22. Sal Khan: “If It Works for 15 Cousins, It Could Work for a Billion People.”

22:40What are the subjects that we really do need to learn versus the ones that we don't necessarily have to learn as much anymore? What's the future of higher education? And then I'll admit selfishly, my oldest was four and a half years old. I was going to go into kindergarten. And I had already been making the rounds and giving TED Talks about mastery learning and personalization. And I said it would be hypocritical for me not having my own child immersed in this type of a school. And so I started talking to, frankly, other employees at Khan Academy who felt the same. And I put a slide deck together and I kind of convinced families of 30 kids ages 5 through 10 years old to go into this experiment.

23:19We were able to get a space from Google in an office building we were in to start the school, reclaim a little bit of the parking lot for a playground. And we got started. This isn't a school where we had an IQ test to join. And we had kids who started off the school who were in the bottom quartile on standardized test scores. All of those kids, we haven't published this as a study, so this is pseudo anecdotal, but it's based on real data. All of those kids in the bottom quartile are now operating in the top decile because I would argue they had a chance to learn at their own time and pace, fill in those gaps.

23:54When you get an 80 % in a traditional system, you're told you're a C student. When our students get an 80%, they're like, you're at an 80%. Keep working on it to get to 100%. So it completely changes even how they perceive themselves. The expectations are fundamentally different. We are also seeing really powerful things with the mixed-age environment. There's actually some research about this, that when older students are with younger students, all sorts of good things happen, which is frankly in line with human nature. For most of the 300 ,000 years of human evolution, we lived in these multi-aged clans or tribes.

24:26But especially I think the positivity happens for the middle school or the high school students because they now feel responsibility. And I think it takes a lot of that negative energy that often goes into bullying or all that middle school angst and it takes it into a positive place. We actually have our first graduating class this year and we're seeing that they have been able to navigate what is otherwise, especially in Silicon Valley, a very stressful college application process. And they're getting very good college placement. It's really what the colleges have been asking for, kids who have authentic interests, who actually have mastery of content, which is exactly what the school is focused on.

25:00How long is the waiting list and how do I get on it? The rate limiting factor, to your point, has actually been real estate. Silicon Valley real estate is not a trivial thing. And so we did have the school limited pretty significantly. But now we're moving actually the upper school to co-locate with a community college where these kids are going to be able to have this really great journey, but also finish a good chunk, if not most, of college before they graduate high school. And then we're moving to another campus. The whole school K-12 right now is about 200 students. We think we're going to expand to about 300 students.

25:33What prevents you from doing five of these schools or 100 of these schools or 10 ,000 of these schools? Well, that's part of the idea. We've been trying to stay relatively under the radar for the last seven or eight years. But now that we are showing that it's working, that the kids are healthy and happy, over the next few years, you're going to see a spread much faster. One of the things that I keep pushing the team is we got to show that it can be done in an economic model that could fit most places. It's now at the scale that it's about. It's pretty close to the average cost per student for the local public schools.

26:08If you factor out the cost of real estate that we have to pay real estate, a lot of them don't. So one of the potential challenges to this model is that there's a real efficiency from a cost perspective of having one teacher teach 30 kids the same thing, whether or not it's the right thing to teach the kids at the same time. It's obviously not, but it's an efficient way to do it. But what you're saying is in the Khan Lab School, you're actually finding that because of probably cost efficiencies that come from other sources, like the teachers don't really have to lecture anymore. Instead, the kids are largely working independently, I would suspect, most of the time.

26:42You can actually make this on par in terms of costs with the traditional teaching model. Yeah, and it's not just the kids working independently. In fact, they are oftentimes spending time with teachers, but that time with teachers is much more focused. So it might be a small group for 15 minutes that is focused on exactly what those kids need at that moment, while another group of kids are learning at their own time and pace. And we're also seeing this type of phenomena in mainstream public classrooms, but the school is able to rethink everything. So even how we do scheduling and use of space and all of these other things that enable these ideas that, hey, your age shouldn't be the indicator of what you're getting exposed to, that if you're ready to move ahead or if you need to back up, either way, there's no shame or no stigma.

27:29You should just be able to do that. When I meet educators, they all agree class time should not be passive lecture. It should be interactive. You have to differentiate for students. This is always what's been the gold standard, but it's just been hard to implement in the traditional Prussian education model that we developed from 200 years ago.

27:56So you've hit on this model that really works and you've proved it to yourself, at least with the lab school. Do you not have impatience for making broader transformation? I would think you would bristle at the fact that you see these answers and it'll be how long? Decades at best before these are available in a widespread way. Does that frustrate you? Oh, yeah. Don't be fooled by my relaxing tone of voice, which maybe I fine-tuned over thousands of videos on Khan Academy. But no, I've had to develop a practice of meditation so I can sleep. I've been known to be so obsessed and agitated and impatient about things and want to make them happen fast because, yeah, the real wholesale change, that is a long game.

28:42That's going to be decades in the whole scheme of education. If we can get a major change in 10 or 20 or 30 years, that is worth it. Khan Academy, we did surveys at four-year colleges, and this was a few years ago when Khan Academy was at a lower scale. and the question that we randomly sample students, has Khan Academy had a meaningful impact on your education? And we thought it'd be lucky if 10 % of college students said yes. It turned out that 60 % of college students at the schools that we surveyed said Khan Academy had a meaningful impact on my education. So that tells me that we're already making a dent.

29:16We just have to make more and more of a dent between adding more subjects, making the interface more engaging. And then there's another piece that I've been impatient about around credentialing, We're realizing, wait, if someone is able to get mastery on Khan Academy, if they can record themselves, both their face and their screen while they take the unit test, while they explain their reasoning out loud, and it's peer reviewed, that then certifies them to go on a journey to become a tutor. But it also shows that they know the material. And University of Chicago has been using schoolhouse.world certification as a factor in college admissions.

29:49We're talking to universities about, look, if someone can tutor pre-calculus or someone can tutor biology, why can't we give them college credit for that tutoring? You know, to your point, you've been pushing me to say that I'm being more bold that my tone lets off. You know, these are big ideas. I want to create a world where for close to free, you can essentially get everything that you need to know to work, to get a job, to go to grad school. Now, for some kids, that might be all they need. But for other kids, they're going to need an in-person community. They're going to need support. In fact, I would argue for most kids.

30:21And so that's where you want to interface well with the existing system. So the test prep industry, firms like Stanley Kaplan, the Princeton Review, that's a multi-billion dollar industry. Now Khan Academy comes along and provides completely free, amazing SAT prep materials. Do you think you'll cause that entire industry to unravel? College Board, the folks who administer the SAT, they reached out to us saying, look, the College Board has just ignored the test prep industry. because we never wanted to validate them. But at least the perception of inequity, and maybe the reality is real, we have to address it.

30:57When Nadia was preparing for the SAT, I went through the College Board 10 SATs book, and I did every math question in video form. And College Board said what we loved about those, which apparently they were looking at, is that you never did what the test prep industry did, which is like, okay, this is hard. This is how you guess. I always said, look, you might think this is hard, But this is really just an application of what you learned in Algebra 1, where if you think about it this way, or if you're having trouble with it, why don't you go review this other video or do these other exercises on Khan Academy?

31:29And they're like, that's how it should be. It should not be gaming the test. It should be becoming more college ready. And then the test will measure that. And that's when they said, would you want a partner to make the world's best test prep in conjunction with each other that happens to be free? And we said, yes, absolutely. So obviously the aim was to democratize the SAT. But a few times in my own research, I've set up plans where I make things available to everyone with the goal of hopefully having high take up on the bottom end and maybe less high take up on the high end. But oftentimes I've found it's just not true.

32:04It's the opposite. Are you able to see in your data whether you're hitting the middle and the bottom more than the top? Or how does it pan out? It's a really good point. And this is something that both us and the College Board wanted to really understand. What we have seen over the years is the proportion, if you go by race, it's about the same as the proportion of test takers of the SAT. We are slightly overweighted on Black students and Latino students, but it's roughly the same proportion. Now, on income and on parents' education level, we have seen some of the phenomenon that you're talking about, where we have a higher proportion of children from higher income and kids with more educated parents.

32:45With that said, though, you don't look at over-proportion, under-proportion to understand whether it's driving equity or not. You have to say, what does the world look like with this resource? And what does the world look like without this resource? So the world without this resource, the affluent, they're going to Kaplan, they're going to Princeton Review, they're getting the help. The poor kids aren't getting the help. You add Khan Academy now, the rich kids, some of them are staying with Kaplan and Princeton Review, but some of them are saying, wait, this Khan Academy thing is better. So they're switching to Khan Academy, not because it's free, they're switching because it's better.

33:18That's actually validating of the platform. It would be a problem if the rich kids stayed with Kaplan and Princeton Review and only poor kids were using the new platform. It would continue to that perception that free isn't as good as paid. And now all of a sudden you have a huge swath of kids from historically under-resourced groups who are actually able to get test prep. The analogy that I draw is a museum or a library or park. In many cases, museums or libraries or parks might be disproportionately being used by affluent people. But if you take those parks away, the affluent are going to go to their backyards or they're going to form private parks.

33:55Or if they take the libraries away, they're going to buy the books. They're going to have access while the poor are not going to have access. Pandora makes it easy for you to find your favorite music. Discover new artists and genres by selecting any song or album, and we'll make you a personalized station for free. Download on the Apple App Store or Google Play and enjoy the soundtrack to your life. I like things my way, my coffee, my schedule, and my treatment. So I talked to my doctor about self-injecting with the Vivgard Hytrulo Pre-Filled Syringe, which contains F-Gartigamide Alpha and Hyaluronidase QVFC.

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35:20So I've been spending a lot of my time lately fighting a different educational battle than the one that you're focused on. I strongly believe we're teaching kids the wrong things. And I believe that much more time and effort should be put into teaching students about data analysis, understanding the difference between correlation and causality, how to work with spreadsheets or data visualization, computer programming. What's your view on this? Yeah, I agree. And I would add personal finance or just general finance in there, probably a little accounting, a little bit of law. I will say as someone who I love calculus, I teach calculus, I've made hundreds of videos on calculus, statistics and data science and all of these things that we just listed are more useful than calculus for pretty much everyone.

36:06There is a system. It was decided essentially in 1890 by the Committee of Ten, which was 10 university presidents in the U.S., that sat down and said, what is important? And they're the ones that actually determined that you learn chemistry in 11th grade and biology in 10th grade and physics in 12th grade. And obviously they were doing that before we even knew about DNA or we had the modern federal reserve or interstate highway system. And we really haven't been able to revisit these things because it has so much inertia to it. I also think that we should put much more effort in schools, helping children to understand their own emotional lives.

36:43So mindfulness and conflict resolution, dealing with stress and trauma. And these are things that every adult I know spends an enormous amount of time on belatedly. What do you think about bringing that radical change into school curriculum? And how might you do it if you agree that would be a good idea? Oh, I'm a huge believer in it. I often shy away from talking publicly about it because it's not measured in the same way that your math scores are, that it doesn't get as much attention. But at our lab school, we don't just have PE. We have outer wellness and we have inner wellness. The students meditate.

37:18They're learning to self-regulate. There's some hidden cognitive behavioral therapy that we're working with the kids where they learn to become more aware of their own thoughts and aware of their own feelings. We have epidemics right now globally, but especially in the U.S. around stress, anxiety, loneliness. How can we address these? Our lab school, I would say about 30, 40 percent of the energy is on that because the academic stuff is happening in a lot of ways easier. We're able to put more energy there. I have published on Khan Academy some guided meditations for students and things like that.

37:48Personally, I've started meditating religiously for the past two or three years, and it's changed my own life. I continue to be impatient and angsty about all of this change happening, but I wake up in the middle of the night a lot less. When I talk to schools, people in education, about data science, the answer is always, yes, that makes a ton of sense. How can we do it? And when I talk to them about emotional wellness, usually it's complete silence. I think the schools just feel completely unprepared for taking that step. They're feeling overwhelmed because even on the things that are measured, which is essentially math, reading and writing, we know the data is not good.

38:28And so I think a lot of these systems feel so overwhelmed. The reality is if kids actually learn to write at an eighth grade level, if they learn to read at an eighth grade level and they truly master eighth grade math, they are going to be pretty empowered because the sad reality is very few high school students have actually mastered reading, writing, and math at the eighth grade level by the time they graduate from high school. Many times by the time they graduate from college, they really haven't done that. Almost nobody uses 10th or 11th or 12th grade math ever in their everyday life. I agree with you 100 % that a great goal would be for everyone to understand ninth grade and bath at the end of 12th grade.

39:04But the way the incentives are set up now and the way the high stakes testing works, schools are incentivized to piecemeal as best they can, 10th grade, 11th grade, 12th grade learning. And it doesn't leave any time to go back and actually get the mastery of ninth grade. I would argue that they could be incented right. It's just it takes a little bit of a leap of faith. The same is true of the higher education system. My hedge fund days, I remember talking to a CFO of a company and I remember like, well, you know, based on my calculations, it looks like you make about, I think it was like a jeans company.

39:35It looks like you make about$20 per unit on your jeans. Like, how did you know that's not public information? You published your quantity you sold and you published your profit in two different periods. It's called a system of equations. I learned that in eighth grade. You know, this is someone who probably went to fancy business school and they learned all that stuff. They probably got A's in it, but they didn't realize that this is just basic algebra. If you really master 12th grade or first year college biology, chemistry, physics, and math, you are like dangerous in the world in a good way.

40:11You've had so much success. Do you have trouble reigning in your ego at all? That's why I meditate. No, well, look, for me, I'm a big believer in your ego creates most of your suffering in the world, most of the suffering in your own mind. I'd like to believe that I've never taken myself seriously. I've taken some of what I've worked on very seriously. Like when I worked at the hedge fund, I was driven like, okay, I have to do well. Obviously, part of my ego was like, I want to be, quote, successful in this field. But a lot of it was I want to be able to support my family and do things that are intellectually stimulating.

40:48But then when you transition into a mission like Khan Academy's, you're like, wow, this is important. If you fail, Sal, maybe millions of people aren't going to be able to learn as much or whatever. And so that creates a certain form of stress. I guess you could say it's somewhat ego-driven in that it's associated with your identity. It's just, Sal, you've tied your identity to this mission. You've got to make this succeed. And one thing that's helped me not be as stressed or anxious, although I still am sometimes, is to say, Sal, you got to let go of that. Your identity, your persona, your ego, like these are just completely human constructed things.

41:24And trust me, I have more than my share of failures and times where I've been knocked down and things aren't looking good. And so I also need to remind myself in those times that, look, this isn't about this thing called Sal, this physical body, this persona that you identify with. This is about just trying to do every day what you think is right, and then the chips fall where they do. This goes back to things like Buddhist and Vedic philosophy of don't get attached to the results. That's what's going to cause suffering, but do what you think is right. Is there anybody in your organization who will tell you you're wrong?

41:56Is there anyone who wouldn't? So that's good. I mean, so you cultivated that because that's really hard. You're such a good talker, and you've had such great results, and you're such a visionary. It's really hard for me to believe that the people who would work for you would feel the ability to tell you you're wrong. I'd love to hear from them. But what you just said is very nice and very flattering. But I think, if anything, I almost feel like the people who work a lot with me almost go into an engagement with me saying, well, you know, Sal can be convincing. So I'm almost going to put like extra guards up to be extra, you know, play devil's advocate.

42:31Obviously, you want to cultivate a place where it's not about being right. It's all about the mission. So it's easy to say, though, that you want to have an organization that is mission driven. But are there particular things you've done at the academy? Are there norms around failure or around telling you you're wrong that make it easier for people to do that than a typical organization? One of the big questions when we started, especially not for profit, is how we're going to attract top talent, especially in a place like Silicon Valley, where people could go work at Google and Facebook and get all the stock options and whatever else.

43:07And I remember reading a study back when I was a hedge fund analyst, and it said that beyond a certain level, pay and things like bonuses, actually, they're not that great of an incentive, or they can even be a disincentive at some point. And what really people care about, they definitely need enough pay to feel valued and feel like they can support their family at a reasonable standard of living. But beyond that, it's all about having mission that you feel like a real purpose, feeling that you're working around other people who are alongside and are invested in you, and having intellectually stimulating work that really leverages your skills.

43:38When we give job offers to, let's say, an engineer or a designer, most of them already have job offers or are coming from many of these tech companies that pay a lot. And we get 70 or 80 % of them. Not only are we attracting these people, we're getting some of the best people in the world joining us because I think some of the best people in the world are drawn to purpose. There are a lot of people who are thinking about careers and they're not sure whether to follow a for-profit path or a not-for-profit path. Do you have advice for people about how to make a wise decision in that case? When I meet people who are in college or just graduating from college, I tell them just to ask a lot of questions and don't be afraid to ask nosy questions.

44:22And then based on that information, find a path that, especially early in your career, is going to grow you and challenge you the most, where you're going to get invested in, you're compensated fairly, you have great managers who are willing to keep giving you more and more, frankly, as much as you're willing to take. But at the same time, make sure that you have space for your interests and your passions outside of work, that you don't define yourself, your persona by just that one job. I give the example, the hedge fund I worked at, it's non-stereotypical, Dan Wohl, who was my boss, I was ready to work 80 hours a week because I thought that's what you had to do at a hedge fund.

44:58But I remember after the first week or two, he's like, Sal, why are you still working? It was like 6 or 7 p.m. And I was like, oh, no, Dan, I got to analyze these companies. He's like, go home. I was like, okay, I'll analyze them from home. He's like, no, no, no, go home and don't do this. And I was like confused. And he's like, look, Sal, our job as investors is to avoid making bad decisions and make a few good decisions every year. If we just work ourselves silly, you're going to end up making bad decisions. And so he's like, you need to have other interests. You need to recharge. And when you come to work, be there 110%.

45:27I was like, all right, Dan, I will do that. And that's what allowed me to tutor my cousins and write software for them and all of this. A lot of my peers who went on a similar track to me, they weren't lucky enough to have a Dan Wohl as a manager. By the time they were in the 30s or 40s, they're making a ton of money, but they've completely forgotten what they wanted to do with that. They've completely forgotten their passion or they've gotten the golden handcuffs. One of the good things is I've always lived quite frugally. I've never been attached to a certain standard of living. A part of it is fear.

45:56When I grew up, my family wasn't well off, but that also gives you a certain form of freedom so that you can sometimes pursue these other things. Yeah, I'm glad you added that because I was going to say that I give almost the exact same advice that you just gave, but with one addendum, which is if you do take a job that pays you a lot, don't get addicted to the money because then you're stuck. and those golden handcuffs are brutal.

46:24I love the ideas underpinning his con lab school. And I was only half choking when I asked about getting my kids on the waiting list. My wife and I actually talked about moving to Silicon Valley for that reason. But we decided it would be better to get Sal to start another con lab school here in Chicago. So that's what's at the top of my to-do list for today.

46:50People I Mostly Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network and is produced by Freakonomics Radio. Morgan Levy is our producer, and Dan DeZula is the engineer. All of the music you heard on the show was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at pima at freakonomics.com. That's P-I-M-A at freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

47:22Trust me, I have many low self-esteem moments, so I will call you anytime. Remind me of how dynamic I am.

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