Ask Sal Anything! Homeroom with Sal - Monday, June 29

Hi everyone! Welcome to our daily homeroom. For those of you who don't know what this is, this is really a live stream that we started during Covid but have kept up. I guess it's still going on, but it's really a way to have interesting conversations or just to kind of interact with each other and talk about interesting things.

Today, we're actually going to have an Ask Me Anything, which we've done a couple of times before. I really enjoy it, and hopefully you enjoy it as well! So, start thinking of your questions. Put them on the message boards, whether you're watching it on YouTube or Facebook. We have team members who can look at those messages and they'll surface them to me. But it literally could be about anything. I like some of the questions that are a little bit out of left field.

Before we begin, let me give my standard announcement or thanks to several corporations that have stepped up in the run-up, actually as soon as they found out that we were already running at a deficit pre-Covid, and that with Covid, our deficit has grown even more. Special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and Novartis. Even with that help, we're still running at a deficit. So, if you're in a position to do so, please think about donating to Khan Academy. Every donation helps, and that's what allows us to keep it free, non-commercial, and reach tens of millions of students around the world who otherwise would not have access to really world-class learning in a personalized way with interactive software, etc.

But with that, I would love to take some questions. So, let me see what questions are starting to come in. Actually, before I even start answering questions, I will give a little bit of an announcement. Some of you know that I've been doing this; it's not an official Khan Academy project, maybe one day it will be. It's very complementary to Khan Academy: schoolhouse.world. The idea there is that it's myself and some volunteers who have been putting that together, and that is a way to match students who need help, who need tutoring, with volunteer tutors.

It's interesting; I have talked about it before where I said, "Hey, if you're a tutor, you can volunteer. If you're a student, we actually have more tutors than students." So if you need tutoring, there is an opportunity, especially on high school level subjects, for free tutoring at schoolhouse.world. I encourage you to check it out. We’re expanding; it started in calculus, but now we're expanding into Algebra 1, Algebra, Geometry, Precalculus, Trigonometry, or Calculus. So, pretty much any high school math subject, if you want free tutoring, there's a great opportunity to get it at schoolhouse.world.

There will be a little form you have to apply to get in because it's still at kind of a very alpha early stage. But it's a great way, and my hope is that we are able to create a critical mass of both volunteer tutors and students who need help. That, over time, especially as we get into back-to-school, will be above and beyond Khan Academy, where you can get help at your own time and pace, get practice and feedback, and you can get videos. There’s also a place to get free in-person, I guess you could say virtually in-person or over video conference / Zoom help. So please check that out, especially if you're a student.

Incidentally, I see the questions that are coming in. So from YouTube, Osama Al-Safi asks, "How many hours of study does a successful student study?" And then actually from YouTube, Sun Jae Suk's Noreen says, "What helps you study more effectively?"

These are related questions. I would say anything in life that you want to get good at, if you're able to put in a minimum of twenty to thirty minutes a day, you would be surprised how far you can get. So, if you're just trying to say, let's just say pick math, if you're just trying to get better at math, you literally do twenty to thirty minutes a day, you will get better at math, especially on Khan Academy, working at your own time and pace.

Now, there are certain things that just to get started, get into the flow, take a little bit more than thirty minutes. Like if you wanted to learn to be a programmer or become a great writer, but even then it's about regular practice. It's about just showing up and starting to write, whether it's writing a creative writing story or whether it's writing some code. There, you might do a longer stretch due to three hours at a time, or even if you're really in the zone, do several hours.

But once again, it's all about the regularity of it. If you are giving an exam the next day, obviously you're in those situations where we have to cram a little bit. You know, and I'm guilty of doing what I'm telling you not to do, but I think sleep is very important. So, I wouldn't go—I wouldn't study into your normal sleep time. The reason is not only will you be more rested the next day; sleep is when a lot of those neural connections are forming in your brain. It's when your subconscious has a chance to really process a lot of that information.

So, I find that I could study a good bit, and if I get a good night's sleep when I wake up in the morning, not only am I refreshed, but my brain actually has understood the material in a strange way a lot better.

So, from YouTube, Part Sha asks, "What do you use donations for?" Good question, Part.

You know, a lot of you associate Khan Academy with things that maybe I have done, made videos, etc. But what you might not appreciate—and I think I get undue credit—is that Khan Academy has over two hundred full-time people. And you might then say, "Why does Khan Academy need two hundred full-time people?" Well, first think about the number of subjects and grades that we are covering at Khan Academy. You know, we have Khan Academy Kids for early learners, then we go into elementary school, middle school, and high school, even early college. That is many, many—we have over forty to thirty grade-level years of courses, so there's a lot of content there that we try to cover as comprehensively as possible.

It's not just creating the videos. It is creating exercises for every skill for every standard, and when we create exercises, we don't just create two or three per standard. We create twenty or thirty so that you can get as much practice as you need. Most students will not see all of the items on Khan Academy, but in case they need more practice, we have that practice.

Then on top of that, when you have a site that is serving twenty to thirty million people every month, it actually takes pretty technical sophistication. Just the server costs on Khan Academy, pre-Covid, cost about five to six million dollars a year. With Covid, our traffic has increased by a factor of two to three, and so then you can imagine our server costs are on track to be ten million or even crossing ten million a year.

Then on top of that, all that software that you see on Khan Academy—that's free, that's non-commercial—the teacher dashboard, the interactive, the game mechanics, being able to keep track of what you know and what you don't know and give you as much practice as you need. In order to write software that can scale to that many people, you need a very good engineering team and a reasonably sized engineering team.

So we have eighty engineers, and you might say, "Eighty engineers, what are they all working on?" Well, think about all of the back-end infrastructure to keep something up and running like this. Think about the constant improvements we want to do in the user interface, and you know, like any piece of software, there are bugs that we have to constantly fix.

Then on top of that, think about the different grade levels and modalities on Khan Academy. We're also the official practice for the SAT, and we're also the official practice for the LSAT. That has a slightly different software experience, so that’s where the engineering comes in. Then obviously, working with engineers, we have designers, product managers, and then we have a philanthropy team that obviously is to raise money. So you might say, "You know, Part, we do need to pay their salaries."

Then, you know, we have a partnerships team where we need a partner with folks like the College Board or LSAC or other groups to make sure in school districts to make sure that Khan Academy is having the maximum impact. We have an efficacy and research team where we're constantly trying to study how Khan Academy is impacting people and how we can get better at that.

We have an amp data analytics team that's looking at the data, oftentimes in conjunction with the efficacy research team, to understand how we can get better. And then, of course, you just need a subgroup of leaders to help manage all of this.

So hopefully that explains it. But I will say this is kind of in the spirit of me asking for money; if you're in a position to do so, our budget is the budget of a large high school. But obviously, Khan Academy reaches many, many more than that would apply. The social return on investment of Khan Academy is very, very, very large, and you can do some calculations on that however you want to calculate it.

It's very large, hopefully!

So from Facebook, Patricia Atsing COO asks, "What is your favorite food?" So that might seem like a simple question, but my wife will tell you for me it's very complex. There's a lot of soul-searching because there are things that my animal brain wants to eat that I know are not good for me, and then when I eat them, it creates this whole cycle of guilt.

So it's not clear whether net-net there’s benefits to it. I do have a sweet tooth. You know, I think I've grown up eating some South Asian desserts that I especially like. Like I don't know if you're familiar with... in Bengali we say "Roshogolla," Hindi speakers would say "Roshogola," a kind of a... I don't know, a cottage cheese milk sphere that's boiled in syrup. As you can imagine, for someone who has a family history of diabetes, that is not a good thing to be eating, but that is one of my favorites.

There's also another South Asian dessert known as "Rasmalai," also one of my favorites, but not a good thing to eat. So I've been lately trying to actually cut out all sugar. The way I work, I find abstinence is easier than moderation. That's a very debatable thing. I'm curious to see how you feel on that spectrum: whether it's easier to be moderate or whether it's easier to be extreme.

For me, if you just cut it out. So I've been trying to be more, I guess you could say, ketogenic. But in that spirit, I've been able to find some good... I've been ordering from Costco. I thought you do not like some sponsors, but I've eaten one of these kind of keto chocolates. They're kind of like Klondike bars, you know, with a stick, but they're ketogenic. They have like no sugar, no carbs in them, so that is my current favorite food. That is my daily indulgence.

Another thing that I really enjoy is rose milk. So, take some milk, add a little rose water to it, and then if you don't know what rose water is, you can usually buy it at a local international store or oftentimes a Persian store, Iranian store. Then I put Monk fruit, which is my kind of natural sugar substitute—very good. If you're not worried about sugar, just put regular sugar in there.

That's another one of my favorite drinks. But as you could see, I have a sweet tooth.

So, DLX Coating 247 says on YouTube, "Do you read the YouTube chat?" Well, the very fact that I've just read your comment implies that I am able to read some of it.

Alright, Hikaru from YouTube says, "How can I get a job in this economy? How to get a job after college?" That's a really good question, Hikaru. You know, I don't know your particular circumstance or skill set or what you're hoping to get a job in or where you live. But, you know, my general advice for getting a job: when I came out of college, it was a very hot job market. It was in the late 90s, and I had a degree in computer science and math.

I found it was almost like a bounty of opportunity. Then when I graduated from business school, that was in 2003, that job market, I think, was much more similar to the job market that's starting to emerge now. That was one of the worst job markets. You know, I remember when I graduated from business school, the Career Services said this is the worst job market they saw for MBAs since the early 70s.

My attitude towards that is just keep putting yourself out there. When I graduated from business school, my then-fiancée, now wife, she was in New York, so I really wanted to work in New York, and I applied. I really wanted to work in finance; I wanted to work at a hedge fund. I applied probably a hundred places. I probably ended up getting 20 or 30 interviews, and I got none of the jobs.

So it was not a pleasant experience, but every day I just said, "Okay, I'm going to submit this number of resumes. I'm going to write this number of cover letters. I'm going to just put myself out there." Every job interview, every rejection—that's a learning experience. It took a while, but eventually, I found, you know, there was a guy. He was—you know, I was 26 at the time and he was 33. He was starting a small hedge fund in Boston, which wasn't ideal because it was about two hundred miles away from where my fiancée lived, but he gave me an opportunity finally.

That was probably the 30th interview that I had. But you know, if I didn't get that, I was looking at other opportunities. I was looking at this—you know, I needed some way. I didn't want to graduate and just not have some way to pay off my debts and pay my bills and live.

So I was looking at whatever opportunities. You know, sometimes you can get very fixated in a particular industry or particular job type, as I had with hedge funds. But I realized at the end of the day, it was very important for me to make a living one way or the other.

So, you know, even though it's good to keep trying at whatever that aspiration is, I definitely was looking at jobs that maybe paid less, but I still felt I could learn something from and build my experience because I would see any pay was better than no pay. So I would always index on a job where you'll learn new things, where people invest in you.

If they pay decently or pay fairly, then that's great as well. But it's more about, especially early stage in your career, are you going to be able to grow? Are you going to be able to learn important skills?

Other things that I would recommend doing is, you know, just be your authentic self. You know, keep—if you can show artifacts of things that you have done. You know, this is the world when in 2003 when I was applying, I think it was pre-YouTube and all of that. You know, today you could create screenshots of work that you've made and explain it, and that has two benefits: people will see the work that you've created, and they can also see you explaining it, which shows that you have communication skills.

Other things—yeah, the more artifacts you can create of your work product, the better. I think that'll help you stick out if there's a lot of resumes that they're sifting through.

So let's see from Facebook. Osama is my Sal, "What are your strengths as a teacher?" You know, it's hard to say that you ever fully know yourself. But I would say my strengths are that I usually have a love for whatever I'm teaching. In fact, I don't think I would teach anything unless I'm personally excited about it. I think passion and curiosity are infectious. I'm a naturally curious person, so I don't view teaching as, "Let me just, you know, regurgitate something and hope the other person gets it."

I view teaching as "Let me show or help this other person discover how exciting this is and how intriguing it is, and how this is connected with the universe, and how it helps us understand our place in the universe."

I would say the other aspects are, you know, I try to bring—when I explain something, I try to bring kind of a comfort to it, you know, a relaxation to it. So when you watch a Khan Academy video or if I'm teaching in person, I try to use a tone that I’m using now. I don't use, like, "The next step of this equation is…" when the—you know, I think stresses the situation.

When folks are stressed, it's harder to engage with the material. I would say the last thing is—in this course, it's close to the first thing—is I do believe that you could have done things best when you understand the intuition and when you can see how they're connected to other things. So I definitely try to do that as much as possible. I do it for my own brain to understand how my brain works, and I think it's helpful for other brains as well.

So let's see other questions here. So, Pramate Honey from YouTube says, "How do I maximize my writing potential?" I'm not, you know, a writing expert, but I would say it goes with one of the earlier questions. I think you can't go wrong with just keep writing, keep practicing the craft, and then put yourself out there. Show it to people. Get feedback from people, obviously ideally feedback from folks who can give you constructive feedback, like teachers or other people whose writing you really like.

When they give you feedback, it's human nature to get defensive. I get defensive, at least in my mind, when someone says “Wait, you just said I'm great. Nobody sees how genius it is" or whatever. But recognize feedback is a gift, and you don’t have to take— you know, not everyone’s feedback is 100 percent right. There are amazing writers who, you know, at an early point in their life, someone told them, "Yeah, you're not good at this," or a seller said, "Oh, don’t take that too seriously."

Just keep writing. When people give you feedback, really try to listen to what they’re saying, keep iterating on what you're creating, and I think if you do that, you’ll have a good chance of becoming a great writer.

So let’s see. Prasad Kotta from YouTube says, "Mr. Khan, what is a good topic to do to expand your creativity?" Good question. I don't know if I have a clear answer. I think one thing is that you need time to truly be creative. I think in our world today, it's very easily overscheduled.

When you get overscheduled, you could be doing productive things—you could be learning things even—but creativity really sometimes comes out of boredom. It comes out of like, "What do I do with myself for the next two hours?" I think that's a very important muscle.

Other things that I like are: surround yourself with other creative folks who like to brainstorm, who like to think outside of the box or don't even see the box. If you don't have them around you, seek people out on the internet like that. If you watch a lot of TED Talks, you'll see a lot of creative people and how they think about things. There are a lot of people on YouTube, even people who are doing fun, silly things; they're incredibly creative, and you can tell.

If maybe I could do something like that. At the same time, you know, build up your skills. If you want to go into the visual arts, to be a great visual artist, you need to be creative, and it is nice to have some core skills. If you want to be a great mathematician, you have to be creative.

But it's also useful to have some core baseline skills. If you want to be a great writer, creativity is huge, but it's great also to be able to write well, communicate well, and have decent grammar.

So that's the best advice I could give you, but there's nothing like surrounding yourself with other creative people and kind of feeding off of that.

So from Facebook, Saida Al-Saost asks, "Thank you for your work! How do you find which subjects to be taught that aren't taught yet? How do you keep track of what students need?"

So, I think the question is how do we decide on kind of what to prioritize next? We look at—you know, our vision is to cover all the core academic subjects from pre-K through college. So, that's the universe—that's math, science, social sciences, and language arts in turn. I hope in ten years we have all of that.

But within that, we prioritize what subjects are we capable of doing well, especially capable of doing well given the modalities that we do have at our Khan Academy today. What are subjects that we know a lot of students have difficulty in or could use extra support or don't have access to world-class materials?

That's why math was kind of an obvious first place to start, and then we were moving into the sciences, some social sciences—it's kind of gone in that order. But that's what we thought about, and we say, "You know what, the core academic subject"—we view it as something that most students take or need to take if they want to keep progressing academically.

So, you know, in K-12, that's your math all the way through maybe calculus or statistics, and then if you go to the college level—calculus, statistics—maybe things like differential equations, multivariable calculus. These are things that most people, if they go into a STEM career for sure, are going to take.

If you think about the sciences—chemistry, physics, biology—at both the high school and college levels, to go to college, maybe organic chemistry as well. You know, if you look at social sciences, the world histories, the civics, you know, I would love at some point to do law.

You know, you can debate whether economics is a social science or kind of a traditional science, but economics and psychology are something that many students take. So, these are—we don't have psychology on Khan Academy yet. Everything else I mentioned we do, but we now have psychology, but that is something that I think would be something that we would eventually do.

So that's how we think about it.

Let’s see. Minelli Hernandez from Facebook says, "Thank you for Khan Camp 2020! My three children are enjoying and learning a lot!" Great! For those who don’t know what Khan Camp is, it's a way to keep everyone learning over the summer. If you do a web search for Khan Camp, you'll see the resources there. It’s a way to keep kids engaged as they do or get ready for grade-level courses, which I highly recommend for any student, parent, or teacher out there who needs to get students ready for grade level.

So, Siddhartha from YouTube says, "How to keep focused on academics in between so much going on in the world?" What, you know, I definitely empathize with what you're saying. I think there’s so much in the world—some of it in our locus of control, so to speak—we can do something about, and some of it depends on who we are and the degree we can do something about it.

But then there's so much else in the world. Especially if you watch the news, it can make you anxious, make you worried about things that you really can't do much about. It's important to be informed. You don't want to just stick your head in a hole and pretend like the rest of the world is not there.

But what I try to do is stay informed. You know, I try to quarantine (not to overuse the word) myself—reading the news and things like that— to about, you know, a max of thirty minutes a day. But the rest of the day, you know, I—many of y’all know I meditate every day. That’s a way for me to clear my mind, to still my mind, and then just focus on putting one foot in front of the other and say, "What is in my zone of control that can make myself or the world around me better?"

Then I say, "Let me do it." What I find is if I start my day early and I start taking action and I start having small wins, then that builds momentum. Those small wins could be, you know, I got my meditation in; I had a good meditation first thing in the morning. I went for a run. First, I run—I try to run a mile every day, so it's not like long-distance running but I run a mile as fast as I can every day.

I make my bed; I do that first thing in the morning. So when I build these wins, you know, if I'm able to make a video or two in the morning, you know, by nine or ten in the morning, I'm like, "Okay, I made my bed, I got ready, I went for a run, I meditated, I made two or three videos." Then all of a sudden, I say, "You know what, Sal? You are a productive human being!" Yes, there’s stuff going on in the world, but just keep at it.

You’re making your positive dent either on yourself or around the world. So that's how I attempt to think about it. But obviously, we all have times that you just feel a little bit, you know, we veg out or just process.

So there are questions from Facebook. Maya Wytch says, "I always wanted to pick your reading list. What are your favorite writers?" And then there’s another question from Osama—Smile’s second question from Osama on Facebook: "What are your favorite books, novels?"

I've answered this in different ways before. If you look back here, some of my favorite books—you’ll see some Isaac Asimov right over here. I love the Foundation series for multiple reasons.

Asimov, more and more, has written about epic space science fiction, and I love that because it just expands your worldview or your universal view beyond the day-to-day that we all live in. We can all get caught up with, "Oh, gotta pay the mortgage, gotta go to work, go to the meetings." There's just a day-to-day. Some of it is good, some of it is kind of tedious.

But then it's great to get into these universes where, like, "But wow!" There’s this whole, you know, time and space and what's our purpose? I feel like it elevates them, you know, that previous question about creativity.

I find when you read science fiction, sometimes fantasy as well, it takes your creativity to another level because by definition, these types of stories break outside of the bounds of traditional thinking. So in that realm, Isaac Asimov, you know, Dune by Herbert—Dune is one of my favorite books.

Arthur C. Clarke—almost anything he’s written, I’m a big fan of in the science-fiction realm. If you go outside of science fiction, I love actually Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice most famously. I like Kurt Vonnegut, a big fan. You know, there’s a—you know, Candide by Voltaire; if we were to go into a little bit of the classic, I love Don Quixote.

You know, strangely, I relate to him on a lot of levels. Talk about someone who's living in their own reality. So those are the ones that stick out for me.

So, Misha Natarajan from YouTube says, "Do you ever burn out?" You know, it depends on how you define burnout. There have definitely been times in my life where I felt tired and stretched and said, "I just need a break."

And you know what? It happens; it kind of creeps up on you. You know, you're doing well, and then a little—you’re getting a little tired, a little bored, and you're like, "No, this is super important. I’m going to power through it." Before you know it, you're really not in a good place.

You’re crabby, or you're snapping at people, or you're not assuming positive intent of others; your brain is just kind of constantly worried about something. I've tried to become much more aware of when I'm falling into that. You know, the meditation helps a lot.

I think you know we keep—we often try to push ourselves to the limit. Your work is everything. You know, when you are lucky enough to work on the social mission, it sometimes does feel like the work is everything. "There are millions of people who need this help!" etc.

But you also have to remind yourself, no matter what your job is, if you truly burn out, that's not going to help anybody. So I've been learning to take it a little bit easier. I have, you know, my weekends to really rest and recuperate. There was a time in my life, even in Khan Academy, where I would kind of just keep working because I am so passionate about this mission.

But you know, spending two to three days with family and friends and just doing nothing, getting your head into a different place, is very, very, very important. Every year I get older, I realize just how much more important it is to do so.

I highly recommend meditation, highly recommend breaks, and giving yourself every day a little bit of time to do something that's unrelated to your core work. And every week, spend a day or two at least to kind of take your mind someplace else. You have to do it, and I think you'll actually find you’ll get more work done in your regular work.

So let's see. There are so many questions—oh, we're already at time!

Let's see, there's Prasad: "Did I play any sports when I was young?" I played—I wasn't your typical super athlete type person. I played in the neighborhood with other kids in the apartment complex that I lived in. The only sport I ever did in an organized way was I was on the wrestling team in tenth grade, and I enjoyed it. I wasn't bad, but my only trophy of substance in wrestling was having the highest GPA on the wrestling team.

So you can take that for what it’s worth. I always really enjoy these Athlete Anything. Hopefully, you all enjoy it too. But I'm late for a meeting; I just realized.

So I thank everyone for joining! Tomorrow, we're going to have our head of engineering. I know they had that earlier question about what does everyone do at Khan Academy, so we're going to have our head of engineering, Marta, talk about our engineering work and what we hope to do there at Khan Academy.

Then on Wednesday, we have another really, really interesting conversation around really just childhood and how students are raised and the effect on their psyche and things like that. So, I look forward to seeing you all at future homerooms!