Homeroom with Sal & Eric Schmidt - Tuesday, November 17

Hi everyone! Welcome to Homeroom with Sal. We have a very exciting show and a very exciting guest today, Eric Schmidt. But before we jump into that conversation, I will give my standard announcements.

First, a reminder that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization, and we can only exist through donations from folks like yourself. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate.

I also want to give a special shout out to several organizations that stepped up over the last few months. Many of them have been supporting us over the years, but especially when they saw that we were running at a deficit pre-COVID and our costs went up because of COVID. We've had 250 percent of typical traffic. A special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and Novartis for helping us fill that gap. But we still need more help, especially for 2021, so please think about making a gift.

I also want to make a reminder announcement that there's a version of this live stream that you can get wherever you get your podcasts: Homeroom with Sal, the podcast.

So with that, I am super excited to introduce our guest, Eric Schmidt. Eric, there are a lot of things folks know about you. You are the former CEO of Google, you were the executive chairman of Google, you're an advisor to Google, and you're actually a former board member of Khan Academy. You've been a supporter of Khan Academy over the years. Thank you for joining us!

Eric Schmidt: Well, thank you, Sal. When we first met and you had this little operation in Mountain View, I knew the impact that you would have would be fantastic. But the combination of a new set of tools and, frankly, the pandemic has accelerated you to this sort of new level that's really remarkable. So congratulations to you and the team. I'm sure it's been intense.

Sal Khan: It has. You know, obviously, it's been an unfortunate situation for the world, but it's been nice that we had something very critical to do.

Eric Schmidt: By the way, I learned one thing. I learned many things from you when I was on your board, but I don't know if you remember when you first had this idea of looking at math and trying to figure out which the minimum number of math questions to get the maximum amount of knowledge transferred. I thought that was a great public service to all students by the Khan Academy. So the fact that you could back-solve to what math exercises you have to do would have saved me an enormous amount of time when I was learning math.

Sal Khan: Well, you seem like you've done just fine, and I'm flattered because back in the day, I thought all of the learning was coming towards me, so I'm glad a little bit went upstream to you.

Eric Schmidt: So there's a ton to talk about. I encourage everyone watching on YouTube and Facebook to put questions in the message boards. We have team members who are going to surface them to Eric and myself literally about anything and everything.

But one of the things where I want to start is on a pretty powerful project that you're working on, and actually, I'm collaborating with you on, called the Rise Program or the RISE Scholars Program. Tell us what this is and why you decided to get involved in this.

Eric Schmidt: Well, it's interesting that I tried to figure out when I left Google what was really important, and it turns out the most important thing was talent. I was talking to my various friends, and I said, "Well, how did you know that you were unique in this area?" That's code for, "Are you a nerd?" They said that roughly what happened was when they were a teenager, which is an awkward time for everybody, there was some kind of teacher or mentor or experience that got them to understand that they had a special gift.

So then talking to everybody, we had this idea of building an app, which we ultimately asked you to build, so thank you for that! It would try to identify students in that sort of 15 to 17 age group with exceptional talent, and I don't just mean math, though. I mean any kind of talent that’s really off the charts amazing.

The idea was that if we did this, we would figure out a way to get a list of such people, and then working with the Rhodes Trust, we would figure out a way to identify starting with a hundred of them. So you're part of this grand experiment.

Sal Khan: No, and I want to emphasize how excited I am about this project. I mean, you're seeing here on the screen some of these students who are able to submit submissions, and one of the really powerful things—I mean, I think what you touch on is you know there are these super young people around the world. You know, you, myself, we were all probably lucky early in our life to have certain people really believe in us and certain people support us. If we can create a framework so that they can feel supported, you know selfishly speaking, these are the young people who are going to cure the diseases, we're going to solve the major social problems, and we're going to be the entrepreneurs, the artists that really move society forward.

Eric Schmidt: Well, what happened was we wandered around. We talked to you and your team, we talked to some other teams, and there are groups that do a pretty good job of surfacing talent, but they are not uniform across the world. So it became clear that there was talent that was not being found.

So the insight was that it’s pretty reasonable that pretty much any teenager has access to either their own mobile phone or someone near them has one, pretty much everywhere. We had the idea—again, I think it was really your idea—to let them start by submitting videos, right? Because a video is hard for them to fake, and it's a good project to get them to express who they are, what they care about, and what is special about them. So that's the grand experiment.

I remember when we first started talking over a year ago, and your team reached out. They said, "Hey, you know, we're interested in finding these really high-potential kids around the world, maybe a lot of them are using Khan Academy." And I said, "Yes, a lot of them very well could be using Khan Academy, maybe a lot of them are watching this right now."

But I said, "What would be really cool is if we could capture your traditional academic content mastery, whatever you want to call it. Things that traditional test scores measure, because that's important, and honestly, Khan Academy prepares a lot of that. You have things like SATs, which we partner with. But then there are other things that traditionally aren't measured, like your sense of humor, your creativity, your entrepreneurship."

We brainstormed together and said, "Let's create this app," and the app is called Hello World, where we essentially have challenges. Actually, you have a challenge there on how someone can change the world. I put a challenge on there where people need to figure out ways to make me laugh. And when they submit these videos, they also get to review other people's videos and help them on their journey to grow themselves. What we're hoping is that not just for the Rise Program, but this could be a new way of folks being able to show who they are, showcase who they are, and get access to opportunities.

One thing that I'm sure a lot of folks are thinking about is, "Well, what does this mean? Let's say I won; I become a Rise Scholar. I'm one of that hundred this year, what's going to happen to my life?"

Eric Schmidt: Well, hopefully, with first place at some point, the pandemic will be over, and at that point, that cohort will have some kind of residential program, you know, three or four weeks together, which we think will be transformative. What we know is that each person has a specialized set of problems and opportunities, so we'll start with trying to make sure that they're operating at their full potential with career and college counseling and so forth. If they need a way to get into a university in the US, we'll find a way.

These are people who will get into wherever they apply, but we want to encourage them to apply wherever. As part of this, we've made a commitment that it's a lifelong program, so over time, we'll provide mentoring and help, and we'll also take the older recipients and use them to mentor the younger ones. Because of the way our model works, we are also going to start tracking whether the signals that your app produces ultimately are predictive of future behavior.

So the key thing is we have an idea of what shows excellence, and there's some anecdotal data, but over say a decade, we'll be able to say these cohorts and these characteristics are the most likely to predict future success with the help we're providing.

Sal Khan: So that's really interesting to me, and I really want to emphasize this. I've been telling every young person that I meet who I think could have a chance at this—I was like, "You have to look seriously at this program." I think you said in a very light way, but students who win this, they're going to get access to a lot of mentors, a lot of support. Once again, not just now and through college, but for the rest of their lives. If they have ideas on how to help humanity, they want to start a business, they want to start a not-for-profit, essentially you're creating an ecosystem to support them.

Eric Schmidt: We are. Let's discuss what the world will look like in 25 or 50 years. There are going to be more people; it's also going to be more complicated. Humans are really good at building complex governance systems, political systems, social systems. So this next generation of leaders is needed now, and they have to be up to the task of an even more complicated and interconnected world. I'm excited about that.

I think that my general view is the sooner we can turn the current regime over to a younger generation who can fix the mistakes we've made and make some new ones, I think the better.

Sal Khan: And I forgot, it's my bad. You're the co-founder of Schmidt Futures, and Schmidt Futures is kind of the creator of this Rise Program. Explain what Schmidt Futures hopes to do, generally speaking, and how Rise fits in that.

Eric Schmidt: Well, it's become the vehicle to express the things that I care about, which started off with talent. We're also spending a lot of time funding science. There's a new generation of scientists—there always is—and they are accelerating discoveries in key aspects of science, medicine, math, those sorts of things, and I'm funding at a very large level.

So far, I'm getting very interested in the notion of creating institutes around new problems. For example, we have created a virtual institute that's a code for a funding system to look at the really hard science problems in climate change. I'm not talking about dealing with it; I'm talking about why we still don't understand, for example, the relationship of sea ice and the sea around it, and exactly why it melts the way it does. These sorts of things—there's plenty of science to be done, and I'm trying to fund it.

And especially since the government is now funding R&D at the lowest percentage since Sputnik—1.7. So literally, what is it, 70 years later, it's the same percentage of GDP for science. That's insane, right? Nevertheless, that's where we are, so this is an opportunity for private philanthropy.

I'm also extremely interested in learning, and frankly, this came out of, I don't know if you remember, but you had an event at your house before, back when we could have events in houses, where we talked a lot about education. You were with Bill Gates, who's a big funder of Khan Academy as well. One of the ideas there was to try to build the database of information about how people learn.

That's called learning engineering, and it turns out we have lots of opinions about how people learn, but we don't actually have any provable data. We don't have any AI science around this, so I'm trying to fund that as well.

Sal Khan: It's a pretty bold goal. I mean, you know, if I read between the lines, it's really you're stepping up and you are stepping up in massive ways to kind of help fill this gap that normally is done by nations and governments. What we're obviously a very unique time with the political environment, with COVID, with what's going on in work and remote work and all of that. Given your org, Schmidt Futures, what is your sense of the future? If we're looking back five years from now, ten years from now, what do you think is going to change for the better, and what do you think is going to change for the worse?

Eric Schmidt: Well, I don't mean to say the obvious, but when historians look at the West's performance with respect to the pandemic, they’re going to give us an F. Democracy, as it's currently formulated, is not serving the health and safety of the citizens of Europe, South America, and the United States.

There are a few democracies in Asia, primarily, that have managed to get through this. There are a couple in Europe, but otherwise, it's been a disaster. The reason I'm hammering on this is that the compound negative impact of the pandemic, especially on minorities and the underserved, is going to be hard for us to catch up. I thought things were going pretty good before the pandemic; things were getting better.

But if you look at ratios of inequality, the issues of education, and so forth, one of the reasons that Khan Academy is so important is there's evidence that especially students of color, people who without proper means, are literally going to miss out on a whole year of education because the schools are closed or partially open. So we've got to collectively solve this problem. The future of our nation is at stake.

Having said that, as sort of the number one concern, there's all sorts of reasons to think that the model of entrepreneurial discovery, the kind of creativity that we're doing, is going to accelerate for all sorts of reasons. So if we can just get through this pandemic with minimal loss of life and get people back to school and to work—which somehow the at least the Trump administration seems to have forgotten to focus on at the moment—and we're waiting now on the Biden transition, which is two months away, which is insane during the middle of a pandemic, but nevertheless, that's where we are.

There's every reason to think that we can make great progress in biology, chemistry, mental health, use of, I don't know, telehealth—I mean, there's an example after example. I'm the chairman of the Reimagine Commission for New York State, and we've looked a lot at what the future looks like. Once you have relatively broadly available broadband, it's possible to have a somewhat more effective and somewhat more efficient learning experience.

I'm not one of these people who thinks we go back; I think we go forward, and the new world is much more hybrid. As an aside, one of the things that the pandemic has proven is that people can be productive working from home if they choose to.

It looks to me like we've got some new fundamental learnings in our society which are probably positive after this terrible experience.

Sal Khan: And there's a lot in that. I mean, on just the second-to-last thing you mentioned, then I want to get to the last thing you mentioned, the notion of essentially access to broadband and the digital divide. What's your sense? You've had ties to government and probably talking to them, advising them, obviously, your role at Google. What do you think are the chances that we can finally close the digital divide at home? I mean, my back of the envelope would be one to two percent of one of these rounds of stimulus would essentially do the job. What do you think our odds are?

Eric Schmidt: That's why the current situation is insane. The government is being forced because of economic activity to come up with a number of trillion-dollar bailouts. All we need is 50 billion or 100 billion to both wire up the rest of the country and fund all the rapid testing, fund all the sentinel systems, fund all the knowledge systems to keep us safe. And yet every time this comes up, it doesn't get funded.

There's something wrong here; there's some cognitive problem. But in any case, in our New York work, we discovered that there are hundreds of thousands of households in New York State that do not have effective access to broadband. Now, you might say there are plenty of rural people, and the rural people suffer because their primary access is cellular. So, you know, it's literally on a cell phone. But there are many, many underserved communities within the cities of our nation, and it's just stupid.

It's basically because the prices are too high; there's no subsidy, or there are subsidies but the people are not aware of it, or the build-out has not completed and so forth. We've got to address that. So as part of our commission, we're making a set of recommendations which essentially say in order to operate going forward, you have to embrace universal broadband, and you have to measure it.

I'll give you a simple example: under the FCC rules, you can count connectivity based on a single household within a zip code. In other words, the coverage looks a lot better than it really is. So we propose, for example, crowdsourcing the actual coverage map so we can figure out who actually has broadband, and you'll be surprised where the holes are. Here I am in New York City. New York City, and you spend a lot of time in New York, New York has plenty of holes. It's easy to cover if you want to.

Sal Khan: That's fascinating. And what's your sense? Assuming we are able to cover it—and I have to say the silver lining, I've never seen more energy than we're seeing right now at hopefully closing the digital divide. You know, that kind of your last point that you had made around the future of work, and that people realize that they can be reasonably productive remote. Given your vantage point as, you know, the former CEO of the techies of tech companies that has a lot of infrastructure that allows people to work remotely, what do you think is going to happen to work and business travel and all of that?

Eric Schmidt: Well, there's a couple of interesting statistics. One is that only about 30 percent of the workforce can effectively work from home. Think about the number of people who are security guards—they open doors—they have to be in some kind of manufacturing facility to oversee something; they're teachers who have to be in a classroom, etc. There's so many jobs which are not able to work from home at the moment.

And for those who wish to work from home, some of them don't have environments, as we discussed, where they have appropriate broadband, or maybe they don't even have a working environment where they can do their work because they live in a relatively cramped place, which wasn't a problem now it is because they have no space to focus on what you and I are talking about.

I think these things will adjust. And I think the most important thing is that we're not going to go back to the structured nine to five in the office. It's going to be more flexible; they're going to be more hybrid models. Also, and I don't mean to be a downer on this, but the pandemic will go on for a long time. Even if you make the most positive assumptions about vaccine effectiveness and so forth, the rate at which the vaccine works, the number of people who get it, the effectiveness of the vaccine in terms of length of time means that we're going to be operating in this strange hybrid model for probably more than a year from now, maybe longer.

So we need to have a plan to get our businesses back to work, to get our students educated, to have our mental health addressed, and frankly, to have some fun and enjoy our lives during this period.

Sal Khan: No, it's fascinating, and there's so much that's in flux. So we're getting a ton of questions on Facebook and YouTube. So the first question from Facebook: Mandy Roby asks, "Do students apply themselves, or do they have to be nominated?"

Eric Schmidt: I could take that and the answer is both. You can nominate yourself, and you can be nominated by somebody. There is an app entitled Hello World - Rise, which is available on Google Play and on the Apple App Store, and I encourage people to download it.

Sal Khan: And I wonder who wrote that app, Sal.

Sal Khan: Just for everyone, you know, as we mentioned earlier, this app is a project—it's actually a cousin project of Khan Academy. It's another not-for-profit called Hello World, and I'm the chairperson of it. But I've been working very closely with that team to think about, you know, in a world where Khan Academy can have people learn at their own pace, kind of core academic things, have supports, ideally do it in a classroom setting but also be able to do it on their own. How does someone prove who they are to the world?

And Hello World is that app, and I encourage anyone listening to apply to that. You know, sometimes folks might say, "Oh wow, there's going to be 100 kids in the world—maybe I'm not one of those hundred kids." But I encourage you, this app is going to look at dimensions of your personality that you might not have appreciated yet and that we might appreciate. If you're really funny, if you're creative, if you—you know, it's not just your traditional assessments.

Now, we are also going to be looking at people who are off the charts in traditional measures as well. But I encourage everyone to apply, and even if this year you're not able to get the Rise Program, just going through the process of—the process of going to the app and going to these challenges, we're hoping over time to connect students—all of y'all—with other opportunities as well. Opportunities for other scholarships, higher education opportunities, and jobs.

So I encourage everyone to download the Hello World app and apply, and Sal, you and I have talked about this before, but I'd really like you to take this app that you guys have built and use it for more general assessment, self-assessment by students. As we learn what's great about people, maybe this app can help you provide a better experience in your learning programs and also better referrals.

Sal Khan: I think the platform you built is broader than what Rise is offering, and I think you can pull that off.

Eric Schmidt: That's what we're hoping! And you know, that's what we're very excited about. Working with Rise is kind of the first end goal for the app because, as we said—and I think you know you're being very humble with what this program is. I mean, you know, I'm telling every young person if my older son was a little bit older, I'd be like, "You're applying for that tonight!”

Sal Khan: We've been waiting for your kids to grow up for a while.

Eric Schmidt: No nepotism—it would be on their own merits. But this is a great program for anyone who honestly—anyone who just goes through the process of applying, I think it's going to be a really powerful thing. You're going to have artifacts that you're going to be able to show folks to impress them and get opportunities. Then for the folks who become finalists and the folks who become part of the Scholars Program, this is generally going to be life-changing. And you get to be part of that first class of people that are going to be heavily, heavily invested in.

So there's other questions coming in over here.

Sal Khan: Oh, whoops! I dropped my headphones. So one question here—and we touched on a little bit, but maybe we'll double down—this is from YouTube, SmartBear5 asks, "How will Schmidt Futures change the future?" You mentioned some things in kind of scientific discovery, filling the gap of government, you know, in your dream, but still, you know, what do you hope that the future will be different because of Schmidt Futures, let's say in 20 years?

Eric Schmidt: Well, what I hope is true is that we have an unusually good model for talent. In other words, that we can somehow feel the talent better than others and that we collect these teams together.

So what I'm particularly excited about, which I'm working on now, is to try to identify the really hard problems in society. I'll give you one: inequality. The inequality is getting worse. How is this okay? It's clearly not. I'm very interested in moving the AI platforms beyond their current technology base to more aggressive uses of AI in terms of knowledge learning.

I'm very interested in using AI to approximate functions that have never been computable before. This occurs in chemistry and physics and biology. I'm very, very interested in the progress that people can make in biological systems. Now, it used to be that you had to sort of manually adjust where you thought the targets of drugs were and how the various components of biology worked, and now you can use synthesis programs that will actually do this.

There's evidence of people who can use synthetic biology at scale now to build parts of life that would be helpful for human existence. I can just go on and on and on.

Sal Khan: I could talk to you for hours about pretty much every clause of what you just said. What you just talked about, I mean, you know, just to underline some of what you said. I mean, it sounds like this work—just even one dimension that last dimension you referred to—this could accelerate the number of drugs we discover and make them more effective by an order of magnitude or two. I mean, that just—that would be massive.

Eric Schmidt: So it's interesting that there's a drug that was just developed called Halicin. It was developed by a group at MIT, and the group had a synthetic biologist who was brilliant and a computer scientist who was brilliant and a number of other chemists who were brilliant, and they worked together as a team for a couple of years to actually build a drug that appears to be a new class of antibiotics that was discovered by computer.

If that is a replicable model, right? So here's a proof point: then it looks like a whole bunch of problems that have bedeviled humanity for a very long time will be close to falling. We'll see—of course, drugs take a long time to develop, and they have to be safe and all of that.

Sal Khan: That's mind-blowing! And just to explain everyone watching, because you know there's a lot of young people here trying to figure out what do I do with my life, what is a synthetic biologist? Explain what that is—how's that different?

Eric Schmidt: Synthetic biology is the creation of what you think of as life that is carbon-consuming cells, if you will, using essentially a computer. There are techniques where the cells are essentially combined and you get something that is a life form. Now, by the way, we're not creating humans with this; we're dealing with, you know, tiny little things. But those tiny little things can be, for example, put as part of a drug to help some biological process. They can also be used to detect things.

So the various biology is very powerful, and we're just learning how powerful it is. For things like, I don't know, like the classic example in synthetic biology is fuels that do not have carbon in them—in other words, synthetic fuels. And that's another example today. Synthetic biology is primarily focused on new drug categories because, frankly, that's where all the money is now.

Sal Khan: That's mind-blowing! Even when you talked about that, not only are you kind of synthesizing new organisms or new molecules, but the how to synthesize is being informed by artificial intelligence. I'm assuming it's being trained on data of what other types of molecules have been able to do as far as being antibiotics or something like that, and that's being able to create new molecules.

Eric Schmidt: It's interesting that it's pretty clear that 30 years ago, if someone asked you what field you should get into, the correct answer was computer science. Computer science has sort of taken over the world in terms of—it’s now the number one major in most universities; it's accepted as a mainstream activity. Whereas 30 years ago, it was sort of crazy. People like me were seen as sort of on the side; it was sort of seen as a fad. Now it's mainstream.

Sal Khan: What's the next one?

Eric Schmidt: It's clearly biology because biology is so deep, so powerful, and so poorly understood at the molecular level, at the processes level. Once you—so here's an example: we can't build a fully functioning model of a digital cell yet. Think about it—we should be able to do that.

There are teams that are now trying to build small models of, not human, but mouse brains. Again, we're off by an order of magnitude in our ability to do it. The biological world is so much more complicated than I thought and is likely to be chip-able, a wayable—whatever the word is—because of the advances of the technologies that I'm describing.

So to me, if I were to give advice to a young person, if you can do biology—and biology is fascinating; it has a heavy math component. Again, touch up on your math! But the fact of the matter is that's where the money is going to be, in the same sense that it used to be computer science.

Sal Khan: And it sounds like, I mean, it's really the convergence of these two because it's really the computing that is allowing us—because biological processes have been so unfathomably complicated. And, you know, you mentioned the cell, and you know, there's a video on Khan Academy—I still remember doing this—where I had like this image of the cell that a lot of books have, this very simple thing with the nucleus. But the reality of a cell—it's like a whole universe in there, and the complexity of how it works is mind-boggling.

Eric Schmidt: I'm funding a project, a large project, which has not yet been announced, to try to understand how the cells communicate with each other. Think of it as the biology of life. We don't even understand the signaling between the various components of the cell. We can see the cell, we can name the parts—the microscopes are really good—but we don't understand how the transformations occur.

And the theory is that there's probably a unifying language, it's one that we haven't discovered yet, which was built by God and by nature, which is at the basis of all of that.

Sal Khan: That's cool!

Eric Schmidt: No, it is! It is mind-blowing! And just to explain everyone watching, because you know, there's a lot of young people here trying to figure out what do I do with my life, what is a synthetic biologist? Explain what that is—how's that different?

Sal Khan: We could talk for hours about any one of the sentences you mentioned today, but thank you so much!

Eric Schmidt: Well, let me thank you, Sal! You've changed the world. You've changed probably a million lives already, and you're on your way to 10 million. I admire what you've done. Having you as a partner is one of the great things in my life today, and I want to do more with you.

Sal Khan: No, Eric, the feeling is more than mutual. You've been a—you know, and I—you know, you were very kind when you said you learned something from me, but in the early days of Khan Academy, I remember when 60 Minutes was doing a piece on Khan Academy, and then the producer randomly said, "Oh yeah, we got Eric Schmidt." I was like, "Eric Schmidt knows who I am?"

Then you—I mean, I remember at the end, anyone could find it on YouTube—that 60 Minutes piece, you were very generous about, you know, who I was. That helped me believe in myself. If Eric Schmidt believes that about me, maybe I should do something with my life.

Eric Schmidt: So we're trying to recreate that feeling, Sal, that I inadvertently created in you, for a million people using your app on the Rise Program. That's what we want to do; we want that feeling that you felt that lifted you. We want everyone to have that feeling. Imagine if we can pull that off together.

Sal Khan: No, I love that! I love that! Let's do that! And it's going to be selfishly motivated because these are the young people who are going to entertain us and drive discovery of medicines and keep us alive longer and make our lives better. So I'm excited to go on this journey with you, Eric.

Eric Schmidt: Okay, thanks again, Sal!

Sal Khan: Thank you! Well, thanks everyone for joining! A super exciting conversation on a lot of levels. I mean, I literally could talk to Eric about every one of those things that Schmidt Futures is working on because you could write like a science fiction story about each of them.

But I do want to encourage everyone listening—whether you are a teenager, whether you know a teenager, whether you're the parent of a teenager, or teachers of teenagers—take a serious look at this Rise Scholars Program. As I talked about with Eric, this is not some—let's call it a small scholarship; this is something that is literally transformational for a young person's life.

Just going through the process of going to Hello World and applying for it, you can see the URL right there: risefortheworld.org/apply. This is the first year, and I think when you get in on the ground for something, that's even that much more exciting. So encourage everyone watching to apply and get everyone else to apply. It literally is going to be a life-changing opportunity for you.

So with that, I will see you—actually, I'll see you in a little while—probably after Thanksgiving break. I'm going on a little bit of a vacation, so I'll see y'all in, I guess, that's going to be December. See y'all then!