In 2004, Sal Khan, then a hedge fund manager, started tutoring one of his cousins when she needed extra help with math. He started recording YouTube videos of his tutorials that he then turned into an interactive global education platform called Khan Academy. Khan is now pushing the boundaries of education even further. His book Brave New Words explores how artificial intelligence will transform learning.
I sat down with Sal Khan to talk about Khan Academy and his vision for the future of education. Sal Khan, welcome to Meet the Press. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for being here.
So let's talk about Khan Academy. You started Khan Academy after you started tutoring your Cousin back in 2004. You were helping her with math. Now you have a 180 million users worldwide.
It's just extraordinary. Bill Gates has called you one of the most exciting innovators in education. Did you ever imagine Khan Academy would get to this moment, this point? No, I definitely, I definitely have grandiose visions every now and then.
But I quickly, I try to ground myself. Maybe I had some daydreams, but if someone asked me, realistically, no, I wouldn't have thought in, you know, 10, 15 years it would have happened like this. Well, remarkably, I had the great pleasure and honor of interviewing you back in 2011. I was just starting my career at NBC News, and you were just getting Khan Academy off the ground.
How did you take it to a place where you have hundreds of millions of users all around the world? Yeah, 2011, we were just as you know, I quit my day job and set up a nonprofit in 2009. We didn't get funding for Kanikai. We filmed it funding until 2010 so that we were like months into the end of 2010.
So you called the economy four, five months. We were above a Chinese tea shop in downtown Mountain View. And, you know, at the time, we already had some scale. We were at about a few million learners, as you mentioned, is now 180 million.
But, you know, it's just a lot of word of mouth. We've added a ton of content. You know, at the time, our goal was to cover all of math from pre K to the core of college. Now our goal is to cover all of academic learning from pre K to the core of college.
We've been working with school districts. We're now in 50 languages. There's 50 plus efficacy studies on what we're doing. We're much larger team.
We interviewed me back then. I think we were maybe eight or nine people. When I first interviewed you, you were still putting your office space together. Oh, so we were like four people.
Yes. We had all this IKEA furniture that we were putting together. Yeah. Now we're 350, where hundreds of thousands of people donate to us.
We're still primarily philanthropically supported, but, yeah, it's come a long way. What does that mean to you? To know that you are quite literally impacting children all around the world. And full disclosure, including my daughter, who's 4 years old, who uses Khan Academy to help her learn.
You know, I pinch myself all the time. I, you know, I don't want to jinx it, but I tell my wife all the time, like, I would switch places with anyone. So it's fun to work on intellectually, to be able to tackle this problem. When I was a kid, and every kid probably thinks about, oh, how do you tackle the problems of the world?
And I always use to peel the onion. It all does boil down to education. And now we get letters. Even back in 2011, I was getting letters from people all over the world.
My wife and I just had a young woman from Afghanistan who, who used Khan. When the Taliban took over Kabul, she couldn't go to school. She used Khan Academy as her school. And then she applied to mit and MIT said, oh, well, you need to be able to prove to us that that's your work.
And then we have this other platform called schoolhouse.world, where you can get free tutoring and you can verify your knowledge. And so she used that. And she's a freshman at mit. And so when we hear stories of people like her.
This is about three, four years ago, I met a young. No, five, six years ago, I met a young man who was in prison for 15 or 16 years. And his mother gave him transcripts of Khan Academy while he was in prison. And when he got out, he was most excited at age 32 of using Khan Academy.
And then he took the SAT and he did so well, he was able to transfer to Stanford as a junior. And that's where I met him. I was giving a guest lecture at Stanford and I said, any questions? And this 32 or 33 year old raises his hand and he starts crying and things like that.
It feels like in a science fiction book. Just to put a fine point on this, as you said, Khan Academy is now in 50 different languages all around the world. You teach math, science, writing, SAT prep, just about every subject. What was the vision that led you to expand Khan Academy this way?
And why do you think it resonates with so many students around the world? Well, you know, back in 2008, as you mentioned, I was touring my cousin. I was an analyst at Headshot at the time and I like that job. But I was getting all these letters from people.
The viewership was growing. I was writing software for my cousins too. And I've always thought that's where the real learning happens. But at some point I started taking over my life.
And so when I set it up, there were some venture capitalists who were trying to get me to start. And it was tempting, but I just thought about these young people who wouldn't get access to it if I could paywall or anything like that. So that's why I set up as a nonprofit. And I was sitting in my walk in class, which is still headquarters of Khan Academy.
And I never started a not for profit before, but there's a line on the IRS form, they say mission colon. And I honestly thought about it for eight seconds. I said free world class education for anyone, anywhere. And I think it probably sounded delusional for a guy in a walk in closet.
And even 50 years ago it probably would have been delusional. But I was thinking about, look, I'm just this one guy. And these people from anywhere from Africa to Mongolia to New York City are able to use this around the clock. This scales.
The Internet software allows us to personalize education in ways that you couldn't do it before. So it seemed plausible that the same way you could have stores going from commerce to E commerce, maybe you could take institutions, things like universities, and make them a public good on the Internet. I remember those early days, it was just me. Someone point out that Khan Academy was getting more usage in a month than Harvard had in its history.
And so that's when I started thinking, well, maybe this could be like something that could reach billions of people and why not go for it all? All the academic material eventually doing credentials give pathways make people reach their potential. You talk about the importance of personalized education. Why is it so important that it's personalized?
And you say really a one on one experience. In many ways, if you go back, and this is a particular day, if you go back about 2,300 years, you would see Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great or who would be later called Alexander the Great. And for most of human history, that was the gold standard of education. You had a personal tutor or sometimes a team of tutors, but most people didn't get that.
You had to be a prince, you had to be a member of nobility. And about two, 300 years ago, we had this very utopian Idea mass public education. But we had to compromise. We couldn't afford to give everyone a personal tutor.
So we bashed students together in groups of 25, 30, 35. We start moving them together. And that's the system we have today. And it's done hugely positive things.
Literacy rates have gone through the roof. Things like algebra, esoteric. Now we expect everyone to learn it. But we also know that a lot of people fall behind.
And if you are a middle class, upper middle class family or you have a very good cousin, you might be able to get some tutoring. And that's what upper middle class families have always known. Or you know, hey, let me get a tutor so that my child doesn't fall behind because that tutor can personalize. Or if you talk to any teacher they know in those 30 students, some kids are ready to race ahead.
Some kids might be a grade level or two behind. And you kind of have to teach to the middle. So what personalization allows you in the class of 20 or 30, or if you're learning by yourself, to get a little bit more of that attention? Speed up, slow down, dig deep when you need it.
In 2019, you started to partner with school districts or why was that such an important step for you to take at that time? Everything that we do at Khan Academy, we want to move the dial for all students. And in 2019, we had a ton of students and teachers using Khan Academy. And we start reaching out to school districts and say, hey, look, a bunch of teachers are using us.
A bunch of students. Look at all these efficacy studies we have. And every superintendent told us, oh, look, we would love to use you in the entire district, but you have to give us support and training and integration with our rostering systems and dashboards. And so that's when we said, look, if we're serious about moving the dial for cities, for states, for countries, for the world, we have to work with the global public education system.
So we always, we're doing it informally. That's why we started the formal partnership. How complicated was it to start partnering with school districts? Because it sounds incredibly daunting.
It was daunting when we started and there was a bunch of close advisors, even a few members of our board, saying, this is going to get hard. You know, we're just putting stuff out there. Whoever wants to use it is using it. But now you have to go be compliant with all the regulations in school districts.
But, you know, we went with eyes wide open. And it's actually good to be a little bit naive sometimes because you're willing to try, but so far so good. We're approaching about a million and a half students and teachers just in U.S. districts.
And those are the formal partnerships. It's tens of millions of, if you just think about people who are using it. And I was just in Brazil, we're talking to some of the major school districts in Brazil. I was in Australia, we're doing a lot of work in India and Philippines and Thailand and in Vietnam.
And so, yeah, we're making headway. You said something that's really interesting. You said sometimes it gets a little bit naive. And another way to put that is you don't put boundaries on what you imagine that you can do.
Where does that come from, Sal? And to what extent does that, is that a guiding principle for you? If I were to guess, I read a lot of science fiction books and you know, one of the cool things about science fiction books, especially more epic ones, is it happens on just a huge scale. And a lot of times I cite Isaac Asimov's foundation series.
For anyone who hasn't watched that read that, I encourage them to read it. But it takes place 30,000 years in the future and he's colonized the galaxy. And this academic sees that a dark age is coming where you're going to have the empire collapse, and he sets up a foundation with all of the galaxy's knowledge to shorten that dark ages. I read that when I was in seventh grade and when Khan Academy was starting.
Like, what if Khan Academy be like the foundation and hopefully ran I drink the dark ages. But if we could imagine a world where anyone on the planet, on the planet, regardless of what the government's doing, regardless of if they're in a rural area, they have access to an education, a world class education, they can participate, they can get connected to the economy, then today will look like a dark ages. It'll be a pretty cool time to live. Do you ever have days where you think the task that I'm taking on is too enormous, where you have felt daunted on this extraordinary journey that you've been on to really help educate the world's population?
There are, you know, if 2009 Sal saw 2025 Sal like, oh, wow, Khan Academy stunt grade. We were tens of millions, hundreds of millions of users. But 2025, tell me this is, you know, now I feel as far as we've come, I tell this to the team all the time and our funders. It's a proof of concept.
Yeah, 180 million. That's great. But guess what? There's 2, 3 billion folks who need to learn.
About 8 billion people need to learn. And with things like artificial intelligence, you're going to have economic dislocation. You know, there' whole country is going to have to reskill their labor force based on what's probably going to happen in the next 10, 20 years. So the task is huge.
But I tell our team if it's not us who's going to do it? No one else is really thinking about this on this scale. So Sal, we are currently in the midst of really a revolution in artificial intelligence. And you have said you would like to give every school a software update.
What does that mean? What would that look like? What I remind myself and everyone else. AI is moving so fast in a lot of ways it's exciting.
It's also scary frankly. It's not to get over index on the technology, but always take a step back and think about what problems are we trying to solve. And in education it goes back to ideally we would have personalized education for every student. Ideally we would have a one to one student teacher ratio, but we don't have the resources for that.
And so our true north in this AI world is really the same true north we've always had. As you mentioned, I started tutoring my cousins and contact me over the years using the like video, using things like software, using things like teacher tools has been trying to scale up in a class of 30 the kind of thing that I was able to do with my cousins. And now in an AI world we're imagining, hey, we could go even further. So it's not about replacing humans.
I think that would be a disaster. It's about having that teacher in that classroom being able to one get better support themselves. Teachers spend a ton of time with things like grading papers, writing lesson plans, progress reports. And then every teacher they know they can't be with every all 30 of their students at the same time.
So if you imagine, if you go to a teacher and say, hey, what if we got you four or five graduate students who show up in your classroom and help your students make sure that they're working on the right thing, they're staying on task every night, they're going to work with you to help plan tomorrow's lesson, grade some papers and then administer tomorrow's class and you're in charge, would you want that teacher? And most teachers say yeah, absolutely, where you get the resources. And that's what we hope. AI can start to at least one of the dimensions.
So you think that AI is actually helping teachers to be more effective. Yeah, most people, I think all people who become teachers, they get into it for that human connection. And if they think about it from a student point of view, the times that I remember really connecting with the teacher weren't because they gave, I mean sometimes they gave dazzling lecture, but it was usually because they said, hey Sal, I talk to you. Hey Sal, that was really great what you did.
Or hey Sal, cut that out. If you gotta work on that, it's when they noticed you and they were gonna have that human connection. And most days teachers don't have the time for that with most of the students. But in a world where you can take some things off of their plate, where students can be more supported in the moment so they're not getting stuck on their, on their homework in the middle of the night, where they can have a question answer without them feeling embarrassed or feeling stupid or whatever they might think is happening and just supporting the humans to have more human to human interaction.
I think that's what we do. We have a school in. My kids go to Con Law School. And the true north of it is yes, we do use technology, but it should be technology in service for more human to human interaction.
In 2003, you developed something called khanigo. The word clearly derived from the Spanish conmigo, which means with me. And it's like a personalized AI tutor. Where did you get the idea for this and how does it enhance what you're trying to do overall with Khan Academy?
This was almost exactly three years ago. I got an email from Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at OpenAI. And this was just a reminder for folks. This was six months before ChatGPT came out.
No one was really closely paying attention. And we were the first, I believe, the first or one of the first organizations that they showed GPT4 to. And GPT4 was even a more advanced model than what ChatGPT was initially built on. And when we saw it, um, it had issues for sure.
But it could also emulate the types of chat conversations that I was having with my cousins back in 2004 and 2005. And so we immediately thought if we could simulate what a one on one tutor could do. Beyond videos, I made 7,000 videos, a legitimate critique of vendors. What the student has a question.
I was like, well, there's probably a video for that, but now they can literally ask a question. Or if you're stuck while you're doing an exercise on Khan Academy, now you can get that support. But not doing it for you, but do it Socratic. I remember that first night that we had access and I prompted, you are Socratic tutor.
We don't do this now. But at that time I said, you're the Robin Williams character from Dead Poet Society and you know, tutor me. And it did it. Not perfectly, but it did it.
And that was in those early days. And so that's when our imagination started to say, hey, why couldn't we use this not by itself, but in conjunction with teacher tools, in conjunction with videos, in conjunction with the software exercises to get that much closer to what Alexander the Great had with Aristotle. Well, in your book Brave New Words, which is about the future of AI and education, you talk about Khan Academy given early access by ChatGPT. Exactly what we're talking about.
You also write that you had initial fears about it, that this would somehow create a generation of cheaters. But then you ultimately came around and came to the conclusion that you now have, which is that there are real benefits. What do you say though, to parents and to teachers who are concerned that AI will lead to more cheating? So you gotta access the first thing I try to do.
I tried to get it to cheat and it did cheat. Like, oh no, this is gonna open up a Pandora's box. And it's not just cheating. It would hallucinate, it would make up facts.
And they still can sometimes make up facts. Your computer was awfully bad at math. It was not always doing the right thing. And then there was issues of what if a student asks to do something inappropri.
What if you're asking to how do you harm someone? Or if you're having just something that's not healthy. And our team, we started having all these debates. We had signed all these non disclosure agreements.
We were the only people. There were a few people in the world were having these debates at the time. And that's when I told the team, look, these are real risks, but let's write them down and put guardrails and then move forward because there's so much positive, so many positive things that can happen. So let's make it so more cheating, it'll be Socratic.
Let's give the teachers and administrators and parents transparency in what's going on. Let's have another AI look at the conversation and make sure that if the students doing something shady that it can notify parents and teachers. And in my book I have a chapter on cheating and I start off the chapter, before you even get into AI, what was the state of cheating before chatgpt it existed. It existed.
And it existed actually pretty, pretty blatantly. A lot of places there's websites, well for the last 20 years that will write your paper for you for $5 a page. There's sorority sisters and fraternity brothers who've been sharing papers for a very long time. So things like that have always existed.
And the opportunity here is we have something called writing coach on Khanmigo. And what that does is the teacher can assign through the AI and the AI won't do it for the student, but with the student it'll act as an ethical writing coach. They'll go through brainstorming, they'll do outlining, it'll draft, give some feedback and when the student submits the essay through the AI now the teacher just doesn't get the final output like our teachers got when we were young. The teacher gets the whole process.
It's like being able to talk to the tutor. How long did this take Sal? Did he, did he work on it? And the AI can actually notify the teacher, hey, this paragraph right here, we didn't work on it.
It just showed up and it looks a little different than Sal's other writing. Maybe you want to look into it and that's the way that you can really police these things. But it's not just about policing. It's also about supporting better, you know.
Several school districts, including some of the biggest in the country, New York, Los angeles, initially banned ChatGPT over fears of cheating, over fears that students would be too reliant on them. How do you think school districts as a whole should approach AI? It's interesting. When we first were talking to OpenAI back in 2022, the whole the big launch was going to be in March of 2023.
That was the day that they were when they were going to launch GPT4 and they were, we were going to launch Kongo on the Same day in November 2022, ChatGPT comes out and even the OpenAI folks didn't expect it. And as you mentioned, everyone starts banning it. And I was pretty bummed because we're working on something with guardrails that's pedagogically positive, that has transitive for teachers. And here's a tool that's very clearly abuse for cheating.
It had a lot of inaccuracies, et cetera. And in some ways it was a blessing because by the time three months came around, a lot of the school districts started realized look, this is going to be a part of kids future and there's probably ways of leveraging it in the classroom that are positive. If only someone would put the right guardrails, if only someone would give teachers tools and provide transparency. And so when we launched Khanmigo, we were bracing ourselves.
It was like, oh, Khan Academy, you still like them, but not doing all this AI stuff. But people like, oh, thank you, thank you for doing this. And at the time we launched it as a pilot and we were hoping that maybe even a few, 5, 10,000 students in school districts would formally use it. And if you told me that in two or three years it would be a million, two million are using it, I would say, oh, that's quick to ambitious, but that's where it is.
So this is fascinating because polls show that people are very divided about how they feel over AI. But you are saying the reaction that Khan Academy got to incorporating AI was largely positive. Was there any backlash? I think, you know, if anything, it's almost flipped the other direction where pretty much every school district we talk to feels a need to be doing something with AI.
And if anything, it's a role reversal. I find myself and our team saying, hold on a second, you know, don't just use AI for AI's sake. Try to come up with the problems that you're trying to solve and then make sure that AI can actually solve that. Well, right now, as you can imagine, there's probably 10 startups starting every day that are like, oh, we do this, we can do that.
Like school districts, be very careful, make sure this can actually move the dial. Because we've seen this happen before. When computers first came out in personal computers in the 80s and 90s, a lot of school districts bought them and they collected dust when the Internet came. Oh, we need this for everyone.
But sometimes they collected dust when the iPad came out. There's some cases of school districts spending hundreds of millions of dollars, but they didn't know what to do with it. So we're really encouraging everyone with AI, where there's an education around, what are the problems you're trying to solve? If you can solve it with pencil and paper, solve it with pencil and paper.
But there's certain things like personalization, helping teachers with their lesson planning that we think AI can be really helpful. You are a father of three. I have two children. And I know one of the concerns that I have about AI is that my kids will become reliant on AI for writing, for thinking about complex problems, for math.
What do you say to parents like me who have that concern that AI will make it Harder for their kids to do independent and tough thinking on their own. AI is a technology, it's a tool. And I also point out, folks, the tools themselves are neutral. They can be positive or negative.
Fire, which is probably the first tool that we learn to harness as a species. You can destroy, burn, but you can also keep warm, prepare food. Same thing with AI, it's going to amplify your intent. So, yes, if your children are using it to cheat, if your children are using it to cut corners, to kind of check out, that's not good, that's not a healthy thing.
But if they're using it to go deeper into a conversation to answer their questions, it's actually a really powerful skill. We're seeing that in schools. The kids that know how to ask questions, they're off to the races with AI. But a lot of kids, they haven't been able to build that muscle yet.
And this is hopefully helping them build. And the teachers say yes, those teachers are often not going to raise their hand and ask a question. They're not articulating what they need. And so this might be a good outlet for them.
And also in the workplace, you know, now at Khan Academy with our team, and I think every executive is doing this in their team. How are you using AI? We're pushing our employees to leverage AI more. So you want your children or anyone's children to be really thoughtful about how use these tools, make sure that they're not, they're not using it to amplify their laziness, but they're using it to amplify their creativity, to amplify their, you know, they're brainstorming with it, they're digging deeper, they're accelerating, they're learning, they're doing things like that.
It can be very positive. Let me ask you about the state of education overall. According to a survey from the Department of education, just 14% of 13 year olds said they read for fun almost every day, with another 22% saying they read it for fun once a week. In fact, reading for pleasure is at its lowest level since the question was first asked in 1984.
How do parents and teachers grapple with that fact? Sal? It's a hard one. And I'd be lying if I would say we didn't struggle with that in our own house because, you know, look, if we were in like, you know, the Victorian era, reading was the source of entertainment.
There was no tv, there was no radio, there was definitely no social media or Internet. So people forget these Victorian era novels that we Force our kids to read. This was entertainment. Kids were like, mom, dad, can I read?
You know, Pride and Prejudice, please? So, you know, there's just so much more that's competing for children's time now, for all of our time. I mean, I would put the question at adults, too. You know what?
I think the best we can do as parents is one, we should be modeling it for our kids. If we can put our devices away, if we can be reading books. I think a lot of times our kids pay more attention to what we're doing than most people realize. But, yeah, we try in our house.
Some of this has happened very recently. Like last night. Put the computer down. We got to spend some time reading as a family.
And, you know, sometimes I catch myself like, oh, wait, I'm telling them to read. And I'm on, you know, I'm trying to solve some Google on my phone and let's all read as a family. You know, a recent study from your alma mater MIT found that using AI Chatbox actually reduces activity in the brain versus accomplishing the same tasks unaided. Does that worry you?
Because I hear you talking about what can be the real benefits of AI. But that study is pretty stark. Yes, and that's just as a bit of a double click on it. They did different use cases, and the use case where they showed the kind of the brain atrophy happening was the use case where they gave the kids homework problems and they said, just use AI for them.
So you can imagine, of course they said, you didn't do the homework. They just typed in the question and gave the answer and they copy and pasted it. So of course those kids aren't going to learn. It's analogous to if you did a study, you said, kids, go home and cheat on your homework, will you learn?
No, of course you're not going to learn. So it is all about how you use the technology. And it's fair. You know, kids left their own devices, will probably try to find the quickest path to doing their work.
And that's where the transparency on the tools, where the teachers can see what students are doing, they can see if they're actually engaging versus not engaging, that the AI can report back to the teacher that A is on the teacher's side. It isn't some hat thing happening in some back alley where the kids are like, hey, give me this. It's like I'm telling the teacher everything we're doing together. So it's in your incentive to engage.
But I think there's an Opportunity because of that, to go to do more engagement. There's tons of education research that if you can go back and forth and have a conversation, you're going to learn much better than if you just read something or watch a video or even just do an exercise. And now AI starts to bring that capability, but we can enforce it because it's going to be transparent to the teacher. I know that one of the issues you really care about is the lack of access that we see in schools all across this country, whether it be to the Internet, effective, fast Internet, or these teaching tools like AI.
How do you see Khan Academy playing a role in helping to expand access nationwide? The way we think about it, and you know, the first time we met many, many years ago, when we went to schools, especially went to more low income schools, you didn't have enough computers, you didn't have Internet access. The good thing is in the United States now is in Brazil. I can't say that about Brazil.
In the United States now, almost every school we visit has sufficient devices, has sufficient computers, and now it's access to tools that will really accelerate students learning. And you know, we talked about Khan Academies. We want to raise the ceiling and we also want to raise the floor. There's a ton of schools that a majority of minority, majority schools, I know that's a mouthful, don't offer courses like calculus, don't offer courses like advanced physics.
And so there might be a few kids or many kids who are ready for that, but they're not able to compete to reach their potential. So we want Khan Academy to be a way for them to get access to those courses. Or, you know, here in Newark, I visited a few months ago, there was a young boy, I think he's in third or fourth grade now, he's off to the races on Khan Academy and he's now doing algebra 2 or pre calculus. And so that's a young man who, he's gonna do amazing things for his community.
And his genius would not have been discovered if he didn't have a way to do this. All these other students in the same class who are two or three grade levels behind and once again, if you just keep pushing them forward, you're going to have to water down the curriculum in order to make it look like they're dancing, which is unfortunately happening too often. A majority of kids going to college, they have to take remedial math, which is essentially middle school math, because they were just promoted year after year. So our hope is the personalization, the access to rigorous Materials.
When we survey kids at universities who use Khan Academy, they said this was the rigorous course that really prepared me because my high school wasn't used to sending kids to this type of environment. It's just extraordinary to hear you talk about it. And I wonder what you think about the future of education. When you think about a classroom 10, 20 years from now, what does it look like in your mind?
Yeah, before, when people used to ask me, in 50 years, I was like, oh, yeah, the world's not gonna change that much. And now when they say five years, let's go, it's gonna be very different. What I would like to see, and this is what we're building forward, is if we go to classroom in 10 or 20 years. At first, this is just a great classroom.
The kids are talking to each other. The teacher is walking around, sitting next to the students, saying, he does a great job. I really like how you did that. Kids look really engaged.
It will look like an exceptional classroom today. But when you start paying closer attention, you'll realize that the teacher and the student have much more support to do that really engaging experience than they've ever had before. Maybe the teacher has something whispering into its ear, into their ear, saying, hey, you know, go talk to Kristen. She just.
She's really engaged today. She's really excited about today's topic. Go give her some encouragement. She could really.
Why don't you go now, talk to breakout group number five. They're having a little bit of a conflict. I think they need you. And then that night, that teacher's able to co create with the AI an even more engaging lesson based on what the students have said or done.
And the AI can. Hey, yesterday's lesson went well. The kids really enjoyed it. I talked to them about it, but a lot of them were still confused about the main idea of a paragraph.
So why don't we reteach that tomorrow in this way? So the teacher always feels like they're really supportive. And the students never feel stuck. And when they come to class, they don't feel like it's a class where they just have to sit still with their finger on their lip, but they can.
It's play. They get to talk to each other, move around. It's games, simulations, and in theory, you can do some of that today. And some amazing, heroic teachers are doing it.
But it is a lot of work to do really, really, really well. And I hope that it can be everywhere. We can also imagine augmented reality and virtual reality, but I think that's actually the Meat of it. I actually think it's unlocking the human to human connection by taking out a lot of the administrative planning and support.
T Sal, how do you, Sal Khan, the head of Khan Academy, keep up with the pace of technology? This is, this is one of those. Every day I probably want to check my phone. I'd have like five teammates.
Have you seen this? Have you seen that? Have you seen this? We have to do this by next month.
And so it doesn't make your head spin. But what I keep telling myself and I keep telling the team, Khan Academy and our board and our founders are our true north, is trying to build towards that classroom where there's more human to human connection. Trying to build to that world where every student on the planet, whether it's a young girl in Afghanistan or orphan and Mongolian, there are real stories this happening. Have access to the same education that your night kids have access to and then they can prove it and that eventually can get jobs with it and they can go get into college or get into graduate school with it.
And as long as we stay on that true north, yes, AI will be a part of it, but so will very simple tools. We should do it in the simplest possible way. Do you think that we are getting smarter as a country, as a world community? My guess is that things are, you know, we talk about polarization and politics and you know, maybe even in wealth and things like that.
You know, if for someone who is engaged with their learning, who is curious, this is the most exciting time to be alive. There are young people, actually people of all ages. I remember I got a letter from a woman who had terminal cancer and she said her life dream was to learn calculus. She was going to spend the next three months of the rest of her life on calculating calculus.
So for someone who's curious, there's no ceiling to. Especially now with artificial intelligence and everything else that's happening. You know, you're going to see 10 year olds learn quantum physics and there are going to be people who push the frontiers. At the same time we know that, that these same technologies can be used to make very addictive things.
You could, you know, social media people are already, their companies are already building AI friends, AI girlfriends and boyfriends. You're going to have AI entertainment that is very, very immersive and I'm excited about some of that. But if it gets too addictive, these games and this entertainment, then yeah, you could see this divide of the people who are using the tools to accelerate their own potential and the people who are Kind of in like a opium haze of, you know, I mean, you've already seen that in places in East Asia. Unfortunately, a lot of young men are so addicted to video games, they're not even getting out, forming connections.
So, yeah, I worry about that. But whenever I think about that, I think about, well, maybe there's ways of using the same technology to put guardrails, you know, right now on a computer. Every parent worries what their kids are doing. We worry about it at home.
There's very blunt instruments where you can protect from certain sites I know AI can observe and be on. The parents and the teacher sides say, hey, that article's not appropriate for you. Or you played this video game for half an why don't you go to a little bit of Khan Academy? Better, why don't you go around outside right now?
Or why don't you actually call up your friend instead of just chatting with that same friend for a little bit? And it can do that if you can report to the parent, like, hey, why don't you go walk over and get them to play outside? In fact, you go for a walk because you've been on your phone too long too. And just finally, Sal, Khan Academy has just expanded and grown in the most extraordinary way since I first interviewed you back in 2011.
What is next for Khan Academy? So a lot of what we're doing now is, as you mentioned, expanding into districts, expanding into international districts, expanding into writing, which I don't think we were going to be able to do in the near future. But because of what we're able to do, artificial intelligence, writing, reading comprehension, I'm hoping to start being able to give people credit for the work they do on Khan Academy. We have a sister, a non profit, called Schoolhouse World, which is all about free peer to peer live tutoring.
So this is about human connection. So anyone in the world can go to schoolhouse and actually get free live tutoring. And these other tutors are vetted volunteers who've proven to know the material. Some of them are software engineers, retired teachers.
Some of them are just really precocious college students, high school students. We have a platform on schoolhouse where people can have dialogues. This is another issue. No one's talking to each other.
But we had a conversation with kids in the US talking to kids in China about free speech. We're having kids in red states and blue states talk about everything from Israel and Palestine to gun rights to all the hot button issues, but they're able to have respectful dialogues about it. So we're just trying to build out all the content, new ways for humans to interact with each other, tutor each other having conversations, and then be able to prove it so they can get into college. A lot of universities in the popular cities in the country are using Khan Academy plus Schoolhouse to let kids in.
They want these kids who are tutoring each other. They want these kids who are having dialogue. And I'm hoping in the next five years we can maybe we can have a way for people to get diplomas. If you're in a rural place, you don't have access.
You're an adult who needs to reskill that. We can play a role there. Well, we look forward to watching all of that happen. Salcon, thank you so very much for joining us.
I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I'm Craig Melt. Cheers.
Cheers. Cheers. I've always been a glass half full kind of guy, and now I'm talking to some people who look at the world that way too. It's really fascinating.
Folks who share their defining moments, their triumphs, their challenges, their stories are fun and quite candid. So I hope you're joining each week and who knows, you might just come away with your own Glass app. Full search Glass Apple with Craig Melbourne From Today on YouTube and wherever you get your podcast. Hey, everyone, I'm Dylan Dryer, co host of the third hour of Today and mom to three wild boys.
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