Sal Khan, Founder of Khan Academy

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. This episode's guest is Sal Khan. He is the founder of the Khan Academy.
He attended the University of New Orleans and MIT. In 2012, Time Magazine named Sal one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Khan Academy is a nonprofit educational institution that provides free courses in math, science, and the humanities. The Khan Academy courses are available in forty-six languages and used in more than 190 countries. There are approximately 7,000 videos and 70,000 practice problems. These videos have been watched 1.7 billion times. There are more than 110 million registered users and more than 20 million active learners per month.
Two of the surprising parts of this interview are his opinion of SAT testing and the security risks of discouraging foreign students from coming to the United States. I truly believe that Khan Academy is one of the Internet's greatest success stories.
Listen to this episode and I think you'll see why the can-do, empathetic, and intelligent Sal Khan made it happen.

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I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People.

Guy Kawasaki:
In preparation for this interview, I took the Algebra I test, and I scored seven out of nine on the quiz, so I was actually quite happy-
Sal Khan:
Pretty good.
Guy Kawasaki:
... because it's been probably fifty years since I took algebra so my parents' discipline paid off at some level.
My first question is, what is Nadia doing now?
Sal Khan:
She is in New York. She lives in Brooklyn. She is doing grad school in clinical psychology at The New School in New York. She wants to be a clinical psychologist. So I think she's on track.
Guy Kawasaki:
So she has not matriculated into a mathematics curriculum. If you told me she was a PhD of math and teaching at MIT, I would be blown away.
Sal Khan:
I tried. I tried that. No, this has nothing to do with me. Nadia is actually an incredible writer, so out of high school, I'd like to take a little bit of credit for helping her on the math side of things but because of her passion for writing, she went to Sarah Lawrence and then later realized that she would want to get into kind of healthcare, especially around psychology, so that's what's she doing now.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Since we alluded to Nadia, and I know you must have been asked this a hundred times or a thousand times because I've been asked, "What was it like to work for Steve Jobs?" at least 10,000 times. So there may be people who are wondering, "Who the hell is Nadia? Why did he even ask that?" So maybe you can give your quickest explanation of the genesis of Khan Academy.
Sal Khan:
So if you rewind back to 2004, I was a year out of business school, and my original background was in tech and in math - I had just gotten married and it just came out of conversation - my family was visiting from New Orleans, which is where I was born and raised, visiting me in Boston.
It came out in conversation, actually my aunt told me, Nadia's mother, that Nadia was having trouble with math in school. So when Nadia comes into the room, she's twelve years old, I say, "Hey, Nadia, what's going on?" She said, "Yeah, I can't get unit conversion. Math's not my thing. I took a placement test last year and I didn't do well, so I'm dealing with being kind of in a slower math class right now." I told Nadia, "I'm 100% sure you can learn unit conversion. How about when you go back to New Orleans, I'm happy to get on the phone with you and be your personal tutor." And she agreed.
The first weeks were tough. I had to kind of deprogram her lack of self-esteem in math but, slowly but surely, she got unit conversion. She got caught up with her class. She even got ahead of her class, and at that point, I became what I call a tiger cousin.
I called her school up, this is true, and I said, "I really think Nadia Rahman should be able to retake that placement exam from last year." They said, "Who are you?" I said, "I'm her cousin,” and they let her. The same Nadia that was put on the slower math track was put into an advanced math track. So I was kind of hooked.
It was a little intervention that I did on the part of a family member, and it was a way of connecting with her and it was a way, and obviously, it seemed to have helped her a little bit. So then I decided I'll start working with her younger brothers, and then over the next year-and-a-half of so, word spreads in my family that free tutoring is going on. Before I knew it, I'm working with about ten or fifteen cousins, family, friends from around the country.
The first pattern I noticed was that they just had a lot of gaps in their knowledge, and so I started writing software for them to fill in those gaps that would generate practice and that I, as their teacher, could keep track of it.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's always a good idea to check both sides of the story. So I'm taking you down a little side trip. I tracked down Nadia, the Nadia, and this is what she said.

Is this Nadia Rahman?
Nadia Rahman:
This is she!
Guy Kawasaki:
This is Guy Kawasaki. I'm the creator of a podcast called Remarkable People, and I want to do a reference check. Is that okay?
Nadia Rahman:
Absolutely.
Guy Kawasaki:
So the person's name is Sal Khan, and he says that he was your tutor. So how was he as your tutor?
Nadia Rahman:
I think I always thought of Sal as a kind of goofy older brother. I very much did not know him as this super genius that I think he is known as today. I was kind of a grumpy middle-schooler. I had very low self-esteem for whatever reason. In my lifetime, I had come to think of myself as goofy, as someone who wasn't capable of excelling in the way of math and science.
Sal came along and he saw that I hadn't gotten into the accelerated track at my school. As a concerned tiger cousin, he offered my mom to help tutor me. That was the beginning of it.
At first, we did over the phone. He noticed that I kind of often trailed off. I would nod my head and say that I would get things when I wouldn't. Eventually he started recording his sessions and doing it on, it was thing called Yahoo Doodle. That allowed me to pause and to rewind and to review things that I needed to.
He noticed that I learned a lot better when there wasn't this kind of social pressure, when there wasn't the pressure to look like you're paying attention and look like you're getting it. It very much helped me, and I was able to get into the accelerated track in my school. Yeah, so it was great.
Guy Kawasaki:
And where are you now?
Nadia Rahman:
I am in New York. I am at The New School for Social Research. I'm getting my master's right now in clinical psychology, and I'm applying for my PhD this year.
Guy Kawasaki:
And where did you do your undergraduate work?
Nadia Rahman:
I actually did my undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence, which is - it's funny. It's a liberal arts school, but I think it very much allowed me to have this integrated education that allowed me the freedom to take philosophy and literature and science. I was pre-med, but I was able to integrate these things in a really cool way. I think that was very much influenced by Sal.
He was a money man. He was a hedge fund manager. He was a sci-fi nerd. He was great at art. I have these paintings in my house in New Orleans that he painted, and they're just incredible. Very much this kind of right-brained, left-brained kind of guy. He integrates science and math and philosophy and English in a really cool way that has always inspired me. I think, yeah, my decision was, in part, based on his tutelage.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do people around you know that you are the genesis of Khan Academy?
Nadia Rahman:
Yeah. My friends do, and they make fun of me that I'm the most famous person that's bad at math in the world. My claim to fame in this world is that I'm a dummy in some ways, but no, it's funny. I feel like I have this cachet whenever I'm in a math or science or psychology class. When anyone begins to catch wind that I'm his cousin, I'm this nerd superstar, even by proximity to him, which I think is very funny. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
He has been interviewed dozens, if not hundreds of times, and has anybody ever done what I just did, which is seek you out and try to get your side of the story?
Nadia Rahman:
People haven't interviewed me. You're the first person to ever interview me, actually. A lot of people ask what I'm up to these days. So from a young age, I felt a lot of pressure to succeed, because how would it look if the first people of the Khan Academy ended up doing something that, let's say that, Asian moms and dads wouldn't be proud of?
Guy Kawasaki:
In my fantasy, I would have found out that you are now PhD in mathematics at MIT, but doing what you're doing is arguably cooler, so thank you very much.
Nadia Rahman:
Oh, well thank you so much for interviewing. This was so fun.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would really be disappointed if you told me, "Well, yeah. No, he really didn't help me with math. He just made that whole story up."
Nadia Rahman:
No, no.
Guy Kawasaki:
He was such-
Nadia Rahman:
He was instrumental in my success even today. It's funny. He's now taken on a new role. He loves to match-make, so for the last three years, he's been very involved in finding me a perfect suitor. He's very much become an Indian uncle.
Guy Kawasaki:
There we have it, Sal Khan, overachiever in everything he does, huh?
Nadia Rahman:
Yes sir. Absolutely.
Sal Khan:
And that was the first Khan Academy. It was just a little app I made. Then I was showing this off at a dinner party, and the host of the dinner party, I give him full credit, his name is Zuli Ramzan, said, "This is all cool, Sal, but how are you actually scaling up your lessons." I said, "Yeah, it's hard." And he said, "Well, why don't you make some videos and upload them onto YouTube for your family?" I initially thought it was a horrible idea. I told him YouTube's for cats playing piano. Got over the idea that it wasn't my idea, and I gave it a shot, and long story short, after about a month of that, I told my cousins, "Look, watch this stuff at your own time and pace."
After a while of this, I asked them for feedback, and they famously told me that they liked me better on YouTube than in person and so I took that as positive feedback and kept going and soon became clear, people who are not my cousins were watching. By 2009, this is about five years after I started tutoring Nadia, I started, frankly, having trouble focusing on my day job. I was reading letters from folks around the world saying how it was helping them.
I started thinking, “Maybe this project,” which I never imagined to be any type of a business, but “maybe I could set it up as a not-for-profit, and hopefully the universe will conspire to support it, and it could one day reach millions or billions of people.” So that's when I took the plunge, set up Khan Academy as a not-for-profit with a mission of free world-class education for anyone anywhere, quit my day job, and started, hat in hand, looking for funding while coding the software and continuing to make videos.
Guy Kawasaki:
If you had not had a large family with a lot of cousins, maybe Khan Academy wouldn't exist, right?
Sal Khan:
That's true. I think there's two precursor ingredients for Khan Academy to exist that were somewhat counter that wouldn't always be there. One is a large family of, in this case, cousins who are at the appropriate age. I was in my mid/late-20s, but I had a lot cousins who were between eight and fifteen years old and so I had a bunch of guinea pigs to work with.
The other person I have to give a lot of credit for is, I worked at a hedge fund, and the stereotype in hedge funds or in finance is that you work day and night. You do nothing but work. Frankly, I was ready to do that when I had my job at Wohl Capital. My boss's name was Dan Wohl. It was just me and him at the time. He actually was a strong believer that our job as investors, which makes all the sense in the world, is not to work ourselves to death and then make a bunch of bad decisions. It's to make a few good decisions every year and to avoid making bad decisions.
He actually fairly strongly believed that we had to leave work and have other interests and other passions. It would give us a broader view. It would recharge us for the day. So he actually forced me to stop working, to some degree, so that I had time in the afternoons, so that when a cousin needed help, I was in a position to do that.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's the only hedge fund manager that I ever heard-
Sal Khan:
He's very successful.
Guy Kawasaki:
... that has that attitude.
Sal Khan:
He's very successful. If Dan wanted to, he could have been the next Warren Buffett, but he was very balanced, and he retired early to focus on his family.
Guy Kawasaki:
Have you come to believe that Khan Academy is core or supplemental?
Sal Khan:
Yeah, that's one of those debates, these semantic debates, that we've had from the beginning. Depends on the use case. There's kids out there that have very little in the way of a formal education, or even if they do nominally have a school, their school might not be at the level of rigor that they really need.
So we have examples of there's a young girl in Afghanistan, Sultana, who when the Taliban took over her town, forbade all the young girls from going to school. Khan Academy became her lifeline, became core for her, and she goes from essentially elementary school math to algebra, trig, physics, chemistry, bio on Khan Academy, decides she wants to become a theoretical physicist in the U.S., smuggles herself into Pakistan to take the SAT.
Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times writes an op-ed about her, Meet Sultana, the Taliban's Worst Fear. That gives her political asylum, and last I checked on her, she was doing quantum computing research at Cal Tech. So for the Sultanas of the world, we're core but, obviously, those are kind of the edge cases.
For most of our users, we're a supplement, and the supplement can be with a capital S. There's a lot of our users, depending on the month, twenty to thirty million coming every month, who are trying to get unblocked on something that is likely happening in their formal school setting that they just don't understand. They want more practice. So in that world, the tutor, for a lot of kids, a large chunk of all kids in America use Khan Academy at least once a month or once a year, much less the world.
Increasingly in classrooms, we are also seeing very heavy usage of Khan Academy, and that's where we still are supplement to whatever curriculum the school might have adopted, or the teacher might have adopted, but we are an obvious place to go for regular practice. So teachers can assign things on Khan Academy, and kids can get immediate feedback. Teachers get a lot more data than they ever had before. We try to be a personalized practice use case where they can start to learn at their own time and pace and we have a bunch of efficacy studies that point to that accelerating kids a lot more.
Guy Kawasaki:
For something like algebra where there is a right answer, I can understand that, but what do you with something like history?
Sal Khan:
Yeah. It's a good question. I think in all subjects, there are a core content base that there's usually pretty good agreement on one should know these things, and then there's a bunch of other things that might get more into the subjective.
So to your point, math there's a lot of right answer stuff in math, and so we can give a lot of practice, a lot of feedback, but history, which is a topic that we've only begun to go in, we don't have the same depth as we have in math, but even in history, there's definitely some must-knows that one could argue, some key, whether it's events, ways that things are connected with each other, how things happened.
Then there's a lot of the more subjective. How do you view something, the analysis? And some of that should definitely be learned as well. So our view is, over time, we definitely want to get all of that basal skills and knowledge and intuitions. Then, if we do have to go, or if we can go into the subjective, we are able to give some reasonable, well-thought-out voices that are adjacent to the middle, I would say, that can give a reasonable narrative.
That is going to be a lot harder, and I think it's going to be especially hard as we go internationally. So this is something that I do think about over the long run. Right now, with math and, for the most part, science, it's pretty easy to go into another country or go into another state, not a lot of debate there. Yeah, I suspect history will get a little bit messier.
Guy Kawasaki:
In one sense, a thermometer is not liberal or conservative, but even something like climate change, even that's politicized now.
Sal Khan:
That's where, something like climate change, for us, it's never about, “Hey, you should believe climate change because ninety-nine out of 100 scientists believe that.” We say, “Look at the data yourself, and we're going to give you the skills so that you yourself don't have to defer to experts, so that you yourself can say, ‘What is the probability of the following data points happening?’ ‘How likely is this due to random chance or due to the natural changes of the earth versus manmade climate change?’”
I think that's all we can do. It's very hard to disagree with those critical thinking skills that give kids the skills to judge for themselves. I think when they can judge for themselves, then it's transcended politics, and now I am projecting, it's pretty obvious that climate change is not politics. It's science.
Guy Kawasaki:
How do you enforce quality standards for the courses?
Sal Khan:
Yeah, in the early days of Khan Academy it was me introspecting on what quality looks like. There's quality of are you true to the standards? Is it factually correct, et cetera? Then there's quality in terms of is it interesting? Does it capture the passion, the intuition? Is it the best way to approach something? Does it visualize it in a useful way?
As we've grown and scaled, I still make a lot of the content, but we now have a team of experts who internally will look at the standards, who will interpret the standards, who will create video requests for me or for others, who will create items, and then they get that vetted by third parties. Oftentimes, these are the people who create the standards and so that's kind of an advantage the Khan Academy has.
A teacher doesn't have the luxury of being able to go to standards authors and say, "Is this what you meant when you said this standard?" Also, frankly, a lot of the for-profits, the standards agencies aren't as sympathetic to them as they are to Khan Academy because we have such reach and obviously, what we're doing is a social effort, it's not a business. So we get a lot of really positive stakeholders helping us ensure that we are truly world-class.
Guy Kawasaki:
I was on the board of trustees of Wikipedia, so I know that it's not true that anybody can edit anything, and so a lot teachers believe that, and that's why they say students can't cite it, but you definitely have a small cadre of people who are recording the videos. It's not anybody can submit, “Here's Calculus According to Guy.”
Sal Khan:
Yeah, although I think Calculus According to Guy would be quite interesting, so think about that.
Guy Kawasaki:
It would be short.
Sal Khan:
Think about that. No, this was an interesting decision in the early years of Khan Academy. For a lot folks, I live out here in Silicon Valley now, Wohl Capital, Dan's wife, Allison, became a professor at Stanford. So we moved the firm out to Silicon Valley.
Out here, people always think in terms of platform scale, leverage the crowd, all of these things. So when Khan Academy was starting, I too, actually, thought, “Okay, what I'm doing with my cousins and the software and the video, this is a proof of concept, but the real power is I could create a generalizable platform with ratings and create and then crowdsource a lot of this content.”
Part of the realization was, there's a couple things. Academic content actually is quite evergreen, and even one or two or three people in a focused way making this content can actually cover a lot of territory. To date, I've made about 7,000 videos that cover fourteen or fifteen years of learning, so to speak.
Guy Kawasaki:
You have single-handedly made 7,000 videos?
Sal Khan:
Yeah, it's one of those things. You do five, six a day, it adds up over fourteen years! I still do them. I made three this morning. They're these little six-minute, seven-minute, eight-minute things, but they add up, and you can cover a lot!
We also realized that I think there's a power, no one in Silicon Valley talks about it that much, but there's a really power of the brand of the content. Silicon Valley's all about the platform, but the brand really matters. Inadvertently in those early years with me just making content for my family, people felt like, "Wow, this is unusually approachable. This is quirky. This is eccentric. This is easy to understand." That became our brand.
We did try some experiments in crowdsourcing, and we realized this is potentially undermining the brand. It's not giving the same quality of content that we would like and frankly, just even the coordination costs of crowdsourcing sometimes is harder than just insourcing it, doing it ourselves.
Now I view Khan Academy, it is a platform, and we are trying to bring other voices, other forms of content there, but it's not about, you don't need 5,000 content creators. You can cover most academic subjects with one or two content creators. That also creates continuity. You don't want to attend a class where every ten minutes a different teacher is walking in, no matter how good they are. You need to build some trust the teacher, learn how to think, and then you're more likely to engage.
Guy Kawasaki:
Arguably, you're maybe the world's leading expert in online education, and now that's the de facto for everybody. So do you have some insights into how we can avoid a catastrophe in education as we deal with the pandemic?
Sal Khan:
I've talked pre-pandemic about a slow-motion catastrophe that was happening, and now the pandemic might be a relatively fast catastrophe if we're not careful. The slow-motion catastrophe that was already happening is in the U.S., seventy percent - seven-zero percent - of all kids who go to community college have to take remedial math. For a lot of us you might say, "Oh, remedial math, maybe it's algebra. Maybe it's pre-calculus." No. Remedial math in a community college setting is sixth or seventh-grade math.
So the majority of kids in America, they're going through the motions of seventh grade, eighth grade, algebra, geometry, on and on and on, and then they get to community college and they say, "You're not even ready to learn algebra yet," and they have to go back.
So to me, that's a massive catastrophe. Not only are the time and the money, time for the students and the system and then the resources put into it, but then these are those kids that when they get to college are the least likely to graduate, the most likely to have debt, the most likely to be underemployed or not employed, and they come from some of the most vulnerable communities to begin with.
So that was pre-COVID. Now, COVID, that just got that much worse, because now, on top of the fact that kids were accumulating these gaps that were becoming debilitating, a large chunk of the population wasn't even able to engage. Twenty, thirty, forty percent, depending on the school district, didn't have adequate access to the Internet or devices at home. Even when school districts have done heroic efforts to get devices to them, for various reasons, the kids aren't engaging with it. Maybe they don't have the supports at home. Maybe people have to share the device.
So the catastrophe is we could have a year or longer where not only are the kids not learning, but they're actually atrophying, and if it goes long enough, they could completely disengage from the process of school altogether, which leads to all sorts of negative outcomes.
I mean, there's good evidence that, in effect it's kind of a dark statistic that some communities have, because there's such a lead time to prisons, they look at fourth-grade test scores as a leading indicator to figure out what the prison needs are going to be in ten or fifteen years and so, this is a very serious thing, but obviously, it doesn't have the same urgency of a war or people protesting on the streets or whatever else but it's just as serious, and in some ways, might underlie all of it.
Now the way to address it, you need access as a first layer, and we're seeing a really good movement there. But the other layer is make sure that it's engaging as possible. I would say that whether we're doing it during COVID distance learning or whether in a classroom.
Engagement to me, and there's a lot of evidence behind this, is not just talking to students, lecturing them. If they get an eighty percent saying, "You're a C student. Move on now," kind of branding them. Engagement is meeting them where they are. If they have gaps in their knowledge, give them the incentives and the opportunity to fill in those gaps, learn at their own time and pace. When they get into a room with other human beings, I guess whether they get into a room or Zoom or whatever, Google Meet with other human beings, that they're mainly interacting with them.
So the teacher is facilitating that interaction. They're asking questions. They're cold-calling them. They're pulling them out of the screen. They're putting them into breakout sessions so that they have a chance to really engage.
Three weeks ago, I wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, which was we can't let this crisis become a catastrophe, and it's exactly that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Right.
Sal Khan:
Khan Academy is one piece of the distance learning equation, which is we can let kids practice and get feedback at their own time and pace. Teachers can monitor that but there's this other piece of the distance learning equation, which is the live synchronous interactions on video conference, and how do we do that well? Then there's questions about, once everyone comes back, that we've had this suboptimal year, how do we get people back on track? And not just back to the status quo of what we were doing before, because I said, that was a slow-motion catastrophe. How do we maybe use this crisis to catapult us to a better place so that we allow all kids all the time to have a better chance at engaging and not having these debilitating gaps?
Guy Kawasaki:
Much of the advice from people like you, educators, is for the teacher. Do you have any advice for the student, this is how to make the most of your Zoom call algebra class, your Zoom call biology class?
Sal Khan:
My number one tip for a student, and to some degree, I could say this for a parent, but for students for sure, you've got to take ownership. You can't just sit and wait for other people to spoon-feed things to you. That might kind of work while you're in middle school or in high school, but as you get into later high school and college, and then for sure once you work, the kids who are used to things getting spoon-fed to them, those are the kids who really struggle, while the kids who are used to pulling information, pulling knowledge, taking ownership of their own journey, they do just fine and Khan Academy is a tool for you to do this with.
If you spend even twenty, thirty minutes a day on Khan Academy, regardless of whether your teacher or your parents are asking you to, you find you're learning edge, and there's ways to do that on Khan Academy. You can start at your grade level. If you have trouble with that, you can start at the Get Ready for Grade Level course. If you do twenty to thirty minutes a day, money-back guarantee.
I say that somewhat jokingly. If you were paying, I would still give a money-back guarantee. But if you do that religiously for two or three months, you will go from potentially struggling in math to being strong in math, very much like many of my cousins' experience when I was tutoring them. That will have huge implications for your trajectory in life, your earnings capability, et cetera.
My other advice is, when you're doing something, I remember when my first job, I was at a very big tech company, and there's some days when you work at a big company that you kind of feel like just a cog and you're like, "Does it really matter what I'm doing?" I remember my boss gave me a pep talk, and it was really good one. It lasted with me. He was like, "Look, yes, everything you're saying from a cynical lens might be true, but all you have to do is, you have a finite amount of time. How do you make this day have its impact? How do you become better because of this day, and how does the world become better than this day? And arguably, how does the organization you're a part of become better because of that day's work?" I would take that same mindset for any student.
Some things you might not find optimally engaging or a little bit boring, but use that as a learning lesson. That's going to grow you. If you can learn to deal with that adversity, if you don't do as well as you would like, take that as a learning lesson, and then when you have the opportunity to engage, whether it's in person in a classroom, or on video conference, make use of it.
I remember I was a kid in school that I was like, "Oh, the teacher doesn't want to hear from me," or "I don't want to be the kid that's asking questions." Or I want to be the cool kid in the back. Doesn't serve you that well. Definitely the teachers love the kids that engage, and don't do it to brown nose or just to be teacher's pet, but do it because it's going to make you a better person.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that a Harvard or a Stanford education via Zoom is worth $60,000 a year?
Sal Khan:
Well, there's different ways that you could account for it. I think what's interesting right now is people are finally unbundling, or decoupling, the various pieces of an education. We've always said education, but it's really at least three different things. There's a piece where you need to learn skills, accounting or calculus or improving your reading comprehension. There's a piece around credentialing. I want a signal that's going to carry currency in the broader world, and then there's a piece around socialization and community and friendships.
A little thought experiment, pre-COVID, if you went ten years ago to Harvard graduation and you meet some kid. You're like, "How much did you pay for this education?" They say, "I don't know, $200,000." You say, "Okay. We're going to write you a check right now for $200,000, but you can never tell anyone that you went to Harvard. You can't write it in your resume. It's no evidence." I don't think a lot of kids are going to take on that.
Guy Kawasaki:
No.
Sal Khan:
You get everything else. You get the experiences, you get the memories, you get the community, the friendship, everything else you get, you're just not allowed to tell anyone that you went to Harvard and got this diploma. I don't think you'll have many takers. So that's a signal that just being able to say that has a lot of value to folks.
Now we can debate whether it has true value or just perceived value but I do think that's there. So big picture, COVID is putting an even bigger spotlight, and frankly just the rising cost of college education pre-COVID have put even a bigger and bigger spotlight on what is the actual return on investment of the four years of opportunity cost plus, depending on where you go, it could be 150,000, $200,000 of debt or more in certain cases and I think you're seeing people start to ask that.
So to answer your question, I think if you go to some of these places and you take advantage of it, and there's ways to take advantage of it, even in distance-learning world. Distance learning might be a great time to try to get a research internship, once again, working on Zoom, with a professor, or get advice from them or things like that or leverage the community, even if it's a virtual community for now, to build a network that you can use to do other things in your life, it can very valuable, and that signal could be very valuable. If you're just viewing it as a place to learn accounting and calculus, yeah, you can do that for free other places.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, you could do that on Khan Academy.
Sal Khan:
Yes you can.
Guy Kawasaki:
And you could be in Afghanistan.
Sal Khan:
And you could be in Afghanistan. That's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think it's pretty clear that, based on that experiment and in my own feelings, yeah, it's probably worth a quarter-million bucks, even if it's a Zoom, just to say you went to Stanford or Harvard or one of the Ivy Leagues. If you're the president of a second-tier school, what the hell do you do right now? I mean, you're entire thinking is geared towards tuition, butts in seats, asking alumni to make more buildings, and all of a sudden, that comes crashing and burning down. What do you do?
Sal Khan:
It's a tough situation. Sorry. Actually, I realize my son needs to be picked up, and I thought my mother-in-law was going to do it. And-
Guy Kawasaki:
No problem. Believe me, I've been on both sides of this.
Sal Khan:
Let me check with her, I'll be right back. I'll be right back.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, okay.

So Sal just left the conference and now I can look at all the books on his bookshelf, and let me just look here. So it's a lot of science fiction. There's a book about piano.
Sal Khan:
All right. We're good. We're good, so I can answer your question.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm checking all your books.
Sal Khan:
Oh good!
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm looking for any of mine.
Sal Khan:
Oh!
Guy Kawasaki:
That's okay.
Sal Khan:
They're there. They're there. They're there someplace.
To your question, I think even pre-COVID, if you're a university president of a university that has a high cost structure, a high cost per student per year, even pre-COVID I think you have some very serious questions to ask because people are kind of looking at what's the economic ROI, not social ROI? What's the return on investment from getting a diploma? What percentage are able to pay back their debts, get employed at a level that they would have expected, et cetera?
Now these questions have gotten even harder because a lot of people are pushing back, whether they even need to come back to campus. This coming school year, we've obviously seen at some of the elite universities, twenty percent of the students have decided to defer for a year. For a lot of the lesser elite schools, they might, instead of defer, say, "I'll just go to my local community college. It's functionally equivalent right now because it's happening over Zoom, and it's going to be a lot cheaper,” and then that's going to hurt already very delicate finances for these schools.
I think there's a, as painful as it is, I don't envy these university presidents, but I think that form of scarcity of resources actually can drive innovation. I think for a long time, universities have been kind of the gatekeeper to a middle-class or upper middle-class life. That's put them in a position where they could kind of just name their price, and when you can just name your price, it creates bloat. It creates inefficiencies. It doesn't create a lot of accountability.
I think over the next five or ten years, most universities, a lot of them are going to figure out ways to unbundle what they provide, make a clearer value proposition and become more efficient and the ones that do, I think are going to do just fine while others are going to suffer. That's how the world works.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you know about the Google Certificate program that they just introduced where it's a six-month course in data analytics? Google says that "We'll just consider this equivalent a BS or BA when we view you as a candidate because we've trained you in what we need to train you?" I mean, to me that's an earth-shattering piece of news, that Google is going to train you and recruit you at that level.
Sal Khan:
I think this is the tip of the iceberg. Google is doing that. Amazon has been doing these coding tests because they're just not getting enough, where if you do well on it, they'll put you in the same bucket as a Stanford and MIT computer science major. What I think you're going to have happening is a lot of kids, they're going to realize that, “Hey, I can go straight to that,” while a lot of other kids, they might go through a traditional college experience, but then realize, "That oh, I should do this on top of it as well."
That'll also put some pressures on this cost and the value proposition of college for a lot of kids, and I think it's just the tip of the iceberg. More and more corporations are realizing that they're going after a very limited pool, and even when they do do that, the signal that even being a major in whatever major it is or having a high GPA doesn't correlate as strongly as you would like, and then especially if you're trying to diversify your pipeline, going to the same places that already have an un-diverse pipeline aren't going to help your situation much.
So if you can make pathways in terms of opportunity costs and actual dollars cost to attain are easier, but it's still just as rigorous in terms of someone's work ethic they need to achieve or their intellect that they need to achieve. Yeah, it makes all the sense in the world to me, and that's going to help catalyze, accelerate some of this change.
Guy Kawasaki:
You have expanded into some SAT coursework. What does that mean? Does that mean you support standardized testing? It means that it's a necessary evil?
Sal Khan:
Yeah. In this game, the College Board reached out to us in 2013, 2014 and said, "Look, we're going to revamp the SAT, and we want to address this decades-old, at least perception of inequity, and probably real inequity around this test prep industry but we want to work with Khan Academy because everything y'all talk about isn't how do you game the test. It's about actually learning the material." Where everything I talk about is in traditionally academic model, kids accrue gaps. Those gaps over time become debilitating. What you need is a way for kids to fill in those gaps, truly be college ready, and then they'll be fine on anything. The SAT or any other course.
We launched official SAT practice on Khan Academy back in 2015. Since then, a majority of all kids who take the SAT use it, and what we always highlight is, yes, it's officially test prep, but it's really college prep. It makes you more college ready, and then as a byproduct, you will do better on the SAT.
My view on the SAT itself, I try to look at everything from first principles. It's very fashionable these days to beat up on the SAT or to beat up on the notion of standardized tests, but I'm like, “Well, what would you prefer? An unstandardized test or no test at all?” I've met people who maybe do, but they never realize that the more subjective you make the process, it actually benefits the affluent more, because then you start leaning on institutional knowledge and connections.
The whole reason why the College Board even came into existence and the SAT came into existence was 100 years ago, probably you or I wouldn't have gone to the colleges we did because we didn't come from families that had connections. We didn't probably go to the right schools that were pipelines into those colleges, and then the SAT actually helped level the playing field for us, where regardless of where... It's kind of like that Google test you just brought up.
Regardless of where you're coming from, regardless of how you got there, you get to take this test. It's truly standardized so that Stanford can say, "Yeah, wow. That kid from Appalachia is just as good as this kid from Harker from the Bay Area whose parents are tech executives,” so there's a value to it.
Now the negative of it is when people over-weight it, when people view their SAT score as all-encompassing of who they are or even parents try to project that onto kids. College admissions officers and the College Board will always say, "This is only one data point of many that we use in making a decision." They do look at other things, but our society sometimes over-weights them, but once again, they get over-weighted because they provide, in some degrees, a clearer signal because they are standardized.
Everything else is really muddy. Grades, super subjective. Essays, we know people can get help. That's super subjective. You need something. Now I think there's other modalities. I'm working on a project called schoolhouse.world where, this is separate from Khan Academy, it's a separate nonprofit. We're just starting it, but part of it is a place for people to get live tutoring help from volunteer tutors. So there's that aspect.
Another is, how does someone validate what they know? We're coming up with a system where they can record them getting questions right, getting unit tests right on Khan Academy, and then other people will review it and say, "Yeah, that's definitely Guy's work. He knows his derivatives in calculus." Then the ultimate credential would be how good of a tutor you are, because that's very hard to fake.
So if you are a highly-reviewed tutor in a domain, then we can send that signal to colleges or to even employers and say, "This person clearly knows their stuff. They're tutoring, and by the way, that also tells you that they have good communication skills and that they have empathy and that they're willing to do community service."
Guy Kawasaki:
That is fascinating. I never thought about that being a good tutor is a pretty good acid test of, as you say, not only the education, but also the social skills, unless people get tutored in how to be a tutor, which-
Sal Khan:
It's still not bad. At the end of the day, if they'd be a good tutor-
Guy Kawasaki:
But going back to the SAT, you could make the case that the kid in Appalachia is not getting tutored in the SAT, so it's not fair.
Sal Khan:
Yeah, well, that's where we come into the picture, and that's why we did this official SAT practice for free is we try to level that playing field so it is more fair, but I completely agree with you. There's no delusions that more affluent, the more savvy will go to schools with more institutional knowledge, et cetera.
I'll stress again - if we were to take the SAT away, that kid in Appalachia is going to have even fewer tools at their disposal to be able to compete because their guidance counselor doesn't know how to write a recommendation, the same way that the guidance counselor at a fancy prep school at Phillips Andover or Exeter knows how. Their teachers don't know. The universities are going to look at their grades and say, "Well, I don't really know how that compares to some of the schools we're used to seeing." So you need some form of signal.
Now, maybe the schoolhouse.world could be another signal. If the kid in Appalachia can become an awesome tutor, a highly-rated tutor, that is a standardized benchmark that now the Stanfords or whatever school can start to judge, "Hey, this kid is actually interesting." So I think there's no perfect instrument, and everything can get misused in its own way, but you do need some form of measurement, and ideally, it's standardized, and ideally the activation energy, the ability to engage is as little correlated with wealth or family education as possible.
Guy Kawasaki:
There could be a very ironic situation where someone goes through the Google or Amazon Certificate program and use that as data for their college application, or your tutoring program, like "I'm a highly-respected tutor at Khan Academy or your other organization, and so you should admit me to Stanford." I mean, heads would explode. Now the tail is wagging the dog, right? I think that would be a great outcome.
Sal Khan:
No, it would be exciting. I mean, look, there could be a world where you could be a great tutor of coding. You could be a great tutor of managerial skills, “Well, that's the manager I want to hire. That's the coder I want to hire. If they're good enough to be able to explain to other people, they must know the intricacies, and they have good communication skills, et cetera.” That feels compelling to me.
Guy Kawasaki:
I read something about some people have criticized you because you're such an icon of education, and yet you have no formal training or education in education. So does that ever piss you off? I mean, how do you react when somebody says, "How can he tell me how to teach? He's not a teacher?"
Sal Khan:
Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot in that. I think there's different, I would say, cultures in any society, especially in our society. There's a more traditionalist culture where, before you need to be a manager, you need an MBA. You need to be certified by some authority, and there's another kind of school of thought that, “Look, if you can provide evidence that you're able to do something, hey, that's all we need to see,” and that actually I think gets to the crux of our conversation is to what degree do we rely on traditional pathways versus new pathways?
Putting me aside, one thing that I find really interesting is pretty much every university that has a school of education does not make getting an education diploma as a requirement for teaching at that university. So if you look at, pick your university, what percentage of your faculty had a degree in education, the people teaching the big... now, I think there's an argument that some of them needed it. So this isn't to disparage the value of a credential to get a master’s in education. I actually think there's some very valuable things that someone could learn from these things but it's to show that there's correlations, and some people can do well with it, and some people can do well without it.
These universities that research everything, they don't do a lot of research on what is the actual correlation between these signals that they're trying to put out called “diplomas” and actual efficacy of those people's skills. They run tests on the viscosity of ketchup and things like that. They should be able to do controlled tests. "Hey, we're asking you for $60,000 to get a master's in whatever. Well, let's do a controlled study, people who didn't get it, what are they able to do versus people who did get it? And do we see a statistically significant outcome?"
I think that's the kind of research that would be great if universities could start to understand the actual signaling value or the actual impact of the training that they're trying to provide.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I mean, that might happen because universities will have to differentiate themselves. I mean, the fact that they're under such pressure may force that kind of thinking as opposed to, "Well, we'll just run another capital campaign and up tuition eight percent next year because we accept only five percent of our applicants so it's a seller's market." Right? It's not going to be a seller's market after a while.
Sal Khan:
Yeah, we'll see. I mean, there's a lot of driving forces there. We could talk economics.
I do fear that we're getting more divergence and people are always predicting this because of automation and puts more value in capital than in labor and all of this. COVID is seeming to making that even more extreme. So there might be an argument that some of these name brand places might always have a willing base of people with a high capacity to pay. Our hope is that that doesn't become the world we're in. It becomes a world where the universities become a lot more efficient and thoughtful about what is a good use of resources and time, and they're able to create the value proposition for families and a world where it's not based on ability to pay or resources at your high school that mean-
Guy Kawasaki:
But even if you are a Harvard or a Stanford, if all the students from China can no longer attend, that's kind of a game-changer right there in terms of revenue too if these people are not allowed to get visas to come here.
Sal Khan:
Oh yeah. I mean, that's a whole other thing but you're right and the reality is that places like the Harvard and Stanfords of the world, the full-paying tuition, oftentimes the international students are subsidizing, allows them to give very generous financial... I was a financial aid kid in college. So I give MIT and a lot of schools like it a lot of credit.
There's no way I could have even thought about going to MIT. My mom was making minimum in Louisiana. I think at the time it was like five fifty an hour. She made $16,000 the year that I applied to college, so there's no way I could have thought about going to MIT which even back then, room and board plus tuition was approaching $30,000. I couldn't have gone if not for very generous financial aid. But yeah, you're right.
The international issue, it's not just a finances issue, and it's not just getting diverse perspectives at a campus issue. I actually view it as a national security issue, and this is why I really don't understand.
If we are lucky to be in a position where the best minds on the planet are eager to come here, the same person who's sitting in Shanghai, they can come to the U.S. and develop the state-of-the-art weapons system or the state-of-the-art computer or the state-of-the-art whatever, or they could sit in Shanghai and do it, and we have a chance of poaching them, that will undermine their ability to compete, even from a national security point of view, much less an economic point of view. So it feels like you're really undermining that power that the U.S. has historically had by having some of these policies.
Guy Kawasaki:
A lot of it is the mindset of the person. So if the mindset is, “This is a zero-sum game, if we admit this student from Shanghai, it's one less American who's going to get this opportunity, and that student from Shanghai is probably a spy.” There's a lot of racism and stuff involved in that kind of thinking I think.
Sal Khan:
I've seen that argument used more in the jobs side of things where we're talking about visas for work. I actually do some of the things of not being a lottery because the argument behind some of these, the H-1B Visa program and things like that, it is that we're not able to find enough Americans for this world, while the counterargument is, “No, you're just looking for low-skilled labor that is a little bit more attached to you because they have to go through the H-1B process with you as the employer.”
So some of the potential reforms that we even heard from this administration are like, “Okay, it shouldn't be a lottery. It shouldn't be random. It should be stack ranked.
The people who are getting the highest job offers should get the highest likelihood of getting a visa,” and the logic there is, “Yeah, those employers are not hiring them because they're low-cost labor. They're hiring them because they're giving them a $200,000-a-year salary because they literally couldn't find someone with that same skillset.” So I can buy that, but at the same time, trying to narrow it makes no sense because these global companies, the Googles, the Microsofts, the Apples of the world, they want that person. They want that person wherever they're going to get them.
They're either going to be able to bring them to the U.S. and hire them in Mountain View or Cupertino, and then that $200,000-a-year salary, that person's going to become part of the economy, and that money's going to flow into the local economy and pay federal taxes. Or they're going to pay that person $200,000 in Shanghai or $200,000 in Dublin or $200,000 in Bangalore, and then that $200,000 is going to flow into that country's tax base and so on and so forth. So it also doesn't make a lot of sense from that point of view.
Guy Kawasaki:
So let's pretend that Betsy DeVos calls you up, or let's pretend that Joe Biden wins the election, and he calls you up, and either of them say to you, "We want you to be Secretary of Education. We love what you did with Khan Academy. You've democratized education. You've shown us the next curve of education." Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, somebody calls you up and says, "Sal, would you be the Secretary of Education?" What would you say?
Sal Khan:
I'd say, "Thank you, and I would like to work very closely with whomever you appoint as Secretary of Education." There's certain aspects of that job that I probably would not be good at, which is the politicking side of it but we do have a lot of ideas, and we do think there's an opportunity right now to transform the country in ways that'll accelerate education outcomes, create economic opportunity.
If we're going to put more people to work, that's part of the COVID crisis, there's way to do it that's going to improve our overall human capital, so I would love to work on a project with whoever the next administration is to drive that, but I would convince them that I would be more useful to them doing a lot of the making and the building and a lot of the innovation versus maybe just giving speeches and visiting schools and fighting with Congress over money.
Guy Kawasaki:
So let's say you have the ear of the Secretary of Education. What's the first thing you tell him or her?
Sal Khan:
Let's create a nationwide competency-based system so that if you can prove these artifacts, that counts for credit in high school or college anywhere in the country. These are signals that you have a nationally recognized transcript that also be used as a signal for employment, akin to what we just talked about and we're going to create a pathway, arguably Khan Academy could do this, where any student, maybe in the world but for sure in the country, can learn whatever they need at their own time and pace to get to those outcomes. Ideally, they'd be able to do that in conjunction with their school system.
So then the school systems would all kind of rally around, “Okay, that's our true north. I would use schoolhouse.world as a national tutoring program. Now, every kid in America will have access to at least group tutoring at a rigorous world-class level. Your ability to be a tutor is going to be the ultimate signal on this nationwide transcript, which, all of a sudden, you've created a national public works force out of our young people and even some older people and they're all working to improve each other's actual potential and human capital.
I do think it's going to be the best signal of capability in 21st century, and we could extend that across every major domain. Well, that's just getting started, but there's more.
Guy Kawasaki:
I keep coming back to this tutor idea, because it is in a sense, a way to institutionalize helping others. I mean, you cannot be a good tutor if you're not helping others, right?
Sal Khan:
That's right. That's right. It's hard to fake that. I've always said, the best way to look like you care about others is to actually care about others.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, it's review time. Steve A. in Hawaii,
"Have you ever listened to a podcast, and when it's over, you forget where you are, what day it is, and you lose track of time because you are so captivated? This is easy when watching a good movie or reading a great book, however, not so often when listening to a podcast. Well, I've listened to many podcasts and just recently started tuning into Guy's Remarkable People podcast. I am thoroughly enjoying my way through his diverse lineup of guests. Every episode transports me and leaves me wanting to learn even more.
"Speaking of more, check out his conversation with Julie Packard, ocean lover, philanthropist, and conservationist, where he interviews Julie to learn more about her work in healthy oceans, and how her father, David Packard, is an amazing dad, leader, and innovator. She also shares the importance of MBWA, managed by walking around as part of the HP way. Then in episode eleven where Guy chats with Steve Wozniak about his experiences working at Apple and HP. Wow! Great stuff.”
"I just finished listening to his podcast with Lisa Leopold, entitled Professor: Education, Apology, Speaking, Storytelling. It inspired to write in and share how Guy's podcast is a must listen for all. More specifically, Lisa's story left me with insightful tools and resources, such as fully understanding the importance that the messenger and not just the message needs to be credible.”
"Guy has an amazing gift of identifying remarkable people, building connections with listeners, piquing our curiosity, engaging with us, and leaving us wondering what's up next. Here's a secret tip, sign up for his slick email feature where Guy emails you when a new episode is live."
Mahalo, Steve A. from Hawaii. That was a great review. I hope you'll review my podcast too. Go to the Apple Podcast app and have at it.

Use of Khan Academy is exploding during the pandemic. To put it mildly, lots of students and parents are looking for education resources. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy.

I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. Thank you to Jeff Sieh and Peg Fitzpatrick who educate me in the ways of sound design and social media with every episode. Until next week, wash your hands, wear a mask, avoid large crowds, and listen to Dr. Tony Fauci. Mahalo and aloha.

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This is Remarkable People.