Why AI Could Be the Best Teacher You Ever Have w/ Sal Khan

23:52My challenge with AI, now we're going to step back on the AI question for you because you, Peter Diamantis, have sort of this positive outlook. I've had Mo Goddad on who's a little bit more trepidatious, I think, about things. And so this last weekend, I was in Arizona and it just struck me two things happened. One, I was at my son's college graduation and it was beautiful. I'm proud of him. He graduated with honors and I was sitting there thinking, I wonder if this structure exists 20 years from now. Like a physical place he goes, you go through here for four years, there's a ceremony at the end.

24:25I just sat there wondering, am I watching something that's going to disappear? Like Blockbuster Video, for example, right? And then we were driving out of there and literally on the way back, there was a car next to us that was an Uber with nobody driving it, which just like freaked me out. But I'm looking at going, I don't even know that I would get in there, but it has replaced the need. We went from taxis to Ubers. That was innovative. Didn't need a taxi cab driver anymore. Now we don't even need the driver. Then when we left, we were at the airport and I went in and there were three people working there.

25:00Yet they had these computers that are AI generated computers where you would scan all of your goods. So nobody really even checked you out of a store, which is an entrepreneur. They still had three people working there. I'm thinking, I don't know what these three people are doing here. They don't, they're literally just monitoring the AI, so to speak, the machine. And I thought to myself, long-term, someone who owns one of these businesses is not going to pay the driver long-term. You're not going to pay three people to man your store. You'll pay one to make sure everything doesn't break down.

25:27And so when it comes to teaching in the book, you say, I don't think this eliminates the need for teachers. Candidly, I'm not sure I'm persuaded to believe that just yet, that this technology isn't going to completely eliminate or wipe out lots of different careers and sectors of work. So make the case, do you believe some are going to be eliminated and why won't it be teachers? So I definitely think there's going to be job dislocations. And if I were to take even an education lens, you know, there are these offices we all remember from like universities. You know, you'd walk down these hallways and you're like, what do all these people do in these hallways?

26:05They weren't professors. They were some type of registrar's office or this office or that office. I think AI will be able to do a lot of that work. On the teaching side or being a professor, it depends what we consider being a teacher. If the role of the teacher is nothing but giving lectures, making assignments and grading papers. Yeah, I think AI is going to be able to do that. And I think the good news is that that's going to raise the floor for a lot of folks who did not have access to world class information, world class practice and assessment, world class feedback. AI is going to be able to give it that.

26:41But I think any great teacher, that's not what they are about. They are really about forming human connections with their students, mentoring their students, acting as coaches for them, being able to do more small group interventions, being able to orchestrate really engaging conversations, simulations, games in the classroom. And so I think any teacher who indexes there and then leverages the AI to do everything else, not only are they going to be very relevant, they're going to be very important. And I also think they're going to enjoy their job more than ever.

27:17if Nadia was her age now, what advice would you be giving with her about the rest of her life and her career as it relates to this new revolution? Yeah. Well, my, my daughter is exactly the age that Nadia was. So she's 12. So I definitely see the parallels, but there, there is something about being the father versus the cousin that's not as engaging. so I'm dealing with that. But the, I'm still a traditionalist and I write about this in the book. I think it's even more imperative for someone to be excellent at the traditional skills, reading comprehension, written and oral communication, solid content knowledge, critical thinking, mathematical skills.

28:03Not, and a lot of people say, well, why are you saying that? AI is going to be able to do a lot of that. I was like, AI is going to need someone to manage it. and those who can elevate above the AI or at least keep up with the AI, they're going to be in the best position to leverage the AI and they're gonna become wildly productive. And there's gonna be elements of the AI that we're talking about decades before the AI is going to be good at where you're going to need people who interface with the real world and interface with the AI. But once again, they're going to have to understand the work that the AI is doing.

28:32They're gonna have to be able to put those pieces together. But to do that, you're gonna have to be even better academically at all of these things. And there's other areas that, as we mentioned, it's not traditionally in the academic system. Entrepreneurship, you know, entrepreneurship, if you think about it as a factor of production in economics, it's the ability to put pieces together that already exist in ways that create value. That's going to be the ultimate skill because there's going to be even better pieces to put together, better Lego building blocks with the AI. So that's what I'm telling my kids.

29:01You know, my son is finishing his freshman year in high school and he loves piano. He loves coding. I've been encouraging him look, take your piano, compose stuff maybe use AI to make music videos have creative expression for it for his coding, I'm like look use AI before whatever your aspirations are you can now start making professional level games or applications that you didn't even think were possible before I'm also encouraging him to teach other people so that he builds those very human skills that aren't necessarily developed in a traditional academic environment We have a platform, another nonprofit called Schoolhouse.world, which is all about free tutoring.

29:41The way that we give free tutoring over Zoom is you have vetted volunteer tutors. So I'm trying to get him to be a vetted volunteer tutor so that he can give back and learn to communicate and lead folks. But I think if you develop those types of skills, you're going to be in good shape. Are there any industries, I'm pinning you down here, any industries that you, with your vision, because Khan Academy, even though you say it's, you know, I saw this pattern, I kind of stumbled into it. You're a visionary. you saw a need you saw where the future was it's like they say in hockey i don't know if gretzky was the greatest player but everybody else skates where the puck is he was skating to where the puck was going where do you think the puck is going in terms of careers if there was if there are there industries that you say this is going to be an industry if you pursued it and chased it you're going to be in great shape when it comes to ai and are there one or two where you're like you know my sense is these are going to be in in some trouble i would say whether you call it engineering computer science.

30:38You know, a lot of people are skeptical because like, hey, these AIs can code better than they can do almost everything else. But if you're good at it, I remember I graduated with a CS degree and a master's back in the late 90s. And I remember everyone telling me that, hey, your job is going to get outsourced to India. You should do something else. And that's one of the reasons why I went to business school. But if you look at the last 20 years since then, the inflation adjusted salaries for engineers has gone through the roof. I became a hedge fund analyst because I thought that's how I could pay off my debt versus working as an engineer.

31:10Now, the best way to pay off your debt is go get some stock and work as an engineer. I think that trend is going to continue. Even at Khan Academy, we've seen that phenomenon. We're already seeing our engineers get two or three X productivity from these AI tools. To me, that's not told us, oh, we only need one third as many engineers. We're saying we need three times as many engineers because we can we can now do so much more. The return on investment from hiring more engineers now is even better. So I think you're going to see that type of an accelerant. I think anyone you don't have to be a formal engineer, but who has that type of thinking where they can put the pieces together to make something work, I think is very, very powerful.

31:52So, you know, your point about whether universities in the traditional sense are going to exist. I think they are going to exist in some way, shape or form, but you're going to have many other alternative paths. And I've been a big proponent of competency-based learning. It shouldn't be you sat in a chair for four years and now we're going to give you a diploma that might mean something. It should be, hey, here are the skills that matter. You should try to learn them and prove that you know them. If you haven't proved it yet or if you fail the first time, try again next month. And I can imagine, you already see this in fields like engineering and software engineering, because there's such a shortage that there's alternative paths.

32:28I'm trying to actually my 15 year old, I'm trying to get him to do one of these software engineering camps that even people with engineering degrees do because the universities aren't teaching them how to actually be a professional software engineer. But if he does that when he's 16 or 17, he could actually go make six figures. And then if he wants to go to college, he can go to college and, you know, he'll be able to treat his friends to dinner. That's how you want to make your friends. But so I think you're going to have other other pathways other than the four year degree. And it's going to put pressure on a four year degree that costs two hundred, three hundred thousand dollars, has a four year opportunity cost to get a little bit more innovative.

33:08It is. I we share that opinion. I I was thinking about, you know, in college sports now, these guys have their NIL deals and they can make more money younger. The two things that I want everybody to hear is that if you have a young person in your life, there's going to be an opportunity. more and more the world has been innovative that younger and younger people can get wealthier and wealthier frankly you look at zuck or cuban or musk or whoever right even in my case i got pretty wealthy young not on their level but younger and younger and i know a lot of influencers sort of teach be patient but there's a chance now as a young person if you're entrepreneurial and innovative or even if you've got these unique skills you can start to make an awful lot of money much younger in life the other applications if you're middle-aged or a little bit older making a pivot in your career and learning a new trade or a new craft or a new skill is going to become so much more accessible to so many of you to change your life in midlife than it was before when this access wasn't there the reason I wanted you on the show back in the day Sal was this a question about you and please you know I know you have a great deal of humility but the more I read about you years ago I'm like okay here's this really brilliant man he could have taken his life and stayed at a hedge fund or started his own one or and I don't know that I don't know if Khan economy has made you an extremely wealthy man or not but I do know if you applied yourself and wanted to build massive wealth if that was the course you wanted to take in your life by this age you could be in the conversation with these other titans of innovation in the world you clearly made a decision as a pretty young man to pursue I think passion and cause over net worth.

34:47At least it appears that way to me. Is that true? And if so, why? Like, was that a conscious decision you made? And are you happy that you made it in hindsight? Most of the time. Yeah. And no, I am not independently wealthy in that sense, but because Khan Academy is a not-for-profit. You own as much of Khan Academy as I do. I get a salary from the board. I think a very generous one, more than I expected to make when I started this as a nonprofit. But yeah, I have a solidly upper middle class lifestyle now, but I'm very happy with it. You know, my decision back in 2008, 2009 to work on this full time, I just dug deep and said, well, what makes me happy?

35:30And I was like, well, you know, as long as I have my friends and family, we have the resources where I don't, You know, I grew up fairly, you know, I grew up in a single mother household. We didn't have a lot. So I did and frankly still do have some insecurities about, you know, when financial stress gets too much. But I said, look, as long as we can get a, have a 2000 square foot house, have a couple of cars in the garage, go out to eat every now and then, go on vacations every now and then, nothing ostentatious. And, you know, I have my friends, my family and my health and I get to work on something I care about.

36:04That's wealth. That's the ultimate. And, you know, everything else would, you know, I don't really need much more than that. And that's when I quit my day job to start working on Khan Academy. And, you know, every now and then, you know, I might look at like, oh, a peer startup with much less scale, et cetera, might be worth X, Y, or Z. But then I just think about, well, what would I do with all of that? And I just remind myself, I forgot who said this, but I think it was the 19th century. Some author wrote, you know, I have something that many of these billionaires at the time, I think he said millionaires will never have.

36:45And then the interviewer said, what? And he said, I have enough. And it's I have more than enough. You know, I I I click my heels every day to work and I I feel blessed every moment. And I think that's very, very few people on the on the planet get to feel that way. I admire that. tremendously that's an easy thing to say everybody like in hindsight but when you have the capacity that sal has to have made that decision is a really noble decision and to live it out every single day of your life as you see peers of yours with way less scale that haven't reached 165 million people with transformation build massive wealth and i've always wanted to ask you that um because i've admired it so much from a distance so just want to acknowledge you for that brother the the work you do in the world clearly matters and um i think when you're doing it like you said maybe you don't feel the impact of it because you're in the day-to-day grind but just know as a as a fan of yours looking back at you i have so much admiration for the way that you've decided to serve and live your life so i want to acknowledge that no i appreciate that but yeah yeah it's really good time so good i'm having a good time doing this interview i i just gotta be honest with you.

37:59Let me ask you this. I'm going to poke a little deeper. What are your fears about the next five or 10 years of AI? I've seen you talk a little bit about this, but you've covered most of the positive things. Clearly, you're a bright enough man to know there are risks that come with revolution and innovation. What are they in your mind? Oh, and there's some things to be afraid of, to be sure. I am very afraid of what we're going to be able to do with, what bad actors are going to do with deep fakes. You're already seeing cases of fraud where, you know, you get a phone call from, sounds like your child says that they're arrested, it's interacting with you.

38:37They're trying to get you to, you know, send bail money. It's fraud. You're already seeing, yeah, unfortunately, you know, people creating deep fakes of their classmates doing things and putting it on social media. That stuff is scary. And I don't have all the solutions on how to fix that. I think you're going to have state actors using AI and deepfakes, but not just deepfakes, just AI's ability to seem very human to manipulate people, to affect society. And you can imagine if you saw videos of people waiting outside at their bank and they're not getting their money and it's all fake. well, then it could create a run-on bank.

39:22So these could be very, very serious things. So I'm very worried about that. I'm also worried about the economic dislocation. You know, I talked about who's safe, who's not safe. You know, if you're a copywriter editor or a copywriter, you're writing text. If you're working at a call center, you're doing medical transcription, or if you are a, let's call it a middling software engineer, engineer, you're not a great software engineer, you're kind of middle of the pack. I think that's going to be a tough economy. And so hopefully there's net new jobs that are more human centric that the AI can't do.

40:02That's my hope, but I'm not sure if that's going to be the case. So we have to be on top of that. I'm afraid the pace of change is so fast. I feel like I'm in the middle of it. The people doing the research at OpenAI and Microsoft and Google are texting me and slacking me on a regular basis. So I feel like I'm plugged in, but even I feel like I'm falling behind. Every day, someone in my team says, what about this? And I'm like, oh my God, we're not gonna be able to incorporate that for another six months, but will that be too late? So I worry that when the change is so fast and it's accelerating, people have been talking about the singularity for 30 years now, we are in it.

40:43And I feel it every day that it's like, what I thought last year would take a year ended up taking two months. And then two months later, what I thought would take now two months is now taking two weeks. So it's, it's, it's, it's accelerating. So anytime change like that happens, you just like, you just don't feel in control as much. And I weren't, you know, in the education realm, but I guess this is more broadly, I worry about AI not being used well, and then people throw out the baby with the bathwater. And then the real problem there is the bad actors aren't going to slow down at all. And then the good actors are going to slow down out of fear and then it's just going to get worse and worse.

41:22What's the separator then? Like I feel like it used to be if I knew more than you in life, you know, if I had more information than you, if I was better educated than you. This is an overall general statement and it's not an easy one to answer, but to some extent access to that is now levelized in an instant. And that's overall generalization. And by the way, that's sort of been the case the last decade and a half in the world anyway. So in your mind, what is a separator skill somebody needs in culture now to succeed, to prosper, to increase their lifestyle, to increase their impact? It's entrepreneurship in the purest of forms.

42:05And you mentioned this has been the case the last 15 years. You can think of someone like, you know, Justin Bieber would not have been discovered if not for YouTube. I, to some degree, would not have been discovered if not for YouTube. You can think of people like Mr. Beast, who now has hundreds of millions of subscribers and is making probably similar orders of magnitude of money. Before, if we go back 20 or 30 years, there were all these gatekeepers, these taste makers who decide who's in and who's out, regardless of how entrepreneurial that person was, no matter how skilled that person was.

42:39but then the internet democratized that dramatically. Now you still do have bottlenecks because a lot of things are very capital intensive. If I want to make a great movie, it still costs a hundred million dollars maybe to make that movie. I have to go still through the tastemakers, through the production houses, the movie studios. I thought it was funny, the debate with the Screenwriters Guild. I thought it should have gone the other way around. The the production houses should have been afraid that the screenwriters are going to start using AI to produce the entire movie. Because why do they need the production house anymore?

43:13If they can take an amazing story, it's those people with an amazing sense of story. And if they have a vision for what they want to create, they're not going to have to raise$100 million anymore. They're going to be able to do that movie for$100 ,000. And then you're just going to have more. And there's going to be a lot of, when you lower the hurdles, you're going to have a lot of crap out there. And you see that on YouTube and on the internet, but you're also going to get a lot more good stuff that's going to get discovered, it's going to get surfaced. So yeah, I think it's generally that pure raw entrepreneurship is going to become even more and more valuable.

43:48In the past, things like going to, getting a college degree, having brands on your resume, whether it's college brands or graduate school or employer brands on your resume, it was a signal to the tastemakers, to the gatekeepers that, I'm hiring a hedge fund analyst. Let me get that kid from Harvard Business School who seems to know what they're doing. And you won't even look at kids from someplace else. But as these tools democratize the ability to do things, you're going to have more and more people not have to go through these gatekeepers, not have to go through those same doors. They're going to be able to prove on their own that they're capable.

44:26Gosh, just blows my mind. A couple of last questions. I'm just sitting here processing everything you're saying. I'm like, we are really in the middle because my world isn't your world every day, right? Like this hasn't impacted me much yet. And quite frankly, I think the vast majority of the people that listen to my show haven't felt the impact of this yet. And that when I do a show like today, I want to make sure they have context for it. Like this is here. This is coming where this isn't pie in the sky, everybody. Like it may not hit your real estate business yet or your mortgage company yet or your insurance business yet.

45:00or your gym yet, but there is an impact and an application and to get educated about this. I mean, go to chat GPT and just play with it. For example, just see it, just experience it. I guess my last question would be the human being, right? Someone said to me the other day, I told him I was interviewing you and they said, please ask him about like, can't avatars just do all of this work now? In other words, why would a human being, if I'm, if there's a school teacher, Why would I not just have the avatar of a school teacher? That avatar doesn't have a bad day. That avatar didn't have a disagreement with their spouse that morning.

45:39That avatar doesn't get sick every single day. So the need for the human over that avatar in general will always be what? I know it feels like I've sort of touched on this with you, but specifically everybody, you could take an avatar of me right now and I could come give a speech to your company. I could do a Q &A afterwards that's better than the Q &A maybe that I would do if I weren't having a very good day. In my mind, in my business, that does to some extent kind of freak me out a little bit. So the overall case, everyone think about that, the avatar version of you in anything you do, unless it's a physical thing like lifting a weight.

46:17Why do we not need to worry about that in general? I know it's a little bit repetitive, but it's asked in a different way because that's what it looks like. Yeah. And look, even the lifting weight, I've been told that the robotics is the next big inflection point that's about to hit. That's going to be like a science fiction book. But my view, you're right. And maybe not today, but we can imagine three to five years, you are going to be able to Zoom with an AI that can look at you, interact with you. It's going to feel like an amazing teacher or coach or coworker. I still think that at least in the teaching context, it's going to be better to have both, that you're going to have the in-person tutor.

47:00At the end of the day, there's just something very powerful that there's another sentient human being that is taking the time to care about me and that I've connected with. And no matter how good the AI gets, you're going to say, huh. I mean, it's kind of like machine-made versus handmade. made. We still value, you know, if you look at a painting and we'll pay, you know, today we'll pay a hundred times more for a original painting than for a print. Why? Because you're like, oh, there was a real sentient person who stood there and this was their real creative expression. And I think that's even more important when you're talking about someone who's looking you in the eye, even if the AI can pretend to look you in the eye, but someone who's actually looking you in the eye, who's actually emoting with you, who's actually hugging you, I think it's going to pay huge dividends.

47:50I've heard, I don't know if this is true. I'll taper what I was about to say. We think there's five senses, but there's millions of subtle cues we're constantly getting from other people, many of which are probably subconscious. I don't consciously smell someone else's pheromones, but maybe it's happening subconsciously. Or there's all sorts of gestures and things that I can't even consciously articulate. That stuff's happening. And look, I actually think the AI is going to get pretty good at some of that too, because it's going to train on a lot of things that we're not going to necessarily pick up.

48:24But I've got to believe being in the room with someone, knowing that other person is sentient, they're taking the time to care about me, is going to pay a huge psychological dividend. And if that person can be augmented with avatar versions of themselves, well, that's awesome too. Wow. What a crazy, crazy conversation. You guys, Brave New Words for me. You know, you read a book, you're like, I've read this book before. Okay. This book you've not ever read before because these times haven't existed prior. And what I love about Sal is the way in which he writes is easy for everybody to read. And he's taken a pretty complicated topic and made it very digestible and simple to understand.

49:05There's solutions and the problems are stated in the book. There's a vision in the book as well for the future. And I just think that the book is outstanding. I can't recommend the book enough, everybody. It's called Brave New Words. And I got to tell you, brother, you're one of the people that's moved culture and society forward over the last 10, 15 years in this country, around the world. Actually, not just this country, around the world. And I'm just grateful you exist. I'm grateful you made the decision you made many, many years ago with Nadia and that it's taken off to this point. and I'd love to have you back on another year or two and just update on where all this stuff is now and you can point us to the future then as well.

49:42I'd love that. No, well, I really enjoyed this conversation and let's do that. And I think in a year, we'll have a lot more to talk about. Things are moving fast. I do too, you guys. I do too. Hey, everybody, this is one of those shows. I'd listen to it two times because there's so much in here. And just start to get your head around this, guys. We're moving into a new world. We're living in it now. And it's people like Sal that can guide you through it. But hey, guys, check out Khan Academy. Make sure you do that. And make sure you get the book, Brave New Words. All right, God bless you, everybody.

50:09Max out. This is the Ed Myron Show.