Ask me anything with Sal Khan: May 15 | Homeroom with Sal

Hi everyone, welcome to the daily homeroom livestream. For those of you all who are wondering what this is, when we started having physical school closures, we realized—and everyone had to be socially distant—we realized that it's our duty really, as a not-for-profit with a mission of free world-class education for anyone, anywhere, to not only accelerate the development of a lot of the software tools and the content, but also try to create as many supports as possible for parents, teachers, and students as we go through this fairly tough time.

We've been running webinars for teachers and parents to understand how to use the different kinds of county resources, and we've been doing other things, but we thought it'd be fun to have a way to connect and taste synchronous and have conversations during this time of social distancing. So, welcome to this live stream! I do like to make my standard announcement: Khan Academy is a not-for-profit. We only can exist because of philanthropic donations from folks like yourself.

I want to give a special shout out to several corporations that have stepped up in the last few weeks to help us, especially with the COVID response. We were running at a deficit even before the crisis, and our costs have gone up. We're seeing about 2.5 to 3x the traffic we normally do. We're trying to accelerate a bunch of programs, so special thanks to Google, to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, and to the many other philanthropic and corporate supporters pre-crisis as well who continue to support us. Special thanks to the many thousands of people who donate whatever they can; you know, $3, $5, it all makes a difference, and it all adds up because it allows us to serve many, many, many millions of students.

So today, we've been having some incredible guests, and I'm sorry to announce that today's guest is not so impressive—it's me. So, every now and then, we like to mix in having guests and just, you know, a time for you to ask me anything you would like to ask me. And I say that in the broadest possible terms. I have yet to be offended by a question, although I don't want to encourage you too much. But please, on YouTube and Facebook, ask me anything! We have team members who are looking at the message boards on both YouTube and Facebook to surface any questions.

And so already, there's one from Facebook. Kesava Rahman asks, "Hi Sal, please answer my question." Well, I am answering it right now. "How did you study, and how did you recommend studying? Please give a comparison on effectiveness." Well, I'll tell you what has worked for me growing up and even today. You know, a lot of people ask me, "Sal, how do you cover, you know, how do you make a lesson on organic chemistry, and a lesson on the Napoleonic Wars, and a lesson on physics?" Some of those subjects I have a deep intuition and I know from my academic background, but a lot of them I have to study to learn it well.

And so whether it was when I was in school or even now when I'm studying, I have a very active process. When I'm doing one, I like—if I'm doing something especially in math or the sciences, I like to work through problems. Sometimes it's problems I can find in a textbook or on, say, Khan Academy, and sometimes it's problems I'm coming up with myself. I was like, "Well, exactly how does A lead to B?"

So my number one thing is while you are studying, constantly ask yourself questions. Even in a subject matter like history, where you say, "Okay, I have to read this fairly dense chapter of my history textbook to understand or to get a sense of the context of things," constantly ask yourself questions like, "Why?" "What?" "Why did Julius Caesar cross the Rubicon?" I mean, did he really think he could do it? And what that does is, one, it forces connections where it frankly just makes everything more interesting, but you're also going to retain a lot more because you're engaging more of your brain on that concept.

So it's not just about memorizing "Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon" on such-and-such a date, but when you start to put yourself in his shoes and say, "Okay, what's the risk/reward? Would I have done the same thing in that situation?" Or if you're in biology class, "Well, why does that make sense?" Or just even experiencing the awe of it. You know, when you study the cell and you're like, "Wow, it's almost like a whole civilization in there. It has so much complexity!" And it puts you in awe of how everything all works together.

And I think when you study with that type of mindset, not only is this studying more effective, but it is more enjoyable. I would say one key, though, is to not do it in a stressed state, and to do that, it's all about building a habit so that you're able to learn consistently and do, you know, depending on your age level or what you're studying, 20, 30, 40 minutes every day.

Try to make it as active as possible, and then what you see is by the time you get to a test, it'll feel intuitive. Versus if you cram it, you know, six hours the night before the exam. And even if you're studying on Khan Academy, if you're watching a video, always try to pause the video, try to do it yourself—whether it's me or someone else making the video—before we work through it. Try to see whether you could even come up with some of the intuitions about it before we explain it.

And even if you do, you know, you watch the whole video, then stop it and say, "Okay, let me see if I can replicate the thought process. Let me see if I can explain it now. Let me see if I can go through that same worked example." So, the more active you make it, the better.

See, other questions from Emmanuel Peter asks from YouTube, "Are you going to put a geography course on Khan Academy?" We don't unfortunately have near-term plans to do a geography course. Emmanuel, I would love to eventually. You know, the vision of Khan Academy is all of the course subjects. We have Khan Academy Kids now, so really from Pre-K through elementary, middle school, high school, and even the core college. But we do not have geography yet, which I think is a very valuable course.

So hopefully one day. Some of it is resources for, you know, any philanthropists or corporate sponsors out there or individual donors. You know, things like middle school science. Geography and middle school science is actually one of the areas that we would really like to find some support for if we can. We're starting to do stuff in English and language arts for grades 2 through 8, but that's another area where we would love to talk to potential sponsors.

And, you know, the Khan Academy Kids effort—there was just this efficacy study that came out. It was a randomized control trial—which means they randomly put students into one of two groups: the control group or the treatment group. And in the treatment group, the control group, they used a kind of a family-friendly app. These are four-year-olds who come from high-poverty families, and then the treatment group, they used Khan Academy Kids 20 minutes a day.

And the treatment group, after I think it was about a month and a half, they were completely able to close the gap between some of these really high-need communities, these high-need students, and their more affluent peers. So these students went from roughly the 30th percentile to the 70th percentile in that six-week-and-a-half. So that's another area that I would love to add more if we can find the resources. It goes up to first grade; I would love to add to second grade, third grade and then, you know, internationalize. But no, no geography just yet.

Okay, from Facebook, Ozma Abou asks, "Hi, I'm new to using Khan Academy Kids. Apple, we were just talking about that!" Or Khan Academy app, "Do you have both in both apps in Arabic?" I did a quick search and I found you have a website in Arabic, but I actually couldn't find it. Any clarification is much appreciated.

So, thanks for asking, Ozma. So, unfortunately, we do not have either app in Arabic yet. We do have many localization projects around the world. You can imagine though, languages like Arabic and Farsi and Hebrew, and they are right-to-left and sometimes bi-directional languages, and we haven't been able to build that into our product yet. That is one of our to-dos that we hope to be able to do one day.

With that said, there is a translation project of Khan Academy into Arabic, and I think if you do a Google search, you should be able to find that translation project. So it's not the full functionality; it's not the exercises and all of that, but at least the videos—there are versions that have been either dubbed or redone in Arabic. So, you know, definitely try to see if you can find those resources.

Elliot H from YouTube says, "Did you have any earlier startups that failed?" The simple answer is yes; I have had my share. You know, I don't even remember them all. I'm someone that probably I've always had a few harebrained schemes. As early as I remember, I remember in college I was trying to start—actually, we won some business plan competitions. I was trying to start an effort. Looks like my internet connection is doing weird things right now. I hope you all can hear me.

But in college, I started an effort that was actually around education, where if you have an EEG which can measure kind of mental activity, you know, can mention the various cycles of brainwaves, that if students were able to stay focused on something, say doing math problems, it would reward them. And that if they lose their focus while doing it, it would say, "Hey, come back; snap, snap, you know, come look at what—you know, stay focused on the problem!" So, we called it Cerebral Technologies, but we never got too far with that.

Then, you know, during my first job on the side, I was trying to—you know, I had this idea—this was in the early, this was in the late 90s. I had this idea of locally scoped domain names. This was—yet, you know, there's obviously domain names for the whole world, but like, what about pizza.com? Shouldn't that go to your local pizza parlor, not just to some random global pizza place?

So that was the idea—that you could get these domain names, and they would go to different places depending on where you are. We got a little further, but that didn't go too far. And then I joined a start-up in the late 90s called Meat VC. This was a legitimate startup; it had venture funding and all the rest, and I was their CTO. It got pretty far; we grew to 40 people.

We actually—the whole idea was to democratize venture capital. And the reason why they even needed a CTO is that we were building a platform so that anyone who invested even a dollar into the venture capitalist's funds could understand the entrepreneurs, understand the businesses that they were investing in, things like that. But then the Nasdaq collapsed; was it in spring of 2000?

And that's when I said maybe I should go to business school. And then, even before business school, me and a buddy just tried to—we started this thing called Truth Bites, which in hindsight, we probably should have kept at it. It was pre the big social media wave, but it was essentially you sign up all your friends, and you could ask questions that you normally, you know, feel less comfortable being open about, and you could answer them with some level of anonymity. It was kind of a way to foster more open and vulnerable communication.

So, that's just some of my list of failed startups. And actually, there’s more. There's actually, you know, I joined a hedge fund out of business school, and it was called Wool Capital. It was just me and my boss, Dan, and we ended up hiring a few more analysts, and it did very well. But then Dan decided to retire and he encouraged me to start my own fund.

So I literally took over his expenses and his team, his office, which was very expensive, was costing a lot of money, and I started something called Khan Capital Management. And that was a month before the fall of 2008, where into the entire stock market collapse. I still am a little defensive about it because Khan Capital did exist; it existed for about eight months.

And even in that year, we were up 4% in a year that the market was down 40%. So that’s my slide insecurity trying to justify it failed despite performance, but it obviously wasn't an environment where people were interested in investing in a new investment fund. And so, you know, that actually was a tough one because that actually—I burned a lot of our savings, frankly, on that. So that was actually one of the harder ones. I can laugh about it in hindsight.

And then, and then Khan Academy. So yes, I think that's actually a pretty comprehensive list, but a good question. So Maya Sharma from YouTube says, "Are we in a recession, and what stocks should we invest in?" So the first part is easy to answer. I think the simple answer is yes. You know, a recession, there's multiple, you know, strict definitions of it, but it's usually two quarters of kind of reduced economic growth.

Obviously, because of the quarantines and then, even once—where are those stay-in-place orders—then, even once we're out of it, people's behavior is going to change. They're going to travel less; they're going to go to restaurants less. Well, even the restaurants that are open, they're going to have to have less capacity because they're going to have to be socially distanced.

So you're definitely—any of you just look at the unemployment number. It's not just in the US, but around the world, and so it's very clear we're for sure in a recession already. And unfortunately, the question is how bad will it be? You know, I'm not in the investment world anymore.

We've had some interesting folks like Ray Dalio and Mellody Hobson who are, you know, some of the top investors in the world, on this livestream. And, you know, from what I hear from them, there's definitely—sometimes with the stock market, it is incredibly volatile right now. That's very hard to time when you get in, but you know, when there is a lot of volatility and a lot of emotions in the market, that is a time that interesting opportunities can sometimes get lost in the fray.

So I would say if you are diligent and you look for things, look for things that have a good thesis and a thesis that can do well in any type of economy, you might find some diamonds in the rough, so to speak. But you know, I do say that I know how sophisticated many investors are, and I know all of the work that we used to do when I was an analyst at a hedge fund.

So I'm actually afraid to be a stock picker today because I know there’s a version of myself on the other side of that trade who's doing a lot more analysis than I can, than I have the time to do right now. So most of, you know, I do it before 401k, then that's passively, you know, just an index thing. But most of, you know, my savings I use it to pay down our mortgage, and to, you know, we do have like a rental property, and I don't know, and I have no idea how that's all going to play out with what's going on.

It's going to be a tough, you know, my best guess is it's going to be a tough couple of years coming up. So yeah, I definitely would shy away from doing anything very risky, but this is not a place for me to give you too much investment advice. Take it all with a grain of salt.

So this is Zarya Khan from YouTube, not a question, just a comment, says, "I remember seeing him younger than this." So yes, I guess I've aged. Thank you for pointing that out! In fairness, you know, many years ago, you might remember Khan Academy Sal Khan from 2008-2009; that's when we first started really getting on people's radars. And it's been 11 years since, and so, you know, I try to wear the cream and the lotion and sunscreen, but, you know, we all age, and the beard—I heard, you know, because it's gray, it has gray in it, so whatever, it’s a trade-off.

These are good questions and comments from YouTube. Michelle Mitchell says, "Hi Sal, how did you pick a major in college?" Good question, Michelle. So for me, well, I'll tell you what my thinking was when I was maybe your age if you are picking that major right now. I was—I guess you could say I'm a romantic in that. When I was in high school, I was convinced; you know, I was obsessed with physics. I said I want to be a theoretical physicist, a PhD one day; I want to ponder the nature of reality, I want to answer the big questions.

And then, even in my college applications, when they said, "What do you want to major in?" I said physics, theoretical physics. And when I got to college, it was actually around that same summer before college there was a local professor that found out that I had a lot of interest in math and computing and also found out that I didn't have a computer.

And so he had access to computers, so he gave me a summer internship, and so I was able to essentially learn to code using, you know, a proper computer. Actually quite good computers, you know, these kind of mini-computers that are one step up above PC type, you know, back then in the mid-90s, and that's where I started getting a real love for computing.

And I said, well, you know, there's something about programming where you can create realities. You know, and people even debate whether the reality we live in is a simulation, but that kind of got me excited about, "Hey, could you create realities? Could you create experiences?" And there was also something about technology and programming that I liked is that it could scale.

You know, if you create an interesting experience in theory, an unlimited number of people could use it, and that was pretty compelling. So, I eventually decided to become a computer science major and a math major at the same time, and that's the path I went down. And, you know, as I got further in my undergrad, I started thinking about, "Well, what about money?" And, you know, I didn't come from a wealthy family; my mother made, I think, $16,000 in 1993.

And the only reason why I remember that is I had to do her taxes so that I could get her aid. I remember the number very clearly. And, you know, I was—you know, MIT was very generous with the financial aid, but I still was incurring about, give or take, about $10,000 a year in debt. And, you know, that was a lot of money for my family.

And so, near the end of my undergrad, I started thinking very seriously about how do I pay this back? How do I start making money? How do I help out my family? And I was going to do a master’s, but I kind of hurried that up by taking a few more classes.

And then, the good thing is with the late 90s, and I—you know, I hadn't really thought about it much, but computer science was a very in-demand career, as it continues to be. So it worked out financially well. Actually, I'll take that back; it's not like I didn't think about it at all.

I think, you know, when you come from fairly humble circumstances, I don't think you oftentimes even allow yourself to go into a field that might be viewed as a little less than practical. So I think that was definitely one of the constraints for me. You know, if I were giving advice to you or to a family member who's 17, 18 years old, 19 years old, and thinking about their major, I would say, "Fine, fine!"

You know, especially in the economy that we're about to go into, look at the fields that, you know, there's demand for. You know, I know this sounds like very pragmatic advice because it is, but if you're able to kind of put, you know, money on the table, food on the table, however you want to describe it, and you feel productive, that was gonna open up a lot more things to you in your life.

And so, you know, it doesn’t—you know, everyone talks about computing now, and obviously if that's something you're excited about, definitely go into it, but there's a lot of other interesting areas. You know, I, growing up, I thought something like accounting was kind of, you know, that’s bean-counting, etc., etc.

But then when I went to business school, I discovered that finance and accounting are fascinating subjects, and that’s actually why I had this career transition into investing. So I think there are a lot of things that we very easily can get programmed by stereotypes. We might have a friend or a family member say, "Don't go into that; that's, you know, those people are like this or like that," or "That career is boring," but give it a shot.

And almost any field, if you put yourself in the right mindset, actually can be fascinating. So that's the advice I could give, but you know, definitely try to come out of college with some skills that you think have a good chance of—I mean, you’re gonna be able to pay off your debt and things like that.

I do have people in my family—this is, you know, just a microcosm for the whole country. I don't think colleges talk to freshmen enough about the implications of the debt and how it can stay with you a very long time. And I don't think they give enough data to freshmen and sophomores who are picking their majors to tell them, "Okay, people who majored in X, what are their job prospects like when they graduate? How much are they making? What percentage of them have paid off their debt? What percentage of them are in default on their debt ten years out, fifteen years out?"

And I know these are kind of buzzkill answers, but I think it's super important. So, you know, if you can, try to do some of that research yourself. Talk to people; go to your college and say, you know, try to find alums who are, you know, in the major you're interested in—one year out, five years out, ten years out, fifteen years out. And I think they'll be very frank with you.

Some of them will say, "It was the best decision I ever made to major in X!" And some will say, "Um, you know, it's not as easy as I thought to make a living in X," or, "Maybe I am making a living, but, you know, the subject matter is one thing, but then the job is a different thing." So that’s the best advice I could give.

I will give a plug, you know, Bank of America has been a longtime sponsor of work we've been doing in financial literacy and in careers, and so look up Khan Academy Careers and Better Money Habits at Bank of America, and you'll actually see a bunch of video profiles of people in different careers and understanding the trade-offs in them.

Okay, so IBG—the POQ says, "What inspires you to learn various topics?" Well, for me, you know, we're in this mystery called life. And, you know, I've said it before on this live stream. We, you know, there’s been thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge, and most of the things that are, you know, now a paragraph in your textbook or a video on Khan Academy, that's oftentimes the culmination of many people's lifetime work.

And they would do anything—they would have done anything to have access to that information. And so I always remind myself, there's something interesting about this—that someone wanted to devote their life—and there usually is, you know? I mean, the science and subject, I mean, there—their, you know, when you look at literature and how it can evoke human emotions and transport you to another time or another even perspective, you know, that's somewhat magical.

If you look at the sciences, they really are all about understanding the nature of our reality, the nature of life, the nature of how, you know, a just a handful of elements can, you know, combine in different ways to form a cell or an avogadro—these are mind-blowing, mind-blowing things. So that's what gets me excited.

And obviously, I have an extra motivation that if I can really digest it and stay excited about it, then I can hopefully be a little bit infectious with that and help other people get excited about it as well. So there, from Joanna Mena from Facebook—"Sal, do you have suggestions on how to keep kids engaged in online school? Sometimes they study to have good grades for the teachers, but while studying from home, they don't have the engagement with other humans and lose interest."

You're asking a super important question, Joanna. You know, and I won't pretend like I've solved all of it at home. My older children, you know, we might—they go to school that I helped start called Khan Lab School, and they've done a really good job of essentially helping young people—my kids are 11, 8, and 5, and especially the 11 and 8-year-old who've been in kind of the system where there's been a lot of emphasis on agency.

Students set their goals, but then once a week, they check in with their teachers to review their goals. So there is accountability around it. But that muscle that they've been building over many years, even pre-COVID, it seems to be serving them well right now, and their teachers are doing an incredible job of keeping it going over the course of this—the situation we're in.

So I see even young kids, as young as 7, 8, 9 years old, if they're used to that muscle of, "Okay, you have a set number of goals for the day, for the week, for the term," and that there’s a daily and then maybe weekly or maybe quarterly term check-in. That actually can be pretty good.

And then, you know, on the day-to-day, I think it's all about structure. It's all about habit. Our five-year-old has been maybe the most difficult, but even with him, the more we get the structure and the habit, and we celebrate the small wins, and we make sure there's a lot of time for breaks and we don't try to do too much at once.

You know, we say, "Hey, you know, for the five-year-old, if we can get a productive hour-and-a-half today, that's a win!" And then once we get into the habit of that productive hour and a half, we're going to keep going. But then for my older kids, it's all about, you know, just making sure they have balance. Even in these times of social distancing, that they have time to go outside, that they have time to play, they have time to do creative things.

That while they're doing their independent work or their Zoom sessions with their teachers that they’re taking breaks, they’re stretching, and things like that. That's the best I can give. There are other resources—we've had parents and teacher webinars that go into much more depth on this, and obviously, we've released things like daily schedules and learning plans to help with some of this.

But I think those check-ins with both parents and teachers that hold their students a little bit accountable and they know they're gonna come that helps them build that muscle. So I would just say stick to it; it can sometimes be a little messy at first, but over time, if there's a silver lining, it's that students could build more of that agency in that independence muscle.

So let's see, from Off Table Khan from Facebook—"Any plans in India?" We actually have a whole team in India, a kind of CAD me—India team. There's several folks in Delhi and in Bangalore, so yes! Simple answer: we have plans. I could go over the whole effort, but if you do some web searches on it, you should be able to find our India.

You know, we have an English version of Khan Academy, which is—for those of you who don't know English, it's a hybrid between Hindi and English. We're translating into, or redoing actually, many of the languages in India. We're mapping to many of the state standards, so India is actually one of our geographies that we're very focused on. The other is Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, and then, as I mentioned, there's 45 translation projects from mainly volunteers around the world.

So Adam Boop Kurriak is, "Is it possible to take the SAT from Khan Academy?" You could prepare for the SAT from Khan Academy, but the administration is not on Khan Academy. But I highly recommend, you know, even if you're not taking the SATs right now, when we've partnered with the College Board on this, we said we don't want this just to be superficial test prep.

We want this to be something that really helps students become more college-ready, improves their mathematical critical thinking, their reading comprehension, their writing skills. So actually our SAT practice, the official SAT practice on Khan Academy, I actually think it's a great thing for anyone—for sure any high school students and even maybe some middle school students—to start doing. Putting in half an hour a day, forty minutes a day, if you do that, I think you're gonna find that you're going to really build those muscles, especially through this kind of COVID crisis and through the summer.

And then when you happen to take the SAT, you're going to be like, "Oh, this just all makes sense. This is all pretty straightforward!" And frankly, you'll just be that much more college-ready. So from YouTube, Explorer Questioner, "An unorthodox question for Sal: do you perhaps garden?" Not a little bit. My wife is the gardener, and she would like me to be more of a gardener. You know, so I'm trying to garden more. My wife does a wonderful job; we have a very pleasant garden.

Maybe one day I'll do our live stream from our backyard, but I definitely see the appeal; I just haven't—if I claim to do any gardening, if my wife is watching, she would roll her eyes. So I won't make claims that I can't back up. From YouTube, Anglo Indian Boy, "Do you play chess?" I do, but I play at a—I would say I’m a very good amateur, and my 11-year-old son is getting—is—we're about even now.

So he’s on the site Chess Kids which I have to, you know, give credit; it's—you know, he spends time on that whenever I win. He goes and like learns new things, new openings, and then he comes back, and then he usually beats me. So he’s definitely a much faster trajectory, and I think we're about a year away where, you know, I might—I might not be able to beat him anymore.

But yeah, I would consider myself a good amateur chess player, but I definitely love the game. Let's see, well, I do say, I mean, I will brag a little bit. There was this—there was at this event in Silicon Valley; Magnus Carlsen was there, a chess champion, for those of you who don't know, of the world, and he offered to play for people blindfolded.

And my name was picked from the hat of the people there, so I was one of the four people who got to play Magnus Carlsen. He was blindfolded and playing four of us at the same time, but I was the last person standing. So there was a—he took care of the other three, and then he's obviously blindfolded.

And then there was a moment in the game where I actually had an advantage, but then when his entire chess brain power was focused on me, I could almost feel it, and it was incredibly intimidating. And then I just panicked and he won. Not to say that he wouldn't have won if I didn't panic.

Famous favorite board game—where all the time—but I can go a little bit longer. I think I have time—what's your favorite board game from Alexander Theiskovitch—sorry if I'm mispronouncing your name, Alexander—from Facebook. I'm a big fan of Risk, Monopoly, and Settlers of Catan, but with all of them, they get much better if you add kind of a notion of markets to them.

So I have a version of Risk that I play; it's kind of a Paranoia Risk. Paranoia Risk is where every army's their goal is to try to remove another army from the board, but you don't know who's trying to remove you. You can imagine there's a lot of intrigue, and what you do is you can create stocks for each color, and then you can have another separate group of twenty to thirty people trading securities, so if that color wins, it's worth a hundred at the end of the game; if they lose, it's worth zero.

So at any given point in time, the value of that color trading should be the probability that they win the game. That's a fun thing! And Monopoly, I like to add notions of investors, so there are even people who are, you know, they're willing to take equity stakes in various players.

You can introduce things like insurance contracts, debt instruments in Monopoly. So I think that's pretty—you know, corporate structures so that you can have multiple investors in like the shoe. So that’s a fun way to—and in Settlers of Catan, you can actually, you know, there's something I used to do in summer camps I used to run with middle school students. You can play Settlers of Catan with no trading.

You could play trading at your board, then you can play trading where you have other boards, and then you could trade. You can kind of do that as international trade, and then you could introduce some form of currency. And then what's interesting is you can see it on every one of those steps; more trade will create more building, and more currency will create more building just because more people are able to get what they need.

So it's a good way of understanding money and the value of trade. So, other questions here, and I know we're all at—I’ll answer one or two more, so Josy Mubarak from YouTube says, "Given the COVID-19 has given the effect it's had on primary and secondary schools, what has been the effect on the Khan Academy platform?" Well, Josy, we've seen our traffic be about, depending on the day, 250% to 300% of normal traffic, so we've definitely seen a huge increase in load on the platform.

I guess that's the main effect. You know, the effect on the organization, obviously, is everyone is now working remotely, and, you know, people are dealing with their own—some people have young kids at home, but I have a lot of support at home as well. But you could imagine a lot of folks have young kids, and so we're trying to work with all of our team members to make sure that they feel fully supported as they have all of these competing tensions.

And just as an organization, we're trying to accelerate forward as many things as we can do. But as I said earlier, you know, most of our resources come from philanthropy, and, you know, so that's a lot of—that's very front of mind these days is making sure we can raise enough money to do the things we're already doing, especially to the earlier question, you know, we're going into harder economic times. Who knows what happens to donations over the next couple of months?

So I'm definitely—that's something that I sometimes wake up and think about. And, you know, how could we potentially get more resources so that we can accelerate even more, add more subject areas, improve our platform, etc.? So that's kind of the stuff that at the Khan Academy level we've been thinking about.

So Bobby Lyn Joseph Karrat from Facebook, "Oh, this is very nice, Sal." A question: "It sounds like they're—a teacher." So, you know, I know a week past Teacher Appreciation Week, but thanks Bobby Lyn Joseph Karrat for being a teacher, and it sounds like, you know, you're really into Khan Academy. Thank you for that.

So let's see—there are so many good questions! This is an explorer questioner. You're asking really interesting questions, Sal. "Where in the U.S. would be a good place to live for a lifelong learner?" You know, I've actually gone through this thought experiment before in my life, because as you can imagine, Silicon Valley is not a cheap place to live.

And when Khan Academy was just me in a walk-in closet and we were living off my savings, I used to, you know, look at other places in the country that had a nice climate, that had a better cost of living, and thought about whether I should move there—not with the family. So, you know, there’s nice places everywhere, but I definitely—San Diego is now quite expensive too, but it is cheaper than the Bay Area.

But the Bay Area is actually a great place for a lifelong learner. I mean, the cost of living is very high, but as I say, you know, your backyard, because the weather is good, you can view that as one of the rooms of your house, so that makes it a little bit better. Yeah, whether there are a lot of places—I, you know, depends on what you look for.

For me, it's really who you surround yourself with. You know, do you have a good friendship community? Are there other people who intellectually stimulate you around? If you have that, you know, almost anywhere can be pretty incredible. So let’s see, I guess let’s see—are there any other questions?

Well, there’s so many—I feel like going through all of this, but I know I'm guessing I'm missing a meeting right now. I've been guilty of that before. This is Sami Sultana—what inspired to study at MIT? Well, I don't want to make this a big MIT story. I think there are many great universities, but it was—I'll tell you the story. When I was seven years old, my mother’s second-youngest brother—so my uncle at the time, who we weren't living with, we were living with them in a while, but anyway, we were at his house.

I remembered this house; I was seven years old, and he was in college at the University of New Orleans. I remember him doing some math, and I remember being intrigued because it looked just like random symbols to me. I was like, "His name is Dale; Shaab mamamoo," and our language means "uncle's mother's brother." So I said, "Dale, Shaab mamamoo, what is this?" And he said, "Sal, this is calculus."

And I was like, "What is calculus?" And he's like, "Well, it's this math where…" he tried to explain, and then I said, "Can you teach me calculus?" And then he was like, "Well, no, I don't know if I can teach you calculus." And I was like, "Why do you need to learn calculus?" And he’s like, "Well, I'm studying to be an engineer." And I said—I remember this super vividly—and I said, "Well, what does an engineer do?" And he's like, "Well, an engineer builds things to solve problems in the world." Like, he wanted to become a mechanical engineer.

And then I said, "Well, then I want to be an engineer too!" And then he said, "Well, if you want to be an engineer, you should go to MIT." And he doesn’t remember—I’ve told him this; I’ve told him this story many times. He has no recollection of the story, but I had no idea what MIT was, what it stood for or where it was, but something just entered into my brain based on my uncle’s, you know, five-minute conversation with me when I was seven. It’s like, "Oh, I should go there!"

And, you know, I remember when I went to high school, in ninth or tenth grade, it just kind of stayed in the back of my mind, and then when I talked to the guidance counselor about it, the guidance counselor's like, "Sal, you gotta up your game a little bit!" Not that—I was a good student, but you know, I grew up in Louisiana and there's probably about five kids a year who go. And I didn't go to one of the famous schools in the state, and so anyway, that's—I was always enamored by the notion.

And, you know, for me personally, it was a wonderful place. You know, there’s a lot of—it’s a place—you know, I gave a commencement address at MIT a couple years ago, and I said it's the closest thing I can think of on the planet to like Hogwarts, where, you know, you can debate whether there’s real magic in the world, but a place where people are focused on creating cool things that could help humanity and are creative about it.

And are very, very accepting of people's eccentricities, I thought, was really nice. And I've obviously made some of my best friends from college, and I met my wife there, so I definitely—I had a good experience. But obviously I think any experience—you know, one thing I've learned in life is it’s not where you go; it’s not all of these things we often put a lot of importance on.

It's the energy that you project outward! So if you go wherever you go to college, if you say, "Hey this, I am so lucky I get to be in an environment that is focused on learning, an environment where I can meet friends and bond and be open," if you put that energy out there, the friendships will happen; you will learn; you will explore; people will gravitate to you.

But if you go with kind of a cynical attitude and you're like, "Oh, these people are out to compete with me!" or, "You know, this isn't my first-choice school!" or things like that, then it’ll kind of be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I would say regardless of where you want to go—obviously I only had one college experience, and that was MIT, and I really enjoyed it—but what I found, whether it’s at MIT or other places, there were people who didn’t have a good experience and oftentimes it might have been because it came with some cynicism or whatever.

And so that’s my best advice: it’s not going to this school or that; it’s the attitude that you bring to it. So, we’re all out of time. I mean, you know, I’m enjoying hamming it up with you all right now, and you all are asking some really good questions. But we’ll have more of these Ask Sal Anything sessions in the future.

So thanks a bunch for joining, and everyone have a wonderful weekend! Thanks for joining the live stream. I’ll see you all on Monday.