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

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

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Hey everybody, it's Neelai from The Vergecast. For the next little bit, we're running episodes of my new podcast Decoder with Neelai Patel in the Vergecast feed, just to give you all a little taste of it. On this episode, I interviewed Sal Khan. He's the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. That's the online learning platform. A super interesting conversation. If you've missing the Tuesday interview episodes, they're moving over to Decoder. We just want to put them here now, give you a taste of them. Without further ado, here's Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my new podcast about big ideas and other problems. On this week's episode, I'm talking to Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit online learning platform for students in kindergarten through high school.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Welcome to Introduction to Economics. Here are my tips for reducing stress around taking important tests. Welcome to Foundations of American Democracy. What I want to do in this video is think about the origins of algebra.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

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

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

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

• 3:46Nilay Patel?

  Sal Khan, you're the founder of Khan Academy. Welcome to Decoder.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:51Nilay Patel?

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

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, when the pandemic hit in mid-March, and we first caught wind of it in February, or it might have even been late January, I got a letter from a teacher in South Korea saying how he was leaning on Khan Academy during their nationwide school closures. And I'm like, how wild is that? A whole country shut down physical schooling? And then a few weeks later, early March, you know, I live in Northern California, and actually, the local private school had to shut down. That was, maybe it was the first US shutdown in the country. But then it started to dawn on us, and I'm on the board of my children's school that I started a few years ago. And they started talking about, well, we have to have some plans if we shut down. And that's when it started on me. Well, if people shut down, a lot of people are going to lean on Khan Academy. We could have never foreseen

• 4:55Speaker 02

  this, but you know, we're accessible, we're free, we're proven, et cetera, et cetera. We cover multiple subjects and grades. But yeah, we saw our usage go through the roof as soon as the schools closed. It was about 250 to 300% of normal. And to be clear, I view only Khan Academy as a suboptimal situation. You always want the Khan Academy where you can get your practice, your feedback, learn at your own time and pace, adapt to you. You want that in conjunction with ideally a great physical experience. You know, I make it very clear, if I had to pick between an amazing teacher, or amazing technology for myself, for my own kids, or anyone's kids, I'd pick the amazing teacher, in person, any day. The technology has to be in service to how do we take that to another level. And you know,

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Khan Academy has always been around, all about, hey, you're one teacher, how do you meet the individual needs of 30 kids? How do you give them practice at their learning edge? And that's where Khan Academy is. Or you're a student in a class, but you're a little confused, you need some gaps filled at night, it's 11:00 PM, how do you get help? Khan Academy is there for that. But as soon as the pandemic hit, people started leaning much, much heavier on Khan Academy. Then, you know, the thing that I observed was huge inconsistency in the synchronous part of distance learning that was happening. My kid's school actually did a very good job. Within three days, they were up and running. And once again, it wasn't as good as being in the classroom together, but they got, I would say, 80% there, 90% there.

• 6:18Nilay Patel?

  Were they just on video conference? Like, give me a specific example of what they did well.

• 6:21Speaker 02

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

• 7:06Speaker 02

  It's, it's much harder and it takes a lot more sophistication than, you know, just going through the same lectures, uh, year after year. And so that's always been the core principles of the school. And, you know, there's other principles, everyone a student, everyone a teacher, learning should not be bound by time or space. You know, we have a couple of kids at the school who are like Olympic level athletes. And if they have to go practice skiing in Tahoe, they should be able to keep learning. And so the school already had a lot of those muscles that as soon as distance learning happened, they just kept doing what they, what they were doing. It's just people weren't able to come physically to the, the, the school as, as much. And what I was really impressed is especially for my older kids, my 11 year old and nine year old. Because the school had been investing so much in student autonomy and students being accountable and setting their own goals and reviewing their goals with their advisor.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  My 11 and nine year old really didn't miss a beat. I mean, my 11 year old is, you know, on the other side of the house right now, cranking through his goals better than, better than I do. Uh, my, you know, my five slash six year old was a little difficult at first, but he, he actually eventually got it as well.

• 8:05Nilay Patel?

  You know, one thing I've been thinking about a lot is we've written stories about this at The Verge, where you just see an entire generation of kids grow up. They've already got sort of like corporate management muscles. We just ran a story about a TikTok creator who makes all the most viral beats on TikTok. And he literally talked about getting views as a KPI. And when I was a 22 year old kid making music, they weren't like KPIs are not part of it. Do you worry that kids who sort of, you know, you're saying cranking through goals? Like, that's a very management approach to learning, right? You're going to set some goals, you're going to hit them, you're going to move on to the next set of goals. Do you worry that kind of these software tools end up teaching kids to be, to think in that more rigorous corporate way? Or is that actually a good thing?

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's, there are certain aspects of, of corporate thinking that, yeah, definitely wouldn't want to kind of, you know, imprint on everyone in the world, but there's some things that I think are reasonably good. Which is, you know, if you think about the alternative, the alternative, when you and I were in school, it was kind of like, teacher, what do I do next? All right, now what do I do? Is that going to be on the test? You know, we all remember some kids would raise their hand, is that going to be on the test? Which is a very passive mentality. You're really not taking ownership, you're letting stuff happen to you, you're kind of doing what you need to do. You're not really very driven yourself. But I think what you're seeing, that student that you're talking about, what I'm seeing in, you know, kids at Khan Lab School, is they're saying, okay, I want to learn something, or I want to be something by a certain date.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  I think that goal setting muscle is a very healthy thing. They're able to, if they're a little bit younger, with the help of peers or with the help of an adult, break those bigger goals down into smaller goals that are more attainable and, you know, a month, a week, or even a day. That, I think, is a universally very helpful capability. And then they learn to organize around it, which I think is very helpful. I mean, it sounds maybe corporate, but my kids are better, like, they, they have Google calendars with their friends and they schedule calls and, but it's all like, it's, it's actually in a very healthy way because they're also doing it like, we're going to play a role playing game together. And this is how we're going to organize. And you could imagine it's even been more important during COVID when, you know, they're not able to just like go to each other's houses in the same way.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  So I think all of those muscles, if anything, not only are they not negative, but I actually think those are the muscles more kids need. Because you have this, I don't want to, you know, impedance mismatch or some type of dissonance that kids get, usually when they go from high school to college. Or from college to the workplace where this like, hey, tell me what to do next model goes to like, no, you figure out what you need to do next. And if you're not good at it, in the workplace. And these kids are able to develop it early on, but they're able to develop it with support of adults. And they're also, and this is something that adults don't have, they're able to develop in the support of teachers and parents that also know what healthy looks like. So if I see my 11 year old, and I have seen my 11 year old get too caught up with his goals and like too stressed

• 11:03Speaker 02

  out about like not hitting all of his, he doesn't use the word KPIs, but essentially his KPIs that that like, I'm like, no, look, this isn't a big deal, Imran. Like you, you can, we talk, you know, the teacher talks to him, it's like, no, no, you got to make sure you do this. And he's being reflective about it. But you know, the reality, you know, we know people in their twenties, thirties and forties who don't know how they, they don't have someone else coaching them like, hey, you got to live your life. You're getting unbalanced. Your, your, your marriage is going to get destroyed. If you, if you, if you don't put some KPIs there as well. So, so yeah, I think it's a healthy thing, but like everything, it has to be in moderation and put in context.

• 11:35Nilay Patel?

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

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  all of their resources and some kids don't even have a Chromebook and a broadband connection.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, similar to, you know, the last three sub-questions were yes, yes, and yes. It is a delimeter. It's always been a delimeter, the digital divide. You know, I'd say over the last 10 years, the US at least has done a good job of closing the digital divide in schools. It's still not completely closed, but the whole E-Rate program got a lot of devices and internet access into classrooms. But COVID has put a big spotlight on the digital divide at home, which is dramatic. And obviously, if you don't, you know, it's not just accessing Khan Academy. You're not going to be able to access your classrooms, Zoom calls, you're not going to be able to connect with family members. Your parents aren't going to be able to do remote work or even look for a job unless they have reasonable internet access at home. We've seen heroic efforts on the part of school districts. New York City distributed 300,000 laptops and got the local telecom carriers to give free internet.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  LA did 200,000. Miami did on the same order of magnitude. So that's great, and we are doing whatever we can to facilitate that, advocate for that. We're part of this Connect All Students campaign from Common Sense Media. I've been telling everyone who would listen, like, you know, every, we're doing a trillion here, a trillion there in these stimulus rounds. And I'm guessing we're probably going to have a few more trillions of stimulus put into the economy. To close the digital divide, my back of the envelope at home, you know, really make internet connection and devices like clean drinking water or heating or electricity, it's going to cost about $10 or $20 billion. So it's like 1% of one round of stimulus. And, you know, you think about all of the things where the government's trying to figure out, how do we empower people? How do we build infrastructure? How do we build human capital?

• 13:54Speaker 02

  This seems like the no-brainer because once you have that, then things like Khan Academy and, you know, can kick in.

• 14:01Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that the government has to play a significant role there? And I ask you specifically because you started a school, right, to try new ways of learning. And when I say the government should play a significant role in building this infrastructure, I'm often told by telecom companies or lobbyists that let the free market do it, right? But it sounds like you think the government should have a pretty significant, direct role in building that infrastructure.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I have a view on, it's funny, when I was in business school, I took a course in the first year on social entrepreneurship. And it was the only course that I effectively, you know, the business school I went to, they didn't really fail people, but they would have failed me if they.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  They give a one, two, or three, and I got a three, which means you got the lowest, you know, you were like the lowest eight in a class of eighty, you know, on that. And that's because when I took that course, I remember the final exam, I was very skeptical of not even just government, but I was very skeptical at the time of even the not-for-profit sector ironically. I said, you know, this just feels good, but is, you know, is that really going to cure AIDS by raising some money and getting people to go on a hike or bike? You know, I was very skeptical. I was very cynical about it. But then when Khan Academy started and, you know, my day job, I was an analyst at hedge fund, I was doing nothing but talking to CEOs, CFOs of publicly traded companies. And I saw, you know, how incentives were driven frankly by folks like myself, public equity investors

• 15:23Speaker 02

  who are trying to, you know, hold, hold management accountable to next, next quarter's earnings or next year's earnings. And I also, you know, simultaneously, I was doing this thing for my cousins. And, and I did appreciate that, look, there are certain parts of society, like I, I am a capitalist at heart. I believe the free market innovates, it allocates resources effectively as long as, you know, there aren't distortions in it. But there's, there's at least two clear places where markets in our society don't work well, or when, even when they do work, they don't lead to outcomes that are consistent with our values. And I would argue that probably healthcare and education. And it's not that every healthcare, every education company has to be a not-for-profit or has to be in the government. There's a

• 16:05Speaker 02

  lot that you could do that can still be for profit. But when you think about the fundamental task of making sure that everyone has access to education, which I think is consistent with our values, you know, a, a system where the payer, the decision maker, and the beneficiary are all three different parties, which is the case in, actually in both education and in healthcare, you're not, the markets aren't going to naturally lead to efficient outcomes, and they might not be consistent with your values. Now, you could argue, maybe that's the area for government to kind of step in, and that arguably, you know, a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere is arguably the mission statement of the public education system. But we know that government can sometimes be a little bit slower. It's got a lot of resources, but, you know, once it starts moving in a direction, it's very hard for it to change that direction. And that's

• 16:49Speaker 02

  I think the not-for-profit sector is really powerful. The not-for-profit sector is where you can go in there and address places where markets alone won't lead to outcomes we'd want, where philanthropy can fuel it. You can show that things can scale, that they can, that can, that have high impact. And then in some cases, you can prototype things for government. So, you know, Khan Academy itself, we're the budget of a large high school. We're about $60 million a year, but we reach over 100 million kids a year. I would like to think that, you know, I'm, I'm hoping that government looks at like that eventually. We're primarily philanthropically funded and says, yeah, that's a good idea. And, and, you know, those folks are good at doing it better than we would. Let, let's, let's make sure that that can actually scale in an unfettered way. And similar things with the digital divide.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  You know, I don't think the government has to get in the business of making devices or, or being the person you call if your internet goes down. But I think they definitely could be the person that could, or the entity that, that puts resources or the incentives in place so that these things get closed. I mean, you're seeing it with the pandemic, right? As soon as COVID hit, they said, all right, there's a bunch of people who are trying to come up with vaccines, but as soon as you get through phase three trials, you then have to go through the, you have to start manufacturing and distributing. We don't have the luxury of waiting, so we're just going to look at the top three or four candidate vaccines. And as soon as they go through phase two, we're going to say, we'll buy them. And if they don't pass phase three, we'll just throw it away. But if they pass phase three, we just save three months or four months of manufacturing time. That's what government can do with its size.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  And I think they could do something very similar with the digital divide.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  It's interesting. You said you'd prototype for the government. That's obviously one, potentially every school that's in countries. I don't know if you think of them as customers, but customers for a Khan Academy. Right now, though, you're primarily philanthropically funded. Tell me how that works. Do you, most CEOs I know, they spend 60% of their time on the road raising money or talking about deals. You are in front of the camera a lot. You still make a lot of the videos. How do you manage that time? And how much time do you spend actually fundraising and, and doing that work of a not-for-profit? Which is, from what I understand, more significant at not-for-profits than even at, at publicly traded or for-profit companies.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's a constant tension. I would say on one level, I mean, given the examples you just talked to, I think I've been fortunate from the get go in that Khan Academy's, you know, if I was running some type of a not-for-profit that was like delivering mosquito nets in Africa, the benefit is, you know, random people in the US wouldn't know about the benefit unless I'm like in front of them, like showing them and giving them the numbers. But inherently in Khan Academy's model, people experience it. I mean, everyone who's donated Khan Academy, usually they or their children were the first beneficiary. And it clicks in their head, wait, this was really useful for my middle-class child? Wow, this could be useful for every child on the planet. Wow. Let me, let me give some money to this. And it is true. I mean, even some of

• 19:40Speaker 02

  our very biggest donors, you know, the Gates Foundation is a supporter, Google's a supporter, and I don't want to make it sound like we're flush with cash because we aren't. I'm, you know, anyone listening, please donate to Khan Academy. There's a lot that we want to do that we can't because of lack of resources. But, you know, the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates was using it with his son, and he told the foundation about it. Several Google execs were using it with their children. And then they told Google.org, hey, maybe we should partner with these guys. It seems pretty cool. So I think that's been one advantage we've had, and just the scalability of it. I think people grok that like this, okay, wow, this budget of large high school, but you could, you can, you can scale to one day billions of folks. But in terms of my day,

• 20:20Speaker 02

  I spend, or my time, I spend about, I would call it a third, a third, a third. I spend about a third of my time doing what I would say is still individual contributor creative work. That's me making videos for the most part. Sometimes it's me like brainstorming whatever strategy or something, or starting new ventures, like, like this tutoring thing. A third of my time, I would say is kind of classical management stuff. But I have a really, you know, we have a president and CEO who's very capable and, you know, she has a very strong team. So that gives me a lot of leverage, but I still am about a third of my time in that. And about a third of my time, I would just frame as external. So we're in that third right now, where, you know, I'll talk to press, I'll, you know, but I'm also talking to potential philanthropists.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's a constant tension of, you know, how much to put into one of those, those three buckets. But the third, third, third feels about right.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  How do you manage the context switch from each one? I personally find it very difficult to go from individual contributor to management and back in the space of a single day. Is that something that you think about managing as well? Or do you just, is it literally two hours, two hours, two hours?

• 21:27Speaker 02

  It, it's hard. You're absolutely right. But to your point, like you definitely can't, you know, you can't have a third, a third, a third, but if it was like every half an hour at switching, there's no way you're going to be able to do that. My ideal days, the ones I'm, I'm pretty creative and productive is roughly from like eight in the morning till about 11:00 in the morning. I have like a good three hour block of creative time. I can be usually pretty productive there. Then I kind of get into management type stuff or, or a mixture, you know, between the management and the external stuff, that is easy to context switch. So you can almost view it as like a third or half your day gets to be reasonably creative or at least you're in control of your time. And then another two thirds to half of your day, you know, the calendar is in control

• 22:09Speaker 02

  of your time where you're, you know, you're speaking to folks or you're either internal folks or external folks. And it works for me. I mean, I have been thinking about trying to carve out like a Friday that's like a pure creative Friday, you know, at least once every other week or something like that, I think would be pretty cool. So I'm, I'm working on it. It's this constant optimization I'm trying to do. I mean, I'm always tweaking, does that have to be an hour meeting? Maybe it can be 30 minutes, maybe it can be 15 minutes. I'm constantly trying to push the envelope.

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  I think particularly now is the executives I talk to are all more public. They all have Twitter personas or Instagram profile. Like that balance is really shifting how everybody runs their business. Everyone seems to be much more keenly aware of it. But if you ever figure it out, please let me know, because I certainly have not. You said you spent a lot of time in that creative process. Take me into that. How do you decide, okay, this is the next thing Khan Academy is going to do. This is the next subject area we're going to cover. This is how we're going to do it? Or is there a body of experts that you talk to? Just walk me through the sort of creative process of making new stuff for Khan Academy.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  In the early days, it was me, you know, just getting letters from people asking for stuff, me introspecting. I used to have a stack of textbooks and I'd look at the standards like, "Yeah, we kind of haven't done that yet. Let me do that." But over the last five or six years, we do have a team now, both internal and external experts that are, you know, they like literally this couple of hours ago, I got an email from the project manager saying, "All right, Sal, this is, this is your cue. This is, this is what you need to work on for videos." And, you know, there was like three chem videos. One is a new video that I hadn't covered yet on distillation. So I did one on distillation. And then there were two videos that they thought needed redoing because, you know, modern chemistry standards are now using different

• 23:56Speaker 02

  terminology than I used back when I recorded the first version in 2011. So I get that. I'm making some stats videos on, you know, geometric random variables. So they, they, they queue up what they want, like the standards, and then maybe they might queue up a worked example if it is a worked example video. And then for me, it's really like, you know, for some of this stuff, I have to spend a little bit of time re-immersing myself in the topic. Usually I'll just watch all the videos that I had made in the past. "Okay, yeah, yeah, I get it. Okay, I'm ready to do it." And then, you know, depending on the video, it, it, there might be a little bit of research that I do. There might be a little bit of looking for, you know, Creative Commons or public domain graphics. But I, I, one thing I have learned is over preparation can be a bad thing. One, it wastes time when you're quote, "over preparing." And then when you

• 24:41Speaker 02

  get into it, you almost over complicate it because you want to throw out all the stuff that you prepared on altogether. And so when I, when I feel like I'm like somewhat uncomfortable, I, I just press record and I go. And, you know, anyone who's watched a Khan Academy video, you can tell that's me talking and thinking in real time. I'm not, I'm not reading a script. I mean, I talk the way I talk right now, which is, I think is part of the appeal. People know, okay, this isn't some like paid voice actor to read a script. This is a guy who's thinking it through with me and being very transparent of his thoughts. And, you know, I usually find that when I do that, when I, it, it, it comes out quite good, that I'm, I'm more prepared than I think. That, and your brain is really good at filling in the gaps. You don't have to script every word.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I'll ask Sal about some of the criticisms of Khan Academy, specifically the problems that arise when teaching qualitative subjects like history and social studies versus quantitative subjects like math and science.

• 25:39Speaker 03

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• 26:40Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. So one criticism of Khan Academy is it's very strong for quantitative subjects, stats, chemistry, basic mathematics. And then as you go into other qualitative subjects, history, social sciences, English, there are just necessarily landmines there that many teachers approach in many different ways and many school districts themselves have heavily politicized in many different ways. So the one that comes to mind for me, policymakers like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas have railed against the teaching of the New York Times 1619 Project in schools.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  Senator Cotton wants to defund the 1619 Project curriculum, a New York Times program with the goal of reexamining the legacy of slavery in our country. He says the curriculum is racially divisive.

• 27:25Nilay Patel?

  How do you approach a problem like that? Is Khan Academy going to have a 1619 Project course? Is the New York Times talk to you? Are you worried that all of Texas will just like ban you from their ISPs? Those are like loaded issues in a way that changing the terms of a chemistry problem set maybe aren't.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's a real thing. And you know, Khan Academy does have humanity. It has it has American history content. It has world history content on it today. Most of our resources have been on the STEM side to date, but we've we've already taken, you know, you can you can go learn American history right now on Khan Academy. And I think there's two things. I mean, actually, even as much as it sounds like America is super polarized, America is actually easier. I mean, if you start going into Turkey and the Armenian genocide, or, you know, other countries are actually much harder. You know, they're like absolute denial of some things that have happened. While in the US, it is much more of like a matter of emphasis. You know, the 1619 project, I think if you, you know, I interviewed the lady who wrote that first article with the New York

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Times on our live stream. And I think if you go to the Khan Academy's content, you know, we we had a Jeffrey Rosen, who's the head of the National Constitution Center, we've done some stuff with him. And, you know, we've had both conservatives and liberals be suspicious of us when they found out that we were doing content on American history. And then, you know, we said, take a look at it. And then they come back to us like, yeah, that was pretty good. That was and you know, I think there is a way, I mean, just on this one issue of the 1619 project versus more of a like, you know, let's be proud of our history type of narrative, which was kind of the one that most of us grew up with. I think there's a way to do both. Where there were horrors of slavery, and it's well documented. And if those horrors are age appropriate, like not going

• 29:07Speaker 02

  to cause trauma for kids, the kids should know about it. With that said, there is a lot that is very positive and powerful about this country, however imperfect it was, and it started. No country was has ever been perfect. And so I think there's there's there's ways to do to ways to do both. That's not to say that I'm sure we're going to face some hard things over time as we go deeper into the histories, or I would say it gets even tougher once you get more formally adopted in a school system than, you know, kind of the things get more tense. But maybe I, you know, I run optimistic. I think there's ways to do this reasonably well. You know, we've been writing our content principles. What we've said is we will always, we want to cover the standards, whatever the standards are, but we're but truth is always what we're in service to. So if we feel

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Like the way that the standard is is missing the truth. We will put, you know, we will go to what the truth is, but we we hold a very high academic standard for what truth is. It isn't just like we're feeling there's a movement and we've got to really push this or create an impression. It's we really, we, you know, we want to go to scholars, say, okay, give us, you know, in some cases, it might not even be our own voice. We'll interview people and say, well, you know, we're hearing both sides. Like, what, what, what, what do you think is is the the right narrative here?

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  I ask this question because it is loaded across so many different fields of what I think of as a core education. Right. When you say both sides, to me, as a journalist, that like it triggers a bunch of media criticism in me. That maybe is misplaced when it comes to, to, you know, middle and high school education. But there sometimes aren't both sides, right? And as you get more and more enmeshed into school districts that are becoming more and more political. How do you balance what you want Khan Academy to be with what the school districts might want? With what you you personally or what your organization might think of as the the truth?

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll give an example and, you know, humanities isn't something we're doing deep dive yet, but it'll come up. So we think a lot about this, you know, and I agree with you saying about both sides. Like if one side is saying the truth, you don't have to get both sides. A hundred percent agree with that.

• 31:09Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I encourage you not to fall into the rabbit hole of like media people criticizing themselves. Like it's very different, but it is to me a very, it's a loaded term right now because of how we perceive the media.

• 31:20Speaker 02

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

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Or that, you know, Thomas Jefferson, you know, while he was writing the Declaration of Independence, he was literally being waited on by one of his slaves, right? Like, there's, there's, there's deep irony there. And I think these stories are really powerful stories for kids to learn. At the same time, it isn't to say that, you know, we, we, we, our, our country is somehow this fundamentally, you know, that we've been told lies our whole life. Like, there were, there, there are very powerful things in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. There are aspects of Thomas Jefferson and, and many aspects of Abraham Lincoln that are very aspirational, especially for the time and context in which they lived in. And so I don't, you know, that's when I feel that there's kind of a nuance there that some of our current debate sometimes loses.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  That you can, you can serve the truth, but that doesn't mean that you have to not still take pride in, in your countries, in aspects of your country's history. There should be shame and some, and guilt in some aspects, but there should be pride in others.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  Do you think the, the online learning model has made this conversation more difficult for students, for educators? This is one where I think that sort of soft experience of being in the classroom. And maybe I'm thinking more from the college perspective, where what I experienced in college was a lot of just overt challenge from my, my classmates and my, my teachers. But even in, in sort of the middle and high school and the humanities zone, right? This is where a lot of that soft conversation, that disagreement, it's much harder to do over Zoom or over asynchronous videos. It's just, it seems much more difficult and much more uncomfortable. Is that something you're, you're trying to solve?

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you know, I, I wouldn't claim that with, you know, Khan Academy's current modalities, we could do all of, you know, of complete, you know, liberal education or humanities education or something like that. What I think we can do, you know, I think in math, even in math, we don't even, we, we say, look, math, you can get practice, you can get feedback, you can understand what you've mastered. And then ideally, when you come into the classroom, you're able to have more peer-to-peer interaction. Either, you know, your friends can help you, you can have discussions about things. Or if everyone's mastered a concept, the teacher can then do a simulation or a game that helps you really understand it. It's really the same idea if you think about the humanities. There's some things, there's some, there's a fact base, there's a causality base that it's good to have. And I think you can do that through asynchronous or digital means. I mean, it's what textbooks do.

• 34:24Speaker 02

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

• 34:55Nilay Patel?

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

• 35:28Speaker 02

  It, it might, and you're probably right, but you know, there are aspects of it. And once again, I don't want to be like the person who, you know, the techno optimist, whatever, utopian person. Because I, I actually, you know, people who know me in my daily life, like I'm, I'm just like not on the phone. I'm hard to reach. I'm very, I'm usually like wandering through the woods. Like that's me. But, but there are interesting things about these modalities, especially these video conferencing modalities where, you know, if you, if you're in a large freshman class in college, there's a hundred, 200, 300 kids in the classroom. Very dehumanizing experience. If you're in a large Zoom, that's also dehumanizing to your point. But the professor with a click of a button, one can poll everyone. And then based on your poll results, put you into breakouts of groups of five or six kids, literally with the snap of a finger or, you know, a click of a button.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  And that type of interaction is actually very, very, very powerful. And you can in theory do that in person as well, but the logistics of it, like you're going to spend 10, 15 It's just putting people, sorting people into into different groups and things like that. And so, you know, I've seen that done. I've seen that even in our own internal meetings. Where if we had a larger meeting of 20, but we said, here are the four questions. We're going to randomly put you into breakouts. That group of four, five, much more productive, much easier to talk, much easier to participate. So, and I think we're just learning, like everyone's still getting their sea legs around this. So there's going to be some interesting. I mean, who knows, there might be a world where, you know, classrooms of the future, you're there in person. But then, you know, you, you, you, you're actually hybrid while you're there in person. Because it might even too much time to walk across the other side of the lecture hall.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  You go onto your laptop and you, you, you start talking, but then, but then you get the benefit when you leave the. You met each other. And then when you leave the lecture hall, you're like, hey, that was a really cool point. You want to go grab lunch, stuff like that.

• 37:07Nilay Patel?

  I can't decide if that is an optimistic or pessimistic vision of the future.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  I don't know either.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot of kids with AirPods talking to themselves in lecture halls.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Well, I'll make the optimistic argument, although I'm not 100% sure. Is think about how many times you sat, you know, when you were in college and you were in these large classes, 100, even 50 people, but 100, 200 people. How many people in that classroom did you really know? And, you know, I would argue in, in college, you know, my college had a class of about 1,000 kids. There was about 10 close friends. And then I had a probably orbit of about like 20 or the 30 kids that we, we kind of knew reasonably well in my class. The other like 900 something, I knew their faces. I knew I took, you know, freshmen, whatever with them. But I really didn't know them. But if there was like these kind of breakouts that I was able to have regularly in all my classes. I would have had an interaction with almost every one of my classmates by the end of freshman year.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  And I would have been more likely, I think, to sit down next to them at lunch or say, hey, what are you doing tonight? Let we can go, you know, there's a concert or whatever. I think it would have been, it would have been positive for the human interaction.

• 38:08Nilay Patel?

  So we've been talking about college. Is that a place you're thinking about expanding into? I mean, it seems like the. The core platform is there, the technology is there, the sort of curriculum building skills are there for the organization. Do you think about expanding into collegiate subjects into? I mean, do you ever think like, we could just run MasterClass out of town and just do cooking videos? Like, is that, how do you think about expansion? Or is that not something that's on your mind?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, no, well, first of all, MasterClass, I know the founder quite well, and I think what they're doing is great, and they do what they do excellent, and I think we'll do, we're not gonna, we're not gonna do the, you know, how to train like Steph Curry type of thing, which is quite cool. You know, we already go into the, I would say, the college general ed courses, your first two years of, you know, we already have most of frankly, the math and science courses, and probably we'll have a lot of the humanities courses over the next couple of years as well. What I would love to do, I mean, that's the kind of that third pillar of Khan Academy's vision of like, can we connect what you've learned to opportunities? And I've always thought that this whole notion of, you know, these bundled diplomas, they don't need to be the only path. In fact, already with COVID, you're kind of seeing an unbundling of these things. You know, these diplomas are, they're

• 39:16Speaker 02

  credential, they're inexperienced, there's some socialization in there. Clearly, the people who run universities, or the original architects of universities said, regardless of whether you need to become a computer scientist or an art history major, we're just gonna keep you here for four years and fill it up, because everyone's got four years of work to do. So clearly, you don't actually need four years to, and you know, we also know people sometimes spend the four years, or oftentimes spend the four years, and they still don't have quite the skills they need to actually do what they want to do. So I see parallel tracks forming, and they don't have to be mutually exclusive, where if students are able to show competency in some core things, that they're gonna get opportunities, whether or not they're at college. You know, and even things like a biology major, if

• 39:58Speaker 02

  you really know your first year, or even your first two years of college-level chemistry and biology really well, like you've really mastered it, you're kind of unstoppable. I can't tell you how many people with even master's degrees, you know, if I were to show them the Krebs cycle, or, you know, they're blown away that I still know, like, you know, photosynthesis, the steps of photosynthesis, because I teach it. But that's really a first-year college biology concept. But you know, we know the the university system, people don't retain most of this stuff. And so I think there's ways that if you could show someone really has mastered this, maybe even that they tutor it on something like schoolhouse.world. That, yeah, you'd give them a biotech job, or you'll put them into your corporate training program, or they're ready for grad school. I think is the type of thing I want to experiment with in the in the coming years.

• 40:43Nilay Patel?

  That's straight credentialing, right? That's you take a test. Khan Academy gives you a certificate that says you know this material, you're ready for X career. Is that's really what you're using with straight offering credentials like that?

• 40:57Speaker 02

  It could be exactly what you just described. It could be some type of performance task where you film yourself and then a peer community validates that, yeah, you did what you you know, you ran that lab or you wrote that piece of code the way you said you would, and you would be able to explain it. And it's peer reviewed. And then the ultimate performance task is can you teach it? That's why that's schoolhouse.world program of like peer to peer tutoring. You know, if if you are a tutor of calculus, you know, your calculus, if you're well regarded, if you're a highly rated tutor of calculus, you know, your calculus more than any test score can ever prove. And not only do you know that, but you can communicate, you have empathy. That's the kid I want to hire. That's the kid I want to bring to my campus, or that's the kid I want to, you know, bring to my organization. So, yeah, I mean, I it is certification credentialing, whatever you want to call it.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  But I want to, you know, we need to think about it in a first principles way, instead of just trying to map the physical versions of these things to the digital world.

• 41:47Nilay Patel?

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

• 42:30Nilay Patel?

  more credential based approach or more skill based approach takes you away from that? Or is that in service to it?

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Well, you know, every college will say exactly what you just said. Oh, college is much more than just, you know, the skills to get a job. There's, you know, we're teaching you how to think. We're teaching you how to learn. You're going to build friendship, like all this. And I actually buy all of those. Like, I agree with those statements. Like, you know, I think about my own college. Yeah, that's right. I had great friendships. I really grew as a human being. I was able to. But the, the issue here is, I mean, it's ironic that it comes from universities that are literally researching everything and they're trying to rigorously put a framework around everything, except their own efficacy, except their own ability. You know, like if you're Harvard and you really think you're that much better than Foothill Community College, or, or nothing, you know, find groups

• 43:20Speaker 02

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

• 44:02Speaker 02

  But I don't think our, you know, the colleges have done, really thought about where we're putting our resources and, and how much value are they, are they really creating? You know, a fun thought experiment, if you were to go to Harvard's graduation and you go up to a random family, a random kid, holding a diploma, very excited, and you just said, all right, we will pay you $200,000, whatever it costs you to go to Harvard. We'll, we'll write you that check right now, but you are not allowed to tell anyone that you ever went to Harvard. How many people will take you up on that? I suspect like no one. And then I think if you went to other folks and if you said, you could pay $200,000, you don't get to Harvard, but the world will think you went to Harvard. Like you'll never, probably a lot of people. So, so the credential is clearly what a lot of the value that probably a lot of the

• 44:46Speaker 02

  families are putting. And I, I, look, I, that's a very mercenary. I think it's important to note right now that you have a degree from Harvard. Yeah, so I pick on them. I'm, I'm picking on them. I'm picking on them. I just, I think the audience should be aware that it's MIT and Harvard, right? My undergraduates at MIT have more. You got a lot of Boston area sort of animosity. I have a lot of Boston, so, but I, I, I reserve the right to pick on them a little bit. Cause first of all, I think those are probably two of the, tho- those schools are gonna do just fine. There's always gonna be a ton of, like, everything we've talked about, about being able to go to a community, having really amazing peers and facilities and nice, you know, dorms, like, those two, there's many schools, but the ones I experienced, they're great at that. They're about as good as it gets at, at that aspect. But they're still

• 45:27Speaker 02

  very expensive and, you know, I could imagine other pathways that are just as interesting. I mean, imagine getting together, and, you know, there are programs that already kind of do this, but like, you get together with a hundred peers and you travel the world together, you know, every six months you're in a different place, and you're able to do your core academics, you know, learn how to factor a polynomial, whatever, you take a derivative of a function. You do that through some form of distance learning and in-person study groups, but you're also working in different countries and experiencing it. That's also an amazing experience. And it might actually be cheaper, what I just described. You know, there's schools like Waterloo in Canada where the kids spend about two-thirds of their time in internships, but they, they do them together oftentimes.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  So those kids get hands-on learning and those kids actually end up saving money and actually end up being more employable when they get out. So I'm not saying that one of these is better than the others, but I'm saying is, there should be multiple pathways. There could be pathways for a lot of kids, and, and this is the other thing, you know, those of us who have been fortunate to go to a school that has a quad and people are throwing frisbees, that's not the norm for most kids. Most kids are going to commuter college, they ideally would be able to support their families in some way, shape or form. They're not having this kind of high-minded debates about philosophy and Ivy color, covered, you know, dorm rooms type of thing. They're just trying to get through their college algebra so they can get their associate's degree and hopefully, you know, get a job. And I,

• 46:52Speaker 02

  so I think there needs to be new pathways. Once again, you could do both, either or, that, that matter. And we also know there's a lot of Harvard and Stanford grads that come out and still feel underemployed. And if they could have some way to prove what they know, so that they can get not underemployed, that would be good for them as well.

• 47:09Nilay Patel?

  I went to the UFC, so I also pick on Harvard all the time, but I'll

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's fair game.

• 47:14Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna take one more break, but when we come back, I'll ask Sal about his experience as the leader of an organization during the pandemic and the problems that come with it.

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• 48:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back with Decoder. I wanted to spend the rest of my conversation with Sal talking about the future of running Khan Academy and his role as a leader. Something I find really hard to do during the pandemic as the editor in chief of The Verge is keeping everyone focused on our mission. The amount of distraction in the world and in our personal lives is higher than ever. And we have to go and attract and retain talent during this time as well. So I asked Sal about how he manages those problems while running a nonprofit with a mission as big as Khan Academy's in a market where he's competing for talent with Google and Facebook.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, this has always been a central question, one of the central questions of Khan Academy, which is, you know, we're based in Silicon Valley. No one owns Khan Academy. It's there's no ownership. I don't own Khan Academy. It's a not-for-profit, so we can't give people stock. But we have found that, you know, we pay better than most nonprofits. We try to be market, you know, actually even a little bit above market salary for Silicon Valley, for tech workers, when it's tech workers, or whatever the function folks have. But we don't give stock. So, you know, in theory, people could still go like literally a couple of miles down the road and work for Google and get at least that much cash comp. And then they could get, you know, at least that much again in stock compensation and go work at Facebook or Apple. But what I've found pretty consistently, as long as you pay people

• 50:02Speaker 02

  enough that they can, you know, live reasonably well, eventually buy a house, go on vacation, send their kids to college, et cetera, et cetera. If you give them intellectually challenging work, an important mission to work on, and good people to work with that are invested in each other, you get the best people on the planet. You know, some of the, many of the people we get at Khan, everyone we get at Khan Academy, I think, could work at any of the top places in the world. In fact, almost all of them have had offers or came from places like that. And some of, some of the folks we have on the team are actually like, you know, world renowned in what they do. And, you know, Google or Facebook or Apple would kill to have them. But these people have just like transcended caring about that. They just want to do, they have like off-the-charts talents and they want

• 50:47Speaker 02

  to do it for, for the good of the world.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  Is that something you have to say out loud over and over again? Is that something you had to say out loud more at the beginning? Or is it something that is now just assumed as part of your pitch?

• 50:56Speaker 02

  It's assumed. I mean, what's interesting is, I think when people even just, you know, see a job posting, they submit a resume to Khan Academy, there's already been a bit that's flipped in their head where they're like, you know what, I'm on this planet for a finite number of years. Like, what am I going to do with that? And really, do I need to get like a second Tesla? And, you know, really, do I need to get? And, and I think as soon as that bit flips, and once again, it doesn't have to flip for like, we're not hiring tens of thousands of people. We're hiring like in a given year, like 10 people. It just has to flip for like, you know, a reasonable number of people. And once it flips, when they, you know, they go through our interview process and then they get the job. Offer, they're actually usually pleased with how much we're paying them because they they had somehow thought it was going to be way less. But I was like, no, we're still going to pay you what you're like

• 51:38Speaker 02

  a good salary. So yeah, we haven't felt like we've had to like really, you know, the most important thing we can do is just keep reminding folks of the mission because obviously, and our ability to execute it, this isn't utopian. Like, we can literally reach billions of folks after keep repeating that for philanthropists, that hopefully gets them realizing, yeah, wow, the social return on investments off the charts. And I would say that the people who work at Khan Academy, that you could view them as philanthropists of sorts, because they are not, you know, philanthropy just means a lover of man, of your fellow human being, because they're not optimizing for money anymore. You know, if, you know, they could maybe go work across the street and may get total compensation twice as much and donate half of it. That's one method of philanthropy.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Or they could just come straight to Khan Academy and leverage their skills to do real good for the world, but not taking a vow of poverty. You know, making enough money to do to do just fine.

• 52:29Nilay Patel?

  Do you let the entire organization into the actual content? So we spent a lot of time talking about 1619 project, but just in general, right? Every company that makes or distributes content on the internet has had or has had to consider a content moderation dilemma, right? What are we making? What are we distributing? Who gets to control it? Who gets to edit it? Is that something that's wide open? Do you have a wall between engineering and teaching? How does that work?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you could imagine, especially in the last few months, it's been a deep conversation in our organization of how we handle these things. And so, you know, we definitely want every member of the organization to have a voice and to be able to hear and not, you know, not just internal stakeholders, external stakeholders too. Obviously, we have funders, we have volunteers, we have, you know, 46 translation projects around the world. But, you know, we do have a core content team and they're actually in the process of re-refining their content principles. And then we try to lean on those principles with a relatively small team to, you know, make the best content that we can and to focus it on what we think is the highest yield.

• 53:34Nilay Patel?

  Does that, are their decisions final?

• 53:36Speaker 02

  You know, I, I act as a kind of the, any, any group, any organization that's developing some form of content needs kind of an editor in chief at the end of the day. Someone's got to make the call and I play that role. You know, and I'm, I'm a little bit unique as a CEO or executive director of a, of a, of an organization is that not only do I kind of operate at the, the, I guess, the high level of like, what's our big strategy? But I'm also a deep member of the content creator. I still produce the majority of our videos directly and, and you know, and I'm, I weigh in on things like our exercises and stuff like that. So yeah, I, I play, you know, we try, it shouldn't be principals during it. It can't just be Sal issuing edicts based on what he had for lunch. But yeah, I, I work deeply with the team on principles. And when there's edge cases, you know, I, at the end of the day, it's going to be me.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  But I, I definitely don't want it to be just like willy nilly. It's got to be, you know, the team has got to feel bought in and that they understand where these, these decisions are come from. And that they're, they're, they're decisions that they can believe in and stand behind.

• 54:32Nilay Patel?

  I'm trying to think of another edge case. We don't have a few minutes, but let me give you one. Um, off the top of my head, you decide to do a history of trust busting in America, which was basically, we're going to do American history. We're going to talk about Teddy Roosevelt and, you know, breaking up Standard Oil. And Google says, hey, calm down. We're a big funder of yours. Calm down on the antitrust stuff. Is that a note that you would take?

• 54:55Speaker 02

  The only thing we would, I would say is if you have evidence that what we're saying is inaccurate, we always want to hear it and we don't care who you are. If you could be some 13 year old who's dug up some contrary evidence, then we would hear it for sure. But if what we're saying is fundamentally accurate, uh, no, we wouldn't, we wouldn't take it down. If someone's making a, a solid academic argument that maybe, you know, our tone is skewed one way or the other. And that we, we like, there's actually good evidence that you could view, you know, that, that there's a counter, counter facts there, then we would probably say, okay, yeah, you're right. Those are important counterfactuals. Let's put those in as well. But once again, it's all in service of, are we teaching this well? I will say to, you know, corporate America's credit, before Khan Academy, I would have thought that there would have been

• 55:40Speaker 02

  a lot of those pressures. We haven't seen it from corporate America. We do have corporate funding. Corporate sponsors and sometimes we've gone into kind of, you know, we have, we've had a longstanding partnership with Bank of America around financial literacy. And, you know, I had content, I still have it up there around explaining the financial crisis and I'm very open filter about all the parties, what they could have done better. Never has Bank of America or anyone said, hey, Sal, you know, that makes us look a little bit this or that way in 2008. No, they, if it's correct content, they've been, in fact, that's why they wanted to partner with us because they said, look, if we try to do financial literacy content, people are going to think it's just Bank of America propaganda or marketing, but we do it with y'all, people will trust it. And so the last thing we want to do is undermine

• 56:20Speaker 02

  folks' trust in you by us somehow trying to micromanage and we're, and they also know that we're pretty pure about that. Like we would be like, you know, the whistles would blow.

• 56:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  If they were, but they, I don't think they even want to do that.

• 56:33Nilay Patel?

  So we're running out of time, but I want to ask everybody this question. There's a lot of change in the world. There's a lot of problems to be solved. What keeps you up at night, both in terms of Khan Academy and then the broader landscape that the organization sits in?

• 56:48Speaker 02

  The thing that keeps me up at night is a fear that we don't capture the moment of what can be done right now. You know, everything that we talk about at Khan Academy, providing a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. And this project schoolhouse of anyone getting free tutoring in the world or being able to prove what they know so they can get jobs. This all in theory can exist. There's, you know, nothing that I said is based on some type of, you know, new discovery that's needed in cold fusion or AI. It can all exist and it's just about kind of putting people together in the right way and convincing them that one, convincing the students that if they do these things that they will benefit, but also convincing the systems

• 57:31Speaker 02

  that this, this can work. So my biggest fear is, you know, that we blow it somehow. You know, I think, you know, I often think that if 2010 Sal saw 2020 Sal, he'd be like, "Oh, wow, Khan Academy way bigger than I could have ever imagined. That's amazing." 2020 Sal must be all relaxed, but 2020 Sal is, you know, if I wasn't meditating, maybe even more stressed than 2010 Sal. I meditate, so I'm handling it all. But, you know, now I think the opportunity, we've shown that Khan Academy can scale, we can reach millions, and we're at like the precipice of all of these really big ideas. I mean, a lot of what we talked about, these are like systemic, you know, plate tectonics that can shift literally over the next five to 10 years. And I think Khan Academy can

• 58:14Speaker 02

  be one of those catalysts that can make it happen. But if we don't, I am afraid that the plates are going to just move to where they were before. And because of it, a lot of people aren't going to be able to reach their potential. So that's, you know, the stakes are high. That's what keeps me up.

• 58:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, Sal, thank you so much. You've given us so much time. Really appreciate the conversation. We'll have to have you back soon to talk about what happens next.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

• 58:39Nilay Patel?

  Thank you again to Sal Khan for taking the time to talk today, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, I'd love to hear what you think of the show. I'm at Reckless on Twitter, and you can email us at [email protected]. If you like this, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

• 58:56Nilay Patel?

  Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. It is produced by Sophie Erickson. Our audio engineer is Andrew Moreno. Our music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll be back next Tuesday with another episode. See you then.

• 59:12Speaker 06

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