General Stanley McChrystal on leadership & navigating complex challenges | Homeroom with Sal

Hi everyone! Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our daily homeroom live stream. This is a thing we started, well, it seems like a long time ago now, but it was several weeks ago when the school closures happened. Just a way to continue to support you as a parent, a teacher, a student. Obviously, Khan Academy has a lot of resources like that, but there's something especially in this time of social distancing about being able to connect people live.

Some days it's just me here to answer your questions, and some days we have incredible guests like today. And so today, our guest is going to be General Stan McChrystal. I'm going to be bringing him on a little bit, but I'll tell you all ahead of time, whether you're on Facebook or YouTube, start thinking of questions that you would like to ask the General and put them in there. We have Khan Academy team members who are looking at those questions, and we'll surface them to myself and General McChrystal.

I do like to remind everyone somewhat because it's important that we are a not-for-profit. We are funded by philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. We were running at a deficit even before this COVID crisis hit, and now with the school closures, we're seeing our traffic be almost 3x of what it typically is. Our registrations are, depending on the day, 6 to 20x of what we would normally expect to be, and we're trying to do more programs. So, if you're in a position to do so, please think about donating.

I do want to give a special shout-out to several corporations who've stepped up in the last few weeks: Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Novartis, and Fastly to help us help you, hopefully, with what's going on with school closures. But we are still running at a deficit, and we still need more help. So whether you're an individual giver or a corporation or representative corporation, please think about that.

So with that, I'd like to bring on General Stan McChrystal. And you know, General, you're one of those people. You're a very decorated person in your career. I could probably read your bio for about five minutes, but the headlines: you are a retired four-star general. You ran essentially a significant fraction of some or all of the U.S. military operations in that we've been in, in recent modern history. And since then, you have gone into the private sector and you are focused on helping advise folks on things like leadership and organizational structure. Did I get that generally right?

"Well, you probably gave me more credit than I deserve. I was part of the team, but yeah, you're pretty accurate."

So maybe a good place to start, you know, there's a lot of young people who are watching this, and they're always thinking about their careers. They're thinking about how do I navigate life? How do I build a sense of leadership? If you could just walk us through your career arc starting from when you were maybe a high school student, but especially once you got into the military. And also, a lot of us don't fully understand how the military hierarchy works and what are the expectations as you become a lieutenant, as you become a first, a one-star general, two-star. How does that work?

"Sure, yeah. I mean, you only kind of figure it out in the rearview mirror. I grew up in an army family. My father was a soldier, and his father was a soldier, and my four brothers all were in the army, and my sister married a soldier. Then when I married my wife, she was the daughter of a career soldier, and her three brothers were all. So, you kind of get it. We were in the army business from the earliest stage. I can remember I wanted to be a soldier like my father because my father was my hero. He was a very low-key guy, a decorated combat veteran but very self-effacing, very quiet. And so, he was my idea, the model of a leader, so I wanted to do what he did and go to West Point. So at age 17, I went to West Point.

Now, that was 1972, and to put it in context, the military wasn't very popular in 1972, the end of the Vietnam War. So statistically speaking, it was the easiest year in the academy's entire history to be admitted. So, here I am. I got into the academy, and I wanted to be an infantry officer, and West Point was 170 years old when I entered, and they took themselves very seriously. I thought West Point was going to be sort of just a turnstile I go through to get to my career, and I didn't take it very seriously. So, we had this clash of cultures: me and West Point, 17-year-old Stan and 170-year-old West Point—you can guess who won.

And so, for four years, I had kind of a rough go of it. The first couple of years, I did horribly in discipline. I did horribly in academics. I almost flunked out. And then my last two years, I started dating this girl, Annie, who I've now been married to for 43 years. And she sort of set me straight, and I started improving on those things. But you come out of West Point basically schooled in things like character and a college education. You're not a trained soldier.

And so the first thing you do is you go to some initial courses, and your desire is to become technically and tactically competent. You want to know weapons, you want to know tactics, you want to be able to land navigate so that when you go to your first leadership job as a platoon leader, you'll be respected, you'll be effective. So, I went through about eight or nine months of additional training schools, to include ranger school, where they sort of try to break you down. And then if you don't break, you get this ranger tab, and you go forward.

But I got to my first unit in the 82nd as a second lieutenant, and it was the 70s army, and it wasn't very good. It was still kind of Vietnam hangover. And the troops, most of them came from a difficult background. And so you walk in a college graduate trained, and you think, okay, I'm going to lead these people. And then you realize that, in fact, they know an awful lot. And although they would do some amazing things on weekends, they actually take care of you; you take care of them. But when it really gets to doing business, they take care of you.

So from an early age, you learn that the fight is going to be won by the sergeants and the privates. The lieutenant is going to enable them to win it, and that gets more true the further you go up. So, you spend the first—I spent four years as a lieutenant, leading first about 30 soldiers as a platoon, as a paratrooper lieutenant, and then I went to special forces and led a team of special forces non-commissioned officers, Green Berets."

Your next number, first appointment. I am curious, you know, you were probably, what, 23, 24 when you were leading that group?

"Twenty-two, twenty-three."

Yeah, and I'm guessing most of them were your age, maybe even a few of them were older than you. How did you handle that? Did you ever feel like an imposter syndrome or, you know, how am I going to get the respect of these folks?

"Well, it's very interesting. You do. The first thing is you wonder, are they going to mind me? Are they going to respect me? But it was really kind of a dangerous thing because what would happen was the non-commissioned officers would be more experienced, and they'd have to be sort of up the hard asses in the private sector.

What does that mean? What does non-commissioned officer mean? It means sergeant. So, you have commissioned officers, which are lieutenants up through generals, and non-commissioned means you're an officer but with no commission. So it's sergeants, it's from sergeant E5 up through sergeant major, and then below that are privates and specialists we call them or corporals.

So, the military's broken into enlisted ranks and officer ranks, and typically people enter as a private or they enter as a lieutenant. Now, some people will be listed and become an officer, but the traditional way is to come in at those two. So as you're a 22-year-old lieutenant, you've got sergeants who are combat veterans who have been around the block, and they have got to be the biggest sticklers for discipline and standards in the platoon. And yet you want to be in charge. So it's this interesting dynamic; you have to earn their respect, but you're not really as qualified or as knowledgeable as they are good platoon sergeants.

You have a platoon leader and then a senior sergeant, sergeant first class. He's responsible, or he feels he's responsible, for training you, for developing you. And if you get the right relationship, it gets very close. And the lieutenant learns to keep their mouth shut, learns to let the platoon sergeant guide them. But the platoon sergeant also learns increasingly to let the lieutenant take more and more responsibility.

Now, when you're young, you can make some big mistakes. I made some very bad mistakes as a second lieutenant. At one point, I started listening to the privates when they would complain about the sergeants to me. I shouldn't have been listening to them about that, but they would complain about him, and they'd go, you know, LT, those sergeants really are a pain in the ass, aren't they?

And if you give them that ear and you start to think, wow, they like me. They don't like the sergeants, so I'm actually a good leader. That's exactly the wrong conclusion because what really the reality was they're, you know, they're wily people, and they are creating sort of a division. And it takes a little much. It took me some maturity to sort of grow through that era before I really learned how you lead.

Another time, or we all have times when you learn about standards. Once we went to this position, and I was pretty demanding because I wanted to have high standards. We went to this position, and I was leading a mortar platoon, and I made them dig the mortars in, which takes several hours, three or four hours of really hard work for the whole platoon. And we dug them in, and then we went to open the range with the range control who allows you to live fire, and they told us you're in the wrong position.

I said, wait a minute! And it was my fault; I had read the papers wrong. So, I had them digging in the wrong position. I went to range control. I said, would you please let us change so that we don't have to move? And they said, nope. And so, I had to go back to the platoon and say we have to move. It was dark; it was cold; it was starting to rain, and I wasn't very popular. I said fill the holes in, which they did. We went to the new location, and then you had this moral question: am I going to have them dig in because I said that's always the standard? But because of my screw-up, they were going to have to do it a second time.

And I remember that night, I said, okay, we're going to dig in, we're going to do it again, and there was muttering, and there was hate and discontent. And the only thing I could do was, yeah, I got in and dug with them, of course. But, you know, you just go through that and you learn that you're going to make mistakes, and you've got to own up to them. You've got to get to look people in their eye and take them, yeah, I could dig into each of these segments because I think there's so much there. But sorry, I just—I see we’re starting to have a lot of questions coming, but continue with that narrative.

I mean, some of this stuff you're saying very nonchalantly like, yeah, and then I started leading some special forces. I mean, my understanding of special forces, these are very hardcore types of training and, you know, you do these things to test yourself too. You want to be in elite units because you want to see, can I do that? Plus, you want to serve with really good people. So, I went to special forces and then I went to this advanced course for a year where they really trained you to go from lieutenant to captain at about the four-year point.

And then I went, as a captain, you're a company commander now. Company commander leads about 150 soldiers, and so at this level, you're leading essentially four platoons. So you're a platoon leader with 30-40 people; now you're a company commander with about 150, and you have four platoons. Now you’re sort of minor level of executive leadership, but you are supposed to be much more mature.

Now, in fact, behind your back, they'll even call a company commander at age 25 or 26—the old man. Yeah, I was very centralized as a company commander. My first company, I had a mechanized infantry company of 14 armored vehicles. I put them all on the same radio frequency so that I said turn left; they all turn left at exactly the same time. And it was a small enough organization where I could micromanage it, you know, kind of put my fingerprints on everything.

And then I moved to another company command. I went to the ranger regiment where it's a more elite light infantry force, and the non-the sergeants there are very, very capable. When I got there in 1985, they were very good at their jobs, and they wouldn't tolerate micromanagement. And so, I got in there, and I was sort of hard-charged. I said, okay, here's what we're going to do, and I started micromanaging, and I got this incredible pushback.

I mean, I got in-your-face kind of pushback because they'd seen a lot of company commanders, and they weren't particularly impressed with me. And they said, we don't operate that way. We are competent to do this, step back and let us do our jobs. And, you know, it sort of started my journey of saying, you know, okay, and when they forced me to do that, we performed far better.

And so, that began, started an arc in my career where I started understanding that my role wasn't to do things. It wasn't even really to make a lot of decisions; it was to create an environment when really competent people could be really good at what they do. You're sort of—then you do some years on the staff. I went to the first Gulf War and things like that. But the next big level is a battalion commander, and that’s about 600 soldiers.

You're a lieutenant colonel; you've got about 17 years in service, and you've got a staff of about 35 officers and then 600 soldiers. I had paratroopers in my first battalion, and now you kind of are the old man. Now you are pretty darn experienced; you've got a staff to make things happen, and yet you're still close enough to these 600 soldiers where you know most of them by sight and name at least, and you can lead by example.

Most officers will tell you that's one of their favorite experiences because it's a big enough organization to actually do a lot, and you get to do a lot of professional development, but you're still young enough to be vigorous and leading from the front and deeply involved in it. Every rank after that, you start to get further from the soldiers. When you command a brigade, you get about 3,000 soldiers, and you've got battalion commanders between you and them, and you're still the commander, but the reality is you're starting to be of a greater distance.

You're starting to be a resource provider; you're starting to be someone who shapes policy. And then as a general officer, that's really what you do. You lead by inspiration and guidance, but you are shaping things for the people who actually get stuff done. And what's the difference? People hear about one-star, two-star, three-star, four-star general. Is there a difference between—like what divides those lines?

"Yeah, that's a really fair question. By law, the army usually has 303 general officers, half of whom have to be one stars, brigadier general. So, there are the four levels of general officer, except in World War II when they had five.

One-star generals typically, you're about 23, 24 years in service. You've been very successful because it's a real eye of the needle. They select 40 people to be generals each year out of about 2,600 candidates. So, only 40 people in a year group that enter in a year get up and ever make one star. One stars are operational; they serve on some staffs; they're assistant division commanders.

Two-star commanders, major generals, command divisions; they command—that's about 15,000 people. They are operational commanders. And then although they don't talk about it, there's really a big difference between two-star generals and three because three-star generals is a pretty small group. I think it's about 50 in the army, and they run big things; they run cores of 40,000 and 50,000 people; they run agencies in the government; they do huge jobs.

And then above that, there's this another big jump to four stars, and they're typically 12 to 14 four stars, and four stars run the army completely in the defense department. Four stars have immense power; all of the general officers have a lot of power, but it's kind of like the Richter scale—your relative influence goes up much more dramatically at the three and four-star level."

Wow! No, I could ask more. I mean, I'm learning a lot just about how the military's structured. I've always been fascinated by this, but I want to make sure I get some questions from YouTube and from Facebook. A lot of people are asking a lot of good questions.

You know, from Facebook, Jenny Evans—and this is kind of a good balance between your military world and what you're doing in the private sector—how do we respond to poor leadership? So I guess this could be a situation where, you know, maybe your leader is—how do you manage around that, or maybe someone in your organization isn't leading well?

"Yeah, that's always one of the toughest questions. If you're in an organization, let's say you're in the middle of it, and the leadership above you is not effective, it doesn't motivate you, or it doesn't get the task done. Well, it's really hard to march into your boss's office and say, 'Ma'am or Sir, you're not doing a good job; you need to do X, X, and X.' It's easy to say you do that, but most of us don't receive that kind of visit very well if we're a leader.

What I think we do is several things. First is we personify being a good follower first because then leaders will appreciate you, and they'll listen to you more. Second, reflect the leadership behaviors you want to see in your bosses. Don't try to make it a difference. Don’t—in front of the people in the organization, don’t try to make yourself look better than your boss because it’s just, it’s disrespectful and not helpful.

But then have the kind of conversations that say, 'Ma'am or Sir, this is what I think might work better as we approach something.' But again, I would tell you put yourself in their position. Don’t be self-righteous. Leaders are often under a lot of pressure. Maybe sometimes they don't see it if you say it in a way where they are receptive when you're communicating. I think you have a much better chance than, you know, being more negative."

I like that a lot! Like, you don't want to just immediately, you know, create a stereotype around someone, climb the ladder of inference, and then somehow become insubordinate or try to embarrass them. That's just going to make it worse. Try to empathize a bit but speak your mind in an appropriate way.

So, a lot of questions about raising kids here around leadership. From YouTube, Waquina M and then Adnan Aziz are asking variations of the same question: What advice do you have to raise kids who think for themselves and become leaders versus someone who will only do what they are told?

"Yeah, well, you certainly want your children to think for themselves because you're not going to be there with them. I would say the first thing about leading, you know, raising kids as a form of leadership is, reflect the values that you want. I've told people this before, but I had this wonderful father and mother, and in my entire childhood, I never saw either of them do anything dishonest. I never saw them take a parking place they couldn't have. I never saw them, you know, take a wink and a nod and keep change when it was given back too much was given to them at a store.

That just everything I saw them do was be kind to people, be respectful to people, and even to us as kids. So, you start by being people that the kids admire and would like to be like. I think after that, when you've got your kids, each kid is different. I mean, that's the thing we have to understand. My son, he grew up, and he's very much his own guy, and I was a soldier and I was, you know, pretty focused and whatnot, and in high school, he had shoulder-length hair.

And, you know, I never gave him a hard time about it. I laughed with him. I said, sometimes I'm keeping pictures of this, and when you get older, you know, we have good fun. And then he had a mohawk through college. He was seven years getting a four-year degree. He had a mohawk of different colors; he was a guitarist, lead guitarist in a punk rock band. Terrible music, but they were pretty successful. I mean, they made CDs and toured and all, but what the way I did it was I maintained the relationship the whole time.

I never tried to say, you should be a soldier. I never tried to say. I just said, great, you know, you don't do that, you know, I joked about us here. But, we just—I thought maintaining the relationship was going to be more important than anything else. Now he's a works for the U.S. government and an intel agency; you know who knew, and he's a father of three daughters. So I say life comes around to pay you back for your youth."

Your son's youth sounds a little bit like some of mine. I tried to grow shoulder-length hair, but it turned more into kind of a sphere. So, from YouTube, there's a sixth-grade teacher, Virginia Garrett, asks, what is the most difficult part of being a leader, and what would you tell a high school child about being a leader?

"Yeah, I got an easy answer for this. The most disciplined part is self-discipline. If all of us took a piece of paper right now and wrote down those things we think good leaders do, we'd end up with some pretty similar lists. And then if we all looked at that list and said what do we in our lives actually do, our lists, we'd probably have to strike a few things off because good leadership is sometimes inconvenient, it's sometimes frightening, it's sometimes awkward.

And so the difference in my view between good leaders and not good leaders is almost never ability or charisma or celebrity; it's the self-discipline to do what you know you ought to do. And because that's hard, because it's all the time. I used to, when I was a four-star, you'd go around, we had 150,000 troops under my command in Afghanistan. I'd go around and I'd interact with a bunch of soldiers that I would only see once; they'd only meet the four-star one time, probably in their lives, and I'd have these interactions.

And I would try very hard to remember that however that interaction was, they were going to write or call home that night and tell their spouse about it. If it was a good interaction, if I treated them respectfully and, you know, that sort of thing, they'd write and say, 'Hey, I met General Crystal; it was great.' If I act a fool, they're going to call a ride home, and they're not going to say that; they're going to say something else. And it's not my reputation. I think about it; it's the reality that that interaction is important enough for them to call home about.

It's important enough for me to be disciplined with so that I treat them the way they ought to be. Now, I didn't always get it right; you get tired, you get frustrated, you get angry, and I interact with somebody, and as soon as it was over, I know I blew that. And then at the end of the night, you're going to bed, and you carry this sense of guilt; you say I wasn't the leader I should have been today. But you don’t say, okay, that's the new normal, I'm just going to lapse into that.

What you do is say I'm going to try to do it better tomorrow, and that is the best leaders I've known are never so self-confident in their leadership that they just kind of go around and let everybody bask in it. They agonize over it. I think that's important."

Yeah, I mean, what I get from that is two things: discipline—being able to do the things that you intellectually know are right even if you don't want to do them or if they're uncomfortable—and then the second thing is to just be constantly self-reflective and not rigid in who you are. Let your, I guess you let your ego drive things is what I'm hearing.

A question about leadership from actually from Poland, Rafale Molech Harodiski asks, what is the right balance between challenging people and caring about them?

"Yeah, they used to say in the military—and I think it was Irwin Rommel who first said it—the best form of troop welfare is first-class training. And so what I would tell people is you don't have to be easy on people; you can be extraordinarily demanding. You can push people hard; you can make their life challenging, and that can be the best thing you can do for them.

Now, you don't have to be a jerk about it; you don't have to be ugly about it. But you can force people to do things they didn't think they could do. In fact, the leaders I remember most fondly that I owe the most to were people who were actually pretty hard on me. I always felt like I had to be really working hard to meet their expectations. But most of them also had a personality where it was desperately important for me to meet their expectations, meaning I respected them enough that their approval was something that mattered to me.

But I would never shy away. Sometimes we think we got to be popular; sometimes we think we've got to be rubbing them on the belly, you know, our people on the belly all the time and saying, 'Don't work too hard,' etc. No, we got to get people ready for the real world, and the real world is challenging. And so in the real world, they're going to have to do it. So I think we owe them that right. You could be hard on someone as long as they know in the heart of hearts that you're doing it for what's best for them versus your own ego, or you're just trying to not be good about it."

So, a lot. I mean, there's a ton of questions. This is great. This is interesting. Beth Otto from Facebook asks, what was your biggest challenge as a leader in your career, and how did you overcome it?

"Um, yeah, that's an interesting question. I had a lot of challenges. I think the first was being a micromanager, and I kind of got people beat that out of me, and that was good. Another thing is I am by nature very, very introverted. And so, because of that, I think if I die and go to hell, it'll be an endless cocktail party where I'm going to make small talk.

So for me, it is being comfortable engaging with people. Now, I'm usually better at engaging with people I work with, soldiers and all, because I know my role, but it was something I had to work at. I'm not naturally gregarious and backslapping and hanging around a lot of people. So that was really important to me. And then I also find that when I get tired, I get short-tempered.

Um, and it's really—it’s more impatient. I never yell or do that kind of thing, but what I do is I just get curt. And if I get pushed hard and I get that way, I'll start being very short with people—most of whom don't deserve it. You know, I've been lucky to have people work around me remarkably tolerable about it because they'll know at a certain point, yeah, he's getting tired; alright, he's starting to be the bad Stan. But it's important for me to constantly remind myself about that."

Well, were there times—just following off on that question—especially when you talked about it when you were in kind of the earlier ranks in the military, but once you were, you know, a four-star general, and you are, you know, you are deciding on things that could affect thousands of people or even geopolitics broadly, were there times where you questioned yourself or you just really said I don't know if I'm making the right decision, or you kind of stayed up at night and just said the consequences are so huge that it was paralyzing for you?

"Yeah, most nights you would make decisions where you sent people into an operation where you know a number of them are going to get killed or wounded, and you just wonder if you've done it right. Those are difficult. But sometimes, others are even more difficult when you've got to fire somebody that you've known a long time, and they're a good person; they're working hard; they're just not right for this. Um, I would agonize over those things tremendously.

I remember there was a much— you know, reported in the media when I was a four-star in Afghanistan. I recommended to the president that we deploy additional troops; we expand our ability to operate, and the president approved it. And I remember right after we approved that, you know, I went into this reflective mood, and I said, okay, I've just asked for 40,000 more soldiers— a percentage of whom are gonna be killed. What did I do?

And, you know, I was able to come back to this and say, well, I used my best judgment. I think it was right, and I do think it was right to this day. But I ask myself those kinds of questions all the time. Would it have been easier or better not to have? And it's not the heat or the public or media pressure that bothers you. It's the mirror pressure when you look in the mirror did I do the right thing?

Did I think was right? Did I use my best judgment? Do I really believe that I did the right thing for the right reason? And how do you—"

That's a fascinating tension for me, you know? How do you maintain that humanity where you're like, wow, these are 40,000 lives, you know? They're not only going to leave their family, but some of them might be killed or injured in other ways, lifelong consequences. And so the empathetic side, that could be almost paralyzing to just think about that idea. But at the end of the day, you have a job; you have to be rational about it; you have to be kind of calculating.

"Um, do you sometimes feel like you err too much on one side of that or the other?"

"I think I always was thinking about that. There were days when I thought I aired one way or another. Um, you know, Ulysses Grant was famous for pushing the Union army so hard and causing so many casualties he would not visit field hospitals because when he went to the hospitals and he saw the tremendous carnage that he was responsible for, he thought it made him lose his resolve.

And yet, he had concluded that the best thing he could do with the nation was lower his head and just go on and win, even though the costs in the near term would be high. I think you make those balances all the time because particularly in the military, the force exists to prosecute American policy, and if that requires us to put it in harm's way, that's what it's for.

You just have got to balance it against being cavalier or doing it for the wrong reasons, or not having done enough due diligence on it. There are a number of things as a military professional you better be asking yourself because people look to you and they ask you, do we need to do that? And you, based on your experience, have enough respect usually from that group that they listen, and so you need to be very careful about what you suggest."

This is fascinating. We're already out of time; we could go on, you know? Hopefully, we can get you on this again. We have a lot of questions for the message.

Actually, let's finish with one question, which I think is relevant to the time we're living in with, you know, the social distancing and COVID and all that. This is from YouTube. Brian Ten Ache asks, what advice can you offer for projecting calm, controlled confidence in a crisis?

"Yeah, a lot of times, you know that stuff is going on, but people are looking at you to—and your temperament—to figure out what's going on. In a firefight, as soon as it starts, the privates look to the sergeants to see how they ought to act. If the privates haven't been in one before, so they're looking to see what are the sergeants doing? Should I be scared? What should I do? Even though they've been trained in what to do, they're looking for an example. That's what leaders should do.

So I would say the first thing is show calm. That doesn't mean you should minimize the problem. You know, there's this tension that says, should I tell my people how serious this really is? Am I just going to scare them, or should I project this overconfidence? No, I would be very candid with the team, say this is the situation; however, we are committed to getting through this; we are committed to succeeding in this effort, following through, and provide inspiration.

Say there, we're going to get through this, and after that, we're going to go on to what we were trying to do. So the leader provides this candor, grounding in reality, provides this confident commitment that says, like Franklin Roosevelt did in his first inaugural address, he said we're going to implement this new deal. We're going to try a whole bunch of things, and some of them won't work; we'll stop those, but we're going to figure out what works and go through it.

And suddenly provided hope to the American people. You don't ever want to say it's going to be easier than it's going to be because then you lose your credibility when it's not. And so I think that the leaders play an incredible role during this period even though we might not have the right answer. You know, we might say, hey, I'm not sure what we ought to do, but I know we're going to figure it out, and we're going to stick with it till we get to the place we need to be."

Yeah, I'm ready to follow you, General McChrystal.

"So, thank you so much! I think this was—I mean, I could see from the message boards—I mean, this was really useful for a lot of folks. And thank you for joining us; I hope we can do this again sometime soon."

"Well, you're kind to have me, Sal. And thanks for all you guys do with the Khan Academy. It's amazing."

Great, thank you!

"Thanks to everyone for joining. Hopefully, you found that as interesting as I did. Obviously, you know, it's a shame that some of these only last half an hour, a little bit more, but we'll try to get more time with all of these folks that I think we can all learn a ton from.

I'll just remind you we're going to be doing this every day, and so come on next week. We're going to have a couple of sessions with just me. I'm happy to answer any questions you all have about anything, and we're also going to have a—we have a pretty fun lineup. We're getting a lot of momentum with really incredible guests, like we've had, obviously, we had Ray Dalio yesterday; we have General Stan McChrystal today, and next week we continue with this cast of really incredible folks that I think we can all learn from.

I'll remind everyone again, we are not for profit. If you're in a position to do so, please think about donating to Khan Academy. It's those philanthropic donations that allow us to do what we're doing, and we are running at a deficit right now, especially as we're trying to support the world in our own way through the school closures that are going on right now.

But with that, I hope everyone has a good and safe weekend, and I will see you all next week!"