VIDEO
SHIV GAGLANI: Hi, I'm Shiv Gaglani. Today on Raise the Line , I'm privileged to have one of our most well-known guests join us, Salman Khan. We've had a lot of amazing guests on the podcast, including Arianna Huffington and CEOs of various health systems and education companies, but among the most famous is Salman because of the major impact he's had over the past decade on the way all of us learn. I think he helped coin the term “flipping the classroom,” or at least popularized it with his famous Ted Talk, about a decade ago, that Bill Gates introduced him on. As you know, he's the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, which has reached tens of millions of learners. It has been translated into over 40 languages. We owe a lot of our roots at Osmosis to the work he's done because he hired Rishi Desai, our Chief Medical Officer, to begin Khan Academy Health and Medicine before he joined Osmosis. Sal, it's a total privilege to have you on the podcast today.
SALMAN KHAN: Glad to be here.
SHIV GAGLANI: The first question I have is just for the learners, for the people who don't know you, but they know Khan Academy, do you mind giving a bit of background about yourself and why you even started Khan Academy, and then obviously we'll go into how the past year with COVID has totally changed what you guys are doing.
SALMAN KHAN: Khan Academy started a little bit in a random way back in 2004. My original training or background was in tech and in math, but post business school, I found myself as an analyst at a hedge fund in Boston. About a year out of business school, I was getting married in the Northeast. My family was visiting me from New Orleans, which is where I was born and raised, and it just came out of a conversation that one of my cousins was having trouble in math, so I offered to tutor her. Her name's Nadia. She agreed, so when she went back to New Orleans I started working with her. She was 12 years old. That started working well for her, so I worked with her younger brothers. Word spread in my family that free tutoring was going on.
Before I knew it, there were 10 cousins that I was working with every night, every day after work. With a background in software, I started writing software for them. I saw a pattern, a lot of them had gaps in their knowledge, and I thought I could write software that gives them questions and that I could keep track of what they knew and what they didn't know. A friend, about a year later, said, “Hey, this is all cool, but how are you scaling your lessons?” He suggested that I make YouTube videos for my cousins. I thought it was a horrible idea. YouTube is for cats playing piano, but I got over the idea that it wasn't my idea, and I gave it a shot. I never viewed this as a business. It was funny in the late 1990s, I had sworn off entrepreneurship. I said, “I just don't have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. It's too mentally and emotionally taxing.“ So I always said, “this is just my family project,” but by 2008, 2009, it kind of took over my life.
There were about 50 or 100,000 folks using it back then. So I set it up as a not-for-profit, just thinking that “look, this could one day be maybe a new type of Oxford or Smithsonian or an institution that could be there for the world.” It was delusional. I was operating out of the same walk-in closet that I am right now to think that one day this could reach billions, but I said, “Well, why not try?”, so I set it up as a not-for-profit with a mission of a free, world-class education for anyone anywhere. In 2009, I quit my day job. I guess I had found I had to become an entrepreneur, even though I had sworn it off. That first year was tough, but by 2010 we got our first philanthropic support, and the last 10 years have just been a journey of adding more content, making the software more interactive, the practice tools for teachers, and growing the users and a lot of what you just talked about, the number of users and the translations and localization to other languages.
SHIV GAGLANI: That's amazing, so as a side note, Nadia is probably in her mid-20s now, and some of the other family members are probably also in their twenties. What are they doing now? What do they think of how explosive their private tutoring with you has become?
SALMAN KHAN: It's a little bit of a running joke with, especially with Nadia, there's a lot riding on her success. You know “don’t feel too much pressure,” but every now and then it pops. Nadia is now 27 or 28. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence, and Fareed Zakaria was her commencement address speaker. It was a little awkward. He called her out. He's like, “Oh, Nadia Raman” is here. The young girl who launched, you know, whatever, a billion lessons, and Nadia is like, "Yeah, my claim to fame is that I couldn't get unit conversions, in 7th grade," like all of her friends give her a hard time about that.
SHIV GAGLANI: That's so funny, so hundreds of millions of people and a lot of parents especially are very grateful to you obviously for creating it, but ultimately it's Nadia who created it because she needed help on unit conversions.
SALMAN KHAN: That's right. That's exactly right.
SHIV GAGLANI: That's amazing. Can you talk us a bit about the growth story from 2010 in terms of how'd you go from millions to tens to hundreds of millions, and then let’s catapult that into COVID and what you've seen over the past six months, especially?
SALMAN KHAN: When I quit my day job, there were about 50,000, 100,000 people using Khan Academy per month. That was in 2009. Pre-COVID, we were looking at about 20 million per month, so it had grown by a factor of what, 200 or something. A lot of people oftentimes say that Khan Academy went viral. It kind of did a slow version of virality, which I would call word of mouth. There's a handful of videos that maybe went a little bit viral, but there's not one video that all of a sudden had like Gangnam style type of use or something like that. It was more that I just kept making more and more content, more software. We started working with schools and then there was the Ted Talk. There were a couple of moments that were like these step functions in our growth.
We were growing quite rapidly as it is. Kind of month on month we were growing 10%, 15% every month sequentially but then in August of 2010 -- and this was when I was still operating out of my closet, I was living off of savings. It was a really stressful time -- it came out of the woodwork that Bill Gates was using Khan Academy. That was kind of mind-blowing to me, I mean, on a lot of levels. There was already a reporter from Fortune Magazine who was doing a story on Khan Academy. It was the same week that Bill Gates was at some event, and he randomly starts talking about Khan Academy, “Yes, there's this new site I'm checking out. It's really cool,” and that reporter reaches out to Bill Gates, his PR people, and they take his interview, and he's telling me, “Khan, let’s just call up Bill Gates.”
I was like, “You can do that? You can just call up Bill Gates?” He's, “Okay, he's taking the interview.” I was like, “What's the interview?” He's like, “The interview is about you.” I'm like, “What?” It was one of these crazy moments. That reporter, that first article in Fortune Magazine, when it came out at the end of August, was "Sal Khan, Bill Gates' favorite teacher." I felt like I had serious imposter syndrome. I was like, "Am I? Did he say that?" I don't want him to think that I said it. That article took us from about 100,000 people every month to about a quarter-million people every month using Khan Academy. You fast-forward to April of 2011. That's when the Ted Talk came out.
That one actually did go viral just as a Ted Talk, and then our usage went to 1,000,000. Then we went to 60 Minutes that summer, it got to 2 or 3 million a month. But then since that 3 million to get to 20 million, it's just been steady word of mouth and people just stumbling on it through search and whatever else, and then COVID hits. With COVID, in terms of learning time, we saw 3X in terms of the number of people, we saw about 50% or 60% increase, and they were spending 50% to 60% more time each. Now we're looking at the order of 30 million folks every month. Pre-COVID, they were spending about 30 million learning minutes per day, and then in the spring, we were seeing them go up to about 80, 85 million learning minutes per day.
SHIV GAGLANI: Wow. That's an incredible story. I love the mix of serendipity that sometimes happens. Sometimes when it rains, it pours bad news and good news, right? That same week Fortune was covering you, Bill Gates was mentioning you at a conference. Speaking of when it rains—and it obviously pours in 2020—we're in a really pouring year in terms of how many absurd things have seemed to happen this year. Can you talk to us a bit about your own personal experience with COVID and then dealing with it, your family. Hopefully, everyone is safe. I believe your wife is a physician if I remember correctly, so anything you can comment about that, and then you've already talked about the growth of Khan Academy during COVID-19, but you're also in Khan Lab School, and it'd be very interesting to hear about the physical school and how it's had to adjust.
SALMAN KHAN: COVID has been sub-optimal for most folks, including ourselves. Actually, I'm a little guilty admitting that I enjoy not having to travel and the efficiency of Zoom and not having to worry about looking too professional below the camera cut-off line. Those have all been wins, and looking at the whole scheme of things, I've been very fortunate. We have a nice house with a backyard where our kids can play. Our mother-in-law lives with us, so we have extra support. I get to work from home. My wife is a physician, but now she's able to spend several days seeing patients remotely. We have all the support that anyone would ever want for something like this. As I said, some of the silver linings have been less travel, more time with kids, just to be able to have lunch with them.
COVID has a way of editing your social life, and I think in a good way, so it's a lot less of the big mixer party-type, gatherings where it's like small talk. You're more of a “let's hang out in a backyard with masks on and sit around a fire and have good conversations with our closest friends and family.” It's been fine from our point of view. We're very fortunate. KLS is a school that I started back in 2014. Khan Academy was doing what it's doing. Hopefully, it reaches billions of folks. I wrote a book called OneWorld Schoolhouse in 2012. In that, the first third was how did the education system get to where it is? The middle third was kind of my story of how I ended up doing Khan Academy. And the last third was what education needs to look like or what could it look like given the tools that we now have like Khan Academy, right? Some of it has nothing to do with technology. Like why don't we have a full year, full-day schooling? Summer vacation was part of agrarian civilization, et cetera.
The fact that kids come home at 3 p.m., that's based on the Leave it to Beaver type of model, which is not the norm anymore. Maybe it never was. Can you leverage peer-to- peer learning on top of personalized software so you can get more human to human interaction? We all know the best way to learn something is to teach it. Can you do mastery-based transcripts where it doesn't matter how long it took someone to learn something? What matters is that they learned it versus the traditional system in which you have a fixed amount of time to learn it, but you have a variable outcome, A, B, C, D, F. Can you get really efficient at the traditional content, traditional skills so you can have more time for kids going out into the world and having internships or projects or being entrepreneurial? That's what we were doing.
Then COVID hits, and it shouldn't be surprising -- and I don't get any of the credit. It's really the administration and the teachers, they get all the credit here -- they didn't miss a beat because the school has been investing for the last six years in how we build autonomy with the students. One of our principles is that the sign of a great education is what do kids do when there's not an adult looking over them? This has always been a school where it'll kind of blow your mind. You'll see seven-year-olds managing their own Google calendar.
They know where they have to be, how they need to be. They know how to run a meeting agenda better than most adults, much more efficiently, and so these kids are very independent. When COVID hit -- and the teachers are very tech-savvy, and it's always been, whenever you have a live interaction, it should not be about lecturing. It should be about Socratic dialogue, problem-solving -- the kids had the agency to kind of do what they need at their own time and space. It's still suboptimal. The socialization, all of that definitely got hurt, but they've done, I think, about as well as you could expect.
SHIV GAGLANI: That's pretty incredible. I obviously knew a lot about the pedagogy at KLS, but I had no idea about the -- whatever you're using to train seven-year-olds to set good meeting agendas and use Google calendar, we should probably watch those videos too.
SALMAN KHAN: They're better than me. I'm not as structured as these kids are.
SHIV GAGLANI: That's incredible. It makes me scared, hopeful, and scared about what the next 10, 20 years will look like. Obviously, over the past decade, you all have expanded into a lot of areas. Obviously, I mentioned Rishi, our Chief Medical Officer helped work with you to create Khan Academy Health and Medicine. You partner with the folks who make the LSAT on Khan Academy Law, same with the college board and free SAT & ACT prep and then Bank of America, I believe in financial literacy, so tons of partnerships. Can you talk to us a bit about some of the most impactful partnerships and how you see partnerships playing a role in the success of what you've done at Khan Academy?
SALMAN KHAN: You just listed most of our major partnerships over the years. Partnerships can be really powerful, but you have to go into them with eyes wide open too. All of these partnerships helped either resource or validate or amplify parts of this mission in really powerful ways. I could go through all of them, but I think that's what the value of a partnership is, is that you don't have to do everything yourself. There are other folks there. You can amplify each other. A lot of times 1+1 is equal to three or five or whatever you want to make it. Our mission is free, world-class education for anyone anywhere. We have no delusion that we're going to be able to do that by ourselves. That's arguably the mission of the entire global education system, so we are always on the lookout to see where we can fit in and amplify others and where they can amplify us.
SHIV GAGLANI: Totally. Some of the most impressive ones I've seen are with telecom providers in traditionally under-resourced countries like Brazil or in the African continent where they provide free Khan Academy; it wouldn't affect the data plan. Do you think you'll see many more of those with COVID, or has that already ramped up because of COVID people can't go to schoolhouses anymore, so they need access to data, downloadable material, or through their mobile phones to your resources.
SALMAN KHAN: Yes, digital divide and internet access is foundational for Khan Academy to be able to do its work. I'd argue it's foundational for people to even participate in the economy these days. There's probably even a health aspect of it. It's foundational to just kind of being educated and taking care of your family and things like that. For example, Telcel in Mexico zero-rated Khan Academy on cell phones, so kids are learning. That kind of stuff is cool. We want to support as much of that as we can and get as many people to do that as possible, but a big dark cloud of COVID has been the digital divide issue, large chunks of the population, even in wealthy countries like the U.S., 20%, 30% don't have sufficient internet access, so those kids are not able to engage the way they need to.
There's a silver lining. I've never seen more energy around closing the digital divide at home than I've seen in the last six months, so hopefully, fingers crossed, we see some movement to make it tangible. In the U.S., we've done $2 trillion of stimulus packages. What people are talking about is going forward with another $2 to $4 trillion. 1% of a trillion is $10 billion. 1% or 2% of one of these rounds of stimulus is probably sufficient to completely close the digital divide in the United States so that this isn't an issue. I don't know what the other 98% is. I mean, we know what some of it is, and there are some good things in there, but this seems like a real no-brainer that would be a huge investment in human capital and infrastructure in the country.
SHIV GAGLANI: That's an incredible way to put it. We've all heard the stories in the U.S., under-resourced students in rural places or urban centers sitting in the McDonald's or a parking lot to use the internet and access resources at Khan Academy. Going into 2020, a lot of us were making predictions about what the new decade would bring. I don't think any of us predicted even a third of what's happened this year. What were your predictions going into 2020, this new decade, for Khan Academy and for the education system as a whole, and what do you think is different now based on what's happened this year?
SALMAN KHAN: Yes. I agree with you. It's hard to prognosticate any year, and then especially this one is straight out of a science fiction book on at least four or five levels. What I've done with my team at Khan Academy is we're kind of entering into phase 3 of our organization. Phase 1 was me tutoring cousins, operating out of a walk-in closet, just trying to show the world that this is a viable project. It's worth supporting. It could make a dent in the universe. Phase 2 was when Google and Bill Gates and all these people. Sometimes when I mentioned Bill Gates or Google, people are like, "Oh, they have as much money as they need.” No, they're keeping us hungry. We need more support. But when we started getting validation from some of these very serious people and started getting resources to start building out a team and getting office space and whatever else that was phase 2, where we showed that we could scale to tens of millions. We ran efficacy studies and scaled our content.
We now have all of math from Pre-K through core college. We're doing a big push in the sciences so we can have all of the sciences from middle and high school. We've even started to dabble in the social sciences and in language arts and obviously in the translation projects, the efficacy studies in school. So these last 10 years have been proving that out, that we can scale to many, many tens of millions of folks and that by itself, we're very proud of. It's a huge social return on investment. With the budget of a large high school, we reach over 100 million folks every year. But the next phase -- and I tell this to the team, I tell this to funders -- this is where we need to really start delivering a free, world-class education for anyone anywhere, which to me means moving the dial for countries.
I get a little stressed when I say it, but I think that's the task at hand for Khan Academy because, on one level, I'm like, "Salman, you're delusional” because countries spend huge sums of money on education. The U.S. spends I think $1 trillion a year, on the U.S. education system. We’re a vapor of that, but we have reason to believe that the way we do it with the scale, the efficiency that we can really empower teachers, we can really empower families, really empower students. To be clear, I don't do this as a replacement for traditional education. I view this ideally as something that can superpower what a teacher can do or what a family can do. That's where we are. If I were to make a prediction for the next decade, I run optimistic, is that we actually do start to move the dial. The US. is where we're the most fleshed out, but we're very deep in places like Brazil and Spanish speaking Latin America and India.
I hope we can start showing we're moving the dial for districts for States and in some cases, even countries. Khan Academy has three pillars that I’ve always talked about. Pillar 1 is, “Can we make all the course materials available from Pre-K through the core of college?” The second one is, “Can we do it in a way that's optimally engaging and personalized?” And the third one is, “Can we take those artifacts and create credentials or signals that matter to the world?” I think in the next decade, those things are going to happen. You're going to see pathways that are competency-based. It doesn't matter if it took you two weeks or two years to learn it. If you learn it, you learn it, and everyone in the world or everyone in the country is going to recognize it, and it's going to unlock doors for higher education. It's going to unlock doors for apprenticeships.
COVID in my mind just accelerates all of this. A lot of this stuff that I'd say, "maybe in five years, we'll get to the credentialing, or maybe in 10 years, we'll get to peer to peer tutoring" COVID made me say, "no, we've got to do this like next month, if we can." So I've spawned up a couple of side nonprofits that are very complimentary and are kind of layered on top of Khan Academy to do peer-to-peer tutoring. So Schoolhouse.world, anyone can get free tutoring there now, or anyone can be a tutor if they're vetted. It's also doing the certification. For instance if you master something on Khan Academy, submit a video of yourself doing it while explaining it out loud to the Schoolhouse community, you'll be peer-reviewed. If it looks legit, we say, "you've mastered on your transcript, and you get a video artifact of it. The University of Chicago just announced last week that they're taking that into consideration for this year's admission cycle, and they're giving scholarships based on your performance there. I see all of this is just going to get accelerated because of all the strangeness of the past year.
SHIV GAGLANI: I love that. That's tremendous. I didn't know about the side nonprofits. I've always said at Osmosis that you have very high-intent learners who want to get into residency, get into med school, get into nursing school. And the \the one-size-fits-all of the application process -- write a personal statement, etc -- in some ways it's useful, but in other ways, take these high-intent people and have them do something helpful. Stack Overflow is a very successful computer science site where very high-intent people could give back to the community, teaching how to code and debugging problems. It sounds like your Schoolhouse.world, but for med schools. We were like, "Oh, instead of just applying with your personal statement, how about you go and translate a Wikipedia article to another language if you can do that, or edit a Wikipedia article, if you can. It sounds very similar and...
SALMAN KHAN: ...or tutor other people on the MCAT. What could be more powerful than a high-end MCAT score if you're an MCAT tutor? On Schoolhouse, the first level is you showed mastery on Khan Academy, and you've submitted a video so it doesn't look like you cheated, but the highest level certification is you are a highly-rated tutor in that unit in calculus or physics or biology. If someone has that, honestly, that's great for college. That's great for graduate school, for med school. Frankly, I'd hire that person. I don't even care what their GPA is in college. If they're a highly-rated tutor in some topics that I really care about, not only do they have subject matter mastery, but that means that they're great communicators. They have empathy. They have patience. That seems like a winning mix.
SHIV GAGLANI: That's a really good point. That's something I'm going to look at after this interview and see if we can plug into what you're doing there.
SALMAN KHAN: I’m recruiting you to teach there.
SHIV GAGLANI: Yes. I'll carve that out for sure. That's actually how I got into education. I don't know if you know this, but when I first met Rishi at a TEDMED, I actually asked him for an intro seven years ago because I was writing a book for college admissions and SAT & ACT prep. I don't know if he ever passed that request along, but certainly, it was something I was very respectful of what you've accomplished even back in 2013. I know we're coming up on time. One question that we always like to ask our guests is since our audience consists of millions of current and future healthcare professionals, primarily, what advice would you give to somebody considering a career in healthcare or anyone of your students who may be considering that career, especially given what's happened with COVID?
SALMAN KHAN: Take anything I say with a grain of salt. My wife and I started dating when she was a first-year med student, so I've observed her medical career. I'm close to it, but I'm not a doctor. I was an MCAT instructor for Princeton, incidentally, back in the day. Actually, I couldn't afford to take the MCAT class. I first called them and said, “How much would it cost?” They said it was like $1,000 or $3,000 or something, and then I called back and said, “How much would you pay to teach it?” They said, “What's your MCAT score?” I was like, “I’m actually going to take it in like three months, but I know my stuff, trust me.” They gave me like a pop MCAT when I went in, and I did fine. But my advice is one, it's an amazing profession, but it's always good to go in with eyes wide open. Not with, I'll say, the obvious stereotype of many say South Asian families where like...
SHIV GAGLANI: ...I know what you're talking about.
SALMAN KHAN: ...they viewed the medical profession as everything. If you're not that, maybe it's nothing. I think you really have to introspect as to why you're doing it. Are you doing it because your family or your culture is telling you that this is the only way to do it, or it's the way to have a secure life? Those are all legitimate things. You need respect. You need money and job security, and all this is really about moving the dial for people because when you see the actual work of doctoring, it's a service that you're doing for people. That goes both ways. I think that people with the right mindset, they like being in service to other people. Well, I think for others, they're like, “Oh, this is hard. Like, I wish I had a desk job and was able to write software and record videos like Sal and stuff like that.” I've met people who are on either side of that.
I would say the other thing is, I think it's a really exciting time to go into medicine because there are so many opportunities for improvement. I think the intersection between health and education is a really interesting one. A lot of bad outcomes actually are really not just because it's noncompliance. It’s about people just not knowing how to take care of themselves as well as they should, or not a good efficient use of doctor's time where maybe they have to explain more than they should have to and things like that. So I think there are a lot of opportunities there. I have a lot of friends in the venture capital community who are doing, I think, some interesting things in healthcare. It's an exciting time to be a doctor. It is one of those fields that is all encompassing, so you have to go into it for the right reason.
SHIV GAGLANI: Yes. That's tremendous. Actually, I went to med school. I'm still on leave from Hopkins med school, but I mostly followed in your footsteps...
SALMAN KHAN: ...I’m sure they’re waiting for you to come back!
SHIV GAGLANI: My mind is funny. I know you went to HBS too. I was debating whether to defer or not even go to HBS, and my mom said, “Look, Shiv. You've already taken time off of Hopkins Med School. If you don't go to HBS, I will disown you,” so I did that to make her happy.
SALMAN KHAN: People might think that that's some kind of false threat. I don't know about your mom. She might've been joking, but I know some families, some who I'm related to, where that would be a real threat, unfortunately. I don't endorse that. I don't endorse it. There's some psychological trauma that happens.
SHIV GAGLANI: For some immigrant South Asian families, for sure. Well, I don't want to take up too much of your time because I know we're out of time, but I will say that the patient education and engagement piece is something that you and I have spoken of before that I think is extremely exciting, especially with what COVID has proven to us about how little people know about public health measures. It took forever to get people to wash their hands and wear masks and still, a lot of people didn't do it. Is there anything final that you want to be able to share with our audience so we can be respectful of your time? Anything I didn't ask that you'd like to share?
SALMAN KHAN: No, I think, I think we covered everything. Whenever there's a big crisis -- who was it Winston Churchill who said “never waste a good crisis” -- and obviously, we're having a crisis in healthcare. We're having a crisis in economics. We're having a crisis in education right now. But that's an opportunity, especially the young folks listening, they could probably tackle things in all three of those areas considering their interest in healthcare, so it's an interesting time to be alive.
SHIV GAGLANI: Those are some great parting words, and Salman, on behalf not only of our listeners, I really want to thank you for taking the time. Also, it's interesting whenever I meet a medical student or even doctors now, because you've been doing Khan Academy for 10 years, so many of them say they got their start and were able to finally understand things because they started on Khan Academy. So thanks for as we say, “raising the line” and helping people get into the healthcare profession and really any profession from the start. I really appreciate the work you do.
SALMAN KHAN: It's all for selfish motivation, so they take better care of me when I inevitably show up!
SHIV GAGLANI: Hopefully, you won't need hundreds of millions of doctors because that's what...
SALMAN KHAN: ...just a handful of good ones.
SHIV GAGLANI: With that, I'm Shiv Gaglani. Thank you to our audience for checking out today's show, and remember to do your part to flatten the curve and raise the line. We're all in this together.
