or better, and actually show that they're doing it, it just doesn't feel that way. As a nonprofit, we should be happy about that. We should say, good. One of the many problems in the world has now been solved. What other problems are there to be solved? And for better or for worse, in the education space, there are many problems to solve here.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  And one of the things we're thinking about at Khan Academy is assessment. So standardized assessment, historically, it's multiple choice, et cetera. That's why a lot of people don't like it. It's very narrow. But we're working on real standardized assessment with real psychometrics that has some of the traditional, but also starts broadening the aperture, asking students to explain their reasoning, giving teachers not just the what percentile their kids are in, but what, giving a narrative. And those things like that are also very hard to just vibe code in a garage. Because you're doing all the psychometric data. You have to get it out there with millions of people to use it. And I think that's an area where very few VCs, or frankly, even private equity firms are like, let's create a new standardized test leveraging AI. Because it's a lot of work.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  It'll take years to get the right psychometric validation and to go out there into schools and other places. But that's where I think we, as a nonprofit, that's tech-focused, can be valuable. We're thinking a lot about credentials, high school credentials, high school diplomas, credit recovery, college degrees, pathways into jobs. And those are the places where I hope AI gets better. I hope it can create a lot of solutions. But I would be surprised if markets on their own are able to solve a lot of these problems.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 23:46Speaker 05

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 24:15Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, but someone who's listening and thinking, okay, he's positive about being likely replaced in three years? I'm not. So for someone who has these thoughts, can you talk more about your new initiative? Because when I heard that at TED Vancouver, that you're partnering with TED and ETS, for me, was another full circle moment because I also took TOEFL and we partner with ETS for my other channel where I talk about learning English. And you're doing this $10,000, is it a bachelor's degree? How long does it last?

• 24:47Speaker 02

  And this is going to the whole job shock thing. I think we need new systems of skilling people.

• 24:53Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 02

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

• 25:13Marina Mogilko?

  Totally.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  If you don't have a meaningful job, if you can't put food on the table. And so we're launching, we announced it at TED, Content Institute. It's intended to be accredited. We're pursuing accreditation. We're likely to do both four years degree and master's degree. And the idea is it would be essentially three components. There will be an academic component. We still think, especially for the bachelor's, you should learn your history, your civics, your accounting, your statistics. But most of the program that makes it really differentiated, it will be online, but we're going to be putting students of all ages. We've already gotten in the last two or three weeks 3,000 people interested in being students.

• 25:54Marina Mogilko?

  Congratulations.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  And it's amazing. Most of them have bachelor's degrees. Many of them have master's degrees. And you can sense the fear that they have.

• 26:02Marina Mogilko?

  They need to requalify.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Exactly, being relevant. And what we are going to be doing is putting people into group simulations, projects, likely leveraging another platform. We have Schoolhouse or something similar where you're on Zoom, you're on a video conference together, you have four hours, you have to build a business, which means create a prototype, maybe make an ad, do the business plan, survey customers, whatever it might do, do competitive research. And then afterwards, the the outcome of that, maybe other teams peer review you, but also you are going to review each other on your communication, your collaboration, your creativity, all of these things that we know really matter and we believe are going to matter. People are calling them durable skills now. They're going to matter even in an AI world.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  They might matter more in an AI world, how well you can sell and listen and form connections.

• 26:52Marina Mogilko?

  How many are there, those durable skills? Can you name them?

• 26:55Speaker 02

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

• 27:40Speaker 02

  We are we're co-designing with them to say like, what are the types of work?

• 27:44Marina Mogilko?

  What do you need now?

• 27:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, what do you expect people to be able to do next year? And it might change the year after. And we're going to create those real simulations so that these these people, not just, you know, not just young people, can have practice doing that, create portfolios and artifacts of doing that, but also start to surface these durable skills of communication, creativity, leadership, collaboration, et cetera. But that's, that's what we're going to do in the master's program and that's what we're going to do in the bachelor's.

• 28:08Marina Mogilko?

  Are those companies going to be hiring graduates?

• 28:11Speaker 02

  You know, no one can commit that like, oh, yes, when you have your first graduates in two years, we're definitely going to hire 20 of them. But this is definitely designed and they definitely have a seat at the table because.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  They too, just like Khan Academy, are reimagining how their roles change. They too are reimagining how they do interviews. And they are completely aligned that right now, if you do an interview, I have a family member who's interviewing at a startup here in Silicon Valley, and she's in the third round, and she has to vibe code a solution for a hospital, and then they're going to have a panel interview. That's where the way that interviews are going. But that's just one project that she's going to do. It's a little bit of an arbitrary one that this company just invented for her. And if she gets the job, awesome. If she doesn't get the job, it kind of just goes away, that artifact. What we're telling these employers is, we're going to make people do 20, 30, 40, 50 of

• 29:06Speaker 02

  these projects, and they're going to be more rigorously designed, they're going to have the portfolios are actually going to be rated, and we're going to get clear skills. That, you know, when you do interviews, how one interviewer does it versus another, it can be, but here you can get feedback from 50, 60, 70, 100 people.

• 29:23Marina Mogilko?

  So they're going to graduate with a different type of resume, basically?

• 29:25Speaker 02

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

• 30:00Marina Mogilko?

  There's signals, not evaluation.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Exactly. And what I normally do now, when I see a resume, even someone who's been working, no matter what they write, I look for YouTube videos of them. I look for some evidence of like, how do they communicate? How do they? And then you try to do it in an interview, which is just, you only have a few hours to do it. So our case to the employers, and I think they believe this, is you're going to co-design these things. When we show you these different projects and simulations, you, Google, Microsoft, McKinsey Bain should say, oh, yeah, wow, we wish we could do that with people in interviews. But you're able to do it, and you're able to get that signal. And that when, if I were to show you, here's a Stanford- Stanford student with a 3.9 GPA. That's kind of the student that say McKinsey would interview. Top 10% graduate of Stanford. Here's another student from the Content Institute, who is in the top 10% of communication skills, collaboration skills, critical thinking skills.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Here are the points of evidence. Here are video artifacts of them doing it. Our intent is that the employer says, oh yeah, we'll treat them at least as much of a priority as the top 10% from a, from an elite university.

• 31:00Marina Mogilko?

  So you're comparing this to elite universities. What about other universities? Are they losing value in this new age?

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and, and it's a good point because our intent isn't to just only tackle the, the very cream of students, only for these very aspirational employers. But there is an intention behind partnering with these aspirational employers because the, the higher education world is, is very polar in certain ways. On one extreme, you have the elite institutions, where some of these employers try to focus their recruiting, but they're super inaccessible, very low capacity. Any of these elite universities, Harvard would tell you of the, I don't know how many students, 70, 80,000 students that must apply. 50,000 actually could handle Harvard, do well there, but they're only going to accept 2,000 of them. And, you know, maybe some of those other students go to another good university, but a lot of them won't.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  And then they won't go to a place where Google or Bain or whoever might, might recruit. So we wanted to show, and then the other extreme, you have online programs. And online programs have been, there are some good high quality ones. And I would say the good ones are places like Western Governors University or Southern New Hampshire University. Those are very good for the person who maybe didn't go down a traditional route. They need to complete their college degree in order to, to enter. But it, it's very seldom that those people are getting the same signal of the person who just graduated from a, a well-known university, a well-known four-year program. So the reason why we wanted to at least show that Content Institute can be a pathway is to get rid of the stigma around online,

• 32:36Speaker 02

  that you can actually create online that is highly interactive, highly human to human, and also creates a great signal. If you do very good, then That is as good as any university. We also want to be able to serve students that yeah, maybe they're not going to end up at as a elite programmer at Google, but they can still create signals that they can get a great job at a regional firm or things like that comparable to still a very strong college degree at a top 50 type of university. That's where we're starting. But then as we scale, I hope we can add more and more programs.

• 33:08Marina Mogilko?

  Looking ahead, like let's look 10 years ahead. Should I be saving for my kids' college? Or you think higher education will be similar to what you're building, which is like $40,000 for four years versus 400,000 standard?

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Oh, what we're building is maximum 10,000 for the degree.

• 33:24Marina Mogilko?

  Oh, for the whole degree?

• 33:25Speaker 02

  For the whole degree. And we said 10,000 to be careful. We actually intended for it to be a good bit less than that.

• 33:33Marina Mogilko?

  Okay.

• 33:33Speaker 02

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

• 34:09Marina Mogilko?

  It was a great time, right?

• 34:10Speaker 02

  It was a great time. But that is, I hate to say this way, but it's a luxury experience. And as a parent, yes, I would love my children to have that. And my son will be applying to schools like that. And I'm hoping he gets in so that we have the privilege of spending probably half a million dollars for him to go. But I think from that, he's going to get great experiences, great friendships, hopefully some great skills, he'll have a coming of age experience. But I see, I could imagine he too might want to still do content institute on top of his degree at whatever university goes, because that might have a more direct link to some of these job-ready skills. Content Institute, we plan on adapting much faster to wherever the tool

• 34:53Speaker 02

  are and we are also seeing even a lot of kids at some of the top universities they're dropping out right now because they're entrepreneurial and they see wow ai's changing so fast

• 35:02Marina Mogilko?

  moving so fast

• 35:03Speaker 02

  this is the window if I don't get in now who knows if capitalism existed for years much less you know so I think for those types of students this is going to be a very interesting and then the the reality is most students who are going to college aren't getting to go and throw frisbees on the quad and look at the iv on the walls and you know and have socratic discussion with world leaders they're going pretty transactionally to get a job they're going to commuter college they're starting at their local community college and so I see things like content institute or maybe content institute coupled with their local regional college or their local community college could be a very viable solution one of the main reasons you can get a great education at your local community college or at your

• 35:45Speaker 02

  local let's say at the cal state system here in california you could get a great education at these places but a lot of students who are high capable or high ambition might say oh well I I got a full ride at san jose state but I'm gonna get my family to pay half a million dollars to go to stanford because I'm not gonna get you know mckinsey's not gonna recruit at san at san jose state now they could say hey I'm gonna go to san jose state I'm gonna get that full ride it's gonna be free and I'm also gonna do content institute

• 36:13Marina Mogilko?

  for 5k

• 36:14Speaker 02

  for 5k and then I'm in and then I'm in good shape so your answer to answer your question if you're in a position to do so I think it's a it's it's a gift that you can give your kids if they can go to a great college and have that experience but I think

• 36:27Marina Mogilko?

  it's becoming unnecessary right

• 36:29Speaker 02

  yeah I mean there's other luxury experiences I could give my child too

• 36:31Marina Mogilko?

  travel more

• 36:32Speaker 02

  yeah exactly imagine if I spent half a million dollars for my child and I said go travel the world with your friends and read great books while you're doing it that's also pretty awesome that might be better than

• 36:43Marina Mogilko?

  or even give them a fraction of that money and say start a business

• 36:46Speaker 02

  start a business

• 36:47Marina Mogilko?

  spend that on tokens

• 36:48Speaker 02

  down payment on a house

• 36:49Marina Mogilko?

  yeah

• 36:50Speaker 02

  there's there's so many things that that could be and you know I give another I have a friend out and this is very silicon valley in the bubble type thing but I have a friend who and this is this is this is artifact of privilege but we were all talking about these like oh what are our kids gonna do in four or five years and like who knows what jobs are and he was saying yeah you know I for I was looking at it for like two or three hundred thousand dollars there are these like mom and pop Businesses you can buy that are like completely unautomated, but they have good contracts with the government or whatever else, or you know, they're part of the supply chain. You know, it could be fun to buy one of those for two or $300,000 and have our kids go and automate, you know, and then turn it into a, you know, essentially be private equity turnaround.

• 37:35Marina Mogilko?

  Maybe interesting use of money versus college to wrap up this topic. Are you more on a positive side, like in five years, the world's still, because I feel like we still take time to adopt. I don't think we're gonna go through dramatic change. Yes, things are speeding up, but I don't think we're gonna have mass layoffs, like 90% of people gone. What are you thinking about the next five years?

• 37:58Speaker 02

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

• 38:27Marina Mogilko?

  For one month.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  And then everyone's like, oh, this is how you code now.

• 38:32Marina Mogilko?

  And it's getting into knowledge work. That's what I'm seeing now, the trend.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 38:35Marina Mogilko?

  More than 50% of queries, I think, is now coming from non-technical people.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Exactly. So my sense is even if we start seeing 4% or 5% unemployment in certain sectors in the next three or four years, that will be very painful. And I think it will start to affect our politics. It will affect, you know, just how we think about things. So, yeah, I don't think you're going to see mass unemployment in the next three or four years, but I think you're going to start seeing some of these pockets in three or four years. It's going to be scary. And if we don't start, and the AI is accelerating.

• 39:11Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  So if we don't, as industry, government, nonprofit sector, start having some solutions to scale at that point, we're going to be in trouble.

• 39:17Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, what can an individual person do today to not get replaced?

• 39:23Speaker 02

  I think the best, the most important skill is this people, you know, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, just being willing to try things out. Even for myself, I'm always preaching this is that sometimes I'm like, oh, I heard about some, you know, I heard about open claw and this and that. I'm like, I should try it out. And I'm like, oh, be a little bit, but just getting over that activation energy and trying it out and fiddling with it and seeing if you can get it to do something. If you have that mindset and you'll be fine. And if you look at your different workflows that you have in your life personally, or that you have at work, and you're like, let me see if I can take that output. And maybe initially I just have to copy and paste it and put it here. And then I can generate this. Oh, I find that I'm doing that a lot.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Let me create an agent that can do that. Or let me just instruct Claude coworker, open claw to do that. Oh, let me be careful. Let me put it in a separate device. Or let me put it in a, in a sandbox someplace. But I think it's that very incremental. None of this stuff is rocket science. You don't have to.

• 40:22Marina Mogilko?

  And even these are like perplexity computers. So easy or like hyper agents.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  You just, but there is a little bit of activation energy of saying, let me try to install it. Let me play around with it a little bit. Let me not be afraid to press some buttons and see what happens. You have to be careful sometimes, but I think anyone who has that mindset, I think is, is going to be fine.

• 40:38Marina Mogilko?

  Give them a prompt that has transformed how you work. I can, while you think I could give mine, that was super transformational this week. I talked to my chat GPT and I said, give me top five things that I'm repetitively doing by analyzing my Gmail calendar and whatever you have access to. And tell me what should I vibe code? And it came up with a really cool thing. Like I'm repurposing a lot of content. So it's like, let's start repurposing your newsletter to LinkedIn. But I'm like, oh, thank you. Yeah, this is a manual process where I'm a manager, communicating with different teams. And like, this is such a cool prompt. I should run it every week or maybe every day, like as an agent.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, the ones that I like, something that I use the same prompt. I've, I mean, this is just, I've replaced what like reading the news. And I just have a bunch of threads about the topics I'm interested in. And like at night, I'm like, what's the latest? But one thing I've found, and I think this is important to build AI. Skills. I've been fascinated by what's going on in the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz and the game of chicken and the gamesmanship that's going on there and how the market seems to be ignoring it, ignoring the fact that we have hundred dollar plus oil prices and, you know, $20 shipping rates. So it's essentially

• 41:48Marina Mogilko?

  I just saw $9 per gallon yesterday in New York Atherton.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:52Marina Mogilko?

  What?

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Well, that's they're the foreboding of the future. But a lot of the times when I was asking, like, what about this? I think this is going to happen. We've all the AIs like, Sal, you're a genius. You're spotting what other people aren't spotting. And it is very seductive because sometimes it'll do it very. And so I have learned to say, be critical of me, like really push back. And even then, sometimes it won't. Like I say, you're so humble for wanting to be pushed back. Okay.

• 42:18Marina Mogilko?

  If you were 22 today, MIT grad, what would you do differently?

• 42:23Speaker 00

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• 43:25Speaker 02

  You know, when I was 22, I did try to do some startups. This was the late 90s, dot com boom. I think the same Sal now would probably be trying to do some startups. And my advice would be, don't run to where everyone else is running. Try to find the lanes that are most empty. Try to find the most boring industries that are most ripe for applying some of these technologies. And I would say, yeah, make sure you invest in your durable skills, in your communication, your collaboration, seek out feedback, seek out mentors, build human connections with people. Those are truly going to be durable.

• 44:03Marina Mogilko?

  If your kids come to you today and say, hey, Dad, I'm afraid I won't be able to find a job, what would you tell them?

• 44:09Speaker 02

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

• 44:52Marina Mogilko?

  Now you can say, I come with 100 agents.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  I come with 100 agents, or why don't you interview my agents before, first? Or, do you have an agent that would like to talk to mine? Or here's my portfolio of AI-generated art? Or here are my workflows that I've automated? Or here's, here's a, here's a Loom video I created of a day in my life, where I have automated my life with agents. If you know anyone like that, I would be interested in hiring them for Khan Academy tomorrow.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  That's, that's what I would tell them. You know, my son is, he's likely to be a computer science major. Five years ago, I was like, oh, that's great. You know, Imran's gonna go work in tech and I chose the nonprofit route. He'll go for profit. We'll retire off of his equity, you know, whatever. Now I'm like, oh, computer science. I don't know, maybe, but you should do it because it's interesting. It's intellectually challenging. It'll be a signal to the world that you can do hard things. You're bright, you're hardworking. But also do all these other things that we just talked about.

• 45:44Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, because 75% of Google's code is now AI. Thank you so much, Sal. This was an amazing conversation and thank you for sharing your wisdom and thank you for inspiring everyone across the world to learn.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.