Sal Khan is hopeful that AI won't destroy education

Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me to claim a special offer.

When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com.

I'm Scott Hanson, host of NFL Red Zone. Lowe's knows Sundays are for football. That's why we're here to help you get your next DIY project done, even when the clock isn't on your side. Whether that's a new Filtrete filter or Bosch and Cobalt. power tools. Lowe's has everything you need to feel like the MVP of DIY. So get it done and earn your Sunday. Shop now in-store and online. Lowe's, official partner of the NFL.

Hey everybody, it's Eli. I'm off this summer on print sleeve and I've turned Decoder over to a bunch of my friends from around the industry who think about the same things we cover on Decoder in different ways. My goal is to give everyone a chance to have conversations they wouldn't normally have necessarily. So I'm really excited. It's Hank Green, star of TikTok and YouTube and CEO of Complexly, the video production company behind all those channels.

This is Hank's second time in the host chair on Decoder, actually. He guest-hosted the show last year and interviewed me, which was deeply embarrassing in also one of our most popular episodes. For Hank's first episode during this run, he's going to be talking to Khan Academy founder and CEO Sal Khan. Han about the state of online learning, and of course, the role generative AI is going to play in the future of education. Here's Hank. Hello, and welcome to Decoder.

This is Hank Green, co-founder of Complexly, where we make SciShow and Crash Course and a bunch of other educational YouTube channels. I'm also an author and a TikToker and... what you might call a poster. You might have seen my face on the internet over the years. And you might also remember last year when I turned the tables on Nilay and interviewed him on his own show, because what better decoder guest than Nilay Patel? That was a lot of fun.

And it was so much fun that they've brought me back again. This time, I'm stepping in for Neelai to host a few Decoder episodes while he's out on paternal leave. And because I cannot interview Neelai, that would defeat the whole point. Instead, I found some really great people to bring on the show.

to have conversations with. And today, I'm extremely excited about this one. I'm talking with a very special guest, someone who I've known for quite a while, as what you might call a colleague in the online educational community. It's Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. Saw was actually Neelai's second-ever guest on Decoder back in 2020, and, well, a whole lot has changed since then.

So you've probably heard the name Khan Academy by now, at some point. The company was officially founded in 2008, but Saul actually posted his first... educational YouTube video to his account in 2006 just a year after YouTube was created. He even beat me and my brother by about a year to our first YouTube upload which is impressive.

So Saul has been around for a long time, and he has seen the growth of the online video ecosystem alongside the online education industry up close for nearly two decades, which is precisely why I wanted to have him back on the show. I want to ask Saul not just what it's like.

running Khan Academy as one of the biggest and most well-funded educational nonprofits in the world in the aftermath of the pandemic, but also how it's all about to change in really dramatic ways due to artificial intelligence. I have been thinking about the intersection of AI and education a lot myself over the last few years. And as we're coming up on the three-year anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT, it's something that has me equal parts fascinated and terrified.

Because it just seems like things are moving awfully quickly. And we're only just starting to really grapple with the effects of this technology on the classroom. I think you're going to find some really surprising answers from Saul on these very hard questions. And I hope you'll learn a lot. I know I did. Okay, Khan Academy CEO Sal Khan, here we go.

Sal Khan, you are the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. Welcome back to Decoder. I am so happy that I get to talk to you. And the only thing that I'm not happy about is that I don't get to do it for three hours because I feel like... There's so much I want to ask. Can I start?

I think that people probably have heard of Khan Academy or interacted with it in different moments of its history because now it has been around for a very long time. Can you just give us a kind of like look at what Khan Academy is in 2025, which might be somewhat different from, you know, a video that's...

Some person watched at some point. I think people don't know how big you are, basically. Oh, yeah. You know, in some ways, the true north of Khan Academy has been surprisingly consistent. But yes, the way people might perceive it has maybe changed if you were to go back. 20, 15 years, people might associate it with math videos that some guy made for his cousin, me. And today, I mean, we still have videos and things like that, but our true north has always been, how can we...

leverage technology to scale up what we think world-class education could look like. Our mission statement as a nonprofit is free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. And these are ideas. like personalization, mastery learning. People should be able to practice and get feedback as much as possible. So over the years, most of our resources have actually been on our software platform, which is free, available for everyone, philanthropically supported. Today, just to give you a snapshot,

We're in 50-plus languages. I think the latest number is 180-something million registered users. And I think the big push that's very different from where we were 15 years ago is we do a lot of formal partnerships with school districts. We started off as a very direct to consumer thing, which we still do, but we realized if we really want to move the dial for.

real students everywhere. We have to work with their school districts. We have all these efficacy studies showing how it can improve their outcomes. But it really needs to be in a classroom setting for most students for it to work. Yeah, this is wild because I chose the exact opposite.

I was like, okay, we make YouTube videos for people that help them learn. And if people want to use them, they can use them. But man, do I not want to get involved with the process of selling something to a school board or dealing with administrators. How did you start to take that on? Like, it's a very, I mean, trust me as a person who's dabbled in it a little bit, it's a different business than building a tech product or making a YouTube video.

To actually get in there and interface with the bureaucracy a little bit. That is, I mean, I agree with you. I think that we would be, complexly, a more impactful organization if we did that. But we have chosen the path of... personal joy to not have to do it. Yes. And, you know, I felt I had some similar feelings and I had other thoughtful people give me even more of those feelings. It's like, are you sure you want to do this? But the reality is, and this is, you know.

This is what I found very promising about our structure is that... You know, our philanthropists that were donating to Khan Academy and our board really were nudging us in this direction. They were saying, look, you know, the first nudge was, OK, you're popular. A lot of people are using you. But how do we know it's working? And so we started running all these efficacy studies.

Well, look, it works. And when I say it works, more than the videos, and the videos are part of it, but when students practice at their own pace and the studies we see if they're even able to put in. 18 hours over a whole year. So that's not that much over a year. You know, these kids are accelerating 30, 40, 50%. And there's been 50 plus studies like that. But then our board and the philanthropist said, okay, well, that's nice. It works. And you have a way to get...

And you have a lot of teachers already using you, but how do you make sure all students are able to use you? And that's where the answer was school districts. We went to school districts and they said, well, to use systemically, you got to give us support, training, integration with our roster. systems, district level dashboards, you have to meet all the accessibility guidelines. And that's when we said, okay, if we're serious about moving the dial at a

state, nation, global level, we have to build this ground game. And so we've been doing it for about seven years, but it's, in my mind, gone better than I expected. Really?

I mean, it's gone very well, but I guess that's true of me as well. It does feel that there was a gap waiting to be filled a little bit. What kind of organization do you think you are? You think you're not really a content company? Do you think you're a tech company? Are you an ed tech company? How do you think of Khan Academy? The way I've always aspired to think of Khan Academy, I've always daydreamed this way, and hopefully I'm convincing other people, is to view us as like a...

as a global learning institution, you know, the same, the same part of your, of your, of your brain that might think of an Oxford or a Harvard. And he's like, wow, those are, those are. storied institutions, but then part of your brain says, yeah, but they don't really scale. Their research scales, but their education side doesn't really scale. If Khan Academy could say, wow, it's like that. Hopefully in 100 years, people say, yes, this is one of the major institutions of our world.

But it scales, it's high quality, it's very affordable, arguably free or very close to free. So that's what I've always aspired to be. I think in real implementation 15 years ago... We were known most for our content. Maybe we were still most known for our content. And then we actually have a pretty large software engineering team to build everything around the content, the practice, the data dashboards, et cetera, et cetera. Now...

AI might be able to create content in the not too far off future. I think we are turning, well, we've always been, but I would say there's even more weight being pulled on to the... How do we create systems that can help raise the ceiling inside of a school, but also raise the floor outside of a school? And, you know, those systems can be software systems, AI systems, but there also could be credentials.

ways to connect students with each other. We have a sister nonprofit called Schoolhouse, where there's peer to peer support. So yeah, how can we build these systems where we can do high scale, high quality education? I want to talk about Schoolhouse and I want to talk about AI, but I still want to talk a little bit about the moment when you were starting to do this thing.

Was there a thought in your head, this could be a company or it could be a nonprofit? This could be for-profit or a nonprofit. Oh, yeah. Did you make that choice? It was a pretty explicit choice. In the early days, I was living out here in Silicon Valley. There were some VCs who took notice back in 2007, 2008. And the first conversation was fun. They said, hey, I'll write a $100,000 check right now. You quit your...

job. We'll start Khan Academy as a for-profit, but then meeting two was always like, okay, let's talk about monetization and maybe we'll do some freemium content or we'll do test prep. We'll charge for that. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. I don't want to get too all high and mighty for anyone who does have a model like that. But I just thought about how much...

how much psychological reward I was getting from people all over the world. And you get this too, like, hey, thank you. That really inspired me. That really helped me. And as soon as you put paywalls, and yeah, I did have a bit of a grandiose dream. That maybe this could be, you know, I always cite the Foundation series, Isaac Asimov.

Maybe I could be something like a Harry Seldon that's creating the new foundation that will keep us from entering a dark ages, or maybe it'll make today look like a dark ages because everyone's going to get educated. So I didn't want to give up on that dream. um and and and there was that that very that very chill not at all not at all um very seldom figure yeah

But, you know, why not? And from my point of view, the main reasons, the good reasons why people will often say go for profit is access to capital. Maybe access to people because you can maybe pay them with equity or maybe you could, at least in theory, pay them a little bit more even cash-wise. There's sometimes a stereotype, which has some truth in it, that nonprofits maybe aren't quite as nimble.

or as fast. And I'd never started a nonprofit before, but I always had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder, still do, that, hey, I think we can get the best of both worlds. We can be a nonprofit. We can have this mission. We can try to build this institution. But we can also attract the best talent. Yes, we can't give them stock because there is no stock in Khan Academy. No one owns Khan Academy. I don't. But we can pay them well.

You can run an organization like this as nimbly as any organization anywhere, but because we're a nonprofit, we have some advantages. People are, you know, we have 50 languages. We didn't... pay to translate many of those languages. People came out of the woodwork. People, especially in this time of AI, I think there's a bias to a little bit more trust. Some of the best people in the world...

They don't want to become billionaires. They're happy if they can have an upper middle class lifestyle and get to work on a fun mission with other cool people. So we've been able to attract some really amazing people. Do you ever have a moment of regret that you didn't do for profit and that you, you know, you get to be Harry Selton, but you don't get to have a billion dollars? On this journey...

I've had to raise a lot of money. I've, you know, we're, we're, we're on budget now. It's just, you never get any of it. The reason I've, I've, I've met many billionaires, wonderful billionaires. We've got Academy would not exist without these billionaires giving significant donations. And, you know, there's been a couple of moments where I won't name names, but a couple of these folks who some of these are people.

you and I grew up reading about and you, you know, we probably fantasize in our middle-class houses or, you know, me in my lower middle-class apartment saying, oh, imagine if I had that much money, I would do this and this and this. And now, and they've told me, hey, Sal, I envy you.

And I'm like, you don't really envy. I've seen how you travel. You should see how, you know, I just got upgraded to economy premium. Like this is, we have different, but you know, they were very genuine. And I've had, I've heard this from at least three or four folks now. They're like, you know, like. you've really found your passion and it's really making a huge difference. And I feel lucky just to be part of this journey. That counts for a lot.

God bless them and what they do, and God bless them for donating to Khan Academy and making it possible. But I honestly wouldn't trade places at this point. Now, you know, can I figure out a way to spend a few more million dollars? Yeah, probably. But actually, even then...

I don't really, you know. Do you think that it could have had like a positive impact on the, like, could it have increased your impact if you were like pushing for market share, pushing for all of that stuff with the sort of investor breathing down your neck kind of incentive?

To some degree, the experiment has been run. There were several organizations that were, let's call it the same vintage as Khan Academy, plus or minus a few years. I would say most notably the MOOCs, the Massively Open Online Courses. They, and I know many of the people who started them, they're very good people. They weren't in it for the money. They were in it for mission, but they were convinced by people.

And I was trying to convince them to go nonprofit, but no, you're not going to get the capital. You're not going to get the, you know, you need that go for profit. And if you look at the MOOCs now, the ones that exist, they. And I don't want to denigrate them. I think they're still doing things of impact. But they were about, let's democratize college education. Let's do something that's world-changing. And now the ones that exist still have become...

Let's do some certification postgraduate that might help some people, you know, transition into data science type of thing. And it's just a smaller vision. I mean, I'm sure they're still helping those people. But they haven't democratized higher education, I think, the way that they could. So when I look at that, I'm like, no, I think it's priceless to still have the dream alive. The experiment has been run, and Khan Academy is very big in hitting a lot of eyeballs and helping a lot of people.

But there is this sort of trope that a nonprofit is going to be less nimble, it's going to be harder to run, there's going to be more stakeholders, more consensus building. How do you organize yourself? How is Khan Academy organized? Do you keep that as a priority? How is that built into the structure of it? Fully honest, one of the reasons, when I was in business school, I had a classmate. It was really funny because he was...

We had this case discussion, and he was talking about how narcissistic it is for people to name organizations after themselves. And his dad, I won't name names, had named an organization after him. of a very large financial company and everyone was laughing about it. But I remember that. I was like, yeah, super narcissistic to do that. But then when Khan Academy started to become, it wasn't called Khan Academy.

And I said, well, maybe this could be something, but I wanted to make it a nonprofit. I said, well, how do I make sure that, you know, my insecure side, how do I make sure that it's hard to fire me? They have to have good cause. And how do I make sure that I have, you know, there's no shares here. I don't, I'm not.

like Mark Zuckerberg, where I control the voting interests of Meta. So how do I, I have a vision, I think I do. How do I, well, my name on the door and becoming a certain, you know, quasi mascot of the organization, it has helped. One, keep it focused on the vision. And having a source, you know, having a source of the vision where like people can, if there's disagreement, people know where to go to get that.

disagreement. Exactly. I mean, that's probably not always the funnest job to have, but... And any executive, manager, CEO has to have some of that in their job. But especially when an organization needs to make big pivots, you know, we might be talking about AI and Khan Academy has been doing a lot of pivoting there. It would have been very hard for someone who didn't start the organization.

whose name's not on the door to be able to make that type of a pivot. And the lucky thing is we have a great board. Many of them are major philanthropists, but some of them are people who just know a lot about education. And they pushed me on all the right ways. You know, they're always pushing, are we reaching the kids who needed impact, et cetera? Are, you know, the trade-off between investment and overstretching our budget.

think very seriously about that all the time. But they also see that not just myself, but a lot of the people that we've brought into the organization are pretty, I'd like to believe, pretty disciplined managers that, you know, and... engineers and designers and project managers and content creators. And I tell any of the, and a lot of our funders are people who are successful tech entrepreneurs. I'll say, look, pound for pound, put our

We're a large team now, 350 people against any 350 person team in Silicon Valley or anywhere else. I think you're going to find. as good or better talent, nimbler systems, et cetera, et cetera. And they see that. And so, you know, that's what keeps us focused that way. So 350 people, how is that organized from board on down? There's the board.

I'm on it, but obviously I report to the board too. And then I have more than your average direct reports. I have about four, I have 14 direct reports. The man. You work hard. Well, you know, this is the thing I learned though. If you have the right people in the seats. The people who report to me, they're fairly senior in their careers. I don't have to spend a lot of time with angst, like, what am I going to do with my life type of conversations.

We have, you know, Kristen is our chief academic officer. She also runs the product management design teams, content teams. We have a great CTO for our engineering teams, the largest. We have a what we call external relations team, which is our philanthropy, but also.

of this work, we're partnering with districts and that's a revenue source for us too, an earned revenue source. We have Khan Academy Kids, you know, we have obviously internal counsel, we have our CFO and all the internal functions. Then we have schoolhouse.world, which I'm nominally the CEO of. I'm more of like an executive chairman there, but the COO there nominally reports into me. So that's kind of...

how we're generally organized, but there's really good leadership across the board here. So I get to jump around and say, hey, have you thought about this? And they usually have, or, well, and every now and then. you know, because people have their heads down and they're in the forest, I can kind of surface and say, hey, but look at, or they're in the trees. I'm like, look at the forest here. We got to pivot a little bit harder. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Thank you.

Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should. One, it's $15 a month. Two, seriously, it's $15 a month. Three, no big contracts. Four, I use it. Five, my mom uses it. Are you playing me off? That's what's happening, right? Okay. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

Upfront payment of $45 for a three-month plan, $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See MintMobile.com. Ford Blue Cruise hands-free highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel. allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control. Enjoy the drive in Blue Cruise-enabled vehicles like the F-150, Explorer, and Mustang Mach-E.

Available feature on equipped vehicles. Terms apply. Does not replace safe driving. See Ford.com slash Blue Cruise for more details. Disney's Lilo & Stitch has finally landed on Disney+. Now you can watch the global phenomenon at home with your Ohana. Be good for one second.

Lilo & Stitch is verified hot on Rotten Tomatoes with an audience score of 93%. Perfect. Stitch. Also cute and fluffy. Disney's Lilo & Stitch. Rated PG. Now streaming on Disney+. And right now, you can get Disney+, Hulu, and all. with an incredible limited time offer. Terms apply. We're back with Khan Academy CEO, Sol Khan. Right before the break, Sol and I were digging into the decoder questions and how Sol, believe it or not, has 14 direct reports, which is a whole lot.

But now I wanted to ask him about Schoolhouse, Khan Academy's online tutoring platform he launched during the COVID pandemic, and how that fits into the broader organization. So 14 direct reports, and that's 14 different departments?

Kind of. And then schoolhouse. I throw schoolhouse in. I mean, just, you know, my universe of people that I'm talking to on a regular basis. But yeah, that's, it's different departments plus finance, legal, you know, a lot of the internal stuff that you have to do running an organization. So let's talk a little bit about Schoolhouse. I think that people don't know maybe this is part of Khan Academy or that this is a thing that you do. I find it extremely impressive and so cool and so smart.

And like, and like, you're the only one who could have pulled it off. Tell me about Schoolhouse. Well, no, I'm happy to hear that. It's funny. There's been a little bit of a controversy of Schoolhouse as of last week. I can tell you about that, which I think it's good controversy.

This is going to publish like five weeks from now, so it'll be six weeks old by then. In the recent past, there's been controversy. We should talk about that. But the idea was, I've always thought, hey, it's great if people can learn from Khan Academy, but what about learning from each other? And the best implementations in classrooms have always been some kids using Khan Academy, but the teachers pairing kids up. They're also learning from each other. And when the pandemic hit.

I said, well, you know, now is the moment to try to do something like this at scale. So we ran a little pilot and we said, what if we created a website where young people, actually people who are learning, they don't have to be young, could say what they need help with. And then we could find other volunteers who can validate that they know the material. So we needed a vetting process, but then they would tutor these people.

for free, just out of the goodness of their heart. And Zoom donated a bunch of licenses and we tried it out. It's a very utopian idea, but it worked at the scale of a few hundred people. So then we got some philanthropic funding and we... set up Schoolhouse as a separate nonprofit from Khan Academy. Honestly, the only reason to do that is just to keep the twos.

focused on what they each needed to do. There was a little bit of fear of liability of people having real conversations on Zoom and what might happen to hit Khan Academy liability. So we kept them as separate. The name was somewhat inspired. I wrote a book back in 2011, The One World Schoolhouse. So we said, schoolhouse.world, although we might change it in some ways in the next couple of years, bring it closer to Khan Academy.

We started doing it, and one of the immediate things was, how do we certify someone? How do we know that they know calculus, for example? And so we created a mechanism. Khan Academy already has assessments that are different every time, but we don't... prove that it's you who did it. And so we said, what if you take the Khan Academy assessment while it records your face, records the screen, you explain your reasoning out loud.

You talk through it. And then Khan Academy will say whether you hit 90% and you're following a protocol. You can't be looking around and doing shady things. And then that video gets peer reviewed by people you don't know to just make sure you're not doing shady things. And then, yes, if you've got 90% on that unit, we say, you know, unit one of calculus, you can now begin your tutoring journey. And there's some training that you go there.

And when we were doing that, University of Chicago reached out and said, hey, everything's up in the air with the pandemic. Could we use your certification for college admissions? And we said, yes, you can. And then MIT and Columbia and Caltech. And now there's a list on the website of 40 plus universities. Yale, Brown, you can name them.

They all said, hey, you could use schoolhouse certifications as a way to prove your mastery. People are like, how are we going to do assessments in the future with AI and everything? And it's like, we just... Sal Khan's already figured out. AI is going to add a whole other layer. I mean, I think we're going to be able to do some nice simulation-based assessments and things like that. And a fun example, I just met this young woman from Afghanistan like three weeks ago, and she...

When obviously she could not go to school, going up in Afghanistan, Khan Academy was her school. Taliban take over Kabul, her family become refugees in Pakistan. She's still not in school. but she's been learning all this time. She wants to go to MIT. She applies. MIT is really impressed with her application, but she has no diploma, no formal transcript, no SAT scores, nothing, no AP scores. And they're like,

can you go on Schoolhouse and validate yourself? And she did. And she got in based on that. I just met her. She was at this Y Combinator. you know, for the top AI engineers in the country type of thing out here in Silicon Valley. And my wife and I took her out to a little meal. And I was like, yes, this is the certification vision of Schoolhouse. It's pretty powerful to hear stories like that.

You know, most recently, and this is where some of the controversy started coming. I think it's good controversy. We went to the same college admissions folks and we said, look.

this certification and and they weren't just interested in the certification they were also interested in the kids who tutored because you could imagine if you certified yourself in calculus and then tutored calculus now this is like this is like one of the like the like who incentivizes people to actually do the tutoring because you're not

isn't like paid and but but like i can say as a person who tutored kids when i was a kid like that's so powerful in just knowing the material better if not also putting that on your little kiddo resume, whatever they make them do these days. If you're one of these colleges and there's a lot of... cynicism around people gaming it, etc. But as someone who, if young Hank ran 100 sessions tutoring chemistry, and he has a 4.8 out of 5 rating, and there are these quotes saying,

I learned more from Hank than I did in my school, or he makes me excited about chemistry. Yeah, if I'm one of these universities, like, I want Hank on my campus. That's the kid I want. But we went to these universities and said, what else could be of value? And they said, well... This is probably too hard, but what if we could have...

if we could give students practice in having dialogue about hard subjects. We don't want them to water down their passions, but we want them to be able to have constructive dialogue because everyone's living in their bubble now, geographic bubbles, socioeconomic bubbles, social media bubbles.

And so that's when we launched, only a couple of months ago, this dialogues platform. Most people would get anxiety just as I'm about to describe this. We make young people fill out surveys on tough issues. Immigration. Israel-Palestine, affirmative action, gun control. I could go down the list. The stuff that we are afraid to talk about at dinner parties and kids fill out a survey. We pair them with kids with the opposite viewpoint.

And they have a conversation. And then after that conversation, it usually goes about 50 minutes, they fill out a questionnaire on... Do you feel that the other person was, you don't have to convince them, but do you feel like the other person heard you? Do you think they can represent your point of view? Can you represent their point of view? Is there anything, any feedback you want to give to that other person? It could be constructive or it can be.

positive feedback. You do as many sessions as you want. And then on your transcript, it just says how many sessions you participated in. It doesn't say what your point of view was. And you can highlight anything you choose to highlight. Hey, Hank said that Sal was...

He really opened your mind to a different viewpoint that you never took seriously before. Whatever it is, I could put that on my transcript. And if I want to, I could share that with many of these same universities. The controversy is... There was a New York Times op-ed, like, oh, this is just another thing to fake in college admissions. And, you know, Nate Silver, you know, tweeted, this is affirmative action for boring kids. And all of a sudden, I'm like, no, how can it be boring?

How can it be boring? Like, it's very not boring to be willing to have an... open conversation about these topics, but being able to do it constructively. And what we've seen, these kids aren't holding back. They're holding their positions, but they're doing it in respectful ways. all i all i have to say about this is affirmative action for boring kids is that's a tweet you know that's like such a tweet and i'm i'm so tired of tweets yes like

I mean, I'm a tweeter. Don't get me wrong. I post. Right here, I post. I post way too much. I want to live that Salkan life. Get off of these postings. But I post, but man, is that a post? That's like... pure like i'm gonna have the the take that everybody's gonna feel good about even if it makes no goddamn sense oh man Well, that's fascinating and does make me sweaty. That's not a choice that I think I would have made. That seems... It's great. Which, yeah.

Did you just call yourself brave? No, I'm saying the students are brave. I actually haven't. I've observed some of these. Well, it's a little brave on me on my part too, but it is. I think it's brave on your part. Yeah. I'm saying it's the opposite of boring. These students are brave to do that.

But I haven't been able to do it because, yeah, I don't want – if I were to get on Dialogues, the kids will say, oh, that's Sal Khan. And did you know that Sal Khan has this view about the Middle East? Did you know that Sal Khan has this view on immigration? I'm like, nope, not going to be constructive. So I can't participate.

That's probably not ideal. Yeah, yeah. I probably won't be on there either. But I think it's a brave decision for an organization to make, which leads me to a decoder question. How do you make decisions? How does Salcon make decisions? How does Salcon make decisions?

I always try to remind myself and the other people who are inputs into decisions, like what we're trying to solve for to begin with. It is amazing how many times in life, you know, there's a friend who's a very successful venture capitalist and I've made fun of him in the past, but he has this like hack that always makes. him look brilliant you go about half an hour into any meeting and he will say hey hold on hold on a second everyone let's take a step back what are we solving for

And he looks brilliant. And everyone's like, oh yeah, we lost track of what we're solving for. And it's true. You know, 30 minutes in the meeting, most people are getting into the weeds. They're not. And you're like, no, what we're solving for is. how do we get more students to participate in society? Or how do we get... So it's important to have those true norths. And then, yes, I try to listen to people who will have...

who are ideally as close to the ground as possible on what they have to say. And then, you know, try to make a call that both makes sense intellectually. hopefully takes the path of less cynicism and more like, no, maybe the world can work this way. Like, why don't we just try? And, you know, people say gut. Sometimes it's like that's a lazy way of doing things. You know, your gut has a ton of neurons. Like our gut, as you know, would be a fairly smart animal if it just wanted...

I don't think the gut's actually making the call here. But the gut is really, you know, we have these neural nets. We have these, you know, hundreds of billions of neurons that are doing things subconsciously all the time. And at some point, they're just giving your conscious mind a memo saying, yeah, no, I think this is the right decision.

And that's at the end of the day, if you have a good true north, if your gut has paid off in the past and you're surrounded by people who are advising you for the right reasons and you make a call and, you know, it is also important to have folks around you that are willing to disagree and commit like, hey, once we make this call. Let's try our best. Let's not grumble and be passive aggressive after that.

So maybe you can walk me through that process a little bit because I want to talk about you, about Khan Academy starting to use AI tools. I got a call from you a couple of years ago. And I remember pacing around my basement on this phone call where you tell me about you going into AI tools. And I was like, man, I would not make this call right now. I do not know where this is going. I don't know what the public opinion around it is going to be. I know it's.

going to be complicated and weird i don't know where it's headed i don't know how powerful these tools are and i was like but more power to them for for you know heading straight headfirst into it this was very early this was like like right after GPT-4 launched. How did you make that particular decision? I remember our call. I don't remember exactly when that call was in the whole timeline, but it was actually...

We made the decision well before GPT-4 launched. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this was after. Yeah, so I probably couldn't talk to you. It was probably as soon as we were out of NDA with OpenAI, I probably called you and said, hey, maybe there's something here. Summer of 2022. So almost exactly, well, you know, roughly three years ago. And, you know, I got a call from Sam Altman, Greg Brockman. They said they're working on their new model.

They'd want to show it to us because they thought maybe there's something interesting about Khan Academy showing positive social uses of it. I was curious. What they showed us was GPT-4. This was well before ChatGPT. This was about six months before ChatGPT existed. And ChatGPT, for those who remember, it wasn't even launched on GPT-4. It was launched on GPT-3.5. It blew my mind the way that you would...

And honestly, even when they showed it to us, they hadn't fully appreciated, like it had trained and they ran a demo with us and they said, do you want access? And I remember it was a Friday and they gave us access, myself and our chief academic officer. And I was slacking with Greg Brockman and I said,

hey, does this work in other languages? And he wrote, I don't think so. And then I just, I barely speak Bengali. And I tried to speak, and it spoke back, not only did it speak back to me in Bengali, it wrote in Bengali, which I can't read. But then I said, can you...

transliterate that into English text. And I was like, wow, it could speak Bengali. I took a screenshot and I sent it to the OpenAI folks. And they're like, yeah, after you asked, we checked. It looks like it can speak every language. So there was like, oh.

See, this is why I would have said no. I'd be like, you guys don't even know what language is it to speak? There's all this emergent... It's fascinating. I have this other friend who's a professor at Stanford, and he's trying to understand. Apparently, like...

You could go from one language to another as like a rigid transformation in a multidimensional space. And that's why it can talk about things in Bengali that it never got trained on in Bengali. Anyway, there's a whole, there's some deep linear algebra there. But this was very early on. And this was another thing I didn't realize that we were doing. A year after that, after we had launched, well...

I mean, like that weekend, I couldn't tell anyone about it. We had signed an NDA, but I was like up all night. I said, you know, write the Declaration of Independence in the tone of Donald Trump. And it did it. You know, George III's a loser. We're going to have the best country. It was actually a pretty good one. George III was a loser. Yeah.

But then when I said, hey, you are an empathetic tutor, I think the exact prompt I said is, you are Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, and you are going to Socratically tutor me. Because I knew this could be used for cheating, et cetera, too. But it was able to do that. And even though it made errors and hallucinations.

It's like, there's something real here. And so, well, we got most of the Khan Academy team under the non-disclosure agreement so that we could see it. And about a month into that, and this is still months before the rest of the world even knew that this was coming.

Our team was surfacing all the fears, the cheating, the safety, the privacy, the hallucinations, the math errors. But I was pretty convicted that like, look, this is, yes, those are real fears and errors. Like we need to turn those into features. But this is going to be so powerful and it's getting better so fast that if we don't really lean into this with our mindset and our mission-focused mindset, other people are, and they're not going to care.

about whether it's cheating. They're not going to care about whether it's good for kids. They're not going to, you know, and honestly, this stuff's going to be so scary for people that they're going to need, hopefully, someone that they can trust, that's built up trust over time. So yeah, that's when we lead in. And then... I mean, there's interesting chat GPT to talk about emergent phenomena.

And the day that that came out, November 30th, 2022, I slacked the OpenAI team. I was like, wait, we're under a nondisclosure agreement. We're not supposed to announce any of this stuff until March. What did you guys just release? And they said, we didn't release anything. We just put a chat interface on an old model that's been out for like seven months and the world exploded.

It's interesting. Some kids in a garage or at a college campus could have done that and now have chat GBT. No one did it. No one did it. But so even that was a shock that you just put a chat interface on these existing models.

and it makes people think about it differently. Wild. How do you actually turn ChatGPT or any LLM or GPT into... something that is useful for a student. So you have to work in math that works. You have to try to obviate hallucinations. You have to put walls around it so that it doesn't do.

do things you don't want to do or like, like be too sort of friendly with students in whatever way it has to be. It has to look and feel like a tool. How do you actually like functionally do that? What do you do to it? Yeah. And look, it's evolving because the models are changing and just people's expectations around these things are changing so fast. But some of our original-

thoughts I think are still true, where there's some just basic prompting you can do. And I say basic prompting, but when you want something that can robustly work for millions of folks. The prompting has to be quite careful and you have to create all sorts of systems to test, et cetera. But to say, look, this is going to be Socratic. Use these techniques. You're not going to give answers, but nudge students forward, you know.

There's a lot more to it, but that's the gist of it. You're going to want to have some level of transparency and oversight, especially if you're talking about under 18 students. And transparency buys you a lot. It doesn't just buy you safety. if a student's saying, hey, I want to learn how to build a bomb, I want to hurt myself, not only having teachers or parents being able to see it, but then having another agent that can see that and actively flag it. Identify.

is important. We avoid hallucinations from the get-go. The models themselves have gotten a lot better over the last two, three years, but... you anchor it on content that you, you know, is good. And we have a lot of content on. Do you, do you have like a big like context window that has a bunch of true facts in it or something? No, we, we, we don't. Well, there's, there's two ways that you can do it. One is.

If you're using our tutor, which we're calling Conmigo, on Khan Academy content, on a Khan Academy article, Khan Academy video, it has that context in it. Or if you're getting help on an exercise, it knows... Like we've passed it the solution to the exercise. So it won't hallucinate or hopefully make math errors or very infrequently make math errors in those cases. So that's one. Anchor it on things it knows. You can also, you know, these...

called vector databases. You could put a lot of content in these databases where based on the conversation that you're having with the AI, it can find which pieces of content are closest to this conversation and then throw those things into the content.

window so you don't have to throw everything in the context window right google now does have some models that you can have like a million tokens you know roughly a million characters uh in in the context window so you can actually throw a lot you know your average book is like 40 000 words so if well actually it's not even characters a token is like a

call it two thirds of a word. So you can now throw a lot into context windows too, but that also has cost issues, et cetera. But, you know, the other guardrails, yeah, I mean, the transparency. There's a lot that we do around the math to just double, triple check the math, just hacks on.

The AI calls another AI to go through the reasoning that can come up with every possible way that the student might approach it, then compare the student's answer to that. So there's things that we've been playing with that have improved the AI's ability to do there. So if I'm like using Conmigo and I...

get the question wrong, it might have already predicted that wrong answer and know that I got it wrong, like how I got it wrong. And what you've touched on is actually one of the hardest things. The AI models... are actually pretty good at math now. They weren't good at math two and a half years ago, but they are now. Right, but now they're like, they call math out. That's actually what they do. They're making like Python calls behind the scenes to actually do the computation.

And the places where you still see the most errors is when the AI is evaluating the student. So let's say the correct answer is one third and the student has put in 0.33. That's not quite right, right? They should be 0.3 repeating. A good tutor would say, okay.

Are you sure that's the full answer? Are you sure it's just 0.33? How would you express that as a fraction? Something like that. And so, yes, now what we have going on behind the scenes is the AI, even before looking at the student's response, is saying, like, what are reasonable responses here?

And then compare that. Or what are reasonable things a student might have done? Or when the student gets an answer, what are ways that the student might have gotten that answer? And then compare it. And this is constantly evolving. As the models get better, we're having to do less of that. But there is still a lot of that going on behind the scenes. We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back. Isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from EBCLIS.

After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking Epglyss achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. For more information, visit www.fema.org. We'll see you next time. Running a business comes with a lot of what-ifs.

But luckily, there's a simple answer to them. Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses, including Thrive Cosmetics and Momofuku. And it'll help you with everything you need. From website design and marketing to boosting sales and expanding operations, Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality. Turn those what-ifs into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer.

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

We're back with Khan Academy CEO, Sal Khan. Right before the break, Sal and I were discussing Khan Migo, Khan Academy's AI-powered teaching assistant, and how he's thinking about the right ways to use AI in education. But now I wanted to focus on some of the more fuzzy aspects of learning, like how what a teacher provides is not just a textbook and instructions, but also a motivational relationship and whether AI can even remotely replicate that.

One thing I've noticed, so like people always say like, hey, you've helped me, like you're the reason I got a five on my MP exam or whatever. And, you know, I'm always like. I think probably you had something to do with it is what I say to them. But what I have learned is that like there's a big component of teaching that isn't teaching. It's like motivational.

You know, it's like the coach in the room who you have an obligation to and who will be disappointed if you don't do the thing that they asked you to do. It's a human being and it's easier to feel obligation to human beings. Do you think that like... LLMs can play a motivational role? Is that part of this? Yeah, I think over time. And they're already playing a little... We've even implemented a little bit of that. Even for myself, I had to give some commencement addresses and I...

I took my first draft and I got an AI to give me feedback and it made me feel good. I'm more confident now. It sure does do that. It does, yes. If nothing else, it will make you feel good about your writing. I could have put a pretty trashy...

A pretty bad speech in it. Phil probably would have given me positive feedback. But what you're touching on is absolutely right. Even, you know, a lot of folks know Khan Academy started with me tutoring family members 20 years ago. And when I really think about it, yes, I was.

explaining certain concepts to them. But a lot of what I was doing is exactly what you're describing. I'd be like, hey, where are you? How come you didn't do the thing I told you? Hey, look, you got to be a little more confident with how you answer these questions. Let's lean into the problem, whatever it might be. And so... Our realization, you know, the first version of Conmigo, it just kind of sat there and waited to be asked, and then it would help you as you needed it.

And I say that's analogous to a tutor walking into a classroom and say, hey, kids, I'm here in the back. If you need me, come get me. But I'm here. I'm going to be reading a novel, whatever. That's not good enough. You want something that... holds them accountable, et cetera. So this new version we're launching this we're piloting it in the fall is.

The AI is front and center. You come, it'll say, welcome back, Hank. Hey, it's been a couple of days. We're falling a little bit behind our goals. Are you ready to get started on this next task? This is what your teacher wants you to work at. And once you're done with that, I have some ideas for you to work on. And then once you go into it, it's constantly...

like, hey, look, you got that wrong. Not a big deal. I think it's a good idea for your review why you got that wrong. And there might be some game mechanics. If you review it, I'll give you some points and things like that. But that's the future. And yes, if we fast forward a few years.

We can all imagine having AI. A real human being is always going to be better, but a real human being is not always available. That can be even a better accountability holder for us. You use a phrase for this. It's not the best. Not the best tool, but the best available tool. Something like that. Yeah. Did I make up that? That's a you phrase? That's not a me phrase. I mean, I've said stuff like if I had to pick between amazing teacher and amazing technology, I'd pick amazing teacher.

Hopefully you can have both.

I've also heard you say that replacing humans in education would be a disaster. And I think that a lot of teachers and parents and students would agree with you. How do you think we avoid that fate? People are complicated. And they're expensive. And so it feels like lots of people would like for all the work to be done by things that are simpler and don't complain. How do we avoid this fate?

One, I always like to point out to people like the economics of our education system. Most people would argue that the teacher role... has the most direct impact on the student of everything that you're spending money on. But if you look at a lot of places, California spends around $25,000 per student per year with like 25, 30.

student teacher, student teacher ratios, New York City spends a lot of East Coast school districts spend 30, 35,000. So depending on how you account for it, there's about... six, seven, $800,000 per class of 25 or 30 kids. They're not paying the teacher that. The fully loaded cost of a teacher with benefits, even a senior teacher. With pension and everything, maybe $200,000 if you put all of that in there, it's usually a lot less. So a lot of the costs of education are going into...

layers of other stuff, you know, some of that stuff is needed. Some things, you know, buildings as part of it. If you had to cost cut, that's not the way to do it. Now, I think AI might help in some of the back office stuff. You might be able to automate the registrar's office. You might be able to automate other functions in the office of a school, and that might save money. But we've always said...

even before AI, that our goal is to raise the ceiling for hopefully you already have access to a reasonably good classroom and a great teacher, but it's still hard for that teacher to personalize for 25, 30, 35 kids. We'll give them the tools to do it. But we also want to raise the floor. And, you know, I talk about this young woman in Afghanistan.

Did not have access to a teacher, but she was unusually motivated and it would have been sad if she didn't have something. And so that's where we did raise the floor for her. We, you know, we hear stories of there's a young girl in a Mongolian orphanage who used Khan Academy. There's kids in rural America who don't have.

a physics or calculus class within hundreds of miles of where they live. Kids in inner cities who don't have a calculus or physics or chemistry class at their school or an advanced one. And so that's where we raise the floor. But the ideal, you know, I always point out about... what, about 150, 200 years ago when textbooks started to become a thing?

A lot of teachers were afraid that it was going to replace them because teachers thought that, oh, I'm the source of the knowledge. Why would anyone come to me if they can read that text? There's a whole book here. There's a whole book here with exercises and everything.

But now teachers can't imagine teaching without a textbook because they're like, of course they need me still, but they need their practice. It's good to have another resource. And I think that's going to be the same thing with AI, where a teacher who's leaning into the tools, you know. A teacher who refused to use a textbook 50 years ago is going to have trouble. And a teacher in 50 years who's refusing to use AI.

might not be able to be all they can be. But if they're using it thoughtfully and the AI is helping them form better human connections with the students, make more engaging, interactive lessons, more personalized lessons.

support certain students while they can support other students and they can tag team, it can act as their teaching assistant. Yeah, it's going to become invaluable for them. So I've heard you say that the incentives of this sector, this education sector, which is the...

second biggest industry in America, are strange. I think you used the word strange. And then the person you were talking to did not ask a deeper, further question. And I was like, oh my God, do I want to know all the ways that Salcon thinks the incentive structure of... of education are strange. Tell me, tell me, what are some of the strange incentives? Yeah. And look, this goes back to the nonprofit question. You know, I don't think you need to make everything in the world a nonprofit.

There's certain things that the private sector does very well. I'm, in my heart, a capitalist. I believe the capitalist system generally works. And there's certain things you want government to do where, you know, the private sector wouldn't naturally do it or wouldn't have the... ability to coordinate to do it. There's certain areas where markets aren't working. They aren't doing what's efficient or what's not.

aligned with our values and maybe for political reasons or just government is too slow or bureaucratic to take advantage. And that's where the nonprofit sector matters. And education and I would say another major sector, healthcare, are two of the areas where the... The beneficiary, in the case of education, is the student, is the beneficiary. The decision maker...

In education, it's typically the decision maker is usually like the school district. Sometimes it's the teacher and the payer. And the payer is in education, usually the taxpayer. There are three different entities. There are three different groups. And you actually see it's very similar. thing in healthcare. And even if it was rational, we still also have this value that...

You know, just as if someone is bleeding and they're dropped at the emergency room, you don't want to say, hey, let me see your insurance. You want to treat them. Unfortunately, I think that might have happened sometimes. But, you know, you want to treat them first. Similarly, if a young person in our society wants to learn, I think most of us feel...

that it should not be based on how much money their family has, whether or not they should get a high quality education. So that value system and the fact that these three... agents all have different incentives, I think is what has led to education not always having the most engaging, the most effective. You know, a lot of the people in the district office, very well-meaning people.

but there are certain guidelines, regulations they have to follow. Some salesperson from a big publisher comes and tells them a good story. They adopt it. The kids hate it, but too bad. Before we built our district offering, I couldn't tell you how many times we would talk to like a chief academic officer or superintendent of a district. And I would say...

hey, why don't you all use Khan Academy, look at our efficacy studies? And they're like, oh, no, no, we believe you. My daughter swears by Khan Academy. It got my nephew through calculus. It even got me through statistics in grad school. But- you know, we have this vendor we adopted last year and, you know, they're on some state list that you're not on. And, you know, we already wrote them a $5 million check. So I think we have to use them.

I'm like, no sense. I'm like, would you use those with your own child? Would you use them yourself? And they're like, no, not really. Oh my God. Yeah. That is what I've identified. And my solution to that problem was simply to not engage with it. But what we have both done, I think, and to our credit is that our first customer was the student and that's how we got into these places. Like we didn't get in from...

From the top down, we got in from the bottom up. And I've seen several organizations, like for-profit companies too, to get into this business that way. And that's the way to do it if you actually want to help. Whereas if your customer is the superintendent, then you're going to have a pretty different set of structures. Can I ask you a question that is a real pink green question?

So once upon a time, I came across this large database of videos that had been scraped to use in sort of a database that anybody could have access to for training AI. And the only... YouTube channel that I found that had more videos in it than the ones that my company complexly makes was Khan Academy, which indicated to me that...

There wasn't just like grab every video. It was grab videos that have good information that we can trust and that that is more valuable. Does that make sense to you that that is why we got grabbed more than the average video? I think so. Yeah. I mean, I don't know about this database and all that, but yeah, I'd like to, I'd like to believe, I mean, you know, even from the, from the, you know, even in the early stages of Khan Academy, even as a nonprofit.

You know, there's definitely a bias, especially in Silicon Valley, to be more of a platform than to be like focused on, let's say the artisanal quality of whatever you're trying to create. And I would always point out, it's like, you don't need. a thousand expletations of l'hôpital's rule yeah you know

one good one might go a long way, but maybe four or five max, you know, with different takes on it. And it's actually sometimes been hard for me to make people believe that because it goes against like, well, that won't scale. I was like, no, it kind of does scale because... L'Hopital's rule isn't going away any. It's not like we're creating some new site or something. It scales the same way a textbook does. Exactly. Except a lot easier because making another copy is...

Basically instantaneous. And we have interchangeable parts. If L'Hopital's rule does get updated, we can just update that part. So given that, and my question is, how do you feel as a creator of content about LLM's... training on the stuff that we make. Do you think that that's just sort of they can learn the way anybody else can learn? Or is there like a difference in value offered by different, you know, content that should be compensated differently?

You know, if I thought, you know, Khan Academy could get a meaningful check for this, I would love to take it. But generally speaking... in a world where let's let's say i i don't have a choice i mean maybe i do but let's say there's a world where i would rather our content is used for for for training if a model in two or three years can create a chalk talk stock tile video and, you know, draw diagrams that are helping people. And, and, you know, that's.

That's going to be net good for society, I think. I'm generally supportive of it on the intellectual debate around... You know, can we, should we just view an AI as just a super smart savant that like sees a lot of material and now can paint in someone's style or write in someone's style or create a video in someone's style? Or should we view it as like, no, it's, it's IP theft. You know, the courts are going to decide this, but...

I've been kind of a little bit more on the savant side because as you, as we know, our videos aren't directly encoded anywhere in these models. These models are just learned. They literally are learning to create and create associations. something similar. And, you know, there've been people who could paint in the style of Leonardo da Vinci or whatever. This is, this is a similar thing, although, you know, on, on, on steroids, but what about you? Are you like, I don't know.

I'm like, I don't know. What I'm like is I'd like these things to make their way through the court so that we can all know, so that we can know what the legal situation is, regardless of kind of how I feel, because there is sort of a law intellectual property question here.

I want to kind of finish off with this. So you talked at the beginning, or somewhere in the middle here, about content creation for artificial intelligence. Of course, you know. already these things are creating content. What an LLM exports is content. Maybe it's just for you, but it's still stuff. But are you thinking about, will there someday be an ability for me to say,

I, you know, I, I need to know about Lagrangians and, uh, and Salcon just sort of like pops up and starts tutoring me on Lagrangians with a piece of content that had not previously existed. And like, you're doing the thing and the, the chunk. the digital chalkboard is happening and I'm hearing your voice. Is that like a, is that a future? Are you going to never die is kind of what I'm asking. That's my, you know, we'll see. But the Mr. Mr. Selden. Well, that's it.

Don't get me started. When you hear someone like Demis Hassabis talk about all diseases will be cured in the next 10 years, it gives those of us who are about to be 50 a little bit of hope. I think it's only prudent that I and other... creators and Khan Academy prepare for that reality. It's likely, you know, as best as we can guess, it's likely to happen. It's probably going to happen, I would guess.

of really robust quality. It'll probably be three to five years when something like that will happen. You know, my vanity likes to think it'll take longer. It might, we'll see. It might be next month. But- You know, and then, you know, our content can still be in some vault, some places like this is what people did before I took over. It'll hopefully still have some almost like primary document value to it.

Like, oh, you know, Hank is like a real person. And he talked about having an upset stomach that day. And, you know, AI won't do that kind of thing. Who knows? I think we're going to give the AI some pretty upset stomachs. They won't have stomachs, but something inside of them will feel... It'll talk about its stomach. It'll talk about what it just ate.

as if or what Hank just ate. But yeah, it's coming. And I think we have to prepare for it. And we are building tools like the new version of Conmigo and the teacher tools. We are having it so teachers can co-create. content with the AI, including practice and administer it through the Khan Academy platform, like Khan Academy content, and then get insights back. So we're trying to prepare for that reality. This is wild. This is wild. I don't know. My take.

on like what the way that on what I make and the way I make it is I think that it would be I think it would be hard and I also think that people like connect to people I think that they're like like it If people don't know that it's not a real person, there will be a betrayal when they find out that it isn't. And if they do know that it's not a real person, they won't feel the same way about it. That's not to say it couldn't be a useful tool, of course. But I think that there's going to be...

One of the hardest things to make into AI will be like a pop idol, you know? People want like a real thing to... Not that that's us, but there's an element of it. Certain niche audiences we can... Every once in a while, somebody will be like, I just really like a smart man who teaches me things. All right, weird way to end it, Sal. I remain very impressed by you, and I'm glad that you got to spend a little time chatting with you today about all of the...

crazy, crazy ways that you are having a big impact on the world. So thank you so much for taking the time. No, thanks for having me, Hank. I'd like to thank Saul Kahn for taking the time to speak with me and thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about the show or what else you'd like us to cover, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at the verge. The team really does read every email.

you can find me on Blue Sky, Threads, or of course, YouTube. Decoder also has a TikTok and an Instagram. Check those out at at decoderpod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a... production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and is edited by Ursa Wright. And the Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time.

lululemon shorts the ones you got me back in the day i think they're called pace breakers the ones with all the pockets i just got back from vacation and i left them in my hotel room and dude i need to replace these shorts i wear them like three times a week

you send me the link to where you got them oh also my birthday is coming up soon so anyways thanks bro talk soon looking for your newest go-to's lululemon what's new gear drops on tuesdays every tuesday head to lululemon.com to shop what's new gear