Charlie: Sal Khan is here.
He's the founder of Khanacademy.org.
He provides 10-minute tutorials on the web
on everything from math to science to finance.
The Harvard MBA and former hedge fund manager
has become an online teaching sensation.
His videos have been viewed
more than 50 million times worldwide.
They have been translated to more than 7 different languages.
Here is a look.
Sal: So the hypotenuse is now going to be 5.
This animal's fossils are only found
in this are of South America,
a nice clean band here,
and this part of Africa.
We could integrate over the surface.
The notation usually is a capital sigma.
National assembly, they create the
Committee of Public Safety,
which sounds like a very nice committee.
Some cells have a membrane around the DNA.
This is called a nucleus.
Notice, this is an aldehyde and it's an alcohol.
Start differentiating into effector and memory cells.
A galaxy!
Hey, there's another galaxy!
And for dollars is their 30 million
plus the 20 million dollars from
the American manufacturer.
If these things end up being worth 30 cents on the dollar,
let's say that we go to some future state
and these really are worth only 30 cents,
the most that the private investor loses
in this situation is his 7 dollars.
If this does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion.
Charlie: I am please to have Sal Khan
at this table for the first time.
Welcome.
Sal: Thanks for having me.
Charlie: So what am I just looking at?
Am I looking at someone who's interested in everything
and has a passion to tell others?
Sal: I think so.
Yeah, that's what I've turned into. (laughing)
Charlie: What have you turned into?
Sal: I've turned into someone, I guess from my point of view,
who gets to, I started off with the math
and the physics and the science and the economics,
stuff that I knew fairly well from my background.
Now I've turned into someone who gets to learn
pretty much anything and distill it down and teach it.
Charlie: You're learning new things,
assimilating them, distilling them,
and then teaching them.
Sal: Yeah.
Charlie: So give me the background that you have.
Sal: As you mentioned, 5-6 years ago
I was an analyst at a hedge fund.
Before that my background was in software
then I went to business school, did the hedge fund thing.
I started in Boston, and while I was in Boston
I had family visiting me from New Orleans.
This was right after my wedding.
This was in 2004.
My cousin, Nadia, I remember we were waiting
for the fireworks over the Charles River
and we were just killing time
and I started giving her these brain teasers,
the type of brain teasers you'd give
at a software interview for like 25-year-old engineerings.
Most people just disengage,
"I don't want to deal with that.
"I don't want to think right now."
But Nadia, here's a 12-year-old, she was like,
"Don't tell me the answer.
"I need to figure it out.
"Okay, can they see each other?"
All these type of things about the brain teaser.
I was pretty impressed.
I started telling her and her mother,
"Hey, you should think about
"becoming an engineer" or whatever.
The next morning, her mom, [Noshradandie]
told me, thanks for believing in Nadia
but she's actually being tracked into
a slower math class, the non-advanced track.
I said that's impossible, the stuff she was doing
yesterday is way beyond her.
She's clearly a bright girl.
She's like no, I think she did bad on a placement exam.
So when Nadia woke up, I said, "What's going on?"
She said, no I ...
Apparently she had bombed units,
converting gallons to quarts and all that.
I said, Nadia, I understand how that can be confusing,
but the stuff you were doing last night
was way deeper and way harder than units.
If you're willing to work with me,
when you go back to New Orleans
and I'll stay here in Boston,
I think we can get you past whatever hurdles you have.
She agreed and they went back to New Orleans.
Every day after work I would come home
and we'd get on the speakerphone
for about half an hour, an hour,
and I'd start working with her.
It worked out.
Two or three months, she got up to speed,
went ahead of the curve.
Then I started tutoring her brothers,
other family members.
Then you fast forward to 2006.
About 18 months have gone by.
I was venting to a buddy,
I was like, "This is a lot of fun I'm having."
By this time I had moved out to California.
I was like, "This is a lot of fun.
"It's really satisfying, but ..."
The first time you give a lecture
on least common multiples, it's kind of fun.
The second time, it's still fun; a little more polished.
The third time it starts to get a little bit tiring to do!
He said ...
Charlie: Do it one time.
Sal: Do it one time.
Why don't you put it on YouTube?
I said, "No, YouTube's for dogs on scateboards.
"It's not for serious learning."
Charlie: (laughing) That's true.
Sal: Once I got over the fact that it wasn't my idea,
I decided to give it a shot.
I put it up there.
Charlie: Now, which one did you put up there?
Sal: It was either Least Common Multiple
or Greatest Common Divisor, I forget.
I think I did them on the same day, that first day.
The cool thing about YouTube is you an sort by upload time.
So that first video you'd shown,
that was literally, that was one of the early videos.
I kind of cringed.
I was like, "Oh, that's when I wasn't using
"the fancy HD stuff."
Yeah, it was on one of those topics.
Charlie: And the reaction?
Sal: You know what?
I had about 20-30 up there, my cousins' initial reaction,
and I joke about this but it's true,
is that they preferred me on YouTube than in person!
Charlie: (laughing)
Sal: I'll take that for what it's worth.
It made sense.
Charlie: You need not come to the next family gathering.
Just send us ...
Sal: (laughs) Yeah, Sal can be annoying sometimes.
Charlie: When did it become Khan Academy?
Sal: You fast forward, it soon became clear,
maybe in 6 months, even from the beginning
random people started watching it,
but then fast forward 6 months,
I probably had 50 or 100 videos,
and I started getting these random letters
from people, just on YouTube.
If you look on YouTube, people aren't always
that civil on YouTube in terms of what they write.
For the most part, everyone was writing,
"Hey, thanks a bunch, this helped me."
Some people would write,
"I was going to flunk calculus until I got this video."
Or "I wasn't going to become an engineer
"because I couldn't handle the course load
"until I saw that video on vectors"
or whatever it might be.
It started to dawn on me that this could be
more than a hobby, although it stayed a hobby right then.
I think the first time Khan Academy came about,
I think it was 2007, I had decided to set up
my own domain name, and so have another way
of viewing the videos.
I also started working on the software
for my cousins so I could give them problems
and give them exercises, and I put it all on that site.
I was working for a hedge fund
called Wohl Capital and my boss was Dan Wohl
and I said, "Well, I'm Sal Khan
"so I'll call it Khan Academy." (laughs)
Charlie: (laughs) What are your dreams?
What do you want it to be?
Sal: I used to be kind of quiet about this dream
because it seemed kind of like a crazy thing.
Even last year it would have seemed crazy
for me to say what I'm about to say,
but now, I think there's a potential for-
Online learning, no one takes it ser-,
They take it seriously, they think it has value,
but online learning is here
and your prestigious universities are over here.
They're not in the same conversation.
I'm hoping Khan Academy can turn into an institution
that, I don't want to say rivals, but it's
talked in the same conversation as some of these things
that have been around for hundreds of years.
Charlie: In the places where you can learn.
Sal: In the places where you can learn
at a very high level.
So you can start at arithmetic but you can go deep
and it's a real learning experience,
it's not something superficial.
Charlie: So how many people work for you now?
Sal: We have 8 people.
We just have 8, we had 6 if you'd asked last week.
Charlie: So eventually you will give diplomas?
Sal: That's an open question.
If you focus just on K through 12,
and our video content goes well beyond K through 12,
but just on K through 12, right now what really matters
is some of these standardized tests,
the SATs, the AP tests, high school diplomas,
kids are getting into Harvard based
on just being home schooled right now.
We see our real niche right now on the learning side.
Standard education's really learning and credentialing.
We're going to tackle the learning as well as we can.
In the future, we'll see what we can do
on the credentialing side.
Charlie: You've got a remarkable group of people
who believe what you're doing; people from Google,
Bill Gates and a lot of others have cited you
for what you have done and what you are doing.
Is there any pushback from what you have accomplished?
Does anybody say, "Yes, but"?
Sal: My sense of the pushback is
sometimes these articles get written where
the article itself is fairly balanced and reasonable,
but they'll title it like "Will Khan Academy
"Demolish Traditional Education?"
Charlie: Where was this?
Sal: Oh, I don't know, I'm exaggerating.
There was one that recently came out,
will it flip the classroom, or turn education upside down
or something like that.
There are these headlines that are very
attention-grabbing.
I think when someone reads that, they've become
cynical about these panacea solutions
to a big problem, so they might say oh, no,
there's no way that something like this
could solve all of our problems.
For the most part, I think, when people
understand what they're doing,
we haven't gotten a lot of resistance.
Charlie: Who are the people who are watching?
Sal: That's the surprising thing, who's watching.
When I started off, it was for my cousins.
I kind of just made them for my cousins,
they wanted to learn, I was there as kind of
their big brother type figure, so I was motivating them.
Still, when I make the videos, I'm kind of like,
"Well, if I wanted to learn this subject,
"what would I want, how would I want it to be explained?"
I thought that it would appeal to a certain
subset of people, people who like to watch
the Discovery Channel and Charlie Rose and all the rest.
Charlie: I'm hooked.
Sal: (laughing) So I'm really focused on
the intuition and the going deep and showing
how it connects and all of these things
that sometimes get lost in some textbooks in some classes.
The surprising thing is I get letters from
that group of people, but I do get letters
from parents of students with learning disabilities,
kids who were otherwise disengaged from math class
or from school generally,
and then over here they all of a sudden discover a love.
Charlie: That is the most important question
to come out of the conversation between the two of us.
What is it you know, what is it you do
that somehow makes learning more attractive,
more interesting, more satisfying and more productive?
Sal: I don't know that I definitely have "the" answer.
I have guesses.
Charlie: Guess for me.
Sal: I started off making it for my cousins.
I kind of didn't care.
I was kind of like this liberated person.
If someone had told me in 2004,
"I'm going to give you a couple million dollars.
"Produce something that's going to reach
"millions of people and Bill Gates is going to watch it"
and all the rest,
I probably would have produced something different.
I probably would have gotten fancy lighting
and put some makeup on and got some computer graphics,
and probably produced a lot of the education material
that's already out there.
These computer graphics,
"The next stage of photosynthesis is when the ..."
But I think the reality is,
that's what we all assume is good content,
but when someone watches it, it's so dehumanizing.
You kind of check out.
That's not talking to me.
When I made it, it was literally just me in a room,
people can tell, it's just some dude,
he's not getting paid, he's making it for his cousins,
so they can tell there's a human element to it.
They can tell that, a lot of times when people
are trying to get people engaged into math,
they try to distract them.
They'll do like a rap song or they'll play all this music,
and I think people find that patronizing.
They're like, look, don't distract me.
If math is good, it should be able
to stand up on its own.
Charlie: That's exactly what I believe
about this show.
Same thing.
It's a black room.
Just a conversation between interesting people.
That's all it is.
That's what people want.
They don't want a lot of bells and whistles.
Sal: No, you're insulting people.
If you have bells and whistles it's meaning
it's not worth watching.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Charlie: Sal Khan is a very interesting person.
If you don't know about him,
you'll learn a whole lot here.
This kind of conversation
will penetrate that veil of complexity;
and give you a channel to access complexity.
Sal: I wholeheartedly agree.
Maybe I was subconsciously inspired by you.
Charlie: No, you weren't.
But it is the same idea.
When I hear you say it, I realize
that's exactly the way we approach,
that's my mindset as well.
What's the hardest thing about this?
24 hours in a day?
Sal: 24 hours in a day.
I think now the hardest thing is,
I really want me to be all about
continuing to make videos.
I want most of my day, the learning and the producing.
Charlie: But, what?
Sal: But, and this is another interesting thing
about Khan Academy, because I've put these videos out there
and people watch them, I'm kind of associated with them.
I can use that as a platform to engage in the discussion,
however you want to view it.
I still think my biggest role,
and probably the highest leverage for my time,
are those videos.
Even though those videos, that video on line integrals
in the first week might only be watched by
a few hundred people, I think over the next
hundred years, that'll be a big impact.
Charlie: Do people come to you all the time
and say, "We can monetize this"?
Sal: They used to.
About 2 or 3 years ago, when Khan Academy had gotten to-,
kind of people started to know about it,
but I still had my day job at the hedge fund,
a couple of VCs approached, hey, we could do a double
bottom-line hybrid model, a fremium or whatever,
I don't know, all these things.
Actually I got to meeting two with one of them.
Meeting one was a lot of fun because they're like
hey, you can make a salary to do this
and if it all works out you're going to be rich
and all of that.
But meeting two was let's focus on this market
because we can monetize this.
I was like, "No, but I feel like doing Civil War videos."
I said no, I can't, because it was too much fun
to give up the fun part of it regardless of the upside.
Even though I didn't know what a nonprofit
would entail to start and how do you raise
money for it or anything, that's where it became clear
that, no, I wanted it to be a ...
I was like, what are all these universities?
Oh, they're not-for-profits?
I want to be a not-for-profit, too.
Charlie: So that's what you've become?
Sal: That's what we've become.
Charlie: So you get a lot of money
from people like Gates or John Doerr or Ann Doerr
and people like that who believe in what you do and say ...
Sal: Yeah. Ann and John were the first, literally,
I'd quit my job in 2009 and the savings
started to go like this and it was Ann in particular
who really stepped up and allowed me to get a first salary
and then Google and Bill Gates
and everyone else started to get involved.
Charlie: Take a tangent from you for a second.
What's wrong with the way we teach?
Sal: More than the way we teach, I think it's
a systemic thing of how the school is structured.
Right now you have, you and I were sitting
in algebra class, pre-albegra class,
and they're going over negative numbers.
Maybe you get a 95% on the exam.
You feel good about yourself.
You can an A stamped on your forehead or whatever.
Let's say I get a 70%, it's a C or a D.
There's an assessment and it does identify
that I have big weaknesses.
You have even some weaknesses.
You had a 95%, so there's still 5% you didn't know.
Negative numbers is a core thing.
You need to know that really well.
Despite that, the whole class then moves
to the next concept and builds on it.
They assume that everyone had mastery
when they've just shown that no one does.
You keep marching everyone down that path
and people just keep having gaps in their knowledge.
What you have is when you get to,
and we've all seen this with ourseleves,
family members, everyone hits a certain math class
or a certain science class where they hit a wall;
where all of a sudden that A student or that B student
just starts flunking, they just can't-
They have good teachers and they're trying to study
and they're hitting their head against a wall
and it's because they have all of these gaps.
Once you're in algebra class, there's no way
to identify the gap in fourth grade,
or identify the gap in pre-algebra.
Or once you're in calculus, there's no way
to identify that algebra gap.
I think that that's the problem.
No matter how good a teacher you have,
you have just a weak foundation.
Charlie: This is Fortune, August 24:
"His low-tech, conversational tutorials,
"Khan's face never appears and viewers see only
"his unadorned step-by-step doodles and diagrams
"on an electronic blackboard, more than merely
"another example of viral medial distributed
"at negligible cost to the universe,
"Khan Academy holds the promise of virtual school,
"an educational transformation that de-emphasizes
"classrooms, campus and administrative infrastructure
"and even brand-name instructors.
"Quick, free and easy to understand.
"Khan has his skeptics in the education business.
"They don't doubt he means well and is helping students,
"but they question the broad impact
"of any tutorial that doesn't test performance
"or allow student-teacher discussion."
Is that a point?
Sal: It's a point. (laughing)
As all points are.
Charlie: Nothing more; it's a point!
Sal: It is a point.
Charlie: Everybody's entitled to a opinion.
Sal: Or more!
Charlie: Maybe two, three.
Sal: Maybe two or three.
To rebut that last point is that that's exactly why
we have the videos and I keep making videos.
But as soon as we got funding, that little
simple software that I started building
for my cousins to measure what they knew
and what they didn't know.
That's why we started building it
into this exercise platform.
I think over time, the videos will always be
a big part of Khan Academy,
but this exercise piece where students start
at 1+1, it keeps generating problems for them
until they can master a concept, and only then
move on to the next concept.
That's going to become a bigger and bigger piece of it.
So, to rebut that, no, we are doing the assessment
and the feedback.
Charlie: Do you see it as supplementary
to the process of education or a main line
in the process of education?
Sal: We view ourselves as in the beginning
of this process, and I've been at it 4 or 5 years.
As an organization we've only been at it 6 or 7 months.
Our goal is that with Khan Academy alone,
if there's a student in Kolkata, they need
an internet connection so that's a gating factor,
but if they're there, they can get a pretty solid
grounding in a lot of different subject areas,
especially ones that are meaningful to them
that they can use to progress.
But, we think it can also be the operating system
of what happens in the classroom to really
liberate what happens inside of a classroom.
Charlie: How many of them do you do yourself?
Sal: I've produced all the videos.
Charlie: That's what I thought.
Sal: I'm the faculty
Charlie: You are the faculty of one, yeah.
Sal: Our meetings are very non-bureaucratic.
Charlie: Let's assume you're interested
in Napoleon and in the French Revolution.
What do you do?
How to do you prepare?
What's the process of going from
"I'm curious about Napoleon" to
"This is what I have to teach you.
"This is your access to understand this moment in history"?
Sal: Once again, I approach it from
what my brain would like to see.
For me, in history in particular,
I don't feel like I got this in the history books,
and even now when I prepare,
I'm not getting it from the history books on my shelf,
I like to see a scaffold.
I like to see a map.
What is a Holy Roman Empire?
What is that now?
Charlie: How they got to an empire.
Sal: What are these things?
People can just keep referring to them,
but if I can't ...
So what I do is, for history, I immerse myself
in it as much as possible.
I usually read Wikipedia entry first,
just to get the scaffold.
Charlie: Same thing I do.
I go for the scaffold myself.
Sal: Get the scaffold and-
Charlie: Just as a learning experience.
Sal: Just as a learning experience.
Charlie: I want to see where it fits.
I want to see the geography of the place.
What does it look like?
Sal: The beauty, also Wikipedia, if I find cool maps
along the way, I copy and paste.
I make sure they're in the public domain.
I copy and paste, stick it on my little
blackboard art program.
Sometimes I'll draw out a timeline
just to make sure that I get the years right.
But the main thing I do,
whether it's history of chemistry or anything,
is get the scaffold and then really immerse myself
for however long it takes.
Then make sure that I can make
intuitive connections between everything that happens.
Charlie: What's that, an intuitive connection?
Sal: Understand why something,
if I'm doing it on the neuron,
a biology book will tell you the signal
goes across because there's a myelin sheath.
I'm like, yeah, but how does putting a little
tissue around a neuron, how does it make
the signal go faster?
No biology book will tell you that answer.
I'd kind of ponder it a bit,
and then, you know, it's kind of like
a fiberoptic system and one's kind of amplifying
the signal, but you amplify too-
Then I'd call up some buddies,
who are either biologists
or communications engineers or whatever,
I'll say, "Does this make sense?"
They're like, "No, I think you're right."
It's a big deal for me, if I'm doing biology,
why does the myelin sheath make the signal go faster?
If it's history, why did this artillery captain
all of a sudden come to power?
Weren't there other people around?
These obvious questions are important for me to answer.
What's really cool is sometimes you call a buddy
and you're like, "I know you're going to think I'm stupid
"when I ask you this and you're probably going to think
"I have no business making a video on this
"considering I'm asking you this question,
"but why does the Sarcoplasmic reticulum
"release these ions when this happens?"
They're like, "You know what, we don't know."
I'm like why doesn't the book tell me that?
Everyone would like it better.
Charlie: What do your former colleagues
at the hedge fund say?
Sal: They're super happy about it.
My last boss told me, "Hey, if I knew you
"were going to do this, I wouldn't have hired you." (laughing)
Charlie: It's great to find something
that you have great passion for
and involve learning yourself.
Sal: I think I've subconsciously been inspired by you.
Years ago, I was just, "Charlie Rose got the best job."
He's just got to learn everything.
I'm doing it my own way.
Charlie: It's great to meet you.
Thank you very much.
Sal: Oh, thank you.
Charlie: Sal Khan, Khanacademy.com.