Khan Academy CEO: The Real AI Opportunity Is in Boring Industries | Sal Khan

0:00 And so they're asking, and we're saying, "Hey, use more AI. Use more AI." Software engineering, design, product management in all of these tech firms, including at Khan Academy, are changing fundamentally. >> This is Sal Khan. He runs Khan Academy. 100 million people learn on it every year. He built one of the first AI tutors in the world. >> Excellent work. >> No one has spent more time on how people re-skill for AI. >> If we could do three times more with the same resources, we will do three times more. So that would never be the catalyst for layoffs. If you can automate yourself out of a job, we're going to give you a better job with better pay.

0:34 >> What are you thinking about the next five minutes? >> Don't run to where everyone else is running. Try to find the lanes that are most empty. And I would say >> Thanks to HubSpot for startups for sponsoring this video. >> And we're in this interesting phase where AI is changing everything, and your previous book was called Brave New Words. And now you're writing a book called Job Shock. So what has changed in the past two years?

0:59 >> well, what has changed? So much has changed. you know, what I wrote in my last book, Brave New Words, about AI and education, I when I was writing this in 2023, I was afraid that as soon as I write it, it would be obsolete because things are changing so fast. But I keep looking at it, and it's it's still I feel very relevant. I write about things like how AI will brought AI will broaden the aperture of how we assess people, how, you know, peo- people have talked a lot about AI tutors, but there's other forms of assessment, interviews, oral exams.

1:31 And you actually are starting to see some of that. So we could talk a lot of, you know, some of those things that were just ideas 3 years ago, we're now seeing in reality. I just talked to head of admissions at Caltech. And a lot of students who apply, they they give these research papers they've done. And the admissions officer says, "Some of these are real, and some of them not clear if the student did the work, etc." And so they're already using AI to send you to oral exams with these students to evaluate if they understand. and this is pretty high stakes. This is for admissions to to top universities. So you're already seeing AI in that part.

2:03 We've launched Khan Migo out into classrooms. We've learned a lot. There's for a lot of students it's been super useful, but we've also learned that AI 101 or the first 1.0 AI, it it it's waiting to be asked to do something and some students don't want to know how to do it. A lot of them didn't. So what we're now we're in the process of launching a new version. It's more proactive and it isn't AI for AI's sake.

2:29 It's how do we get AI to motivate students, give them more practice, have the teacher in the loop, etc. In terms of why I'm now writing Job Shock, which is some people are surprised cuz most of not just my books, but most of the things I've ever said I tend to be pretty optimistic. But I'm I am increasingly worried. You know, not too far from this is about I don't know. I want to say about three or four months ago, maybe a little longer. I have a a good friend from college who's now a prominent VC and he said, "Hey Sal, I want to talk about reskilling." And so I took I remember I drove over his place not too far from here in Los Altos and while I was driving you see the Waymos like you see everywhere here. I'm like, "Oh, that's interesting. This is cool.

3:07 Look, I live in the future." Then I go over to his his office and he was telling me that one of his portfolio companies has a call center that they've they've just automated 80% of their workforce with a with a generative AI solution. I don't know the exact number, but it sounded like it was in the hundreds if not thousands of people for that one call center and based in the Philippines. And this is why he said, "Well, maybe I want to take 1% of my firm's profits and and put it into reskilling sometime and we started brainstorming. And and we appreciated that especially in a in a economy like the Philippines where depending on how you measure it 5 6 7% of their GDP is directly related to business process outsourcing, mostly call centers.

3:49 If this becomes a trend and there's a lot of reason to think it will over the next 3 to 5 years, what are all those people going to do? And then when we see a Waymo, it's awesome. I was at TED a couple of weeks ago and I interviewed Tekedra Mawakana, who's the co-CEO. I'm a big fan of Waymos. I think it's going to save a lot of lives. It's super convenient. But, my uncle's also an Uber driver in New Orleans. What's he going to do? That's not people's first choice job. It's usually their last choice job in a lot of cases. And if if ride-share goes away, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Out here in Silicon Valley, everyone's talking about what's happening to software engineering, product management, design.

4:27 Are those roles going to merge? Are we going to hire more or less, etc. But, it is crazy times. And I wrote a the Job Shocks genesis was I wrote a New York Times op-ed piece in December where I made this argument that like we have to take this a lot more seriously. We can't just be like, "Oh, the Industrial Revolution turned out okay. More jobs." First of all, the Industrial Revolution also had many wars. The 20th century was the bloodiest. We experimented with communism. We experimented with every everything. A lot of these things didn't go so well. And so, we should have a plan. And that's what Job Shocks is about. How will it possibly transform?

5:04 What are the types of things people need to learn? My son, my oldest son, is a junior in high school. What should he be caring about to be relevant in 4 or 5 years? But, also how do we as a society adapt? >> like universal basic work, people need to feel like a sense of contribution. But, these are big questions that we have to be creative about. That's the exact question my team and I had to answer for ourselves. I run two companies. One is what you're seeing right now, my content business, 18 million followers, a team of 35. And for years, our problem was never coming up with ideas. It was everything around.

5:41 Prepping investor meetings, I did a lot of those, researching guests, writing the weekly updates, and reviewing the scripts. So, partnered with HubSpot for startups and put all seven of my Claude skills plus the framework we actually use to decide what to automate into one free download. The link is in the description. Five of them are on the founder side. One writes my investor updates in my voice. One does the research before a pitch meeting so I'll walk in ready. One turns my messy notes into clean weekly report. One helps to write my LinkedIn post and one helps to handle hiring. The other two, my content team runs on every single thing we post.

6:20 The first is a voice filter. It catches AI sounding copy before it ever goes live. Words like "unlock", "a leverage", anything that reads like a chatbot wrote it. The second writes our real scripts and we're running it on every single short we make. Of course, I do a lot of edits on top, but it's a great foundation to start with. The last one is the framework itself, the automate or hire roadmap. It takes every task on my team and sorts it into three buckets.

6:46 What hands to AI completely? Where AI does the first draft, then a person checks it, and what stays fully human. And you absolutely don't need a team of 35 to use any of this. You upload the skills into Claude and you start today. Go to the link below and thank you to HubSpot for startups for sponsoring this and building with me. Okay, back to South. >> How much time do you think we have for someone who's an Uber driver watching right now? Cuz I feel like with Waymo's, it took them still it took them 10 years to roll out the operation that we're seeing now and we're only seeing it in San Francisco.

7:17 >> you're going to start seeing a real dent in this in five or 10 years. And that's slower than what a lot of the AI optimist evangelists are saying, but that's also pretty fast. And >> lifetime. >> that's that's before your kids go to high school. That's when they're going to go to high school or when they before they go to college. And driving a vehicle is the largest employer one of the largest employers of men. I mean, women obviously, my Uber driver just now was a woman, but like disproportionately men, >> Yeah.

7:45 globally. If you have a lot of men who can't find a job, who are angry, that's and and women, that's going to lead into politics, polarization. People are going to move towards extremes. So, I I I suspect that you're you're going to see in the next four or five years, the dislocation start to happen for real. And we're going to struggle as a society on on how what what how do we reskill people? I'm not a fan of things like universal basic income. I think it, you know, like universal basic work. People need to feel like a sense of contribution. But, these these are big questions that we have to be creative about.

8:24 >> Yeah, and it's not just Uber drivers, right? You mentioned call centers. What are other jobs that are in danger? >> I think the writing's on the wall that software engineering, design, product management, these product jobs in all of these tech firms, including at Khan Academy, are changing fundamentally. >> But, are they in danger? Like, are they are these people going to end up in the street? Cuz I don't think so. I think they're >> I'm not sure. I'm genuinely not sure.

8:46 You know, what I've told our Khan Academy team, cuz you could imagine the employees are very worried. And they're saying We have 350 people on our team. And we're 2/3 product people. And so, they're asking and we're saying, "Hey, use more AI. Use more AI." And Anthropic just gave us a report that we're at the top of the stack, apparently, on organizations that are leading into these tools. But, you could imagine the team sometimes feels insecure about this. They say, "Hey, >> Totally.

9:08 >> if we can be three times more productive, that mean you're going to lay off 2/3 of us?" And what we've said very clearly to our team, and it's what we believe, is, "Look, the reason for us we have so much to do. Khan Academy is the budget of a large high school. If we could do three times more with the same resources, we will do three times more. If we could do 30 So, that would never be the catalyst for layoffs. Catalyst for layoffs is if we don't bring in enough philanthropy, if we don't bring in enough earned revenue, then just money will will force us to it, you know? But, it's not going to be AI. AI will allow us to to do more, but we have also said that people's jobs are evolving and people really need to learn how to keep up with the times and we're we've put on our career rubric like learning new tools and adapting or we're actually putting it into our career rubric. So, I suspect that many of our team members are already there. A lot of them are very willing and are going to get there, but I I do sense that there's some people who are like, " I don't know if I like this. I don't know if I want to do this."

10:07 and I think that that might be a more a bigger struggle if if folks don't want to aren't aren't aren't in the position to adapt or change. >> And you think they're going to be at risk in the next 5 years? >> I think some yeah. I I I I think you know, we don't know exactly what these titles are going to be, but this this designer product manager engineer division, it's really >> blending. >> Yes, exactly. And the current framework came mostly out of the late '90s into the early 2000s of okay, how do you build a web apps and it's that model.

10:37 But the new world and not only are those roles people who used to be designers or or product managers are now not just prototyping anymore. You know, last year I met some heads of product. They're like, "Oh, I'm forcing all my product managers to create a prototype." And I'm like, "Wow, that's really bold." Well, now at Khan Academy we're taking our designers and our product managers and we're giving them full dev environments so that they can actually do pull requests and do full, you know, deploying deploying of code. Now, it's still leaning on more of the prototype proof of concept, but it's blending and similarly because engineers can do so much more. I think there'll always be value of that engineer who could be super deep.

11:12 >> Yeah. >> And but they're going to be much more productive, but I think you're also going to see a breed of engineer that can go more customer facing, etc. So, yes, these things are all all all blending. And just the development cycle speeding up too. So, people have to feel comfortable with that. >> Going back to the jobs that are endangered, drivers, call center, customer support, who work in product / designer, software engineer and don't want to adapt. Anyone else?

11:38 >> The people I think are safe are the people who really lean into the human element of it. So, I've said I think teachers are one of the safest jobs, but once again, even before AI, I I don't view that the role of the teacher is to be the sage on the stage and to just disseminate information. We've had textbooks for now centuries. We have videos on demand. We have other places to get information. >> Yeah.

12:04 >> I think the teachers, and we we've seen teachers do this good great teachers have been doing this for decades, move up the value chain. And they're the planners, the architects, the coaches. They're able to form, you know, have eye contact with students and be their motivators. I can't speak for you, but for myself, when I think about the great teachers in my life, some of them were like, wow, they used to give a good performance on the but most of them were the ones that ran a Socratic dialogue with all of us.

12:31 Really made us dream or do things we never thought about or say, "Hey Sal, can you see me after class? Hey Sal, I really liked what you did that time. You know, you have a knack for that." Or "Sal, I didn't like what you did. Stop it. If you did that in the real world, someone's going to, you know, be really annoyed with you." that's that's what I remember. So, teaching, I think nursing, hospitality, sales, anything that has a huge >> Oh, absolutely. I don't think you're just I mean, maybe tele-sales and things like that. AI And and I know there's there's been companies for a while that I can be the salesperson. Yes, some of these sales agents are they're going to get better and better, but their cost of deploying is so low that we're all just going to get spammed unbelievably by it.

13:15 And so, they're probably all cancel each other out in terms of efficacy, but the the ability to actually form a relationship with a someone, be a convincing advisor. And you know, the best sales people aren't like sales people. They're They're actually smart, thoughtful people where you actually respect their opinion. >> Yeah. >> And and you want their advice. And and you know they're a straight shooter. And they'll say, you know, our product isn't best for that.

13:38 >> Mhm. >> You might want to use that. And And you're like, oh, I trust you. Let me use you next time. And so, I think that human connection, anything that could be purely done on a computer and you're not interfacing with other human beings, you're not having to build some of these durable skills of communication and persuasion and listening and collaboration, those will change or or they they might be under threat. >> Okay, let's talk about adopting those AI tools. You just mentioned you use Anthropic a lot. Can you talk about the processes in your company that seem absolutely mind-blowing that would have seemed absolutely mind-blowing 2 years ago and now they're part of your process?

14:12 >> Oh, you know, well, I think engineering is where we're seeing it the most. And that is where we also, and I think you've heard many people say, you know, some of the engineers who are really leaning into this, they're running five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 agents simultaneously, writing code, reviewing code. the Anthropic folks told us that we were one of the biggest users of actually the agents for reviewing code. >> Interesting. >> And and you know, we we I I've gotten a little sticker shock for how expensive this stuff is. Our our run rate on on our our Anthropic bill is about 1.2 million dollars right now.

14:50 >> Wow. >> growing fast. >> That's a year or a month? >> A year. A year. A year. But, it's still a lot for for, you know, >> It's like 200 engineers for engineers. >> mostly engineers. And we're looking on a daily basis and our CTO was saying, yeah, we just saw one of our engineers spend $3,000 in a day. I think that was the number of compute costs. And I'm like, oh my god, what did I think it was >> trying to push them to use even more cuz you see some companies try to do that?

15:14 >> are they doing? I was like, what are they doing? And then he's like, then we talked to them and they actually in a few hours were able to do something that would have normally taken them three or four months. >> Wow. >> okay, that was a great use of $3,000. Go go spend more. But just today we had a company meeting where I said, you know, make sure you're not using the Opus model for just everyday tasks.

15:34 Use Gemini and use your chat GPT account if you're trying to figure out the local restaurant to go to. >> >> So we are trying to get there, but I had the same answer to our team. I I was like, look, if we're using 1 million, 2 million, 3 million dollars of tokens every year, but if we look at what we're producing and that would have cost us 20, 30 million dollars in the past to produce, yeah, we should we should keep doing it.

15:56 But anyway, the engineering is is the most. I think the rapid prototyping. we we just launched a feature a few months ago that in the old days it would have been like, maybe we can fit it by next school year. And this is one of the engineers at a hackathon vibe coded it in a day. And then on a weekend he said, you know, he's an engineer, so he had the full development environment at but he was able to create working on our real data. And it's a very front-end kind of game thing, so it didn't have a lot of implications to what might happen to the back end. He's like, I think we could ship this thing. And got some designers involved, made it made it a little bit nicer, and we were able to ship it in about a month. Something that would have >> taken >> And and so that is the thing that's really Before people said, engineering is hard, so do as much time as possible on design so that you you don't build things that aren't aren't aren't going to be valuable. But now that that model is changing. You should say, no, let's build stuff fast, put it out there. And not always. Certain things you have to really make sure work before they go out there, but certain things you can try out, test your thesis fast. So I think the velocity of the organization is is much faster than I would have imagined a year or two ago.

17:06 >> Do you think 2x, 3x? What's your estimation? >> If I'm honest, as we grew, 10 years ago we were very fast. We're a startup, you know, 20, 30 people. And as we grew to 200-300 people, from my point of view, it started to feel slower because you have to coordination cost, etc. And I think relative to where we were two or three years ago, it does actually feel and this is this is a feeling. We haven't have have a haven't nailed this down, but to me it feels at least 50% faster, maybe 100% faster than we than we were.

17:40 >> That's awesome for us at such a large organization. >> Yeah, yeah, and I and it's accelerating. >> Yeah. what about operational stuff? Have you tried automating that for yourself, maybe? What are you using? >> Got you know, we we just approved all the connectors with the various AIs, so now our AIs can access our Slack and our Gmail and our Docs and all of that kind of stuff. And we are learning and encouraging people how to use it, how not to use it. Don't let it do things without you being in the loop.

18:07 Don't let it post on social media. Don't let it send the email, maybe let it draft the email and then you you check on it. But I am on a daily basis, you know, I talk to one or more of these of these AIs and I say, "What what's falling through the cracks?" And it's acting like a little bit of a chief of staff for me and it's going to my Slack, it's going to my Gmail, it's going that.

18:26 It's like, "Oh, I've drafted something for you. Is this good?" So I I'm already using that and that I'm finding that super useful for just there's always people who are asking me, "Hey, can you do this? Can you do that?" And and I I typically probably 20 or 30% did fall through the cracks and I would only when people keep bugging me do I not bugging me, reminding me that does it does it does it actually happen.

18:47 you know, there's just a lot of paperwork type stuff >> >> that we has dramatically accelerated. >> Totally. >> you we have to write a lot of proposals to people for philanthropic or even school, you know, earned revenue type stuff. And now you can have a meeting, keep all the notes, have a first draft of a proposal. We won't just send that, but now within 10 minutes of the meeting you have a first draft and then that's a good catalyst for everyone to now start weighing in. That would have taken a week before, two weeks before.

19:13 content creation, I'm when I make a video, I always try to like, what about this edge case? What about that edge case? I've been making financial literacy videos lately and financial literacy is full of edge cases. Like, what if I'm 55 and a half, but I've done this and this and I'm in this tax bracket? And that has dramatically shortened the research time for me cuz I am literally once again, I don't just go to the AI and accept its answer. I look at it. I'm like, oh, show me a a source that validates that before I make a video on it. I'm like, oh, it's from IRS.gov. All right, I will now make make that video. So, that's dramatically shortened, as I said, our content creators are able to scale much faster.

19:53 They're still reviewing all the questions, tweaking that, but they are definitely getting >> Oh, the research, of course. Quick pause here. If you're enjoying this podcast, you will absolutely love my Inner Circle newsletter. So, what I basically do is I take all the tips from these podcasts and apply them to my personal life, to my investment portfolio, and to my businesses. This media company and my language teaching business. Sometimes we get amazing results and I share our real tactics. Sometimes we don't and I share that, too. Think of it as an insider version of this podcast. The link is in the description. Join my free newsletter to stay ahead.

20:25 >> Does it ever make you scared? Cuz when you're seeing this progress, are you ever thinking like, oh, in 3 years, AI is able to develop another Khan Academy just by itself? Just because like, why would it need humans? >> Yeah. And and I I have two responses to that. One is my my emotional ego response to that and then one is my more higher minded correct response to it. >> Okay, give me both. >> >> My emotional ego response is, yeah, I do worry about that. And one could imagine, I I think it's very hard right now to vibe code something as as like the same fidelity and quality.

21:02 You could make something that looks kind of like Khan Academy, but not have the rigor, etc. I think in it's quite plausible that in three or four or five years people could maybe start to develop these things. There, I think there still will be the burden to how do you have the efficacy data that it really works? How do you make sure that you're working with school systems in a way that meets all of their data privacy agreements, that >> to their agents.

21:28 >> Yes, exactly. >> >> Yeah, yeah. But but there there will still be some of those frictions. It won't be as simple as as vibe coding. So, I think there will still be some advantages of already having something out there that's already being used by millions and that you have real data on, real efficacy on. You you're able to work with the the the system. The correct answer, which I tell the team all the time, is if we or someone else can create a solution that's as good as us or better and actually show that they're doing it, it just doesn't feel that way, as a nonprofit, we should be happy about that. We should say, "Good.

22:00 One of the many problems in the world has now been solved. What other problems are there to be solved?" And you know, for better or for worse in the education space, there are many problems to to solve here. And you know, one of the things we're thinking about at Khan Academy is assessment. So, standardized assessment, historically, it's multiple choice, etc. That's why a lot of people don't like it. It's very narrow, but we're working on real standardized assessment with real psychometrics that has some of the traditional, but also starts broadening the aperture, asking students to explain their reasoning, giving teachers not just the what percentile their kids are in, but what giving a narrative. And those things like that are also very hard to just vibe code in a garage.

22:41 Because you're doing all the psychometric data, you have to get it out there with millions of people to use it. And I think that's an area where very few of VCs or frankly even private equity firms are like, "Let's create a new standardized test leveraging AI." Because it's it's it's a lot of work and it'll take years to get the right psychometric validation and to go out there into into schools and and other places. and so but that's where I think we as a nonprofit that's tech focused can be valuable. We're thinking a lot about credentials, high school high school credentials, high school diplomas, credit recovery, college degrees, pathways into jobs. And you know, those are the places where I hope AI gets better. I hope it can create a lot of solutions, but I would be surprised if markets on their own are able to solve a lot of these problems.

23:27 >> Yeah, but someone who's listening and thinking, okay, he's positive about being likely replaced in three years. I'm not. >> >> So, for someone who has these thoughts, can you talk more about your new initiative? Cuz when I heard that at TED Vancouver that you're partnering with TED and ETS, for me it was another full circle moment cuz I also took TOEFL and we partner with ETS for my other channel where I talk about learning English. And you're doing this $10,000 Is it a bachelor's degree?

23:57 how long does it last? >> And this is go- going to the whole job shock thing. I think we need new systems of skilling people. >> Yeah. >> And this started with a a conversation with Chris Anderson, who's the the outgoing steward at TED, and I've taken on this new role as vision steward there. And the reason why he wanted me to take on this role, he said, you know, we we should do this, Al. The the future is all going to be about human purpose, human meaning, and human connection. It's almost hard to focus on meaning and connection if you don't have a job.

24:24 >> Totally. >> don't have a meaningful job, if you can't put food on the table. And so we've we're launching we announced it at TED, Constellation Institute. Our it's intended to be a accredited. We're pursuing accreditation. we're we're likely to do both four-year degree and master's degree. And the idea is it would be essentially three components. There will be an academic component. We still think, especially for the bachelor's, you should learn your history, your civics, your accounting, your your statistics. but most of the program that makes it really differentiated it will be online, but we're going to be putting students of all ages. We've already gotten in the last two or three weeks 3,000 people interested in being students.

25:06 >> Congratulations. >> And it's amazing. Most of them have bachelor's degrees. Many of them have master's degrees and you can sense the fear that they have >> They need to re-qualify. >> Exactly. Being relevant. And what we are going to be doing is putting people into group simulations, projects likely leveraging another platform. We have schoolhouse or something similar where you're on Zoom, you're on a video conference together. You have 4 hours, you have to build a business which means create a prototype, maybe make an ad, do the business plan, survey customers, whatever it might do. Do do competitive research. And then afterwards the the outcome of that maybe other teams peer review you, but also you are going to review each other on your communication, your collaboration, your creativity. All of these things that we know really matter and we believe are going to matter. People calling them durable skills now. They're going to matter even in an AI world.

25:59 They might matter more in an AI world. How well you can sell and listen and and form connections. >> How many are there those durable skills? Can you name them? >> Oh, the ETS framework. There's the main framework there's there's five. If you communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking. ETS has a whole framework around this and then there's sub frameworks like oh, leadership is one of them. I think it was in leadership. Is there evidence in that meeting that you had with the person? Did they seek out opinions? In communication, were they able to build off of other people's thoughts as opposed to just talking past them? Things like that. And so you can imagine when you're in many many sessions like this where you're doing real work that you would need to do in a in an AI workplace. And as you know, we've launched this with initially six corporate partners, McKinsey, Bain, Google, Microsoft, Repl.it, and Accenture and I expect we're going to have many more in the next couple of months.

26:52 We are We are co-designing with them to say like what are the types of work >> now? >> Yeah, what do you expect people to be able to do next year? And it might change the year after. And we're going to create those real simulations so that these these people, not just you know not just young people, can have practice doing that, create portfolios and artifacts of doing that, but also start to surface these durable skills of communication, creativity, leadership, collaboration, et cetera. but that's that's what we're going to do in the master's program and that's what we're going to do in the bachelor's.

27:20 >> Are those companies going to be hiring graduates? >> you know not No one can commit that like oh yes, when you have your first graduates in 2 years, we're definitely going to hire 20 of them. But this is definitely designed and they definitely have a seat at the table because they too, just like Khan Academy, are reimagining how their roles change. They too are reimagining how they do interviews. And they are completely aligned that right now if you do an interview, I have a family member who's interviewing at a startup here in in Silicon Valley and she's in the third round and she has to vibe code a solution for a hospital and then they're going to have a panel interview.

27:56 That's where the way that interviews are going. But that's just one project that she's going to do. It's a little bit of an arbitrary one that this company just invented for her. And if she gets the job, awesome. If she doesn't get the job, it kind of just goes away that that that artifact. What we're telling these employers is we're going to make people do 20, 30, 40, 50 of these projects and get a real and they're going to be more rigorously designed. They're going to have a the portfolios are actually going to be rated and we're going to get clear skills that you know when you do interviews, how one interviewer does it versus another, it can be. But here you can get feedback from 50, 60, 70, 100 people.

28:34 >> So they're going to graduate with a with a different type of resume, basically. >> different resume. Imagine this, someone today graduates from Stanford, pick your major, good major, with a 3.9 GPA. When I look at that resume, I say, "Okay, probably smart, got into Stanford, good GPA. I don't know if those skills they learned are going to be directly transferable, but there's probably someone I can work with. Leadership skills, I don't know looking at their GPA. Maybe Oh, yeah, okay, maybe they're the class vice president or if they were the co-captain of the lacrosse team. Okay, maybe they have leadership skills. I don't know. but that's only you're kind of reading >> not evaluation.

29:14 >> And what I normally do now when I see a resume, even someone who's been working, no matter what they write, I look for YouTube videos of them. I look for some evidence of like, how do they communicate? How do they and then you try to do it in an interview, which is you only have a few hours to do it. So, our case to the employers, and I think they believe this, is you're going to co-design these things. When we show you these different projects and simulations, you, Google, Microsoft, McKinsey, Bain should say, "Oh, yeah.

29:37 Wow, we wish we could do that with people in interviews, but you're able to do it and you're able to get that signal." >> >> And that when if I were to show you, here's a Stanford student with a 3.9 GPA, that's kind of the student that say McKinsey would interview, top 10% graduate of Stanford. Here's another student from the Contente Institute who is in the top 10% of communication skills, collaboration skills, critical thinking skills. Here are the points of evidence. Here are video artifacts of them doing it. Our intent is that the employer says, "Oh, yeah, we'll treat them at least as much of a priority as the top 10% from a from an elite university.

30:11 >> So, you're comparing this to elite universities. What about other universities? Are they losing value in this new age? >> Yeah, and and and and it's a good point because our intent isn't to just only tackle the the very cream of students, only for these very aspirational employers. But, there is an intention behind partnering with these aspirational employers because the the higher education world is is very polar in certain ways. On one extreme, you have the elite institutions where some of these employers try to focus their recruiting, but they're super inaccessible, very low capacity.

30:49 Any of these elite universities, Harvard would tell you of the I don't know how many students, 70, 80,000 students that must apply, 50,000 actually could handle Harvard, do well there, but they're only going to accept 2,000 of them. >> Yeah. >> And you know, maybe some of those other students go to another good university, but a lot of them won't. And then they won't go to a place where Google or Bain or whoever might might recruit. So, we wanted to show And then the other extreme, you have online programs. And online programs have been there's some good high-quality ones. And I would say the good ones are places like Western Governors University or Southern New Hampshire University.

31:20 Those are very good for the person who maybe didn't go down a traditional route, they need to complete their college degree in order to to enter, but it's very seldom that those people are getting the same signal of the person who just graduated from a well-known university, a well-known four-year program. So, the reason why we wanted to at least show that Content Institute can be a pathway is to get rid of the stigma around online, that you can actually create online that is highly interactive, highly human-to-human, and also creates a great signal. If you do very good, that that is as good as any university. We also want to be able to serve students that yeah, maybe they're not going to end up at as a elite program or at Google, but they can still create signals that they can get a great job at a regional firm or or or things like that, comparable to still a very strong college degree at a top 50 type type of university. that's where we're starting. But then as we scale, I hope we can add more and more programs.

32:19 >> Looking ahead, like let's look 10 years ahead. Should I be saving for my kids college, or you think higher education will be similar to what you're building, which is like $40,000 for 4 years versus $400,000 standard university? >> what what what we're building is maximum 10,000 for the degree. >> Oh, for the whole degree, not >> whole degree. >> Oh. >> And and we said 10,000 to be careful. We actually intended for it to be a good bit less than that. But, yes, it's for the whole degree. And also, in terms of opportunity cost, because it's competency-based, it won't necessarily take 4 years. So, you you might be able to do it in 2 years, and then you get 2 more years of earning, and instead of $400,000, you spent $5,000, or whatever it might be, to get your degree.

33:03 My answer to your question, and we're facing this myself. My son is a junior in high school. He's going to start applying to colleges. I, as a as a father, and and I think he wants this, too. You know, I met my wife at MIT. A lot of my closest friends, you know, I I still have dreams about college on a regular basis forgetting to drop classes. >> time, right? >> time. It was a But, that is I I hate to say it this way, but it's a luxury experience. And as a parent, yes, I would love my children to have that. And I And my son will be applying to schools like that, and I'm hoping he gets in so that we have the privilege of spending probably half a million dollars for him to go. But, I think from that, he's going to get great experiences, great friendships, hopefully some great skills. He'll learn He'll have a coming-of-age experience.

33:49 But, I see I could imagine he, too, might want to still do Content Institute on top of his degree at whatever university goes, because that might have a have a a more direct link to some of these job-ready skills. Content Institute, we plan on adapting much faster to wherever the tools are. and we are also seeing even a lot of kids at some of the top universities, they're dropping out right now because they're entrepreneurial. >> Yeah.

34:12 >> And they see, "Wow, AI is changing so fast. >> fast, yeah. >> This is the window. If I don't get in now, who knows if capitalism exists in 4 years, much less, you know? So, I think for those types of students, this is going to be a very interesting. And then the the reality is, most students who are going to college aren't getting to go and throw Frisbees on the quad and look at the ivy on the walls and you know, and have Socratic discussion with world leaders and they're going pretty transactionally to get a job.

34:39 they're going to commuter college. They're starting at their local community college. And so, I see things like Content Institute or maybe Content Institute coupled with their local regional college or their local community college could be a very valuable solution. One of the main reasons, you can get a great education at your local community college or at your local let's say at the Cal State system here in California. You can get a great education at these places. But, a lot of students who are high capable or high ambition might say, "Oh, well, I I got a full ride at San Jose State, but I'm going to get my family to pay half a million dollars to go to Stanford because I'm not going to get, you know, McKinsey's not going to recruit at San at San Jose State." Now, they could say, "Hey, I'm going to go to San Jose State. I'm going to get that full ride. It's going to be free. And I'm also going to do Content Institute."

35:25 >> For 5K. >> For 5K. And then I'm in and then I'm in good shape. So, your answer to answer your question, if you're in a position to do so, I think it's a it's it's a gift that you can give your kids if they can go to a great college and have that experience, but I think as a society >> right? >> Yeah, I mean, there's other luxury experiences I could give my child too or to >> Travel more. Cuz that's like, yeah.

35:45 >> Imagine if I spent half a million dollars on my child and I said, "Go travel the world with your friends and read great books while you're doing it." That's also pretty awesome. That might be better than >> Give them a fraction of that money and say start a business. >> Ex- Start a business. >> Spend that on tokens. >> Down payment on a house. >> Yeah. >> there's there's so many things that that could be. And you know, I'll give another I have a friend out I'm this is very Silicon Valley in the bubble type thing, but I have a friend who and this is this is this is an artifact of privilege, but we were all talking about these like, "Oh, what are our kids going to do in four or five years?" And like, who knows what jobs are And he was saying, "Yeah, you know, I for I was looking at it for like two or three hundred thousand dollars, there are these like mom-and-pop businesses you can buy that are like completely unautomated. They're you know, but they have good contracts with the government or whatever else or you know, they're they're part of the supply chain. You know, it could be fun to buy one of those for two or three hundred thousand dollars and have our kids go and automate, you know, and then turn it into a you know, essentially be private equity turnaround >> Maybe interesting use of money versus college degree. To wrap up this topic, are you more in a positive side like in five years the world still cuz I feel like we we still take time to adopt. I don't think we going to go through dramatic change. Yes, things are speeding up, but I don't think we going to have mass layoffs like 90% of people gone. What what are you thinking about the next five years?

37:09 >> I hope you're right. I I I think you're right. Things normally don't change quite as fast, but this is a different type of technology than what we've seen. I mean, you are seeing this kind of exponential curve. We've been seeing that in software engineering. People for the last two or three years have been talking like, "Yeah, AI's pretty good at coding. Maybe it'll affect." And last year, if you ask software engineers, like, "Yeah, it's helping me 20 30%."

37:33 And then there was this Claude code moment about four or five years ago where it just hit a certain threshold. >> And and and and then everyone's like, "Oh, this is how you code now." >> Yeah. >> >> And it's getting into knowledge work. That's what I'm seeing in the world. >> Exactly. More than 50% of queries I think is now coming from non-technical people. >> Exactly. So, my sense is even if we start seeing four or five percent unemployment in certain sectors in the next three or four years, that will be very painful. And though I think it will start to affect our politics. It will affect, you know, how just just how we how we think about things. So, yeah, I don't think you're going to see mass unemployment in the next three or four years, but I think you're going to start seeing some of these pockets in three or four years.

38:18 It's going to be scary. And if we don't start And and the AI is accelerating. So, if we don't as industry, government, non-profit sector start having some solutions to scale at that point, we're going to be in trouble. >> Okay, what can an individual person do today to not get replaced? >> I think the best the most important skill is this people, you know, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, just being willing to try things out. Even for myself, I'm always preaching on this is that sometimes I'm like, "Oh, I heard about some, you know, I heard about open claw and this is that." I'm like, "Well, I should try it out." And I'm like, "Oh, be a little bit."

38:54 But just getting over that activation energy and trying it out and fiddling with it and seeing if you can get it to do something. If you have that mindset and you'll be fine. You're and if you look at your different workflows that you have in your life personally or that you have at work and you're like, "Let me see if I can take that output and maybe initially I just have to copy and paste it and put it here and then I can generate this. Oh, I find that I'm doing that a lot. Let me create an agent that can do that or let me just instruct Claude co-work or open claw to do that.

39:24 Oh, let me be careful. Let me put it in a separate device or let me put it in a in a sandbox someplace." But I think it's a very incremental. None of this stuff is rocket science and you don't have to >> either like perplexity computers so easy or like hyper agents. >> You just but it there is a little bit activation energy of saying, "Let me try to install it. Let me play around with it a little bit. Let me not be afraid to press some buttons and see what happens." You have to be careful sometimes.

39:45 But I think anyone who has that mindset, I think is is is going to be fine. >> Give them a prompt that has transformed how you work. I I can while you're thinking I can give mine that was super transformational this week. I talked to my chat GPT and asked it, "Give me top five things that I'm repetitively doing by analyzing my Gmail calendar and whatever you have access to and tell me what should I wipe code?" And it came up with a really cool thing that I'm going to be repurposing a lot of content. So, it's like, "Let's start repurposing your newsletter to LinkedIn." But I'm like, "Oh, thank you." Yeah, this is a manual process where I'm a manager communicating with different teams. Like this is such such a cool prompt that I should run it every week or maybe every day like an as an agent.

40:25 >> Yeah, you know the ones that I like something that I use use the same prompt. I I've I mean this is just I've replaced like reading the news and I just have a bunch of threads about the topics I'm interested in and like at night I'm like what's the latest? >> Yeah. >> But one thing I found and I think this is important to build AI skills. I've been fascinated by what's going on in the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz and the game of chicken and the gamesmanship that's going on there and how the market seems to be ignoring it and ignoring the fact that we have $100 plus oil prices and you know $20 shipping rates. So it's essentially >> saw $9 per gallon yesterday in the New York Atherton.

41:03 >> Yeah, what? Well, that's the for for boating of the future. But a lot of the times when I was asking like what about this? I think this is going to happen. We've all had the AI is like Sal, you're a genius. You're spotting what other people aren't spotting and it is very seductive cuz sometimes it'll do it very and so I have learned to say be critical of me. Like really push back and even then sometimes it won't. Like it'll say you're so humble for wanting to be pushed back. Okay.

41:30 >> were 22 today, MIT grad, what would you do differently? >> >> You know, when I was 22 I did try to do some startups. This was the late 90s dot com boom. I I I think the same Sal now would probably be trying to do some startups. and my advice would be don't run to where everyone else is running. Try to find the lanes that are most empty. Try to find the the most boring industries that are most ripe for applying some of these technologies.

42:04 And I would say yeah, make sure you invest in your durable skills and your communication, your collaboration. Seek out feedback. Seek out mentors. Build human connections with people. Those are truly going to be durable. >> If your kids come to you today and say, "Hey Dad, I'm afraid I won't be able to find a job." What would you tell them? >> I've had My My kids haven't said that quite yet, but I've had We have Khan Lab School and we have some kids who have said that to me.

42:28 And I say, you know, I I honestly don't know exactly what the answer is. And I actually have some people in my family who are older who are having trouble finding jobs right now. And but what I'm telling them is be up-to-date on the technologies. This is a a moment in time where even though in some ways it's hard to get a job, it's also a place It's It's We're in a moment where it's actually still easy to differentiate yourself. Like today if I if I put on a job application that I have a webpage, people like, "Big deal."

42:57 But in 1996, if you said, "I have a webpage," people like, "Ooh, let's hire this person. They know what's about to happen." >> Now you can say I come with 100 agents. >> I come with 100 agents or why don't you interview my agents before first? Or Do you have an agent that would like to talk to mine? Or here's my portfolio of AI-generated art? Or here are my workflows that I've automated? Or here's Here's a Here's a Loom video I created of a day in my life where I have automated my life with agents.

43:22 If you know anyone like that, I would be interested in hiring them for Khan Academy tomorrow. So, that's that's what I would tell them. You know, my son is He's likely to be a computer science major. Five years ago I was like, "Oh, that's great." You know, he Imran's going to go work in tech and I chose the nonprofit route. He'll go for-profit. We'll retire off of his equity." You know, whatever. Now I'm like, "Oh, computer science. I don't know. Maybe." But you should do it because it's interesting. It's intellectually challenging. It'll be a signal to the world that you can do hard things. You're You're bright. You're hard working. But also do all these other things that we just talked about.

43:56 >> Yeah, cuz 75% of Google's code is now AI. >> Yeah. >> Thank you so much, Sal. This was an amazing conversation and thank you for sharing your wisdom and thank you for inspiring everyone across the world to learn. >> Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.