Homeroom with Sal & Casey Wasserman - Tuesday, July 21

Hi everyone! Welcome to our homeroom live stream. This is something we started several months ago. It's really a way to stay connected and have interesting conversations about interesting things with interesting people. I'm super excited about our guest today, Casey Wasserman.

But before we get into the conversation, I’ll make my standard reminders reminding everyone that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit. We can only exist through philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about donating at khanacademy.org/donate.

I also want to give special thanks to several corporations and foundations that have stepped up since we went to the COVID crisis. We were already running at a deficit before the crisis and, as you know, our traffic and the types of supports and programs we've tried to do have only accelerated. So special thanks to Bank of America, google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Novartis, and other folks like the Amgen Foundation who are long-time supporters of Khan Academy and then have continued to support it going into the crisis. But we're still running at a deficit, so any help you can provide is greatly appreciated.

With that said, I'm excited to introduce our guest today, Casey Wasserman. And, uh, Casey, good to have you here!

It's good to be with you.

So, Casey, you and I go back a little while ago. You know, many years, I mean the early days of Khan Academy. I remember I went and spoke at your organization. And it’s, you know, what I thought would be interesting is just there's so much going on in the world right now that you touch on that, you know, a lot of us aren't familiar with. You're very deeply involved in the world of sports, which is going through something right now. I'd love to learn more about it.

You are the chairman of the 2028 Olympics and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. You do a lot of philanthropic work. So maybe a good place to start, Casey, is, you know, tell us what it means. You know, I mean, you can start wherever you like. A lot of what we try to do is kind of dig into how you ended up becoming who you are. But what, um, tell those of us who aren't familiar with these, especially the sports agency business, what that business is and maybe a little bit about why you got interested and how you got into it.

Well, it's awesome to be with you. I remember our first time I came to your office. I actually was just going through old pictures, just cleaning out old pictures on my phone, and I found it where, like, the Khan Academy was signed on a little grease board like in a shared office space or something. So, it was like funny that I found it yesterday right before we got on this today. So it's really fun for me to be with you.

The sports business, as least as we operate, we're a service business. So we have two groups of clients, if you will, which is how most sports marketing agencies operate. Either you can represent talent, which could be an athlete, a coach, a broadcaster in and around sports. Obviously, if you were beyond sports, it would be a musician, or an actor, or a writer, a director. But in our case, we're just in sports, so it's athletes. It's 2,500 athletes across 35 sports in our case, which makes us the biggest sports agency in the world.

And then the other side of the business is how brands spend their money in sports. So very similar to how ad agencies work for brands, we work for brands on how they spend their sponsorship budgets, strategy, the execution of those arrangements, amplification, and then ultimately measurement. And then the other side of it is how do properties attract those dollars? So if you're a team, a league, or a property and you want to understand what brands are thinking, how they want to spend their dollars, what kind of assets they need to tell their story to connect with their consumers, we help them structure and package that.

And so that sports marketing, in its broadest sense of the word, we operate pretty much across the entirety of the business. We have a thousand employees around the world, and sports obviously is a—well, it's a global business that truly manifests itself locally. So if you're going to be relevant and present in sports or in regions, you have to be in those places, which is sort of given the desperate nature of our business.

And what is the day-to-day like of what you do? You know, someone who works at Wasserman Agency, I mean, you might have to do a lot of things. But, you know, for those of us who are naive to this world, you know, we know the sports figures. We know they play games; we know that they, you know, they get paid salaries. We know there's some sense of economics that there's advertising, there's sponsorship, there's ticket sales. So what does an agency do for the various parties, especially for the sports figures? Is at least how I conceptualize it?

Yes, so for an athlete, I mean, you might imagine. Different than other kinds of talents because team sports athletes and individual sports athletes, by the way, are a little bit different. So team sports athletes have a natural support structure, you know, you're in the Bay Area. Clay Thompson, who's a client of the Warriors, is his support structure during the season. There's doctors, there's food, there's travel, there's obviously basketball, there's health and wellness, there's a traveling support team when they're on the road—all that stuff.

And so the agent is there to deal with the off-the-court opportunities that happen during the season, any other things that might be an opportunity as it relates to basketball. If there’s, you know, obviously he wouldn't be a player who would get traded, but players who get traded if they get injured, things happen. And then in the off-season, we help them sort of manage their lives.

Now on the individual athlete side, like a professional golfer, we help coordinate travel, food, lodging, all that stuff, setting the competitive schedule, actually entering them in the tournaments, hiring and firing of caddies, dealing with sponsors, arranging photo shoots, fixing problems when they happen—in many cases managing social media, triaging social media problems if they happen. You know, they want to invest in a business, they want to buy an apartment or a house—that's across all athletes. They want to get married or divorced or, you know, there's a whole slew of things.

Yeah, you know, I'm not sure the average age of the people watching this, but if you've seen Jerry Maguire, it's a pretty good representation. Maybe not in style, but in substance.

No, I think that was most of our first exposure and for me, only exposure to this. But it is fascinating because you imagine, you know, there are all these contract negotiations and you read about it. You know, actually, I think it would be great math examples, word problems of like if you win the championship, this happens, and if that happens, if you get injured, this happens. There are these, you know, that's what I imagine and, you know, where the agents are very powerful and important. And most agents have a background as lawyers, if I understand.

Yeah, a lot of our lawyers. I would tell you, to your point about a sort of a math lesson, you know, as you know, analytics and statistics and data have become such a big part of sports. Obviously, Moneyball started it in baseball, but it's now pervasive in sport. That’s how teams negotiate; that’s how they perceive value. And so we view, as an agency, our responsibility is to act on behalf of our clients as, you know, take the NFL as the 33rd team, right?

So we have to have the resources and data and analytics and statistics and analysis and financial understanding of television contracts and sponsor deals and local revenue and national revenue and how those all feed into each other—salary cap projections, how long of a deal should you make—all those things so that we can serve our clients best because it has really become a very much data, statistics, financial-driven model. And we need to do our best to represent our clients to achieve the best results for them.

And it's really changed a lot. It used to be relationships and, "Oh, you owe me one here because you signed that guy and you underpaid him, so I needed to take care of my guy here." And those days are not over, but they're pretty much over. And so the whole, if you will, math of it has changed dramatically.

And ironically, while a lot of the agents are lawyers, the legal part has been reduced in many ways. The contracts for team sports are literally fill-in-the-blank contracts. The addendums are where all the math happens, and that's the interesting part, but that's as much analytics as it is legal. So it's an interesting evolution of the business for sure.

Now, it is interesting because when you realize that sports, more than anything, it's very measurable. The outcomes are very measurable. The economics are very measurable. And so, yeah, it's probably more than any other industry, is suited for this type of analysis.

There's a question coming off of a YouTube from Sudha Rani says, "Hi Casey! When did you start?" And so, you know, just how did you get into this? Did you always know that you wanted to be a sports agent? What drew you into this profession?

I would say I always loved sports like a lot of kids growing up, but I was a weird kid in that I loved the business of sports. Kind of an odd thing to love. I spent the summer as a ball boy for the Cleveland Browns and spent more time in the front office than I did on the field, frankly. So I've always loved the business of sports and really, in 2002, acquired our first little agency—a teeny little action sports agency that we still own today that's quite big now; the biggest action sports agency—and just built from there.

We were opportunistic, we were strategic, we made lots of mistakes, and built in a way that we thought was going to create value for the client and make a point of differentiation for us in a competitive industry. So started with a little action sports agency, bought a fairly big basketball and baseball agency, and then have bought a ton of other agencies, hired lots of agents from competitors, and built a really incredible group of business based on great work of about 130 sports agents around the world. And I'm lucky enough to be able to pursue and work in my passion every day.

And so it sounds like it is what you imagined it to be?

Yeah, I mean, I would say there are certainly things that I do that I never imagined I would do and certain things I get to do that I never imagined would be possible. But what I love about our business, the diversity of our business, is that no day is the same.

I get to spend my days, I really think, focus on three things. I focus on the strategy of the company, I focus on the culture, which is about the work environment for the people, and I deal with problems. If you think about human nature, human nature is that you stick your head in the sand and hope problems go away. And the truth is, problems usually get worse unless you deal with them.

So dealing with problems, but creating an organization that actually supports people communicating about problems and rewards people as opposed to penalizing them kind of turns the paradigm on its head. And I think the more you do, the more successful you are, and the more problems you have. And the better you are at dealing with them is the more successful you are.

And so my days are—it depends on the day, depends on the week. You can imagine during this period of time we've had, obviously, unprecedented issues to deal with on behalf of our clients, on behalf of our business. But from things like when baseball players are trying to come back to helping them think about the economics of that, the testing protocols, you know, using all of our resources to help them make an informed decision about playing.

We have players who are player representatives for their teams in terms of all they represent all the players on their team. So, you know, the diversity of what I do is what I love, and I get to do it in a business I'm passionate about in a world of sports that I think is, you know, in a world where you get to—you don't always get to pick what you do. I'm lucky to get to do it in all the sports every day.

And I want to dig deeper into that; I definitely want to go get into what's going on because of COVID because that's obviously fascinating. But there's, you know, a couple of folks off of Facebook and YouTube, you know, you quickly alluded to some mistakes and struggles you made, but you kind of gave the very quick, "You read in a magazine, Casey started here, he graduated there, and then he became the head of an agency, and they're very successful, and, you know, happy ever after."

But, you know, it's never that way. And, and so, you know, from Facebook, Shazad Warrick asks, "What type of mistakes have you made?" From YouTube, Parole Mytha asking, "What are the struggles you encountered on your way?" From YouTube, Susanna Dominguez, "Could you describe a problem and how you overcame that problem?"

So yeah, give us a little bit of texture; fill in the blanks. Was it smooth sailing the whole time?

Never, and there's no such thing. And I think one of the misconceptions people have in this day and age of perceived instant success is that success is a moment in time. And the truth is, my view of success is that it comes from relentless consistency and that pursuit of excellence over a long period of time, relentlessly.

And when I talk about dealing with bad news, if you're able to relentlessly pursue excellence on a consistent basis, it means that the problems you have, you've been able to get through and overcome and get to the other side. And so we have—there is, you know, as I like to say, no one has ever come into my office to give me something for nothing. That just doesn't happen.

And the truth is, we're a better organization because we're better at dealing with problems. It's why we're able to get through a time like COVID. 2009, you know, I mean, I've now been—started this business in 2002, so I've been running this company for 18 years. This is now the second time in my career that I'm dealing with something that was otherwise supposed to be unprecedented. That's, unto itself, unprecedented learning how to manage through these things and ups and downs.

And I can tell you, I was at the NBA All-Star game in February. I didn't think that less than 30 days later, the NBA would shut down for good until hopefully a week from now, and my business would be dramatically off in revenue. I'd have to make all sorts of difficult decisions.

And our business, by the way, is— I think as stable and good and positive. We didn't lay off significant numbers of people; we had like less than 2%. And that's really for businesses that evaporated because of this, not businesses that are just down and working through an environment like this is really difficult. But by the way, problems don't have to be big.

It can be a mistake by an employee that you lose a client; it can be a mistake by an employee that causes a problem internally in terms of culture and the work environment. It can be a mistake someone posts something on social media they shouldn't post. There's an employee, you know, in the end—my name's on the door, and my reputation is at stake, and so all those things are important, and we take responsibility for them, and we take focus on them in terms of making sure we treat them as we would all want to be treated.

And there are literally problems every day. And so the reason I think we have had success is because we've been doing it a long time, I think we do it very well, in the end, we do it for the benefit of our clients. That's the only metric we measure ourselves by is the quality of work.

And the longer you can do it, the more consistently you can do it. You can wake up today and I have a thousand employees and hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. The action sports business, we bought in 2002, had less than a million dollars of revenue. And now if you told me in 2002 we'd be doing what we're doing today with the number of employees we were doing, I would have said no way. I couldn't have imagined how I'd get there.

And I hope in five years I'll be able to look back and say, "That's all we were doing, and now we're doing all this." And I can't tell you how we're going to get to that point, but it's again—it's one of the things I see most amongst a younger generation. I think you and I are is they think that moment of success is a moment because of a singular action. And the truth is it never is; it's the result of a lot of work over a long period of time through lots of ups and downs.

Did you ever have a moment where you're just like, "I don't think I'm gonna make it; this isn't for me; I don't have what it takes?"

No, but that’s probably just, you know, my blind competitiveness. I mean, I am truly crazy competitive. And so even if I was at the brink of that happening, I would never think that because it's just not in my DNA. Just like, by the way, enjoying success is not particularly in my DNA either. So I would say I'm much more focused on always driving forward.

I spend very little time worried about what's in the rearview mirror—good or bad. And and so it's not anything that makes me better than anybody else; it's just in kind of in my DNA.

I think we have some similarities. I have had my moments, but then I’d go on a hike, and I'd say that squirrel doesn’t care that I just failed miserably and embarrassed myself and everything. And then I get over it, and I get back on track.

Before we go to the COVID because I think there are a whole many things we can talk about there, you know, what's I think interesting about being a sports agent is obviously you are running a business. You are a manager, you're a leader for your team, but you're also, I could imagine, an observer of what these elite athletes are like.

And I'm curious, you know, from an outsider's point of view, we say, "Oh look, you know, so-and-so has god-given talent, so incredible, etc., etc." But you see what goes on behind the scenes. You know, what's your observation of what makes talent great? What makes people have enduring and really successful careers in sports? And maybe what's surprising relative to what most people think?

Well, I would say the two things that are maybe—one surprising, one not—but that one, they are—the elite athletes are willing to make sacrifices in some or significant parts of their lives to be the best at what they do. And people don't like to admit that or own that, but you cannot do it all. And they have chosen to make those sacrifices, to dedicate themselves to their craft to be at that level.

Obviously, if anybody watched "The Last Dance" on ESPN about Michael Jordan, he made incredible sacrifices and incredible dedication to his craft. And that's what made him elite, in addition to clearly god-given talent at a level maybe we've never seen before.

The other piece of it is athletes are human beings. They have all the same insecurities, anxieties, fears, concerns, worries, ups, downs, issues with kids, partners, loved ones, parents, finances, good, bad—like they are people and all that stuff affects them. And maybe they're better at compartmentalizing them so that they can compete, but they're people, and they have all those issues too.

So, you know, yes, they can be role models; yes, they ought to carry themselves in a way because they do have influence. But we also need to understand, I think part of this—you started to see with the recognition that the mental health is something that affects everybody, not some people—is that athletes are starting to communicate about mental health concerns and issues that they have.

Anxiety—Kevin Love couldn't go on the court because he had an anxiety attack. You know, most people wouldn't have been comfortable to talk about that. And yet tens of millions of people in this country probably had that happen this morning. And so they are people, and I think that surprises people that they have all the same issues, all the same stuff that we all do every day. And they're able to function and do their jobs. And maybe that's what makes them talented on their field of play. But they're people too, and they can have really bad days just like we all can and really good days just like we all can. And it's important to keep that perspective.

Yeah, that's super, super valuable insight. And going into this COVID, I mean, you alluded to it. You know, most professional sports have essentially had to stop for the last four, five, six months. I'm curious your view, well, one, how do you think this is going to evolve? I know that the NBA is doing this kind of Disney World. I mean, how do you think it's going to evolve? And let's just assume a scenario where COVID lasts well into next year, potentially even longer.

So, a couple of things. A bubble works—that’s the good news. But it also is the bad news because if you burst—if you break the bubble, you know, you can get a really bad situation really quickly.

Two, we are woefully underprepared as a country to test at the level we test at with the consistency and the speed and the accuracy we need to test at to absent a medical solution return to as much as normal as possible.

So I compare baseball now playing 60 games in empty stadiums, the NFL likely to play its entire season mostly in empty stadiums, college football being completely canceled probably, if not delayed, until the spring. And the Premier League in England has announced they're going to play up to 50% capacity, and I think they might even get close to 100% because the testing in the UK has gotten so good so quick, so consistent, so accurate.

And essentially, everybody has an app on their phone with their test results. So if you pass a test, you can go to the Premier League game that day. And so testing is the answer in the short term. Everybody, you know, nirvana would be everybody tested every day—that solves 95% of the problems we're in right now in terms of people having a normal life, whether it's going to a sporting event or going to a gym or going to get, you know, get a manicure. It doesn't really matter.

If we are testing and we know and then being responsible in your behavior—masks, hand washing—all those things. It sounds trite, it's not political; it's fact. It works. Keep your distance, wear a mask, wash your hands, you're likely not to get COVID even in an environment where it exists.

And with pervasive testing, we can return to as much normalcy as possible until there's a medical solution, whether that's in six months or two years, as you said. And no one knows, to be fair.

And so sports is at effect, if you will, until that testing exists. We can't do that. You know, there's enough testing to test a thousand NBA players every day; that's fine. But there's not enough tests to test 300 million Americans every day or every other day, and that's the problem we're in. And that's really one of the great disappointments I have about that we—here we are five months later and, you know, on the other hand, we're talking about vaccines maybe coming quickly.

Well, we're still only testing three million people a day. And I'm no math expert; I think you are. But if you have to give the vaccine twice, like most vaccines do, and certainly like the Oxford one appears to be, that’s 700 million injections, plus or minus. If you're only giving 3 million a day, that's 200 days before you even get everybody vaccinated if everyone agrees—if you started today and if you had all the vials and all that, you know, like it's a real process here.

So like, I don't think we're prepared, and, you know, I went to UCLA. As John Wooden said, "Failing to prepare is preparing to fail."

Hmm, that's a good quote. What do you think is going to happen to the sports? I mean, it sounds like the sports industry is figuring out a way to proceed. I’m not an expert in the economics of it. Is the bulk of the economics our TV and sponsorship? So even with empty stadiums, it won't have the same energy or the same feel, but do you think it'll be okay?

It will be okay. It won't be, obviously, ideal or great. And it depends on the sports. Now, some sports predominantly get their revenues from tickets, and some sports predominantly get their revenue from TV.

And you can imagine the further you are on the TV end of the spectrum, the more stable you are. And the further you are on the ticket end of the spectrum, the more you're gonna have problems. So a sport like tennis, well in its competitive sense, feels very safe because they are clearly far apart from each other physically, but 90% of the revenue comes from ticket sales.

So that's why you haven't seen a tennis match. And by the way, players from all over the world traveling all over the world—that's a problem. And then a sport like the NFL that has so much revenue, even though it's a majority—there's still a lot of ticket revenue—from television, they can play games, and it's worth it to play games.

And everything else is kind of in the middle. And the other piece of it is you can get through a year or two of this at most. I would tell you most leagues are thinking about for the 2021 season—for like the NBA and the NHL, who start at the end of 20 for their 2021 season, or the NFL and Major League Baseball will play complete seasons in 21—or Major League Soccer. I think they're figuring maybe on a blended basis you can have 30, 40% fans for the whole of a season, which means you start out at the beginning of the season with no fans, get to a reduced capacity scenario, and then maybe by the end of the 21, 2021 seasons, you can get pretty close to full capacity.

And then the next year after get back to a sense of normalcy in terms of capacity and filling stadiums, and that’s obviously what people are hoping for. But hope doesn’t solve the problems, which is why we need to focus on things like testing and responsible behavior.

That makes a lot of sense. And you know, even before COVID, what did you think was going to be kind of the evolution or the future of sports? You know, there's questions here about things like VR for sports viewing from Rickmon on Facebook. I mean, is there a view that this is how sports are going to look in five or ten years? And has COVID changed that view at all?

A couple of things. I think one of the things that hasn’t—so a few things to remember about sports: I think it’s truly the only defensible piece of the media business. It matters live; it can't and won't be time-shifted; it's evergreen. And all those things that make it relevant—it's truly local, right? You love your local team; it's what matters; it's kind of embedding the community in a special way.

And sports has really been for the last 25 years optimized for television because the great majority, if not almost 100%, of people only consume sports on TV. I mean, I think the NFL has a stat that 97% of avid NFL fans will never see a game in person. And so you've seen the television experience optimized. The in-stadium experience, relatively—I mean, if you want to look 20 years ago today, maybe the stadiums are newer and nicer, and the tickets are clearly more expensive, but the experience hasn't changed a lot.

I think COVID will change the experience a lot, focus a lot more on the customer experience. And I'm not just talking about health and safety protocols, which clearly need to be better. I'm talking about why are we waiting in line for 20 minutes for concessions? Why do we wait lines for bathrooms? Why do we have cash and slow things down?

Why, you know, again, why isn't the experience better so that the customer gets more benefit? All those things obviously have health and safety benefits, but they have customer benefits, so I think that will happen for sure.

And then the other thing you're gonna see—I think accelerate aggressively—is this sort of transition to different monetizations of content. So obviously we can watch on TV free for the most part or on some cable channels. There's going to be direct-to-consumer for all the leagues. There's going to be a lot more gambling. There's going to be a lot more buying of short forms of games.

There's going to be a lot more buying of a couple minutes of the ends of games. I think the consumption of sports is going to continue to accelerate and be pervasive. I think the points of where you will consume it will start to evolve slower probably than people think.

And I think ancillary ways to consume it will probably accelerate faster than people think.

No, it's super, super interesting. And these conversations always go much faster than I expect. I do want to make sure we get to the Olympics because that's fascinating. You're the chairman of the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.

I guess a bunch of questions I’ll bundle together. You answered however you like. How did you get into that role? Why were you interested in it? And kind of where do you see as the value of the Olympics? Like, what, you know, why are you putting the time and energy into it the way you are?

So I was asked by Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles to lead the bid, which was the summer of 2014. We started this process—it’s actually something I thought was a—I joke with him that it was a terrible idea. And that’s why he's mayor and I'm not, but that was a terrible idea, and I thought we would lose, and it was a fool's errand.

And he convinced me that he's the mayor and I don't really have a choice. So if I wanted my trash picked up, I better chair the bid. So here I am. I happen to be a kid of Los Angeles; I was 10 years old in 1984 when the Olympics were in my city, and I saw what an incredible experience it was.

So I absolutely loved the Olympics. Bidding for the Olympics is a different kind of thing. And now that we have the Olympics, look, being chair in my role in Los Angeles is different than any other city on Earth. We have the physical resources here unlike any city in the world, and it doesn't start with sports stadiums, which in this day and age most people have.

It really starts with USC and UCLA, which is kind of counterintuitive. No city on Earth has two big universities that have athletic programs at that scale that are in the city center, 10 miles from each other. Lots of cities have big universities, lots of city have great universities; some have athletics, some don’t; some are in the city center, some aren’t. LA is unique.

And so the combination of the scale of Los Angeles, the facilities we have on the sports side, but USC and UCLA as a starting point means we can host the Olympics without building a new venue. And there's no sort of comma there, but it’s legitimately we don’t have to build a new venue.

So the athletes, who we will have to house, will move into the dorms at UCLA for the Olympics. The media, who we house, will move into the dorms at USC. We've got stadiums and practice facilities and arenas. We have—I mean, there’s even a model sal here if you want to talk about a fun words problem, you know, take the Rubik's cube of Olympic sports and venues and map it out in terms of transportation, logistics, and all that stuff. Someone would have fun with that.

But there's an environment where we can host the Olympics in Los Angeles and not use a single venue in Orange County. And by the way, you've got great basketball, hockey arena, great baseball stadium—not use Dodger Stadium and not use the Rose Bowl, and still host the Olympics easily.

And so, not saying that that's what will happen, but that's a real scenario. And so we've got an incredible set of facilities, and if we do this right, I think the economic and the cultural and the community impact will be staggering.

As part of our commitment to hosting the games of 28, we agreed to fund—covid aside—we agreed to fund 160 million dollars to subsidize youth sports in Los Angeles for kids in the city so the youth sports was free for everybody. That's the biggest investment in new sports in the history of this country in one city.

And it's a powerful statement that literally has a chance to change this community forever. And that's just the tip of the iceberg if we do our job right in executing the Olympics.

No, that's incredible! I also remember the ’84 Olympics very well, obviously watching it on TV, and I still have the memories of they had that tall guy to play the alien—that was a very memorable moment for me. And, you know, it just makes you, uh, it captures the imagination.

And I, you know, I can't imagine how cool it is to be at the center of that; also, how stressful it is because the logistics you just described don't seem easy.

It is the biggest event on Earth! I mean, it's crazy—the Olympics are the biggest event on Earth by every measure. The Paralympics are the third biggest event on Earth by every measure, and they will happen in the same city in 30 days!

Wow, wow! Until 2028. So I'm hopefully we'll be through COVID by then and everything will be back to normal and all of that.

Well, Casey, thank you so much. This was super valuable. You know, it gives us a lens. It gives me the lens into a world that, you know, we enjoy, but we don't understand all of what's going on. And I could have asked you questions for several more hours.

But, you know, thank you, and thanks for, you know, being a supporter of the work we do. And I hope there are more ways that we can work together and figure out ways to help more folks.

Well, it's my pleasure, and I appreciate you. And you know what a fan of yours and all that you do I am and proud to have known you a long time and be a supporter. And your name might be a bad name in my house because I tell my kids when they ask me a question, "I could just go on Khan Academy," but other than that, I love you and always happy to support you.

Wonderful! Well, thank you so much, Casey!

Thank you!

Thanks for joining. Well, everyone, thanks again for joining what is always a fascinating conversation. I learned a lot. I feel very lucky to be able to do this and ask people questions about the things that are very relevant in the world.

I did just get an announcement a team member, Felipe, just told me. Unfortunately, we were all very excited about tomorrow's conversation with Anthony Fauci. Just found out that we're not sure why, but they've had to cancel.

We're going to see if we can reschedule. I had a lot of questions, and I know you all had a lot of questions, but I'm so sorry to say that we will not be having the interview with Dr. Fauci tomorrow.

But stay tuned; hopefully, we'll be able to get something else on the books. But with that, thanks for joining again, and you'll see me at least one or two more times this week for better or for worse.

You know, stay safe with all the COVID going around, and do everything that Casey just mentioned about the masks and socially distancing and all that. I think that is definitely our best option.

So with that, I will see you later this week.