http://www.charlierose.com/view/content/11484
Chris Matthews of MSNBC's 'Hardball' on “President of the World: The Bill Clinton Phenomenon” which will air on Monday February 21 at 10PM on MSNBC.
CHARLIE ROSE: Chris Matthews is here. He is the host of MSNBC’s "Hardball
with Chris Matthews." He also has his own weekly news program on NBC
called "The Chris Matthews Show." His latest project is a documentary
about former President Bill Clinton. It is called "President of the World:
The Bill Clinton Phenomenon." Here is a look at the documentary.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Bill Clinton’s post presidency is unlike any before.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I had always said that Bill Clinton would run for
president for the rest of his life. Not literally but figuratively. And I
think I underestimated him. I think he has been running for president of
the world for the rest of his life.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Following the former president is a little like going on a
concert tour.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh my god. It’s .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Different cities, different countries, exuberant crowds.
Always the same feeling, that wherever Bill Clinton arrives it is an event.
A happening, to be experienced and remembered.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Always the superstar, isn’t he?
BILL CLINTON: You can do it here, I can figure out how to put it
everywhere and get it funded for you.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right.
BILL CLINTON: I will really help you out.
CHRIS MATTHEWS (on camera): Did you ever have a pause where you thought I
don’t know what I’m going to do next? And then this began to develop, this
almost global role you play now? It is global.
BILL CLINTON, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Well, in the middle of my second term
as president, I began to think about what I would do. And in general, I
thought two things. I thought number one, I want to keep being very active
in the things I cared about as president, where I can still have an
influence. And the second thing I wanted to do was to try to explain the
world we’re living in to my fellow Americans and the people around the
world. So everything has sort of grown out of that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CHARLIE ROSE: This special on Bill Clinton airs on MSNBC on Monday
February 21st at 10 p.m. I’m pleased to have Chris Matthews back at this
table, welcome.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Right before CHARLIE ROSE. We squeeze it in there, an
hour of greatness.
CHARLIE ROSE: Very good. So how did this come about?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I had the idea, I guess if you want to go the inner scenes
-- my son worked for the Global Initiative about four years ago. He came
out of Brown. I guess he was inspired to go in the Peace Corps, but he had
a girlfriend, he is married now. And he wanted to go several months, but
not two years. So he found the Clinton Global Initiative and he went over
to Rwanda. And I was so impressed by what I learned about the Global
Initiative firsthand, that we went over and visited. We went to see the
guerillas in fact, in Rwanda, with him. They get things done. It’s not
like AID.
CHARLIE ROSE: The Global Initiative does?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Yes. They make sure, they say look, they go to a country
like Rwanda and say, look, make sure none of these cocktails, these
HIV/AIDS cocktails .
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: . get out back to the European secondary market, the black
market. We want to guarantee the donors that it gets to the people who
need them, the victims. And then they have somebody in the country to make
sure that gets done, a quartermaster, my son. And I said this thing really
works. This isn’t the old thing where you get a certain percentage, that
the minister gets it for his money sold off to Europe or the black market.
And it’s the kind of stuff like that that impressed me in the beginning.
That is the first thing.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK. But may I ask you how did this happen? So you were
impressed by the Clinton Global Initiative and you began to ask questions
that you wanted to answer about Bill Clinton?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I said this is -- Nobody is covering this story. Sure, we
had Monica, sure we had the impeachment, sure we had Marc Rich. We covered
all the good, the bad and the ugly of his administration and we covered it
incredibly. I covered it as much as anybody, I can tell you. And then I
said, wait a minute, this guy has been out of office, eight, nine, years --
it’s ten years now. And nobody has covered that. It’s all been good.
It’s been basically international more so than here. And I get the feeling
maybe he’s one of those figures like Winston Churchill who is bigger
overseas, and bigger around the world than we even appreciate. We don’t
get it -- remember even Nixon was popular in France. And are we missing
that story?
So I started to look around. The producers dug up the tape of where he is
traveling. And we started interviewing people. And I went traveling with
him to Ireland and watched the Global Initiative in New York with like
hundreds of CEOs, 160 CEOs of big corporations and worldwide leaders to
treat him better than they themselves feel they should be treated. Going
around the world and arriving in a country and being bigger than the
current host country head of state. And he’s bigger than that person when
he arrives. And that has never been like that before.
CHARLIE ROSE: And he instantly cooperated. He said I will do it, it’s
great.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, you know this business. First of all .
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I had to make up for being tough on him.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: So I had to call up Doug Band, his chief of staff .
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: .. and I said why don’t we go to Sylvia’s up in Harlem
where they work? And I guess he’s tired of going up there to dinner. He
said, how about Michael’s, of course, in midtown. So we met and had lunch,
about an hour and a quarter lunch, he was grilling me. And I said, look, I
want to focus on the Global Initiative, the substance of what he is doing.
You know, this isn’t exactly an investigative piece, this is about the
substance of what he has done for ten years and nobody has covered this and
it is a heck of a story. And I want to travel with you guys, and I want to
get inside. I don’t want to get committed to this, to spend a couple of
hundred thousand bucks and you have to say, you said to me, you’re not
going to get in the door. I want time with this guy, overseas, traveling
with them. I get back about two weeks later, and Band says OK, he said
yes, or I assume he said yes because Band said yes. And we got on the trip
.
CHARLIE ROSE: No conditions.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: No conditions, none, absolutely none. I mean, I had the
time -- I got to see what I got to see.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you say anything critical in this hour?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I make sure I touch all the bases. I remind you as if you
need reminding of Marc Rich, of the impeachment problem, I go all the
bases. I do at one point compare .
CHARLIE ROSE: What’s (inaudible) you touch base on the same thing--
(CROSSTALK)
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I cover the past but I focus on the new.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: And if I could find anything new that was bad, I would
have covered it. It’s good. What I have been able to find is good. The
Clinton Global Initiative is really, really good.
CHARLIE ROSE: So was this in some way you taking a second look at this
guy?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: No, it is a new chapter in his life. I think Fitzgerald
is wrong. I think there are second acts in American life. This second act
is very much different than the first act. And let’s face it, that guy has
been wrong for a long time .
CHARLIE ROSE: Well, you got a second act.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Fitzgerald has been wrong .
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: .. for about a hundred years now.
CHARLIE ROSE: Certainly.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I think he was talking about if you drink yourself to
death in 30 years old, you are not going to have a good second act.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK. Here you spent the time with this guy.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: You know, this .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Traveling .
CHARLIE ROSE: President of the world.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, you are on the plane with the guy and it is almost
like Daddy Warbucks, he is flying around the world. He’s got his big
satchel of books next to him, his neat-looking bag -- I’d like to get the
bag -- and he starts pulling out all the books he’s reading. He’s reading
Yates, he is reading all this other stuff. He’s giving me -- I’m reading
this, I’m reading that, he is what do you think of this, what do you think
of this poetry. He starts reading this poetry. And then finally spends an
hour a day studying economics. I mean it’s "Wall Street Journal"
economics, business economics, because the great thing about him is when he
gives a speech now it is not Joe Garagiola (ph), you know, yesterday’s
stories about the old days. He never talks about the past. It is very
interesting. Bill Clinton talks always about what is happening right now
in the economy, in the world, what people care about. He keeps himself
current.
CHARLIE ROSE: So what new did you learn?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: What new did I learn?
CHARLIE ROSE: About Bill Clinton?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: That he won’t quit.
CHARLIE ROSE: That’s new?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, it’s current. It’s new .
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: Come on. Hello?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Give me a break. I can only follow what I follow. The
guy does not want to leave .
CHARLIE ROSE: He doesn’t quit is new?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Charlie, you are ahead of me all the time. I think it is
an amazing story that the guy -- how many people do you know, you probably
know 10,000 people firsthand. I’ll bet you Bill Clinton knows 100,000
people firsthand, and he knows them all around the world. And I keep
coming across this, he knows all these people. He comes up to you in a bar
in the Shelbourne, in the Dublin, OK, it’s midnight. He has spent the
whole day, the morning with the Protestants in northern Ireland .
CR: Right.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: . talking to the business guys, giving business advice.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Then he goes and spends the afternoon opening up his
institute at City College of Dublin -- his own institute. Then in the
evening he puts on the black tie and spends the whole evening -- what you
and I would consider the end of the evening, black tie dinner for the
American Irish and the American Ireland Fund. Then he goes, puts on his
jeans, puts on this very hip new zipper sweater -- his staff, by the way,
all wear the same costumes .
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: . which is the amazing. By the end (inaudible), you know,
the Shelbourne bar in Dublin, beautiful old bar. He sets up court down
there, he’s surrounded by a phalanx of people, and he’s invited --
everybody knows in the British Isles to meet him like a dance card. They
each get their turn, and the guy just won’t quit. OK, now you think this
is normal. I think it is a phenomenon. The guy has been president now
what, ten years ago and he’s still being president around the world. He’s
as big -- you know those stories he could get elected president of Ireland
tomorrow. No, he could.
CHARLIE ROSE: He could get elected president of the United States?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Oh, yes, easily.
CHARLIE ROSE: Easily?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Not now, but the job is not open now .
CHARLIE ROSE: No, I know.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I mean it would be totally conceptual.
CHARLIE ROSE: But if he didn’t have that .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: He is politically a genius and his ability to work with
people.
CHARLIE ROSE: Tony Blair says that, says he is the most captivating
politician that he has ever met.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: And he talks about .
CHARLIE ROSE: He said that to you.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: He talks about .
CHARLIE ROSE: Hello?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: He talks about that in the doc, he talks about that going
down to Blackpool remember where they had to -- Brighton or wherever it
was, where they had their conference and how he just took over the place.
And that’s what he does. And the Kevin Spacey story that is in the doc
about him showing up somewhere in central Africa and the word gets out that
he is going to the Grand Marche, the big market, and he shows up and there
is like 10,000 people there yelling "peacemaker! Peacemaker!"
CHARLIE ROSE: So what is his genius in your judgment?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I think it’s -- remember you used to talk about that thing
you have when you’re a kid, the big plastic thing filled with air but with
the sand in the bottom that you would punch that would come back up again -
- that’s him. And he said that before. I get down. I’ve -- He got
knocked out of the governorship, his first term. Blown away. He is
finished down there, he is in his 30s. He’s gone. Comes back and wins
five terms. He comes out on national television, 1988, remember, he gave
the terrible speech that went on for like an hour down in Georgia.
CHARLIE ROSE: At the convention in Atlanta?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Yeah. Laughed at, Johnny Carson killed him.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: A week later he is on Johnny Carson playing the sax, he
won us back. He comes back and wins the presidency in ‘92 when everybody
said way ahead of time. He gets all screwed up, too elitist between ‘92
and ‘94, Hillary and ego, too far, they didn’t know how to handle health
care politically. Next thing he’s blown out of office. He gives a speech
saying I’m still relevant. He had to say the era of big government’s over
-- all the, you know, all genuflections, he comes back, beats Bob Dole by
nine or eight points. You know .
CHARLIE ROSE: He leaves government - he leaves .
(CROSSTALK)
CHRIS MATTHEWS: He leaves at high -- and 60 some percent popularity when
he leaves, even with the problem of impeachment, he left with a very high
number. So he is able to keep coming back. And I think he had to come
back after Marc Rich, to be -- to answer your larger question. I think
part of this motivation for this incredible commitment to goodwill and good
efforts around the world, good work, I think a lot of it is to leave on a
very positive way. Who wouldn’t want to do that? It makes -- that’s part
of him that does make pretty easy sense, I think.
CHARLIE ROSE: And his ambition is?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Keep it going. Don’t turn out the lights. Don’t go to
sleep. Keep it going.
CHARLIE ROSE: Keep it going.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I think -- and remember, and this isn’t a moral or amoral
judgment about him, but remember the day that Bush gave the inaugural
address .
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: There he is, down at the Capitol, giving the inaugural
address. Split screen. Bill Clinton’s giving a speech out at Andrews.
He’s not going, remember.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, we show that in the clips too. He said I’m still
president, you know, I’m still here.
CHARLIE ROSE: He also said to you I think that no one, other people might
have -- no one loved the job more than I did.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I think it is a great honest line.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: He is there talking about the burden and the loneliness --
wasn’t lonely for him. I mean, his whole thing with Hillary as the
secretary of state -- and by the way, the serious part of this, which we
don’t really get into, but we all have to look and see if it holds is the
coalition between the Clintons and President Obama. That is to me the key
political fact in the country today, that coalition. If that weren’t
there, Hillary Clinton if she were still senator from this state up here in
New York would be the lightning rod for every Middle East problem that the
president had, every economic problem. She would be the way Ted Kennedy
was back with Jimmy Carter. The party would be split. And the fact that
it is not split I think is key to its success, right, and its possibility
of winning a significant re-election. If they weren’t united as they are,
I don’t think they would be winning next time.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you think if she was in the Senate now .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: There wouldn’t be .
CHARLIE ROSE: The things that have happened, she might be positioning
herself to challenge?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Not to challenge, but even if she didn’t, she would be
positioned to inevitably play the role of critic because it would just come
to her. It would be the automatic role for somebody like that. And as it
is, because she’s part of the team and done this perfect job so far, Bill
Clinton’s part of the team -- it’s really that, I don’t know if I said this
before to you, but I think it reminds me of Alan Alda and Jimmy Smits on
"West Wing" when he offered the secretary of state job to the guy he beat.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I mean it’s art -- It’s history imitating art. And it was
-- that moment made me cry.
CHARLIE ROSE: That’s team of rivals too.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: That made me cry.
CHARLIE ROSE: It’s team .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: It does, this stuff. I mean he said .
CHARLIE ROSE: Oh, I know.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: And that would be you. When he said who is your first
choice, and Jimmy Smits said, well, that would be you. I’ll break my
heart. I love that stuff.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes, you do.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: It’s the (inaudible)--
CHARLIE ROSE: What is it about you that loves it so much?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Did I ever tell you the story about Tip O’Neill and Ronald
Reagan?
CHARLIE ROSE: No.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Reagan has been shot. He’s lost half his blood supply.
And the bullet was actually much closer to the heart if you read the
clinical reports. And Nancy Reagan was very concerned, of course. She is
a good friend of mine and yours too probably now and she is a wonderful
person. And she was worried about her husband surviving and she wanted to
keep him alone. But after a few days, the doctors did a fantastic job and
he was beginning to convalesce and get better. And she said with Jim
Baker, it’s time to let somebody in to see him, to let the country know he
is still there. So they followed protocol. They wanted to do something
really miraculous, said why don’t we bring in the leader of the opposition
to be the first guy to see him, the speaker of the house, Tip O’Neill?
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: His bete noir.
CHARLIE ROSE: So I didn’t know this story, because nobody .
CHARLIE ROSE: During the day.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Nobody knew about this. It was during the day.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Because you know the rest of the story. So Max
Friedersdorf, who was head of congressional relations, was stationed in the
other corner of the room when Tip came in -- here is this big guy, comes in
the room.
CHARLIE ROSE: And by the way, you worked for Tip.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I was his top guy.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: So he walked in the room and went over to -- over to
Reagan. Nobody else knows about this. And I never said this on national
television, actually, Charlie, this is for you. And he knelt down next to
Reagan, this is the leader of the opposition, held both his hands and
together they recited the 23rd Psalm together, these two old guys, two old
Irish guys.
CHARLIE ROSE: That will make tears come to your eyes.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: And then he kissed him on his forehead after they’d done
praying together. He said, I want to keep you, you need your rest. And
just walked out. Nobody saw this. It’s chilling, but nobody saw this. It
was never reported, Tip never came back. I don’t think he told his family.
Reagan never told any of this. I got this in a letter from Max
Friedersdorf. Originally tipped off by David Broder about this story. And
it’s just -- it is a wonder of American politics at its best, to me.
CHARLIE ROSE: Did you, but you knew Tip so well. Did you talk to Tip
about it later?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I never knew about it, he never told us about it. I did
speak a lot of times, we would have late afternoon conversations where he’d
just sit there for hours and tell me about Curley and the old days, James
Michael Curley and amazing stories about the old days. I mean, he would
say the things to me like Curley was crooked by the standards of those
days. And I would say and that was his mentor, and I’d say, this the great
-- the purple shamrock, the old mayor of Boston, who went to the can. And
I said personally corrupt? He said personally corrupt. I mean we had
great conversations. I learned a lot from him sitting in the back room.
CHARLIE ROSE: You were fascinated by three people.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: Winston Churchill.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: John Kennedy and who is the third?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Ernest Hemingway.
CHARLIE ROSE: Ernest Hemingway?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Because all of them are avatars, they all lead you to what
you want to be. And they all take you in your life. If you think about
who made Paris great for you, Charlie. I mean, come on, I don’t care what
you say, it was Hemingway, the ‘20s. It was the period, you know .
CHARLIE ROSE: Oh, yes.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Morley Callaghan, and all that stuff. We all got into
that stuff. You know, George Plimpton, we all got caught up in that.
CHARLIE ROSE: You’d be a good shrink, wouldn’t you?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: And then Africa, when did Africa became cool -- when
Hemingway said it was cool, and bullfighting.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes. And Cuba?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: And Cuba, and bullfighting and marlin fishing .
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: And Kennedy -- who made politics just glamorous? Before
then it was three piece suits and boring guys and stuffed shirts and Taft .
CHARLIE ROSE: Well, no, it’s not -- that’s not true.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: It was Taft ..
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: Before that there was Teddy Roosevelt.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Charlie, this is before television. Didn’t count. Just
kidding, yeah, before that there was one exciting guy, and the Roosevelts,
of course. And the other is Churchill, of course, because here was this
little guy with a lisp who had really nothing going for him except in May
of 1940, when they hadn’t even saved the troops at Dunkirk, even they had -
- even before Dunkirk, even before they evacuated the expeditionary force,
when they were finished, Churchill just said to his larger cabinet, of
course we’ll fight no matter what happens. And they all stood up and
applauded. And that saved the honor of the west. Just that one move.
CHARLIE ROSE: Back to JFK. What do you know about his early youth? I
mean, he was the second son.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: He was never intended to be the public son.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: No. He was a writer. From the time he was sick -- I
think Jackie had one thing really important about him that she said
afterwards to Teddy White. You got to remember, he wasn’t this glamorous,
good-looking character that we all got to know, the tan and the lifestyle
and everything. He was a really sick kid his whole life. He was really
sick. He had scarlet fever. He thought he had leukemia as a kid. He had
a stomach problem his whole life. He had a back problem that was
congenital. He had serious problems his whole life, and they never really
went away. Those crutches were always in the Oval Office, as you know.
And he was always in pain.
And yet we never saw that because he kept that away from us. But as Gene
Smith (ph), you know, said to me one time, the great thing about him and
separated from all the rest of the Kennedys was because he was sick so
much, he read a lot. He was a real reader. I’m not going to go so far as
to say an intellectual, but he read so much in his life, and he had so many
heroes like Churchill. Imagine knowing a kid who read "The New York Times"
every day in high school, every day. Imagine knowing a kid in high school,
I don’t anybody like this, imagine a kid who had read Churchill’s history
of the First World War before he got to high school.
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: But part of .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: So he was -- he was this self-made guy. Very much like if
you read "Gatsby", in Gatsby, he’s writing lists like self-improvement
lists like I’m going to come up with -- you know, needed, needed
inventions. He was very much like that.
CHARLIE ROSE: That was (inaudible) young John Kennedy.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Very much a Gatsby.
CHARLIE ROSE: And he made himself into what?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Into Jack Kennedy, a separate person from the Democratic
Party, from the liberal party, from the Johnson party, from his dad. His
dad was an anti-Semite, bad guy in many ways. He was a loving father, but
a bad guy in many ways, all totally wrong about World War II. Just he
thought it was a business, you could negotiate with a guy like Hitler. And
he said, he never had a sense about the moral horror of Hitler, where Jack
did. And if you look about it from the time he was a kid, he wrote about
(inaudible), and he understood that he couldn’t make that defense of
appeasement. You had to understand that there were reasons that in his
case, Neville Chamberlain wasn’t able .
CHARLIE ROSE: Let me just go back, he created JFK. I mean, he created .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I think so.
CHARLIE ROSE: First. And then he created JFK, I mean you’re saying he
created two things.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: He created Jack Kennedy.
CHARLIE ROSE: He created Jack Kennedy.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: And then he created the guy that could be president. But,
you know, I’m working on it. It’s in progress. November. I’m working on
it very hard.
CHARLIE ROSE: All right. Let’s say a bit about .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I’m very -- Charlie, when you don’t see me, and I’m not
sleeping, I’m doing this.
CHARLIE ROSE: Running around with the president. Let me talk about
Washington today. Give me a sense of Boehner versus Obama.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I think Boehner is approaching a kind of waterfall. In
the next week or two, they are going to be I think a government shutdown,
and it’s going to be one of those mano y mano kind of things, a Hemingway
kind of moment where he is going to have to come up against a very cool
customer, President Obama, who you know does well in the clinch. He has
that sort of, you know, in the movie "The Godfather," when he lights the
cigarette out in front of the hospital and you realize this guy was born
for this, I don’t want to go up against that guy. And I think Boehner is a
little more nervous.
He’s an average guy, in terms of temperament. He does get nervous, he gets
choked up, as we know. I don’t know whether he is ready for this fight and
I don’t think he wants this fight, but I think he’s taking it on because
the Tea Party people behind him want to cut government spending so much in
the current fiscal year, right now, they don’t want any more continuing
resolutions, that what is going to happen is there is going to be a moment
in the next week or two when they’re not going to be able to reach
agreement between the House led by the Republicans and Harry Reid on the
Democratic side of the Senate. And you’re not going to have a deal. So
the government is going to stop. And I think we’re coming up to that .
CHARLIE ROSE: What does that mean, the government stop?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Things like Social Security checks don’t go out. That
matters. I mean, Howard Fineman on the other -- checks don’t go out.
People say, oh, I didn’t get my check. It’s not like you can’t get into
Yosemite that night. That’s important to the person who is waiting outside
in the station wagon, but for most people it’s that check that’s not
getting through. And all of a sudden people say, you know, I like the
federal government more than I thought I did. I sort of like that check.
And it is serious business.
So if things stop performing, and I’d realized from last time, there is a
big difference between a legislative leader like a Tip O’Neill or Newt
Gingrich and a president. The country only wants one president. And they
don’t like the other side grabbing .
CHARLIE ROSE: But they clearly are aware of the lessons of Gingrich versus
Clinton.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Yeah, well, they eventually cut their deal. And I think
with luck, what I think Obama is up to, to answer larger questions, he came
in with a pretty minimal effort to reduce government spending, his budget
of his last week. What he is trying to do is euchre the Republicans into
an iterative process, back and forth, a Ping-Pong thing, as they call it
now, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, over a couple of
years, where both parties begin to show their hand. And eventually you
have a kind of a situation you had with Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan in
‘83, where they went on another big story, Tommy O’Neill tells the story
that his dad went to the White House one day at the end of ‘82 when Reagan
had lost that election, lost 26 seats, and Reagan said to Tip let’s go for
a walk. And they went on a walk on the back lawn and came back with a
Social Security deal.
So I think it’s going to take a while to get there. As Obama said, Jack
Lew, I worked with Tip -- who is now budget director, said we’ve learned
from history that the person who sticks their neck out on Social Security
and Medicare and offers to do something doesn’t get it, they just get
killed. Nothing happens because the other side springs into action and
says gotcha.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you think Obama understands this?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I think he knows that. They’ve said he does.
CHARLIE ROSE: And therefore that’s .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Therefore he is waiting for the Republicans to show
something.
CHARLIE ROSE: Therefore he’s not speaking to the deficit commission
report.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Exactly. And you can say that it’s irresponsible, or you
can say he knows tactically you are not going to get there, if that is
where you want to get, until both parties inch forward. So these guys are
like sumo wrestlers, they’re like doing this. And one of these days
they’re going to get closer and they’re going to engage, and he is saying
it will take that engagement of the two parties for it to work. It will
not work if I try to do it alone, because inevitably, you know the press,
you know the White House press corps, the second he calls for a Social
Security trim or a higher retirement age, that second they will say he hit
the third rail. He has ignited trouble. President taking fallout. The
whole story for days in ahead, excuse me, will be how the president made a
mistake.
CHARLIE ROSE: So what does this say about Barack Obama’s political skills?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: He’s learning. I think he’s learning.
CHARLIE ROSE: And .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: This isn’t something you come to the office with. You
have to talk to people like Jack Lew who have been through it in the ‘80s,
have been through it in the ‘90s with Clinton, and say how does this work.
And you have to listen to people who tell you don’t make a quick move.
This isn’t about initial success. It’s about ultimate success.
CHARLIE ROSE: How much do you think he is being counseled by Bill Clinton?
You must have asked that question.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I think he is counseled by his record.
CHARLIE ROSE: No, no, no. I mean .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I don’t know -- I don’t know. I don’t the answer to that.
CHARLIE ROSE: You pick up the phone and you say .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I don’t know.
CHARLIE ROSE: President Clinton, it’s President Obama calling.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I know Bill would like that call.
CHARLIE ROSE: He would like to get it more.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Who wouldn’t? I think I don’t hear anything like that.
So I don’t know if it is going on.
CHARLIE ROSE: And then when he reads that, you know, the Obama’s real
political model is Ronald Reagan.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: That stuck it to him, and he did that early in the
campaign. He said he was a transformative president and I want to be a
transformative president. He belittled. And he made a mistake there a
couple of times, he belittled the Nixon presidency. Whatever you think of
Richard Nixon, he was not, you know, a transitional president. He did a
lot of things. He ended the dual school system in the South, as you know.
He created the Environmental Protection Agency. He ended the gold
standard. He did a lot of things. Wage price controls. He did a lot of
things that were positive.
CHARLIE ROSE: I thought it was the Supreme Court that ended the dual
system in the South.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, he executed it. No, Pat Moynihan. I go by the God
(ph), Pat Moynihan told me it was Nixon who did it, because he actually
carried out the court’s instruction.
CHARLIE ROSE: Amazing Pat Moynihan, wasn’t he?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Miss him.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: You know what he once said to me? I was on a plane with
him. And he sort of -- you know, he was one of the -- he was an outer rim
of the knights of the round table with Kennedy .
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: He was assistant secretary of labor. And actually he did
Pennsylvania Avenue. He carried out Kennedy’s plan .
CHARLIE ROSE: Right, right .
(CROSSTALK)
CHRIS MATTHEWS: . to making Washington beautiful like the Champs-Elysees.
And Pat once said to me, he was a wonderful man. He was so generous.
CHARLIE ROSE: What did he say?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: He said, you know, we were talking about the Kennedy
assassination. He said we’ve never gotten over it, and he looks at me and
says you’ve never gotten over it. That was -- that was inducting me. I
will never forget that.
CHARLIE ROSE: This documentary, are you going to do more of these?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I hope so, I hope we have done a couple, we did one on the
rise of the right about the Tea Party.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: And we’re going to keep doing them. I think the
commitment which I will say on the air they made a commitment to let me do
two a year. Now I’m going to make it official. I love doing them. They
take a lot of work. I work with some people like Tim Smith and Kate
Hampson of Peacock Productions at NBC and we’ve turned out some good stuff.
CHARLIE ROSE: Great to have you here.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Thanks, Charlie, it’s great. Thank you.
CHARLIE ROSE: Chris Matthews, his documentary is 10:00 on MSNBC on Monday
night.
Monday, February 28, 2011
King's Speech highlights stuttering
King's Speech highlights stuttering
Academy Award winning movie highlights the speech impediment that affects millions.
Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Farmer” Algorithm Update
Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Farmer” Algorithm Update
Feb 24, 2011 at 9:50pm ET by Danny Sullivan
In January, Google promised that it would take action against content farms that were gaining top listings with “shallow” or “low-quality” content. Now the company is delivering, announcing a change to its ranking algorithm designed take out such material.
New Change Impacts 12% Of US Results
The new algorithm — Google’s “recipe” for how to rank web pages — starting going live yesterday, the company told me in an interview today.
Google changes its algorithm on a regular basis, but most changes are so subtle that few notice. This is different. Google says the change impacts 12% (11.8% is the unrounded figure) of its search results in the US , a far higher impact on results than most of its algorithm changes. The change only impacts results in the US. It may be rolled out worldwide in the future.
While Google has come under intense pressure in the past month to act against content farms, the company told me that this change has been in the works since last January.
Officially, Not Aimed At Content Farms
Officially, Google isn’t saying the algorithm change is targeting content farms. The company specifically declined to confirm that, when I asked. However, Matt Cutts — who heads Google’s spam fighting team — told me, “I think people will get the idea of the types of sites we’re talking about.”
Well, there are two types of sites “people” have been talking about in a way that Google has noticed: “scraper” sites and “content farms.” It mentioned both of them in a January 21 blog post:
We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.
As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content.
I’ve bolded the key sections, which I’ll explore more next.
The “Scraper Update”
About a week after Google’s post, Cutts confirmed that an algorithm change targeting “scraper” sites had gone live:
This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.
“Scraper” sites are those widely defined as not having original content but instead pulling content in from other sources. Some do this through legitimate means, such as using RSS files with permission. Others may aggregate small amounts of content under fair use guidelines. Some simply “scrape” or copy content from other sites using automated means — hence the “scraper” nickname.
In short, Google said it was going after sites that had low-levels of original content in January and delivered a week later.
By the way, sometimes Google names big algorithm changes, such as in the case of the Vince update. Often, they get named by WebmasterWorld, where a community of marketers watches such changes closely, as happened with last year’s Mayday Update.
In the case of the scraper update, no one gave it any type of name that stuck. So, I’m naming it myself the “Scraper Update,” to help distinguish it against the “Farmer Update” that Google announced today.
But “Farmer Update” Really Does Target Content Farms
“Farmer Update?” Again, that’s a name I’m giving this change, so there’s a shorthand way to talk about it. Google declined to give it a public name, nor do I see one given in a WebmasterWorld thread that started noticing the algorithm change as it rolled out yesterday, before Google’s official announcement.
How can I say the Farmer Update targets content farms when Google specifically declined to confirm that? I’m reading between the lines. Google previously had said it was going after them.
Since Google originally named content farms as something it would target, you’ve had some of the companies that get labeled with that term push back that they are no such thing. Most notable has been Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, who previously told AllThingsD about Google’s planned algorithm changes to target content farms:
It’s not directed at us in any way.
I understand how that could confuse some people, because of that stupid “content farm” label, which we got tagged with. I don’t know who ever invented it, and who tagged us with it, but that’s not us…We keep getting tagged with “content farm”. It’s just insulting to our writers. We don’t want our writers to feel like they’re part of a “content farm.”
I guess it all comes down to what your definition of a “content farm” is. From Google’s earlier blog post, content farms are places with “shallow or low quality content.”
In that regard, Rosenblatt is right that Demand Media properties like eHow are not necessarily content farms, because they do have some deep and high quality content. However, they clearly also have some shallow and low quality content.
That content is what the algorithm change is going after. Google wouldn’t confirm it was targeting content farms, but Cutts did say again it was going after shallow and low quality content. And since content farms do produce plenty of that — along with good quality content — they’re being targeted here. If they have lots of good content, and that good content is responsible for the majority of their traffic and revenues, they’ll be fine. In not, they should be worried.
More About Who’s Impacted
As I wrote earlier, Google says it has been working on these changes since last January. I can personally confirm that several of Google’s search engineers were worrying about what to do about content farms back then, because I was asked about this issue and thoughts on how to tackle it, when I spoke to the company’s search quality team in January 2010. And no, I’m not suggesting I had any great advice to offer — only that people at Google were concerned about it over a year ago.
Since then, external pressure has accelerated. For instance, start-up search engine Blekko blocked sites that were most reported by its users to be spam, which included many sites that fall under the content farm heading. It gained a lot of attention for the move, even if the change didn’t necessarily improve Blekko’s results.
In my view, that helped prompt Google to finally push out a way for Google users to easily block sites they dislike from showing in Google’s results, via Chrome browser extension to report spam.
Cutts, in my interview with him today, made a point to say that none of the data from that tool was used to make changes that are part of the Farmer Update. However, he went on to say that of the top 50 sites that were most reported as spam by users of the tool, 84% of them were impacted by the new ranking changes. He would not confirm or deny if Demand’s eHow site was part of that list.
“These are sites that people want to go down, and they match our intuition,” Cutts said.
In other words, Google crafted a ranking algorithm to tackle the “content farm problem” independently of the new tool, it says — and it feels like tool is confirming that it’s getting the changes right.
The Content Farm Problem
By the way, my own definition of a content farm that I’ve been working on is like this:
Looks to see what are popular searches in a particular category (news, help topics)
Generates content specifically tailored to those searches
Usually spends very little time and or money, even perhaps as little as possible, to generate that content
The problem I think content farms are currently facing is with that last part — not putting in the effort to generate outstanding content.
For example, last night I did a talk at the University Of Utah about search trends and touched on content farm issues. A page from eHow ranked in Google’s top results for a search on “how to get pregnant fast,” a popular search topic. The advice:
The class laughed at the “Enjoyable Sex Is Key” advice as the first tip for getting pregnant fast. Actually, the advice that you shouldn’t get stressed makes sense. But this page is hardly great content on the topic. Instead, it seems to fit the “shallow” category that Google’s algorithm change is targeting. And the page, there last night when I was talking to the class, is now gone.
Perhaps the new “curation layer” that Demand talked about in it earnings call this week will help in cases like these. Demand also defended again in that call that it has quality content.
Will the changes really improve Google’s results? As I mentioned, Blekko now automatically blocks many content farms, a move that I’ve seen hailed by some. What I haven’t seen is any in-depth look at whether what remains is that much better. When I do spot checks, it’s easy to find plenty of other low quality or completely irrelevant content showing up.
Cutts tells me Google feels the change it is making does improve results according to its own internal testing methods. We’ll see if it plays out that way in the real world.
Feb 24, 2011 at 9:50pm ET by Danny Sullivan
In January, Google promised that it would take action against content farms that were gaining top listings with “shallow” or “low-quality” content. Now the company is delivering, announcing a change to its ranking algorithm designed take out such material.
New Change Impacts 12% Of US Results
The new algorithm — Google’s “recipe” for how to rank web pages — starting going live yesterday, the company told me in an interview today.
Google changes its algorithm on a regular basis, but most changes are so subtle that few notice. This is different. Google says the change impacts 12% (11.8% is the unrounded figure) of its search results in the US , a far higher impact on results than most of its algorithm changes. The change only impacts results in the US. It may be rolled out worldwide in the future.
While Google has come under intense pressure in the past month to act against content farms, the company told me that this change has been in the works since last January.
Officially, Not Aimed At Content Farms
Officially, Google isn’t saying the algorithm change is targeting content farms. The company specifically declined to confirm that, when I asked. However, Matt Cutts — who heads Google’s spam fighting team — told me, “I think people will get the idea of the types of sites we’re talking about.”
Well, there are two types of sites “people” have been talking about in a way that Google has noticed: “scraper” sites and “content farms.” It mentioned both of them in a January 21 blog post:
We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.
As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content.
I’ve bolded the key sections, which I’ll explore more next.
The “Scraper Update”
About a week after Google’s post, Cutts confirmed that an algorithm change targeting “scraper” sites had gone live:
This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.
“Scraper” sites are those widely defined as not having original content but instead pulling content in from other sources. Some do this through legitimate means, such as using RSS files with permission. Others may aggregate small amounts of content under fair use guidelines. Some simply “scrape” or copy content from other sites using automated means — hence the “scraper” nickname.
In short, Google said it was going after sites that had low-levels of original content in January and delivered a week later.
By the way, sometimes Google names big algorithm changes, such as in the case of the Vince update. Often, they get named by WebmasterWorld, where a community of marketers watches such changes closely, as happened with last year’s Mayday Update.
In the case of the scraper update, no one gave it any type of name that stuck. So, I’m naming it myself the “Scraper Update,” to help distinguish it against the “Farmer Update” that Google announced today.
But “Farmer Update” Really Does Target Content Farms
“Farmer Update?” Again, that’s a name I’m giving this change, so there’s a shorthand way to talk about it. Google declined to give it a public name, nor do I see one given in a WebmasterWorld thread that started noticing the algorithm change as it rolled out yesterday, before Google’s official announcement.
How can I say the Farmer Update targets content farms when Google specifically declined to confirm that? I’m reading between the lines. Google previously had said it was going after them.
Since Google originally named content farms as something it would target, you’ve had some of the companies that get labeled with that term push back that they are no such thing. Most notable has been Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, who previously told AllThingsD about Google’s planned algorithm changes to target content farms:
It’s not directed at us in any way.
I understand how that could confuse some people, because of that stupid “content farm” label, which we got tagged with. I don’t know who ever invented it, and who tagged us with it, but that’s not us…We keep getting tagged with “content farm”. It’s just insulting to our writers. We don’t want our writers to feel like they’re part of a “content farm.”
I guess it all comes down to what your definition of a “content farm” is. From Google’s earlier blog post, content farms are places with “shallow or low quality content.”
In that regard, Rosenblatt is right that Demand Media properties like eHow are not necessarily content farms, because they do have some deep and high quality content. However, they clearly also have some shallow and low quality content.
That content is what the algorithm change is going after. Google wouldn’t confirm it was targeting content farms, but Cutts did say again it was going after shallow and low quality content. And since content farms do produce plenty of that — along with good quality content — they’re being targeted here. If they have lots of good content, and that good content is responsible for the majority of their traffic and revenues, they’ll be fine. In not, they should be worried.
More About Who’s Impacted
As I wrote earlier, Google says it has been working on these changes since last January. I can personally confirm that several of Google’s search engineers were worrying about what to do about content farms back then, because I was asked about this issue and thoughts on how to tackle it, when I spoke to the company’s search quality team in January 2010. And no, I’m not suggesting I had any great advice to offer — only that people at Google were concerned about it over a year ago.
Since then, external pressure has accelerated. For instance, start-up search engine Blekko blocked sites that were most reported by its users to be spam, which included many sites that fall under the content farm heading. It gained a lot of attention for the move, even if the change didn’t necessarily improve Blekko’s results.
In my view, that helped prompt Google to finally push out a way for Google users to easily block sites they dislike from showing in Google’s results, via Chrome browser extension to report spam.
Cutts, in my interview with him today, made a point to say that none of the data from that tool was used to make changes that are part of the Farmer Update. However, he went on to say that of the top 50 sites that were most reported as spam by users of the tool, 84% of them were impacted by the new ranking changes. He would not confirm or deny if Demand’s eHow site was part of that list.
“These are sites that people want to go down, and they match our intuition,” Cutts said.
In other words, Google crafted a ranking algorithm to tackle the “content farm problem” independently of the new tool, it says — and it feels like tool is confirming that it’s getting the changes right.
The Content Farm Problem
By the way, my own definition of a content farm that I’ve been working on is like this:
Looks to see what are popular searches in a particular category (news, help topics)
Generates content specifically tailored to those searches
Usually spends very little time and or money, even perhaps as little as possible, to generate that content
The problem I think content farms are currently facing is with that last part — not putting in the effort to generate outstanding content.
For example, last night I did a talk at the University Of Utah about search trends and touched on content farm issues. A page from eHow ranked in Google’s top results for a search on “how to get pregnant fast,” a popular search topic. The advice:
The class laughed at the “Enjoyable Sex Is Key” advice as the first tip for getting pregnant fast. Actually, the advice that you shouldn’t get stressed makes sense. But this page is hardly great content on the topic. Instead, it seems to fit the “shallow” category that Google’s algorithm change is targeting. And the page, there last night when I was talking to the class, is now gone.
Perhaps the new “curation layer” that Demand talked about in it earnings call this week will help in cases like these. Demand also defended again in that call that it has quality content.
Will the changes really improve Google’s results? As I mentioned, Blekko now automatically blocks many content farms, a move that I’ve seen hailed by some. What I haven’t seen is any in-depth look at whether what remains is that much better. When I do spot checks, it’s easy to find plenty of other low quality or completely irrelevant content showing up.
Cutts tells me Google feels the change it is making does improve results according to its own internal testing methods. We’ll see if it plays out that way in the real world.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Gillmor Gang 2.26.11
Every Gillmor Gang begins with a mysterious blend of serendipity and confusion. This episode is no exception, as Robert Scoble attempts to discuss the Motorola VaVaVoom or somesuch.
The only problem with that (or any other Android tablet) is that Gillmor himself could care less about anything other than waiting for next Wednesday’s rollout of the iPad II.
John Taschek is an Android fanboy, and Kevin Marks used to work for Google and has not yet shaken the mindset off.
I am trying to think of things to keep me occupied until Wednesday.
In other news, we discuss pricing for the iPad I on launch day, which Scoble’s spies say is coming in [redacted.]
Friday, February 25, 2011
Playable Angry Birds birthday cake
It's become a family tradition that I make increasingly ridiculous birthday cakes for my kids each year. So with my little boy Ben turning 6-years-old over the weekend, and appreciating his love of Angry Birds, I thought I'd have a shot a making him a playable Angry Birds birthday cake with working catapult and iced birds as ammunition.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Monsanto Shifts ALL Liability to Farmers
“If you’re dumb enough to sign a contract with Monsanto, you’re definitely dumb enough to lose your farm.”
In theory I would agree. Unfortunately the reality is that most farmers find themselves dependent on government subsidies. In order to qualify for most large subsidies you you are forced to enter into a contract with Monsanto or their subsidiaries.
;Any thoughts?
said, mustardtits
Farmers like genetically modified (GM) crops because they can plant them, spray them with herbicide and then there is very little maintenance until harvest. Farmers who plant Monsanto’s GM crops probably don’t realize what they bargain for when they sign the Monsanto Technology Stewardship Agreement contract. One farmer reportedly ‘went crazy’ when he discovered the scope of the contract because it transfers ALL liability to the farmer or grower.
In theory I would agree. Unfortunately the reality is that most farmers find themselves dependent on government subsidies. In order to qualify for most large subsidies you you are forced to enter into a contract with Monsanto or their subsidiaries.
;Any thoughts?
said, mustardtits
Farmers like genetically modified (GM) crops because they can plant them, spray them with herbicide and then there is very little maintenance until harvest. Farmers who plant Monsanto’s GM crops probably don’t realize what they bargain for when they sign the Monsanto Technology Stewardship Agreement contract. One farmer reportedly ‘went crazy’ when he discovered the scope of the contract because it transfers ALL liability to the farmer or grower.
A reminder of the important things in life
A sweet short animation I found on Facebook this evening on the finer basics for a good and happy life... Take a moment... and enjoy :)
Just discovered that these wonderful drawings are taken from the book "Be Happy: A Little Book To Help You Live A Happy Life" by Monica Sheehan. Just bought it myself off Amazon, it's well worth it :o) ISBN: 0762429623
Music is "Cuore Di Sabbia" by Pasquale Catalano
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Green Goose – Hands down the best company in the LAUNCH demo pit
Here’s Brian’s working demo of Green Goose’s technology:
Green Goose has created proprietary hardware running at 915 MHz in the form of small stickers that can be stuck onto everyday devices, such as pill bottles, toothbrushes, toys, etc. as well as a software platform that makes these ordinary devices “smart”. The stickers connect to a small device that plugs into a home router (styled like a small green egg) and has approx. a 200′ range.
Brian gave me a demo of the technology platform by brushing his teeth, playing with toy swords and taking his daily medication. After each action, a web app showed the action having been taken, and brian accrued points for each action. This is a cool, real-world way to stop data from being lossy (see Manifesto point #13) and capture it in fun ways. It gets to the “gamification” trend (props to Nathan Lands of Gamify.com!) that’s impending.
Green Goose - Hands down the BEST company in the LAUNCH demo pit from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.
Green Goose has created proprietary hardware running at 915 MHz in the form of small stickers that can be stuck onto everyday devices, such as pill bottles, toothbrushes, toys, etc. as well as a software platform that makes these ordinary devices “smart”. The stickers connect to a small device that plugs into a home router (styled like a small green egg) and has approx. a 200′ range.
Brian gave me a demo of the technology platform by brushing his teeth, playing with toy swords and taking his daily medication. After each action, a web app showed the action having been taken, and brian accrued points for each action. This is a cool, real-world way to stop data from being lossy (see Manifesto point #13) and capture it in fun ways. It gets to the “gamification” trend (props to Nathan Lands of Gamify.com!) that’s impending.
Keen On… Anthony Wood: The Inventor of Personal Video Recorder on the Future of TV (TCTV)
Meet the man who killed the television industry. In the mid Nineties, while he was looking at a Fry’s ad, Anthony Wood invented the personal video recorder (PVR). From this epiphany, Wood founded ReplayTV in 1997, a PVR company which, for a short while, gave TiVO a run for its money.
But Wood not only invented the PVR, he also helped kill it. In 2002, after leaving ReplayTV, Wood founded Roku, a self-styled “cable killer” hardware company which provides a box for accessing on-demand video.
Almost ten years after founding Roku, Wood really is starting to scare the traditional cable industry. He’s already sold a million Roku boxes and streamed a billion minutes of content from Roku devices. And this year, Wood expects to sell a million and a half boxes, thus making Roku, Wood says, the 10th largest cable company in the US.
And that’s just the beginning. Wood’s goal is to control video access to the world – to be the “one box that rules them all.” The $100 billion question, however, is whether Roku can compete with Google and Apple when these giants really focus on refining the hardware that links the Internet with our screens.
So, will Roku, like ReplayTV, be a footnote to 21st century video content, or can it really be the box that rules them all?
How Wood invented the PVR while looking at a Fry’s ad
Madonna & Gorillaz - 3D Holographic Projection
Madonna & Gorillaz - 3D Holographic Projection
Live at the Grammy Awards 2006
Musion® Eyeliner™ System was the holographic projection technology behind the 3D animation of the popular animated band Gorillaz, who performed 'live' at the Grammy Awards 2006. What's even more surprising is that the Eyeliner™ System also re-created a virtual Madonna, who performed her hit single Hung up on the same 3D stage.
Both the live and TV audiences who watched the performance had no clue that what they were watching at least in the first few minutes of Madonna's performance was just virtual reality.
The Grammys performance was a variation on the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon, with the added attraction of a virtual superstar. Yes, that's right. The Madonna you saw on stage with Gorillaz at the Grammys was a virtual as her cartoon counterparts. However, the rappers from De La Soul who came onstage were, in fact, the real deal.
Gorillaz perform the entirety of their album "Demon Days" live in Harlem.
0:34 Intro
1:35 Last Living Souls
4:56 Kids With Guns
8:51 O Green World
[Dirty Harry Missing]
13:39 Feel Good Inc
17:34 El Manana
21:28 Every Planet We Reach Is Dead
26:55 November Has Come
29:46 All Alone
33:41 White Light
36:02 DARE
40:42 Fire Coming Out Of The Monkeys Head
44:27 Don't Get Lost In Heaven
46:32 Demon Days
"Feel Good Inc."
Hahahahahahahahaha,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good.........
City's breaking down on a camel's back.
They just have to go 'cause they don't know wack
So all you fill the streets it's appealing to see
You wont get out the county, 'cos you're bad and free
You've got a new horizon It's ephemeral style.
A melancholy town where we never smile.
And all I wanna hear is the message beep.
My dreams, they've got to kiss, because I don't get sleep, no..
[Chorus:]
Windmill, Windmill for the land.
Turn forever hand in hand
Take it all there on your stride
It is tinking, falling down
Love forever love is free
Let's turn forever you and me
Windmill, windmill for the land
Is everybody in?
Laughing gas these hazmats, fast cats,
Lining them up-a like ass cracks,
Lay these ponies at the track
Its my chocolate attack.
Shit, I'm stepping in the heart of this here
Care bear bumping in the heart of this here
Watch me as I gravitate
Hahahahahahaa.
Yo, we gonna go ghost town,
This motown,
With yo sound
You're in the place
You gonna bite the dust
Can't fight with us
With yo sound
You kill the INC.
So don't stop, get it, get it
Until you're Jet Ahead.
Yo, watch the way I navigate
Hahahahahhaa
Feel good, AHHHHahahahah [x4]
[Chorus]
Don't stop, get it, get it
We are your captains in it
Steady,
Watch me navigate,
Ahahahahahhaa.
Don't stop, get it, get it
We are your captains in it
Steady, watch me navigate
Ahahahahahhaa.
Feel good, AHHHHahahahaha
Feel good,
Feel good, AHHHHahahahaha
Feel good....
Live at the Grammy Awards 2006
Madonna & Gorillaz - Live at the Grammy Awards from Musion Systems on Vimeo.
Musion® Eyeliner™ System was the holographic projection technology behind the 3D animation of the popular animated band Gorillaz, who performed 'live' at the Grammy Awards 2006. What's even more surprising is that the Eyeliner™ System also re-created a virtual Madonna, who performed her hit single Hung up on the same 3D stage.
Both the live and TV audiences who watched the performance had no clue that what they were watching at least in the first few minutes of Madonna's performance was just virtual reality.
The Grammys performance was a variation on the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon, with the added attraction of a virtual superstar. Yes, that's right. The Madonna you saw on stage with Gorillaz at the Grammys was a virtual as her cartoon counterparts. However, the rappers from De La Soul who came onstage were, in fact, the real deal.
Gorillaz perform the entirety of their album "Demon Days" live in Harlem.
0:34 Intro
1:35 Last Living Souls
4:56 Kids With Guns
8:51 O Green World
[Dirty Harry Missing]
13:39 Feel Good Inc
17:34 El Manana
21:28 Every Planet We Reach Is Dead
26:55 November Has Come
29:46 All Alone
33:41 White Light
36:02 DARE
40:42 Fire Coming Out Of The Monkeys Head
44:27 Don't Get Lost In Heaven
46:32 Demon Days
"Feel Good Inc."
Hahahahahahahahaha,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good,
Feel good.........
City's breaking down on a camel's back.
They just have to go 'cause they don't know wack
So all you fill the streets it's appealing to see
You wont get out the county, 'cos you're bad and free
You've got a new horizon It's ephemeral style.
A melancholy town where we never smile.
And all I wanna hear is the message beep.
My dreams, they've got to kiss, because I don't get sleep, no..
[Chorus:]
Windmill, Windmill for the land.
Turn forever hand in hand
Take it all there on your stride
It is tinking, falling down
Love forever love is free
Let's turn forever you and me
Windmill, windmill for the land
Is everybody in?
Laughing gas these hazmats, fast cats,
Lining them up-a like ass cracks,
Lay these ponies at the track
Its my chocolate attack.
Shit, I'm stepping in the heart of this here
Care bear bumping in the heart of this here
Watch me as I gravitate
Hahahahahahaa.
Yo, we gonna go ghost town,
This motown,
With yo sound
You're in the place
You gonna bite the dust
Can't fight with us
With yo sound
You kill the INC.
So don't stop, get it, get it
Until you're Jet Ahead.
Yo, watch the way I navigate
Hahahahahhaa
Feel good, AHHHHahahahah [x4]
[Chorus]
Don't stop, get it, get it
We are your captains in it
Steady,
Watch me navigate,
Ahahahahahhaa.
Don't stop, get it, get it
We are your captains in it
Steady, watch me navigate
Ahahahahahhaa.
Feel good, AHHHHahahahaha
Feel good,
Feel good, AHHHHahahahaha
Feel good....
Little Magic Stories: Interactive Art With The Kinect
Little Magic Stories from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.
Little Magic Stories from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.
Chris O’Shea makes great stuff using a hacked Kinect. This latest experiment is a performance system called Little Magic Stories. It uses a Kinect sensor and a glass screen to create a “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion. Kids can create and animate their own little characters and then interact with them, catching eggs, smacking bugs, and running wild on stage.
Chris writes:
I used the Musion Eyeliner holographic projection system for this project, allowing the graphics to appear to be alongside the performers. This uses a technique called Pepper’s ghost, and you can see the technical set-up here.
An Xbox Kinect camera was used to track the performers on stage. The Kinect was preferred for use over a normal camera for a variety of reasons. Firstly as a depth camera, I can tell when the performers are near the front of the stage, and therefore level with the graphics in terms of projection plane. Also as the depth works in the IR spectrum, it ignores the projected image and stage lighting that can change throughout different scenes.
Adam Curtis -- The Century Of The Self
There are a total of 4 parts and each part runs for about 60 minutes.
Adam Curtis' acclaimed series examines the rise of the all-consuming self against the backdrop of the Freud dynasty.
To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?
The Freud dynasty is at the heart of this compelling social history. Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis; Edward Bernays, who invented public relations; Anna Freud, Sigmund's devoted daughter; and present-day PR guru and Sigmund's great grandson, Matthew Freud.
Sigmund Freud's work into the bubbling and murky world of the subconscious changed the world. By introducing a technique to probe the unconscious mind, Freud provided useful tools for understanding the secret desires of the masses. Unwittingly, his work served as the precursor to a world full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society's belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man's ultimate goal.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
A better way to run your business with Bill.com
Do you run a business? If you do you need to pay bills, keep books, take in cash, track bank accounts, send out invoices. All of which is a pain in the behind. I know, I did that for Dave Winer’s company for a while.
Intuit’s QuickBooks is how most of these companies do just that, but Bill.com has a better idea. Here CEO René Lacerte shows me why.
But, listen between the lines. He’s building a business graph that will be very high quality. Could he be the future Mark Zuckerberg of businesses?
Yobongo: a new kind of location-based chat
Yobongo is an interesting new chat service. One that introduces you to people near you. Here I talk with co-founder Caleb Elston about his plans for the service and get a demo.
Monday, February 21, 2011
How Khan Academy Is Changing Education With Videos Made In A Closet – with Salman Khan
How Khan Academy Is Changing Education With Videos Made In A Closet – with Salman Khan
Posted on Jun 28, 2010 - 10:06 AM PST
Have you ever had one of those “when I retire and have enough money, I’ll change the world” plans?
Salman “Sal” Khan did. And if you look at his resume which lists work at tech & finance firms, you can see that he was on his way to making that money. But he didn’t want to wait.
In this interview you’ll see how Sal started recording short educational videos and built what is now a 1,500+ video educational academy that’s helping students all over the world.
Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!
Andrew: Before we get started, I’ve got to tell you about three great companies. PicClick is the first. It’s a one person start-up from my friend, Ryan, in San Diego. PicClick gives you a visual way to search eBay, Etsy and other sites. Ryan is already doing one million product sales per month on picclick.com, not hits but sales. Go to p-i-c-c-l-i-c-k.com to see how he’s doing it.
99Designs is the largest crowd source marketplace for graphic design. When I used them, I wrote a description of the design I needed and how much I wanted to pay. I got a bunch of designs back. I gave each designer feedback and picked the one I liked best. And that’s the only one that I paid for. Try them for logo design. If you need a blog design, use them. If you need app icons, use them. There’s so many different reasons why you might want to use them. Check out 99Designs and you’ll see why so many past Mixergy guests have used 99designs.com.
And Grasshopper, I’ve had them now as my longest sponsor for a reason. Not only does my audience love them, but you might have heard several guests here on Mixergy say that they used grasshopper.com as a result of these messages, and they love it. It’s the virtual phone system that entrepreneurs like me love because it offers us multiple extensions, music on hold, call forwarding. It gives an impression of having a big professional organization but also caters to your need to travel and be flexible. Check out grasshopper.com. Here’s the program.
Hey everyone, it’s Andrew Warner, founder of mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. I’ve got with me today Salman Khan. He is the founder of an online school that’s launched and run largely through YouTube. Do I have that right?
Interviewee: Yeah. Well, it’s known mainly for the video library on YouTube right now. There’s 1500 videos. It’s had over 16 million views, 200,000 unique users a month. It is definitely the most used education platform on YouTube, and as far as I can tell, looking at the other open course initiatives, the most used library on the web right now.
Andrew: I went to the courses in preparation for this interview, and I saw that you teach math, basic math. You say that you started out teaching 1 + 1 = 2. I got so into a history course that I almost stopped working. I said, “Andrew, you can’t do this.” So, you know what I did? I used this program called Zamzar that’s going to rip your course. It’s going to put it on my iPhone. I’m going over to Estancia here this weekend. On the ride over I’m going to be watching you teach me history. It was that freaking fascinating.
Interviewee: Oh, cool. I’m glad. That’s actually really good feedback because there’s a lot of interesting discussion about how credentialed someone should be to teach a certain subject. And most of my credentials are computer science and in finance and math.
I did the history. I love history, but I did that: one, to kind of push the boundaries, to show that you don’t have to necessarily have a PhD. You just have to have a passion for the subject. So, I’m glad to hear that. And we hope you won’t have to rip it soon. It’ll be on iTunes by the end of the summer. It’ll be on iTunes the entire Khan Academy library.
Andrew: I’m going to come back to that point that you said you don’t have to have a PhD. I want to ask you about what qualifies you to teach all of these subjects because you’re teaching more and more of them. You’ve got a course on how IPOs work, on how to raise money for a startup, all that.
Let me start off by asking you a question that I ask a lot of my other guests here. How much money does the Khan Academy make?
Interviewee: Well, that can be answered on a bunch of different levels. It is a not-for-profit. That’s a decision we can talk about because there was a kind of thought process. I was being approached by some people in the venture capital and the entrepreneurial world about starting as either a social for-profit venture or a pure for-profit venture or a little bit of both.
But, it is a pure not-for-profit, and there’s a little bit of advertising that comes in. It goes to the not-for-profit, and we’re being very delicate about the advertising. We’re not too aggressive there. And when I quit my job as a hedge fund analyst in September, I was making nothing. So, it was essentially living off of savings.
Andrew: I’m sorry. Our video cut out right after you explained that you quit your job as a hedge fund analyst, and then can you pick it up from there?
Interviewee: Oh, yeah. So, after I quit, I was living off of savings until about, I would say, a month ago where we’ve gotten some fairly significant donations. So, now, I can , at least, take a salary to do this, you know, not a hedge fund salary but a salary.
Andrew: And the donations are coming from people who are hitting that donate button on top of your website?
Interviewee: There’s a ton of people who are hitting that little PayPal donation, you know, and that’s anywhere from – I’ve gotten donations as little as 50 cents all the way – but there’s a lot of people who just donate unsolicited 100, 200, 300, 500. I’ve even gotten a couple that were 2-3,000 just from that PayPal donation button.
But, more recently, we’ve gotten some pretty significant checks from people out here in the valley that get us to the point that I’ve ready to have a salary for, at least, several years. And, obviously, there will be other opportunities to go from there.
Andrew: What kind of people?
Interviewee: A couple of them are venture capitalists in this area. The one gentleman, he’s actually not in the valley, he’s in Europe. He’s a pretty prominent businessman in Europe. There’s another. A lot of the people are people that are in the tech space. They’re not doing it as an investment, obviously. It’s a not-for-profit, but I think they’re excited about the potential here, the potential for kind of disrupting and…
The feedback that I get from a lot of them is: look, a lot of people have talked about doing this type of thing. It’s kind of an obvious idea, taking videos from good instructors and put them on the web, and eventually do some analytics around it, do some self-based learning and everything’s going to be great. But, no one’s really done it. The best to date outside of Khan Academy is the open course ware efforts at MIT and Stanford and all of that. That’s essentially just been videos in classrooms and…
Andrew: Boring. Can I say that?
Interviewee: You can say it, and I feel the same. I’m a huge consumer of their open course ware, but you have to be really motivated and sit through a lot of things that you don’t necessarily want to pay attention to, to get to what you want. Sometimes, it’s delivered well. Sometimes, it’s not. It’s kind of inconsistent quality. There’s all sorts of other things that occur when you have the video camera in the classroom that make it a little bit weird. I think they appreciate the fact that Khan Academy is 99 percent execution and 1 percent talk.
Andrew: Let me ask you this, then. I’ve got your resume here. I actually went to the way back machine to see what you were up to before you did this, to see who you were. And you had your resume up and I looked at it and it’s pretty freaking impressive. In addition to three degrees from MIT which a lot of us have seen in news stories about you and the one from Harvard, you worked at Oracle. You worked at a venture capital firm. You were on a path to be one of these rich people of Silicon Valley. You’re not going to be that now, right? Not with this.
Interviewee: Unless they make a movie about the Khan Academy. Yeah, you know, it’s funny. When I was working at a hedge fund, the six years after business school, I was the senior analyst at a hedge fund, and it was doing well. And then, my manager retired. He encouraged me to start my own fund. So, I was on that track to kind of be a hedge fund manager and all of that.
But, the whole time I kind of rationalized that the only reason that I’m doing this is because I want to, one day, start a school. In my mind, I didn’t want to start a school, write grants and go to the Department of Education and get a charter and all of that. I felt the constraints. I just want to become really rich and just do it on my own terms. So, that was my rationalization for just trying to generate alpha day and night.
As the Khan Academy story goes, I kind of got an outlet for some of my ideas with my cousins, tutoring them virtually. And then, the YouTube thing took off, viral software app. A lot of people are using that, and a lot of the vision started to become concrete a lot sooner than I had expected it to. Then, it was just kind of a little bit of introspection, realizing that I got a lot more satisfaction out of it.
The hedge fund job, it is a great job even irrespective of how much they may or may not compensate you, but this was just ten times more fun, just the impact. Almost everything I did on a daily basis, it kind of added to this library that could be around forever. My son, who’s 15 months old right now, could use it when he’s 18 or 30 or whatever.
So, that idea got really exciting, and just when you think about it, and you see people in the valley like this. I think Silicon Valley is an interesting place because you do see this. It really isn’t about money. I think so many people, they view the money as kind of, “How important was my contribution to the world?”
I think with Khan Academy I get to do that without having to play the whole venture backed startup game, and what’s interesting about Khan Academy is even though it’s not going to make me any money and I’m not going to be able to buy a nice house in Atherton and all that type of thing. In terms of just impact, it is already kind of getting more notoriety than many already fairly successful startups. If I had a startup role and I had an exit for 10 or 20 million dollars, that’s a huge win. Those types of things are a dime a dozen out in the valley.
But, the Khan Academy I already feel has more impact than a lot of these. So, from that point of view, it was just way more impact, way more fun. Every day the things that I was contributing, I felt is contributing to a lasting legacy and it’s just the letters you get from people. I mean, this was also another realization. When you work at a firm, kind of the best thing that can happen to you is a pat on the back from the boss or a nice bonus.
But in this, I’m getting letters, like 20 or 30 a day, and these letters – some of them are just thank you, but some of them are like, “I was going to fail algebra until I started using these videos” or “Now, I want to be an engineer, and I thought I was bad at math my whole life.” So, when you get stuff like that, it really makes you say, “Hey, this is what I want to do.”
Andrew: How about this? I saw one letter on your website. Someone said – I don’t know where she was or where he was, but the letter went, “Where I live, black kids don’t really have access to schools, and my mother moved me so I’d have more opportunities, and my teachers weren’t doing it for me. And then, I discovered your videos. Essentially, that was the story and things changed.”
Interviewee: Yeah, that letter I actually put on my website, I view that as the letter that as someone that really convinced me to quit my job. I mean, there are multiple other moments over the last, I would say, over the last three years where Khan Academy got a letter or something like that. And I’d say, “Maybe, I’ll do this full-time or take time off from the hedge fund world.” And then, I’d look at my finances and say, “No, no. Maybe, I’ll do the hedge fund world for a little longer.”
I got that letter in August, late August of ’09. I got that letter in the same week that the Khan Academy got some notoriety from the Tech Museum, from the Microsoft Tech Award. It was getting a little press, and I just kind of viewed it as a confluence of events that were telling me that I should be doing this.
That letter, especially, I still think to date that’s definitely one of the top five letters that I’ve gotten. I mean, without me doing anything incremental for that person, they just consumed these videos over summer and they really changed their life.
Andrew: People in the chat room are just so inspired. I see Dan Blaine saying, “This guy is really inspiring.” We’re only ten minutes into the interview, and he’s already inspired, he says. So, it’s drawing integrity from Joseph Jacks, everybody here. They’re just loving it. “Holy crap” from Joseph Jacks, about your three MIT degrees. So, you’re blowing us away. Let’s do this.
Interviewee: Well, I’ll add this as another kind of thing about making it non-profit here is that the good will that comes out from this is just orders of magnitude greater than anything. I’m convinced if I did it as a for-profit, it wouldn’t have had the same level of good will. We could talk more about that in general, but I think people respond well to it. So, people are coming out of the woodwork to really help as well.
Andrew: See, here’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to ask you about your vision long-term so I could continue to be inspired and inspire my audience. I want to find out how you got here, and then I want to ask you how’d you do it so well because you’re able to take subjects that you didn’t spend your whole life learning, but somehow you make it seem like they’re part of who you are. And then, you explain them in an easy to understand way. I want to learn how you do that.
So, let’s start off with the big vision so we know where you’re going with this. What do you envision in the future coming out of this?
Interviewee: Well, people know about the videos. I’m going to keep making videos. They’re probably the highest return on my time. I was talking to a foundation yesterday, and they were like, “What do you envision yourself in five years?” I spend, at least, 60 percent of my time. I’m still going to make videos and an infinite amount of knowledge, as you know.
I teach things that are not necessarily in my core expertise, but I make them part of my core expertise so I can teach them. Beyond just the video library, I see it becoming a free virtual school, and what I think that entails is you have a video library. You have self-paced adaptive exercise. You don’t need call them adaptive, if you like. I actually started building that before I starting working on the videos.
The videos are actually a complement to the software piece. People can log in at khanexercises.appspot..com. It’s all free. You can see the Google account. It’s on App Engine, and people started coming out of the woodwork. They started working on that. It’s an open source project on top of that.
Not only will Khan Academy be a virtual school, but that code can then be used for anyone else if they want to make their own island of education, if they want. But the idea is you have the videos. You have exercises that start 1 + 1 = 2. I’ll work you all the way up, and they’re dynamically generated. We take you all the way up. Right now, they go all the way through algebra, but we just go well beyond that. With the exercise, I want them to go through calculus, chemistry and those keep building out.
We collect data on everything. We know what videos you watch, when you watch the videos, what exercises you’ve watched. We’ll do histories on when you’re stuck, and then what I think would complete the picture in the virtual school is leverage the community.
Do actual peer-to-peer instruction. So, if I know that Andrew is having trouble with negative exponents and Sal who lives in Mountain View knows negative exponents and I know both of your schedules, I’ll set up a peer-to-peer interaction. And then, you and I will have a session, not too different than I was having with my cousins four years ago.
And then, we’ll also report it. It also becomes part of this library. Then, we can collect all of this data around. Was that a good interaction? I’ll rate you. You’ll rate me. And then, we can also see what the rest of the statistically significant outcomes on your performance.
I think there’s a lot to be said. In the for-profit world, there’s a lot of people doing video libraries. And they’re doing different ways to collect data and have the best videos. Then, there are other people doing exercises, and then, there are other people who are starting to explore the peer-to-peer learning.
But, I’m pretty convinced in order to do it properly, you want to have all of them together in the same place.
Andrew: OK. So, we got the videos today. You talked about what you have up on App Engine. I played with that game for a little bit. It’s interesting. You get to learn, and then you go into a place where you take quizzes, based on what you’ve learned.
So, to use the example that I played with, it was, “What’s 9 + 5?” And if I didn’t know the answer, I could press the button to see a hint, and the hint showed me balls underneath 9. And if I still didn’t know the answer, I would hit the hint again, and I’d see 5 balls under 5 and then I could answer it and you keep track of it. So, you’ve got that today, and in the future you’re going to add peer-to-peer.
You mentioned that there are people who are already doing this. What about people like Cramster who’s doing this already or who else? Who did I interview here? I interviewed the founder of University of the People Shai. He wants to create an online university. How does this fit in with what’s already out there?
Interviewee: You know, I think a lot of the focus so far has been on platform, but I’m not 100 percent. I’m somewhat familiar with both of those two efforts that you’ve had, and I think in order to make these work, platform matters. But the platform really has to have a core of really good content. That’s what’s going to make people use the platform, and I think right now the value proposition and I think that’s the reason why Khan Academy has a lot of attraction is because it has…
When people say, “What is Khan Academy?” It’s 95 percent content and 5 percent platform. But I think that’s what gives us the ability to eventually turn it into 95 percent platform, maybe, 50-50, 50 percent platform. So, I don’t know what these other efforts are, but I’ve even advised a few startups in the valley about education and that.
Without trying to be too blunt about it, I think a lot of their problem is that they’re a couple of MBAs. They have this big picture idea which is not an incorrect idea, but I think they downplay the value of good instruction, or they downplay the value of really good content which I think is super important in education.
Andrew: All right. Let’s go back to how you started this. I feel like everyone probably knows it already, but they can’t possibly. Can you tell people? The reason I feel that is because lately in our space, in the entrepreneurial space people keep talking about you. I saw you on Hacker News. I saw your story on Jason Freed’s site. Of course, a lot of us are NPR nerds. We heard your story there. For anyone who didn’t hear how it started, can you tell them?
Interviewee: Yeah. Well, it depends how early you want to go. If you go back to college, I always did have this vision of kind of creating a Holy Grail. At the time, I thought it would be a software-based education platform. but, obviously, my career got derailed in a hedge fund.
We’re in 2004 now. My cousin and uncle and aunt were visiting me from New Orleans. My cousin, Nadia, was having trouble – It came up in conversation that she was not placed into pre-algebra for seventh grade. And then, I said, “Hey, that’s a big deal. You don’t realize it. It seems like a harmless thing in middle school. But then, she’s not going to take algebra in eighth grade. She’s not going to take calculus when she’s a senior, and that’s when it’ll really limit her career opportunities, all these other byproducts and even her own self-confidence.”
And she is a really bright girl. She was a really bright girl then. It was pretty obvious. So, I made a deal with her. I was like, “Hey, if you are willing to work with me half an hour a day after your school and my work, I’ll tutor you mobily. I’ll be in Boston. You’ll be in New Orleans.” And she agreed, and we started doing it. We just used Yahoo Doodle and a conference call, and it ended up working out really well.
Even within a couple of months, she had not only done pre-algebra, she was working on algebra stuff. And then, I started working with her brothers and then other family members and family friends. A couple of things popped in my mind. One-on-one teaching can really work, even if it’s virtual. It might be kind of obvious, but I wish there’s a way I could make this scale a little bit or at minimum make it a little easier for me to logistically handle everything that I’m doing.
And so, I did two things. I started working on the software. I started doing that before the videos. When I started tutoring even Nadia, I would point her to random websites and I would say, “Hey, there’s some exercises there. Why don’t you play around with them?” And I didn’t know what she did, when she did the exercise. I said, “Well, I’m going to have to take her word for it” and how she felt about it.
So, I kept pointing her to different things, I said, “Why don’t you try my own little Java Script of scripts to generate problems?” And then, I put a little database behind it so I could track when she’s doing it, how long it’s taking her and all of that type of thing. And then, a buddy literally said, “Hey, why don’t you add some videos there?” because I was telling him about these kids. I keep having to do the same lecture over again, and it’s getting hard to schedule. I have five or ten kids that I’m working with, and I have a day job.
He said, “Why don’t you make YouTube videos? It might be useful for them.” So, I tried it out, and the initial feedback I got from my cousins was that they liked me better on YouTube than in person or virtually or live. I think the takeaway was that there was less stress. They could pause and repeat. They could do it on their own time. There’s none of this scheduling situations. So, I got that feedback from them.
Other people started watching the videos, and other people started sending these notes, like “Hey, I got an A on my algebra exam because of this.” At first, it was only one note a week or one a month, but it got me pretty excited, and the idea started to crystallize.
Gee, if I make this library, even if it’s just useful to my family, like my cousins who are using it now and I didn’t have a son at the time, but my future kids and anyone else. That’s like a huge gift to our family, and if other people end up using it, that’s even more neat. So, it kind of became a fun outlet for me.
We had moved out to Palo Alto a year after that. So, I was working East Coast hours. So, I was done with work by about 2 p.m. My wife was in medical residency, so I had a lot of time. This was a fun use of my time, and it was an outlet for me to get these educational ideas off my plate, and I loved mathematics. It was also a way to engage parts of my brain that I hadn’t engaged in a while. So, it was just a lot of fun, and it was actually having an impact.
And then, fast forward four years, September 2009, and take it from there. Now we have, whatever, 16-17 million views, and it’s the most used open course library.
Andrew: September, 2009, being the date you quit your work so that you could do this full-time.
Interviewee: Right.
Andrew: You know, what I’m wondering as you’re saying this, if I had a relative that wanted to learn math or wanted to learn anything, I might help them once. And then, after that I might refer them to a website where they can go and learn after that. Why would you spend so much time? You’ve got a job. You’ve got other things going on.
Interviewee: Well, it was fun. Well, look. If you work at a hedge fund, it was a great job. And I have to say, the hedge funds I worked for and I worked for one hedge fund in particular for six years. It wasn’t the typical, like, really high powered, Type A type place. It was a really intellectual, thoughtful type of firm. My boss was a really great guy, really focused on work-life type balance.
But, at the same time it was a really good job. But, there wasn’t a lot that you could say what have I contributed to the world today and even the nature of the hedge fund job itself. You could do really good analysis and the investment goes nowhere and you could get lucky. So, there’s a lot of that. You almost crave for something that you do every day where you feel like I did this for x hours and that x hours was a positive contribution to something. It made the pie a little bit bigger.
It gave me a little purpose, and it gave me an outlet, and it made me feel like I wasn’t… I talked to a lot of my friends who are roughly at my stage in my career, and I was like, it kind of dawned on me that, “Look, your life is pretty valuable.” And what I was doing at the hedge fund, I don’t want to demean it. I think it’s a great job, but I spent six years of my life.
But really what I had to show for it was I had experience. I learned to analyze securities better, and I saw a lot about how businesses work and all that. But, what I really had to show for it was just some numbers in a bank account some place. Like, I really had no actual, tangible contribution to show for it, and this gave me that outlet where I felt like these years weren’t wasted.
And I feel that more and more. Every day I almost feel like my day is wasted if I don’t make a few videos or I don’t write a little bit of software. If I just sit the whole day in meetings or if I’m trying to fund raise or whatever else, I feel like I’m not doing what the Khan Academy is supposed to be doing.
Andrew: Did you think at the time that this might help you prepare for the school you’ll launch some day, or did you think that, maybe, this would lead to a school or software that I can create and sell? What did you think it was going to lead to?
Interviewee: Once the Java Script modules, once I had about, I would say, 20 of them and I was using it with my cousins and family friends and they were using it, it really was teaching them and you combine that with the videos. So, the video library got to about 100. The combination of it really was pretty good at teaching people pre-algebra through algebra.
I started thinking very seriously. You know what? The school of the future needs to have something like this as its operating system. It needs to have something like this as DNA. So, I did and actually I do view this virtual school that we talked about earlier. It is a virtual school. It can stand on itself. People can go to that virtual school and use it to learn things independent of anything else, but it can also be used as the operating system or the DNA for a physical school where you have a one room school house, kids of all ages.
It’s actually a very bizarre way that people can age with different concepts. So, you have students of all ages in a room together. They’re working on, for part of their day, not their full day; for part of their day, they’re using technology to kind of get their core skills going. If they don’t understand something, there are other people in the room that are going to help them. So, you have a lot of peer-to-peer occurring in the room. It can occur cross site.
And then, the rest of the day is spent doing real project-based learning. There’s a lot of talk about project-based learning, but not much of it is substantive. I mean, real project-based learning, kids are actually learning to program, like they’re really working, building things. They’re actually writing things that are being published. They’re actually composing music, instead of just learning to play music.
So, that’s the whole aspect. I definitely wanted this to become eventually and it does seem like it is becoming the DNA of a possible framework in school. I know I did a couple of summer camps, and the teachers wanted reports; can I see where all the students are. And we pretty quickly settled on a kind of paradigm where the teacher would walk into the room. All the kids were working at their own pace, and the teacher just gets a spreadsheet that says everyone is fine, but those two kids are having trouble with adding and subtracting negative numbers.
And so, instead of the teacher giving a lecture and all of that type of stuff, the teacher takes those two kids aside, does a very intimate session with them and let everyone else work at their own pace. Then, who are the next two people that need help? Then, even before the teacher gets involved, you can have peer-to-peer help and all that type of thing.
So, as you get more and more technology, you get more and more data on it. It can make everyone’s life a lot more streamlined and be able to do much more intelligent things on where you point people’s energies.
Andrew: I can so see the passion as you talk about this. I can’t imagine you were this passionate about hedge funds or venture capital or any of the previous work.
Interviewee: Yeah. No, I was.
Andrew: You were?
Interviewee: Now that I’m not working in those industries, I can say it. [laughs] I think outside of the Khan Academy my job in the hedge fund was probably the best possible job. What was fun about it, as you mentioned earlier, I teach out of my core competency, so a lot of what I do is I really learn new things, and I try to learn it at a really deep level.
And that’s really what I had to do at my hedge fund job where every day we talked to an oil company. Then, the next day we talked to an Internet marketing company. Then, the next day we talked to a chicken egg company. So, it was this kind of process where you’re always learning new things, and you have to become a quick expert.
Andrew: I see. All right. So, you get these videos online. I understand how today when you have – how many videos do you have?
Interviewee: A little over 1500.
Andrew: A little over 1500. I understand when you get to even 500 to 1000 videos, it starts to feel like something. When NPR comes and interviews you, when the BBC has you on, it starts to feel like something. What about when it was just 100 or 200? Did you ever feel at those moments, “I’m just a YouTube producer, me and the guy who’s creating the cat videos” and he’s got more viewers than I do.
Interviewee: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think in the past year a lot of friends and family are saying, “Yeah, what Sal’s doing is great.” You can go back three or four years ago, and I was kind of just going into sometimes the guest room and then eventually a converted closet and making these YouTube videos. “What’s Sal doing? Why’s he spending all his time doing this?” I had a lot of friends who thought it was kind of weird.
Andrew: Tell me how that felt. It’s easy to look back and say, “You know, that’s what happened and we got through it.” Tell me about how that felt so that when I have that situation in my life or one of our listeners has it in their lives where they’re just like 100 videos into a million video project, the way you were back then and no one believes in them. And they doubt themselves, and they can identify with you. So, what was it like for you?
Interviewee: I think what allowed me to kind of keep up the high level of energy and stay motivated and want to do it is that I didn’t care if it ever got to where it did get. I was pretty happy with the, I guess you would call them, small successes. I was excited that 20 people a day were watching, 20 people who I didn’t know were learning math from me. And the idea that, even if I were to get hit by a bus, 20 people a day even if it didn’t grow at all, would still learn math from me. That, to me, was a pretty profound concept.
And so, for me just a couple of notes a day and that idea were enough for me to say, “Hey, this is a project worth my time.” At minimum, knowing no non-relatives watched it, but if my son when he’s 18 years old is able to learn a little bit of algebra or calculus from me, that by itself makes it worth it. That by itself makes it a neat project.
And so, I think in those early days I was just excited by that small impact. That was enough. Now, in the back of my mind it was growing. I said, “Well, if it keeps growing at this rate – Right now, there’s 20. Next month there might be 30, and boy, in a year, we’d have a couple thousand. In two years, you know, exponential growth. It happens pretty fast. So, that would just be gravy on top of everything else that happened.”
Andrew: Did you have a moment where you doubted it, where you were down on it, where you said, “What am I doing here in the closet or on my computer, wherever it was?”
Interviewee: You know, I never did. I never doubted it. I’ll tell you one thing. I’m a bit of a stubborn character, and I did early on have people say, “Who do you think you are?” Like, I have friends who are school teachers, who are academics – not all of them. Some of them were very supportive. They thought it was cool. In general, I got kind of a negative pushback from people who had never experienced the videos.
I think there’s two camps, people who actually experienced the videos and said, “Wow, this is kind of a cool way to learn. And it was strangely engaging and strangely addictive, and it kind of got me excited about things. And it was kind of entertaining.” And those people were almost universally supportive. But, a very small subset of my people who are close to me actually did that. They actually took the time to experience them.
A lot more people I know were like, “You know, there’s billions of dollars being spent on education. There’s thousands of people with PhDs, spending their whole life on fixing the education system. Isn’t it arrogant of you to think that you and your YouTube videos are going to have any type of impact?” That’s essentially the summary of what a lot of people would tell me.
I would defend it a little bit at first. Well in the back of my mind, I would say, “Well, a lot of those efforts, they’re just spent on bureaucracies and people talking about things”, but I wouldn’t say that. My response all along was, “You’re right. I just want to do my own little small thing. And if it has any effect, it has any effect.” But, in the back of my mind, it made me really angry. It motivated me even more to make more and better videos.
To some degree, that’s what – like the history of videos you’re talking about. I mean, every time I make a small set of videos which are algebra and pre-algebra. It always gets, “Oh yeah, that’s nice and cute what you have there, but this won’t work for calculus or this won’t work for differential equations or physics.”
You may be right. But then, I’m going to go home and show that person. I’m going to make something of calculus, and then immediately you get the pushback. This might work for that, but it won’t work for humanities. You won’t be able to do that. You’re going to have to get other people.
It’s amazing how many people still tell me, “So, you’re going to have to get more people.” I mean, I’m open to it. I’m not like a guest. In fact, when I started I thought that’s how this would happen, that there would be 20 of us doing it. It was actually hard to get – a lot of people would say, “Yeah. That’s awesome”, like at parties. People were like, “I want to make videos, and that would be so cool.” But, actually when it comes to sitting down with a tablet and recording YouTube videos, no one really did it.
And so, even now there’s a lot of assumption of like, “Oh well, you’re not going to be able to do all of K through 12.” Part time for four years, I was working at the hedge fund for most of the time. It’s pretty much 90 percent of K through 12 math has been done, and you can extrapolate that whole time. It’s not going to take long to do it.
I’m not going to say that I’m the only person. I actually want other people to do this, but they’re not doing it. So, if they’re not doing it, and I want to do it anyway, so I’m going to do it. It is a bit of a motivating force when people kind of question your validity or your ability to execute on something. I think it ignites a fire in your belly a little bit.
Andrew: Yeah, I’ve seen that. I felt that in myself, too. How do you do it? How do you do it so well? Actually, why don’t you start out by describing it? Maybe, I should have done that earlier in the interview. Why don’t we start out by you describing it first?
Interviewee: The videos, you don’t see me. They’re a black background, almost universally. Some of them don’t have black backgrounds, but they have black backgrounds and I’m just writing in colors that I think look nice while I talk, while I marry the video.
The forum factor, there’s two things. This is essentially a non-experience even when I was doing it, it was an initial line of virtual obsessions with her. She didn’t see me. We just had a conference call going, and she saw what I was writing, and so it worked with her. I sensed that that will probably work.
I didn’t have good recording equipment. I didn’t have a video camera. And even if I did or even thought at one point about buying one, it’s really difficult. Even if you get a nice video camera, you have to get your lighting right. Then, you have to get your own microphone. There’s all sorts of crazy things you have to do to make it look professional, but if you just do screen capture with a USB headset and I started with Microsoft Paint. And now, I’m using a little fancier stuff. I’m still using Smooth Draw 3. It’s a piece of freeware. It comes off a lot better.
And the feedback I get from people, it’s kind of obvious. Now in hindsight, it’s actually a much more intimate forum factor. It doesn’t feel like I’m on the other side of a room, lecturing to you. It only feels like we’re either beside each other and we’re looking at the same blackboard and the same piece of paper, or it even feels like what my narration is your thoughts on some level.
So, the forum factor both is compelling to a lot of students, and it’s real easy for me. I really just have to press record, start the screen capture going. I don’t have to comb my hair. I don’t have to shave. I don’t have to do anything, and I just start talking and start teaching. And, you know, the question of how I do it – things like, a lot of the algebra content. I do a lot of that real time, very conversational.
A lot of the example problems I do. In the early videos I actually made them up on the fly which I realize that kind of wastes a little bit of time. But I always do them on the fly, and I think that gives students a lens into concepts that they don’t normally see.
In the textbook or the traditional lecture, you always have a finished product. The teacher has seen the example. They’ve done the example. Maybe, they’ve done it six times that day for the last 20 years, and you never see the art of the problem. You never see it solved in real time, and I get a lot of feedback. Students like to see me go down a little path and say, “Oh, wait. That’s not right. I did it because it looked like that. Let me back up and go down this other path.”
So, they really appreciate that informal, conversational kind of thinking out loud style. For the more kind of preparation intensive topics, I did cellular respiration or the French Revolution. These aren’t things – I was exposed to them in my education, but they weren’t something that I would like, if you bumped into me two years ago and said, “Sal, tell me everything, tell me how many APTs are generated by the stage of cellular respiration.” I would have been like, “Well, it was a long time ago.” So, those type of things I do spend a lot of time immersing myself in the subject matter.
Andrew: Tell me about that. Tell me about the process. How do you absorb that knowledge, and then we’ll get into how do you share a tough topic with someone else. How do you teach it? How do you get the knowledge in your head so quickly?
Interviewee: Well, I just try to read as many things as I can. To some degree, I don’t know. Obviously, Khan Academy is dependent on the web. It needed YouTube and all of that, but it also needed the web for my own preparation because in the old days you only had one source. You had your textbook or whatever, and that’s very limiting.
Now, you literally have textbooks. You have things like Wikipedia. You have random professors. You have random people on the web, explaining concepts. You know, 90 percent of them are explaining it the same way, but that 10 percent, they’ll say something and it just clicks in your brain. Oh, why didn’t everyone just say that?
And then, you have all these others. I’m actually a big fan of – well, this is actually a commentary of the publishing industry. I think textbooks are written, not to teach. Textbooks are written to impress school boards and to be these impressive weighty tomes, as opposed to something that a student could digest.
I actually think a lot of the whatever, a teacher sells books that arein the library for $10 or the “Barrons Calculus” or the easy way, “Biology the Easy Way.” These are actually really good text. They shouldn’t be downplayed. You start with something like that, and then when you have questions, OK, that kind of gave me the overview. But I still don’t understand exactly what happens at this stage or that stage.
Then, you can use texts as reference, dig deeper, use Wikipedia as a reference. And when I really get to some really core question, I was doing immunology which I’m not an expert in. In one part of my wife’s immunology textbook, she’s a doctor, so she has her immunology textbook from medical school. And I was leafing through it. In one part of it, it was saying, “B cells, they need to be exposed but they need to be exposed to the antigen to be activated.” And in another part it says, “Oh, helper T cells activate B cells.”
I was just like, “Do both have to happen or just one of them? And I couldn’t find it anywhere. I couldn’t find my answer, so I just literally called up a friend who’s the professor of virology at Duke, and I asked him. Look, I know this is a really stupid question, and you’re going to judge me because why does Sal – I should be doing immunology because if I don’t know the answer to this question, and I asked him. He said, “Actually, that’s a very interesting question. There’s certain types of B cells. It’s an area of research and why that is and this and that. It’s completely not in the textbook.”
And so, very quickly as long as you’re really kind of asking yourself the right questions and you really are focused on getting down to a distilled intuition of a subject, it doesn’t take long before you can really get to kind of fundamental questions that even experts in the field say, “Hey, that’s interesting.”
This is another. I talk to a lot of friends who have PhDs, are professors, or doing pieces or whatever, and sometimes – I’ll meet them at a party and I’ll be do a video on this probably next week, and I have this one question about this, like a fundamental concept, something that a first year grad student should know.
And they’re like, “You know what? That’s something I always wondered, but I really didn’t have time to address it in my education. And I had qualifiers to pass, and I was probably embarrassed to bring it up inside of my department. And so, I really don’t know the answer to that.”
One, I mean, it makes me feel a lot better. But, then we would come on a mission combined to get that question answered, and I would be kind of their lay person to say, “Hey, this guy’s wondering.” I don’t know.
If you want to know where I think I’m heading now, beyond people who have spent more time in the field is that I have the luxury of spending as much time as I want on core concepts. And I think core concepts are the most important because that’s where you build your intuition level on the subject.
When I started doing chemistry, before I even started, I just played with the periodic table for, like, a week just to make sure I understood the nuance of why was it structured that way, why is the pattern. How did it come about as opposed to it’s just there and how do you interpret it? How did the first people even think of making a periodic table, things like that? I get that luxury, and PhDs and grad students and professors don’t have that luxury of really understanding.
I haven’t done mechanics videos yet, and I have a friend who was explaining to me a little bit. He’s like, “Oh yeah, if you have this electron, it’s moving in this chamber, this theoretical chamber.” I was like, “Why is it moving? What is it changing directions?” And he’s like, “That’s a good question.”
It’s like one of these fundamental examples that every first year quantum mechanic student learns, and the teacher doesn’t go over that. They just say, “Oh, you get the equation. You learn to mimic it” and so on and so forth, but everyone’s afraid to ask these very basic questions. I ask them. Eventually, I get an answer to them. And I think when I teach it, I’ll answer those questions and then people won’t have those gaps in their heads.
Andrew: It seems like the Khan Academy is great for teaching Khan, for teaching you because you now are going through the ideal university. Can you talk about how knowing that you’re going to teach what you’re learning, the facts which you’re learning, how it impacts?
Interviewee: Oh, yeah. Well, you know, it puts the bar so much higher. I’m going to start organic chemistry pretty soon, and when you’re taking organic chemistry and I took organic chemistry in college, your goal is really to get an A. And if you’re especially intellectually inspired, maybe, you’ll get another level of understanding. But there’s all these other pressures that are going on in college, your grades and social pressures in other classes and all of that.
Now, I know I’m going to explain it, and I know from the math videos, there’s a certain brand, there’s a certain standard that people expect, that I’m not just going to throw something at you and say, “Memorize this.” Or I’m not just going to say, “This is beyond you. Don’t try to understand it.”
The standard people expect from me is that I will give them an intuition, and I will distill it down to a concept where people say, “Oh, wait. That’s obvious. That’s all that thing is saying about the universe.” And so, that’s the standard I hold myself to when I learn it, so it doesn’t take long actually to learn something of a level where you can get an A on most exams in most schools.
But, it’s a whole other level where you’re getting to the really deep why is this intuitive, or why does that expression look the way it does? Or how is it related to another expression? And so, it’s usually motivating while I’m learning. It keeps me going a little bit deeper than I think most anyone would, if they were just doing it for getting a credential.
Andrew: Don’t medical schools teach by showing, doing teaching method where the student gets to learn it, gets to do it and then has to teach it to someone else because when you teach it, you really absorb it?
Interviewee: Yeah. No, I’m a huge believer of that. When I talk about the virtual school, that’s why I think the peer-to-peer is huge. I think mastery comes, not just from being to do a lot of problems, it really comes from that exercise of teaching it. I found it with my own experience, but if you have kids all over the world teaching each other, that’s why you have that one room school house all of a sudden. I think you’re just going to have a whole other level of mastery that doesn’t exist right now.
Andrew: All right. So, how do you teach? How do you teach tough topics? Teach us how to teach because we’re all going to have to teach our employees, or we’re going to have to teach people who we work with. We’re going to have to teach others online.
Interviewee: Right. Well, I think that there’s a couple of things here. You brought up an interesting point because now when you talk about teaching employees and teaching others. I’m actually advising some tech companies where they want to build Khan type applications of their platform and this and that.
At first, I was writing traditional specs, like you would expect a product manager or whoever would write at a company. This is silly. I do YouTube videos. Why don’t I just do YouTube specs? So, I went and literally made a screen shot and played with what the interaction should look like. It’s ten times better. So, I think to a large degree, just the forum factor makes it way better than if I were to write a white paper, white a spec or even if I were to stand at a white board and use my hands and face.
So, one, the forum factor, the screen capture, hand drawn writing is pretty powerful. Some people told me that cognitively just seeing typing or seeing a PowerPoint presentation doesn’t really stimulate the brain. But seeing someone write something out, handwritten, it actually does. I kind of feel like that. It’s actually easier for me to produce.
Beyond that, what I do is just get as comfortable as you possibly can with the subject, but once you get that comfort, don’t script the video. Make it as relaxing as possible. Have fun while you’re doing it. There’s actually a gentleman who’s going to start translating some of the videos to Urdu.
In my one feedback, he did some great videos, but I was like, “Have more fun.” Our energy carries over in our voice, especially when you don’t see the face. You really have to have a lot of energy in your voice, and if you’re not having fun, the student won’t have fun. And so, have fun. Be relaxed but really know what you’re talking about. Like, don’t throw out buzz words without really knowing what is going on behind it.
So, if you’re at a company, I actually think the way that Khan Academy teaches, it’s actually the ideal. Instead of white papers, instead of a lot of what goes on inside of companies to teach people how to do things, just teach your peers and teach it as it really is. Don’t try to look smart yourself by throwing our buzz words that you don’t necessarily understand or that you heard someone else say. And you think it’s smart to say. Just say it in as down to earth of a style as you can. Be frank if there’s something that you don’t understand, and I think that people will respond well to it.
Andrew: What about the way that you give background before you get into the subject? How do you do it?
Interviewee: Well, I think through this process of making 1500 videos, I’ve gotten very good at being train of thought. I think a lot of people when they teach, they actually close down. They actually shut off a lot of their thoughts that would be, maybe, embarrassing, like, when I do a problem, there is a bit of a neuron that reminds yourself that a negative times a negative is a positive. Maybe, even remind yourself why that is. Remind yourself all of these things while you’re doing the problem. I lay all that stuff out there.
So, even if you’re watching the vector calculus videos, I don’t assume anything. I really doing stream of conscious. Every thought that’s going into my brain, you’re actually getting on paper. So, there’s no skipped steps, if you will. I think there’s that.
Before I do the video, I do try to really make sure I understand the big picture really well. And probably, what we’re talking about when I give the background, that’s me articulating the big picture. So, I have a framework in my head of what we’ve even doing. I think a lot of times in all subjects, once you start getting into it, you almost forget what you’re doing in the first place.
While I’m doing it, I like to, like what have you been doing? We’re on step 50 of this equation. What was the whole point to begin with? So, it’s good to remind yourself at the beginning. It’s not some artificial teaching technique. It’s literally, I’m reminding myself. I’m reminding myself this is why we’re doing this problem right now. I think it’s valuable for the student. I think whatever keeps my energy level up while I do the video will also keep up the engagement and the energy level of the person observing the video.
Andrew: I see. People have to get that French Revolution. I can recommend it before I even finish watching it. It was so good. You even gave us a little bit of background, and you said, “Well, the French supported America in the American Revolution.” Wow, I wouldn’t have thought to have included some like that, but it really does help me understand what’s about to happen here. It’s a great reminder.
How do you make it feel interactive when it’s just you and it’s not even your face in the video? How do you make it feel like you’re engaging the person?
Interviewee: I think there’s a couple things. Once again, when we talked about the forum factor, how it looks, but it’s also the videos are on average about ten minutes. These history videos go a little bit longer than that. But, I think because it’s ten minutes, the person goes into the video watching that video. So, it’s not like they’re getting a 90 minute lecture which may engage them for part of it.
It’s almost like the act of clicking on a video is almost like asking a question. Like, tell me more about the French Revolution or tell me more about the Napoleonic campaigns in Russia. And so, it’s literally just addressing that exact video that you have right there, and the other thing is I think it’s the forum factor. It’s a little bit of a my tone. I’m a little conversational. Literally, the tone I use in the video is not at all different than the tone I’m using right now. It’s not at all like a lecture. The next step of this – it’s not that at all.
Andrew: How many of them do you do a day?
Interviewee: Depends what I’m doing. When I was doing French Revolution or some of the more complex biological, biochemistry type mechanisms, then I’m lucky to be able to do two or three in a day. And there’s other things that are taking up my time now which I’m trying to shut off. Running an organization, I’m trying to automate as much of that as possible.
Right now, I’m doing a lot of worked examples for the Monterey Institute in Algebra I, worked examples where they just gave me a bunch of examples. I said, “Yeah, I’ll do them for you as long as I can put them on the Khan Academy.” These are literally just algebra problems. I’m doing, right now, about ten videos a day for the algebra problems.
Andrew: Who is this for? The Monterey…
Interviewee: The Monterey Institute of Technology and Education. They got a grant to build this course and this and that. This is another interesting thing. Going back to what we talked about in the beginning, a lot of people in the world are talking about making open video content available, and we should get good teachers to put stuff up and we do all this analytics.
When it comes to execution, they had gotten this and I told them, “I don’t know what you’re doing or how much money you’re spending on it. But whatever you’re spending on it, I’m sure I’ll be able to do it for a tenth of the cost as long as you’re willing to donate it to Khan Academy, and I think you’re going to find it more engaging because it’s not going to be scripted.
They were like, “Oh great. That’s no problem. We can send you the scripts.” I said, “Don’t send me the scripts. It will ruin everything that’s good about the Khan Academy. And so they sent it, and over ten videos a day you very quickly turn out about 100 videos in not too long and they’d be done. I think when they started, they thought it was this huge grand project and the little lectures will be done in a couple of weeks.
Andrew: One other question here, and I wasn’t sure if I should ask it or not. But I’ve got to ask it because I think it’s important. You and your wife moved to one of the most expensive parts of the country. Here, you are living in Northern California. You’re living around people who are making tons of cash. I’ve got to believe you’ve got some expectations of lifestyle and your wife does, too.
And suddenly, you come home in September, and you say, “Honey, I quit.” How do you deal with that? What’s the story there?
Interviewee: Well, I think the Sal before marriage and before son would have been much more obsessed with keeping it up with the peers in terms of lifestyle and all of that. When I really seriously introspect on where I find joy in my life, it really does not come from – I have saved enough from my hedge fund days but not a lot from my value standards. But enough for me to not feel like living off of savings for a year was going to kill us or prevent my kid from going to college or anything like that.
So, I’d saved enough there, and we live in a 2200 square foot house in a nice part of Mountain View which is not the fanciest neighborhood, but it’s a really nice neighborhood and the weather’s good.
Andrew: Did you have to convince her? Did you have to explain to her, “Listen, I got to do this” or did she understand?
Interviewee: The first few iterations when I thought about it, she was very like, “Wait, you’re going to give up that job where every year you’re making 50 percent more than the year you made before.” The thing about these careers, like hedge funds or banking or anything is, “Hey, stick around. Next year you’ll be making more than you made the last five years combined.”
My wife is not materialistic at all, but for anyone it’s like, “Gee, that would really like not only allow us to buy a nice house and then we can even support our parents.” There’s all sorts of things. You can always think of more things to do with resources, but when you really sit down and think. I used to play a game with a lot of friends, like how much is enough, right? Like, how much – like, what do you need so that you don’t really need everything and anything above that is just gravy and some type of competitive whatever, who knows?
People out here, they throw out five million, ten million, 15 million. That’s way above enough. For me, it was below seven figures. I’m not taking a salary with Khan Academy. I quit my job, convinced that gee, I’m a complete dummy if I don’t convince someone that this is the highest return on social investment.
I mean, for the cost of a pre-school, we can be educating millions of people for all of time. It’s not even like a school where if the funding dries up the school disappears. No, the content will be there. It will be there on iTunes and YouTube forever. I said, gee, I’ve got to be able to convince somebody.
And being in the valley has been a big benefit there because I think people here, more than anywhere; one, there is capital. People have resources, and they see that. They’re not as swayed by the touchy feely nice picture and please give some money and help. They understand things that scale. They understand when there’s something that has broad impact. They understand a return on investment.
And so, yeah. I kind of veered off track a little bit, but I think the simple answer is I had enough, enough was below seven figures but enough that I could put a down payment on a four-bedroom house in Mountain View. We have two relatively new Hondas, and I’m now able to take a salary from Khan Academy.
You know, I tell people, “If you wrote me a check for five billion dollars five years ago, I would have probably bought a house, maybe, a little nicer than this house. But my day would have been spent making YouTube videos. It wouldn’t have changed, and now I get to do it anyway. So, why chase the five billion dollars which already probably would have been happening anyway, and I probably will just end up 40 or 50 years old just probably with some amount of money in my bank and just say, “What have I done?”
Now, in Khan Academy I come in every day and I’m excited about what I’ve done. These videos, kids are already watching it. This is turning into beginning a momentum. It could turn into a new type of school. It boggles the mind. I tell my wife every day and every night I’m boggled by how fortunate I am that this wide open opportunity to do something really big is just there. And no one’s been doing it.
I want more people to do it. I don’t want it to be like, only Sal. But it’s this wide open opportunity to really change things, and all the technology is kind of falling into place. And I think the way to do it is on a not-for-profit because that’s what allowed all of the inertia and the good will and actually kept me straight in terms of my goals.
I think that if I did it on a for-profit basis, very quickly I’d be like, oh, in order to monetize it. I have to go to this part of the market, and I start charging for some part that I should and that people wouldn’t even learn. You experienced a Khan Academy video. Now, that’s a really good video. If I put even a 50 cent barrier on the video, you would never have experienced it. For me, that wouldn’t have been fun.
Let’s look at this way. If I had ten million dollars in the bank and 5,000 people watching these videos versus I have a hundred grand in the bank and 50 million people are watching the videos, that is a much more satisfying outcome for me than the former. So, that’s why I’m doing it like this.
Andrew: This is an incredibly inspiring story. I’ll leave it there. I am grateful to you for coming here and doing this interview. I know you probably could have whipped up five different videos today for Khan Academy.
Interviewee: Oh, no. I have to catch up now.
Andrew: Sorry?
Interviewee: I have to catch up now.
Andrew: You have to catch up now. A few people, as we were talking, came up with suggestions as to what you should do to tweak your YouTube video panel to get more viewers. I couldn’t understand it well enough to explain to you what they were suggesting. Are you open to those suggestions if they email you directly?
Interviewee: Yeah. Well, there’s a couple of ways. They should email me at sal@khanacademy.org. And the software piece is an open source effort, and the few developers who start working on it, they’re rock stars. I’m very open. They’re, “Hey, your knowledge map that you drew out, it should have arrows instead of arcs.” Forget them, I put arrows in there.
I’m a big believer in stuff out there and keep repeating as quickly as possible. As long as the people iterating it aren’t doing really silly things, it should move forward.
Andrew: All right. Well, thanks guys. If you have any feedback, any suggestions, want to be part of this in any way, sal@khanacademy.org, right? But you also have the dotcom.
Interviewee: No, I don’t. Somebody claimed the dotcom. I don’t own the dotcom.
Andrew: Who is the evil son of a bitch who has the dot com, who does not…
Interviewee: Well, I don’t know. I was almost able to get it, and someone got it. I don’t know. There are people more sophisticated at squatting domain names than I am.
Andrew: I guess so. Somebody get that domain name back for him. If anyone out there is listening, get that domain back. All right. Thank you. And also, thanks for doing this interview. I’m really looking forward to this weekend watching your videos.
Interviewee: Oh, great. Thanks a lot.
Andrew: Cool. Bye.
This transcription brought to you by SpeechInk.com.
Posted on Jun 28, 2010 - 10:06 AM PST
Have you ever had one of those “when I retire and have enough money, I’ll change the world” plans?
Salman “Sal” Khan did. And if you look at his resume which lists work at tech & finance firms, you can see that he was on his way to making that money. But he didn’t want to wait.
In this interview you’ll see how Sal started recording short educational videos and built what is now a 1,500+ video educational academy that’s helping students all over the world.
Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!
Andrew: Before we get started, I’ve got to tell you about three great companies. PicClick is the first. It’s a one person start-up from my friend, Ryan, in San Diego. PicClick gives you a visual way to search eBay, Etsy and other sites. Ryan is already doing one million product sales per month on picclick.com, not hits but sales. Go to p-i-c-c-l-i-c-k.com to see how he’s doing it.
99Designs is the largest crowd source marketplace for graphic design. When I used them, I wrote a description of the design I needed and how much I wanted to pay. I got a bunch of designs back. I gave each designer feedback and picked the one I liked best. And that’s the only one that I paid for. Try them for logo design. If you need a blog design, use them. If you need app icons, use them. There’s so many different reasons why you might want to use them. Check out 99Designs and you’ll see why so many past Mixergy guests have used 99designs.com.
And Grasshopper, I’ve had them now as my longest sponsor for a reason. Not only does my audience love them, but you might have heard several guests here on Mixergy say that they used grasshopper.com as a result of these messages, and they love it. It’s the virtual phone system that entrepreneurs like me love because it offers us multiple extensions, music on hold, call forwarding. It gives an impression of having a big professional organization but also caters to your need to travel and be flexible. Check out grasshopper.com. Here’s the program.
Hey everyone, it’s Andrew Warner, founder of mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. I’ve got with me today Salman Khan. He is the founder of an online school that’s launched and run largely through YouTube. Do I have that right?
Interviewee: Yeah. Well, it’s known mainly for the video library on YouTube right now. There’s 1500 videos. It’s had over 16 million views, 200,000 unique users a month. It is definitely the most used education platform on YouTube, and as far as I can tell, looking at the other open course initiatives, the most used library on the web right now.
Andrew: I went to the courses in preparation for this interview, and I saw that you teach math, basic math. You say that you started out teaching 1 + 1 = 2. I got so into a history course that I almost stopped working. I said, “Andrew, you can’t do this.” So, you know what I did? I used this program called Zamzar that’s going to rip your course. It’s going to put it on my iPhone. I’m going over to Estancia here this weekend. On the ride over I’m going to be watching you teach me history. It was that freaking fascinating.
Interviewee: Oh, cool. I’m glad. That’s actually really good feedback because there’s a lot of interesting discussion about how credentialed someone should be to teach a certain subject. And most of my credentials are computer science and in finance and math.
I did the history. I love history, but I did that: one, to kind of push the boundaries, to show that you don’t have to necessarily have a PhD. You just have to have a passion for the subject. So, I’m glad to hear that. And we hope you won’t have to rip it soon. It’ll be on iTunes by the end of the summer. It’ll be on iTunes the entire Khan Academy library.
Andrew: I’m going to come back to that point that you said you don’t have to have a PhD. I want to ask you about what qualifies you to teach all of these subjects because you’re teaching more and more of them. You’ve got a course on how IPOs work, on how to raise money for a startup, all that.
Let me start off by asking you a question that I ask a lot of my other guests here. How much money does the Khan Academy make?
Interviewee: Well, that can be answered on a bunch of different levels. It is a not-for-profit. That’s a decision we can talk about because there was a kind of thought process. I was being approached by some people in the venture capital and the entrepreneurial world about starting as either a social for-profit venture or a pure for-profit venture or a little bit of both.
But, it is a pure not-for-profit, and there’s a little bit of advertising that comes in. It goes to the not-for-profit, and we’re being very delicate about the advertising. We’re not too aggressive there. And when I quit my job as a hedge fund analyst in September, I was making nothing. So, it was essentially living off of savings.
Andrew: I’m sorry. Our video cut out right after you explained that you quit your job as a hedge fund analyst, and then can you pick it up from there?
Interviewee: Oh, yeah. So, after I quit, I was living off of savings until about, I would say, a month ago where we’ve gotten some fairly significant donations. So, now, I can , at least, take a salary to do this, you know, not a hedge fund salary but a salary.
Andrew: And the donations are coming from people who are hitting that donate button on top of your website?
Interviewee: There’s a ton of people who are hitting that little PayPal donation, you know, and that’s anywhere from – I’ve gotten donations as little as 50 cents all the way – but there’s a lot of people who just donate unsolicited 100, 200, 300, 500. I’ve even gotten a couple that were 2-3,000 just from that PayPal donation button.
But, more recently, we’ve gotten some pretty significant checks from people out here in the valley that get us to the point that I’ve ready to have a salary for, at least, several years. And, obviously, there will be other opportunities to go from there.
Andrew: What kind of people?
Interviewee: A couple of them are venture capitalists in this area. The one gentleman, he’s actually not in the valley, he’s in Europe. He’s a pretty prominent businessman in Europe. There’s another. A lot of the people are people that are in the tech space. They’re not doing it as an investment, obviously. It’s a not-for-profit, but I think they’re excited about the potential here, the potential for kind of disrupting and…
The feedback that I get from a lot of them is: look, a lot of people have talked about doing this type of thing. It’s kind of an obvious idea, taking videos from good instructors and put them on the web, and eventually do some analytics around it, do some self-based learning and everything’s going to be great. But, no one’s really done it. The best to date outside of Khan Academy is the open course ware efforts at MIT and Stanford and all of that. That’s essentially just been videos in classrooms and…
Andrew: Boring. Can I say that?
Interviewee: You can say it, and I feel the same. I’m a huge consumer of their open course ware, but you have to be really motivated and sit through a lot of things that you don’t necessarily want to pay attention to, to get to what you want. Sometimes, it’s delivered well. Sometimes, it’s not. It’s kind of inconsistent quality. There’s all sorts of other things that occur when you have the video camera in the classroom that make it a little bit weird. I think they appreciate the fact that Khan Academy is 99 percent execution and 1 percent talk.
Andrew: Let me ask you this, then. I’ve got your resume here. I actually went to the way back machine to see what you were up to before you did this, to see who you were. And you had your resume up and I looked at it and it’s pretty freaking impressive. In addition to three degrees from MIT which a lot of us have seen in news stories about you and the one from Harvard, you worked at Oracle. You worked at a venture capital firm. You were on a path to be one of these rich people of Silicon Valley. You’re not going to be that now, right? Not with this.
Interviewee: Unless they make a movie about the Khan Academy. Yeah, you know, it’s funny. When I was working at a hedge fund, the six years after business school, I was the senior analyst at a hedge fund, and it was doing well. And then, my manager retired. He encouraged me to start my own fund. So, I was on that track to kind of be a hedge fund manager and all of that.
But, the whole time I kind of rationalized that the only reason that I’m doing this is because I want to, one day, start a school. In my mind, I didn’t want to start a school, write grants and go to the Department of Education and get a charter and all of that. I felt the constraints. I just want to become really rich and just do it on my own terms. So, that was my rationalization for just trying to generate alpha day and night.
As the Khan Academy story goes, I kind of got an outlet for some of my ideas with my cousins, tutoring them virtually. And then, the YouTube thing took off, viral software app. A lot of people are using that, and a lot of the vision started to become concrete a lot sooner than I had expected it to. Then, it was just kind of a little bit of introspection, realizing that I got a lot more satisfaction out of it.
The hedge fund job, it is a great job even irrespective of how much they may or may not compensate you, but this was just ten times more fun, just the impact. Almost everything I did on a daily basis, it kind of added to this library that could be around forever. My son, who’s 15 months old right now, could use it when he’s 18 or 30 or whatever.
So, that idea got really exciting, and just when you think about it, and you see people in the valley like this. I think Silicon Valley is an interesting place because you do see this. It really isn’t about money. I think so many people, they view the money as kind of, “How important was my contribution to the world?”
I think with Khan Academy I get to do that without having to play the whole venture backed startup game, and what’s interesting about Khan Academy is even though it’s not going to make me any money and I’m not going to be able to buy a nice house in Atherton and all that type of thing. In terms of just impact, it is already kind of getting more notoriety than many already fairly successful startups. If I had a startup role and I had an exit for 10 or 20 million dollars, that’s a huge win. Those types of things are a dime a dozen out in the valley.
But, the Khan Academy I already feel has more impact than a lot of these. So, from that point of view, it was just way more impact, way more fun. Every day the things that I was contributing, I felt is contributing to a lasting legacy and it’s just the letters you get from people. I mean, this was also another realization. When you work at a firm, kind of the best thing that can happen to you is a pat on the back from the boss or a nice bonus.
But in this, I’m getting letters, like 20 or 30 a day, and these letters – some of them are just thank you, but some of them are like, “I was going to fail algebra until I started using these videos” or “Now, I want to be an engineer, and I thought I was bad at math my whole life.” So, when you get stuff like that, it really makes you say, “Hey, this is what I want to do.”
Andrew: How about this? I saw one letter on your website. Someone said – I don’t know where she was or where he was, but the letter went, “Where I live, black kids don’t really have access to schools, and my mother moved me so I’d have more opportunities, and my teachers weren’t doing it for me. And then, I discovered your videos. Essentially, that was the story and things changed.”
Interviewee: Yeah, that letter I actually put on my website, I view that as the letter that as someone that really convinced me to quit my job. I mean, there are multiple other moments over the last, I would say, over the last three years where Khan Academy got a letter or something like that. And I’d say, “Maybe, I’ll do this full-time or take time off from the hedge fund world.” And then, I’d look at my finances and say, “No, no. Maybe, I’ll do the hedge fund world for a little longer.”
I got that letter in August, late August of ’09. I got that letter in the same week that the Khan Academy got some notoriety from the Tech Museum, from the Microsoft Tech Award. It was getting a little press, and I just kind of viewed it as a confluence of events that were telling me that I should be doing this.
That letter, especially, I still think to date that’s definitely one of the top five letters that I’ve gotten. I mean, without me doing anything incremental for that person, they just consumed these videos over summer and they really changed their life.
Andrew: People in the chat room are just so inspired. I see Dan Blaine saying, “This guy is really inspiring.” We’re only ten minutes into the interview, and he’s already inspired, he says. So, it’s drawing integrity from Joseph Jacks, everybody here. They’re just loving it. “Holy crap” from Joseph Jacks, about your three MIT degrees. So, you’re blowing us away. Let’s do this.
Interviewee: Well, I’ll add this as another kind of thing about making it non-profit here is that the good will that comes out from this is just orders of magnitude greater than anything. I’m convinced if I did it as a for-profit, it wouldn’t have had the same level of good will. We could talk more about that in general, but I think people respond well to it. So, people are coming out of the woodwork to really help as well.
Andrew: See, here’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to ask you about your vision long-term so I could continue to be inspired and inspire my audience. I want to find out how you got here, and then I want to ask you how’d you do it so well because you’re able to take subjects that you didn’t spend your whole life learning, but somehow you make it seem like they’re part of who you are. And then, you explain them in an easy to understand way. I want to learn how you do that.
So, let’s start off with the big vision so we know where you’re going with this. What do you envision in the future coming out of this?
Interviewee: Well, people know about the videos. I’m going to keep making videos. They’re probably the highest return on my time. I was talking to a foundation yesterday, and they were like, “What do you envision yourself in five years?” I spend, at least, 60 percent of my time. I’m still going to make videos and an infinite amount of knowledge, as you know.
I teach things that are not necessarily in my core expertise, but I make them part of my core expertise so I can teach them. Beyond just the video library, I see it becoming a free virtual school, and what I think that entails is you have a video library. You have self-paced adaptive exercise. You don’t need call them adaptive, if you like. I actually started building that before I starting working on the videos.
The videos are actually a complement to the software piece. People can log in at khanexercises.appspot..com. It’s all free. You can see the Google account. It’s on App Engine, and people started coming out of the woodwork. They started working on that. It’s an open source project on top of that.
Not only will Khan Academy be a virtual school, but that code can then be used for anyone else if they want to make their own island of education, if they want. But the idea is you have the videos. You have exercises that start 1 + 1 = 2. I’ll work you all the way up, and they’re dynamically generated. We take you all the way up. Right now, they go all the way through algebra, but we just go well beyond that. With the exercise, I want them to go through calculus, chemistry and those keep building out.
We collect data on everything. We know what videos you watch, when you watch the videos, what exercises you’ve watched. We’ll do histories on when you’re stuck, and then what I think would complete the picture in the virtual school is leverage the community.
Do actual peer-to-peer instruction. So, if I know that Andrew is having trouble with negative exponents and Sal who lives in Mountain View knows negative exponents and I know both of your schedules, I’ll set up a peer-to-peer interaction. And then, you and I will have a session, not too different than I was having with my cousins four years ago.
And then, we’ll also report it. It also becomes part of this library. Then, we can collect all of this data around. Was that a good interaction? I’ll rate you. You’ll rate me. And then, we can also see what the rest of the statistically significant outcomes on your performance.
I think there’s a lot to be said. In the for-profit world, there’s a lot of people doing video libraries. And they’re doing different ways to collect data and have the best videos. Then, there are other people doing exercises, and then, there are other people who are starting to explore the peer-to-peer learning.
But, I’m pretty convinced in order to do it properly, you want to have all of them together in the same place.
Andrew: OK. So, we got the videos today. You talked about what you have up on App Engine. I played with that game for a little bit. It’s interesting. You get to learn, and then you go into a place where you take quizzes, based on what you’ve learned.
So, to use the example that I played with, it was, “What’s 9 + 5?” And if I didn’t know the answer, I could press the button to see a hint, and the hint showed me balls underneath 9. And if I still didn’t know the answer, I would hit the hint again, and I’d see 5 balls under 5 and then I could answer it and you keep track of it. So, you’ve got that today, and in the future you’re going to add peer-to-peer.
You mentioned that there are people who are already doing this. What about people like Cramster who’s doing this already or who else? Who did I interview here? I interviewed the founder of University of the People Shai. He wants to create an online university. How does this fit in with what’s already out there?
Interviewee: You know, I think a lot of the focus so far has been on platform, but I’m not 100 percent. I’m somewhat familiar with both of those two efforts that you’ve had, and I think in order to make these work, platform matters. But the platform really has to have a core of really good content. That’s what’s going to make people use the platform, and I think right now the value proposition and I think that’s the reason why Khan Academy has a lot of attraction is because it has…
When people say, “What is Khan Academy?” It’s 95 percent content and 5 percent platform. But I think that’s what gives us the ability to eventually turn it into 95 percent platform, maybe, 50-50, 50 percent platform. So, I don’t know what these other efforts are, but I’ve even advised a few startups in the valley about education and that.
Without trying to be too blunt about it, I think a lot of their problem is that they’re a couple of MBAs. They have this big picture idea which is not an incorrect idea, but I think they downplay the value of good instruction, or they downplay the value of really good content which I think is super important in education.
Andrew: All right. Let’s go back to how you started this. I feel like everyone probably knows it already, but they can’t possibly. Can you tell people? The reason I feel that is because lately in our space, in the entrepreneurial space people keep talking about you. I saw you on Hacker News. I saw your story on Jason Freed’s site. Of course, a lot of us are NPR nerds. We heard your story there. For anyone who didn’t hear how it started, can you tell them?
Interviewee: Yeah. Well, it depends how early you want to go. If you go back to college, I always did have this vision of kind of creating a Holy Grail. At the time, I thought it would be a software-based education platform. but, obviously, my career got derailed in a hedge fund.
We’re in 2004 now. My cousin and uncle and aunt were visiting me from New Orleans. My cousin, Nadia, was having trouble – It came up in conversation that she was not placed into pre-algebra for seventh grade. And then, I said, “Hey, that’s a big deal. You don’t realize it. It seems like a harmless thing in middle school. But then, she’s not going to take algebra in eighth grade. She’s not going to take calculus when she’s a senior, and that’s when it’ll really limit her career opportunities, all these other byproducts and even her own self-confidence.”
And she is a really bright girl. She was a really bright girl then. It was pretty obvious. So, I made a deal with her. I was like, “Hey, if you are willing to work with me half an hour a day after your school and my work, I’ll tutor you mobily. I’ll be in Boston. You’ll be in New Orleans.” And she agreed, and we started doing it. We just used Yahoo Doodle and a conference call, and it ended up working out really well.
Even within a couple of months, she had not only done pre-algebra, she was working on algebra stuff. And then, I started working with her brothers and then other family members and family friends. A couple of things popped in my mind. One-on-one teaching can really work, even if it’s virtual. It might be kind of obvious, but I wish there’s a way I could make this scale a little bit or at minimum make it a little easier for me to logistically handle everything that I’m doing.
And so, I did two things. I started working on the software. I started doing that before the videos. When I started tutoring even Nadia, I would point her to random websites and I would say, “Hey, there’s some exercises there. Why don’t you play around with them?” And I didn’t know what she did, when she did the exercise. I said, “Well, I’m going to have to take her word for it” and how she felt about it.
So, I kept pointing her to different things, I said, “Why don’t you try my own little Java Script of scripts to generate problems?” And then, I put a little database behind it so I could track when she’s doing it, how long it’s taking her and all of that type of thing. And then, a buddy literally said, “Hey, why don’t you add some videos there?” because I was telling him about these kids. I keep having to do the same lecture over again, and it’s getting hard to schedule. I have five or ten kids that I’m working with, and I have a day job.
He said, “Why don’t you make YouTube videos? It might be useful for them.” So, I tried it out, and the initial feedback I got from my cousins was that they liked me better on YouTube than in person or virtually or live. I think the takeaway was that there was less stress. They could pause and repeat. They could do it on their own time. There’s none of this scheduling situations. So, I got that feedback from them.
Other people started watching the videos, and other people started sending these notes, like “Hey, I got an A on my algebra exam because of this.” At first, it was only one note a week or one a month, but it got me pretty excited, and the idea started to crystallize.
Gee, if I make this library, even if it’s just useful to my family, like my cousins who are using it now and I didn’t have a son at the time, but my future kids and anyone else. That’s like a huge gift to our family, and if other people end up using it, that’s even more neat. So, it kind of became a fun outlet for me.
We had moved out to Palo Alto a year after that. So, I was working East Coast hours. So, I was done with work by about 2 p.m. My wife was in medical residency, so I had a lot of time. This was a fun use of my time, and it was an outlet for me to get these educational ideas off my plate, and I loved mathematics. It was also a way to engage parts of my brain that I hadn’t engaged in a while. So, it was just a lot of fun, and it was actually having an impact.
And then, fast forward four years, September 2009, and take it from there. Now we have, whatever, 16-17 million views, and it’s the most used open course library.
Andrew: September, 2009, being the date you quit your work so that you could do this full-time.
Interviewee: Right.
Andrew: You know, what I’m wondering as you’re saying this, if I had a relative that wanted to learn math or wanted to learn anything, I might help them once. And then, after that I might refer them to a website where they can go and learn after that. Why would you spend so much time? You’ve got a job. You’ve got other things going on.
Interviewee: Well, it was fun. Well, look. If you work at a hedge fund, it was a great job. And I have to say, the hedge funds I worked for and I worked for one hedge fund in particular for six years. It wasn’t the typical, like, really high powered, Type A type place. It was a really intellectual, thoughtful type of firm. My boss was a really great guy, really focused on work-life type balance.
But, at the same time it was a really good job. But, there wasn’t a lot that you could say what have I contributed to the world today and even the nature of the hedge fund job itself. You could do really good analysis and the investment goes nowhere and you could get lucky. So, there’s a lot of that. You almost crave for something that you do every day where you feel like I did this for x hours and that x hours was a positive contribution to something. It made the pie a little bit bigger.
It gave me a little purpose, and it gave me an outlet, and it made me feel like I wasn’t… I talked to a lot of my friends who are roughly at my stage in my career, and I was like, it kind of dawned on me that, “Look, your life is pretty valuable.” And what I was doing at the hedge fund, I don’t want to demean it. I think it’s a great job, but I spent six years of my life.
But really what I had to show for it was I had experience. I learned to analyze securities better, and I saw a lot about how businesses work and all that. But, what I really had to show for it was just some numbers in a bank account some place. Like, I really had no actual, tangible contribution to show for it, and this gave me that outlet where I felt like these years weren’t wasted.
And I feel that more and more. Every day I almost feel like my day is wasted if I don’t make a few videos or I don’t write a little bit of software. If I just sit the whole day in meetings or if I’m trying to fund raise or whatever else, I feel like I’m not doing what the Khan Academy is supposed to be doing.
Andrew: Did you think at the time that this might help you prepare for the school you’ll launch some day, or did you think that, maybe, this would lead to a school or software that I can create and sell? What did you think it was going to lead to?
Interviewee: Once the Java Script modules, once I had about, I would say, 20 of them and I was using it with my cousins and family friends and they were using it, it really was teaching them and you combine that with the videos. So, the video library got to about 100. The combination of it really was pretty good at teaching people pre-algebra through algebra.
I started thinking very seriously. You know what? The school of the future needs to have something like this as its operating system. It needs to have something like this as DNA. So, I did and actually I do view this virtual school that we talked about earlier. It is a virtual school. It can stand on itself. People can go to that virtual school and use it to learn things independent of anything else, but it can also be used as the operating system or the DNA for a physical school where you have a one room school house, kids of all ages.
It’s actually a very bizarre way that people can age with different concepts. So, you have students of all ages in a room together. They’re working on, for part of their day, not their full day; for part of their day, they’re using technology to kind of get their core skills going. If they don’t understand something, there are other people in the room that are going to help them. So, you have a lot of peer-to-peer occurring in the room. It can occur cross site.
And then, the rest of the day is spent doing real project-based learning. There’s a lot of talk about project-based learning, but not much of it is substantive. I mean, real project-based learning, kids are actually learning to program, like they’re really working, building things. They’re actually writing things that are being published. They’re actually composing music, instead of just learning to play music.
So, that’s the whole aspect. I definitely wanted this to become eventually and it does seem like it is becoming the DNA of a possible framework in school. I know I did a couple of summer camps, and the teachers wanted reports; can I see where all the students are. And we pretty quickly settled on a kind of paradigm where the teacher would walk into the room. All the kids were working at their own pace, and the teacher just gets a spreadsheet that says everyone is fine, but those two kids are having trouble with adding and subtracting negative numbers.
And so, instead of the teacher giving a lecture and all of that type of stuff, the teacher takes those two kids aside, does a very intimate session with them and let everyone else work at their own pace. Then, who are the next two people that need help? Then, even before the teacher gets involved, you can have peer-to-peer help and all that type of thing.
So, as you get more and more technology, you get more and more data on it. It can make everyone’s life a lot more streamlined and be able to do much more intelligent things on where you point people’s energies.
Andrew: I can so see the passion as you talk about this. I can’t imagine you were this passionate about hedge funds or venture capital or any of the previous work.
Interviewee: Yeah. No, I was.
Andrew: You were?
Interviewee: Now that I’m not working in those industries, I can say it. [laughs] I think outside of the Khan Academy my job in the hedge fund was probably the best possible job. What was fun about it, as you mentioned earlier, I teach out of my core competency, so a lot of what I do is I really learn new things, and I try to learn it at a really deep level.
And that’s really what I had to do at my hedge fund job where every day we talked to an oil company. Then, the next day we talked to an Internet marketing company. Then, the next day we talked to a chicken egg company. So, it was this kind of process where you’re always learning new things, and you have to become a quick expert.
Andrew: I see. All right. So, you get these videos online. I understand how today when you have – how many videos do you have?
Interviewee: A little over 1500.
Andrew: A little over 1500. I understand when you get to even 500 to 1000 videos, it starts to feel like something. When NPR comes and interviews you, when the BBC has you on, it starts to feel like something. What about when it was just 100 or 200? Did you ever feel at those moments, “I’m just a YouTube producer, me and the guy who’s creating the cat videos” and he’s got more viewers than I do.
Interviewee: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think in the past year a lot of friends and family are saying, “Yeah, what Sal’s doing is great.” You can go back three or four years ago, and I was kind of just going into sometimes the guest room and then eventually a converted closet and making these YouTube videos. “What’s Sal doing? Why’s he spending all his time doing this?” I had a lot of friends who thought it was kind of weird.
Andrew: Tell me how that felt. It’s easy to look back and say, “You know, that’s what happened and we got through it.” Tell me about how that felt so that when I have that situation in my life or one of our listeners has it in their lives where they’re just like 100 videos into a million video project, the way you were back then and no one believes in them. And they doubt themselves, and they can identify with you. So, what was it like for you?
Interviewee: I think what allowed me to kind of keep up the high level of energy and stay motivated and want to do it is that I didn’t care if it ever got to where it did get. I was pretty happy with the, I guess you would call them, small successes. I was excited that 20 people a day were watching, 20 people who I didn’t know were learning math from me. And the idea that, even if I were to get hit by a bus, 20 people a day even if it didn’t grow at all, would still learn math from me. That, to me, was a pretty profound concept.
And so, for me just a couple of notes a day and that idea were enough for me to say, “Hey, this is a project worth my time.” At minimum, knowing no non-relatives watched it, but if my son when he’s 18 years old is able to learn a little bit of algebra or calculus from me, that by itself makes it worth it. That by itself makes it a neat project.
And so, I think in those early days I was just excited by that small impact. That was enough. Now, in the back of my mind it was growing. I said, “Well, if it keeps growing at this rate – Right now, there’s 20. Next month there might be 30, and boy, in a year, we’d have a couple thousand. In two years, you know, exponential growth. It happens pretty fast. So, that would just be gravy on top of everything else that happened.”
Andrew: Did you have a moment where you doubted it, where you were down on it, where you said, “What am I doing here in the closet or on my computer, wherever it was?”
Interviewee: You know, I never did. I never doubted it. I’ll tell you one thing. I’m a bit of a stubborn character, and I did early on have people say, “Who do you think you are?” Like, I have friends who are school teachers, who are academics – not all of them. Some of them were very supportive. They thought it was cool. In general, I got kind of a negative pushback from people who had never experienced the videos.
I think there’s two camps, people who actually experienced the videos and said, “Wow, this is kind of a cool way to learn. And it was strangely engaging and strangely addictive, and it kind of got me excited about things. And it was kind of entertaining.” And those people were almost universally supportive. But, a very small subset of my people who are close to me actually did that. They actually took the time to experience them.
A lot more people I know were like, “You know, there’s billions of dollars being spent on education. There’s thousands of people with PhDs, spending their whole life on fixing the education system. Isn’t it arrogant of you to think that you and your YouTube videos are going to have any type of impact?” That’s essentially the summary of what a lot of people would tell me.
I would defend it a little bit at first. Well in the back of my mind, I would say, “Well, a lot of those efforts, they’re just spent on bureaucracies and people talking about things”, but I wouldn’t say that. My response all along was, “You’re right. I just want to do my own little small thing. And if it has any effect, it has any effect.” But, in the back of my mind, it made me really angry. It motivated me even more to make more and better videos.
To some degree, that’s what – like the history of videos you’re talking about. I mean, every time I make a small set of videos which are algebra and pre-algebra. It always gets, “Oh yeah, that’s nice and cute what you have there, but this won’t work for calculus or this won’t work for differential equations or physics.”
You may be right. But then, I’m going to go home and show that person. I’m going to make something of calculus, and then immediately you get the pushback. This might work for that, but it won’t work for humanities. You won’t be able to do that. You’re going to have to get other people.
It’s amazing how many people still tell me, “So, you’re going to have to get more people.” I mean, I’m open to it. I’m not like a guest. In fact, when I started I thought that’s how this would happen, that there would be 20 of us doing it. It was actually hard to get – a lot of people would say, “Yeah. That’s awesome”, like at parties. People were like, “I want to make videos, and that would be so cool.” But, actually when it comes to sitting down with a tablet and recording YouTube videos, no one really did it.
And so, even now there’s a lot of assumption of like, “Oh well, you’re not going to be able to do all of K through 12.” Part time for four years, I was working at the hedge fund for most of the time. It’s pretty much 90 percent of K through 12 math has been done, and you can extrapolate that whole time. It’s not going to take long to do it.
I’m not going to say that I’m the only person. I actually want other people to do this, but they’re not doing it. So, if they’re not doing it, and I want to do it anyway, so I’m going to do it. It is a bit of a motivating force when people kind of question your validity or your ability to execute on something. I think it ignites a fire in your belly a little bit.
Andrew: Yeah, I’ve seen that. I felt that in myself, too. How do you do it? How do you do it so well? Actually, why don’t you start out by describing it? Maybe, I should have done that earlier in the interview. Why don’t we start out by you describing it first?
Interviewee: The videos, you don’t see me. They’re a black background, almost universally. Some of them don’t have black backgrounds, but they have black backgrounds and I’m just writing in colors that I think look nice while I talk, while I marry the video.
The forum factor, there’s two things. This is essentially a non-experience even when I was doing it, it was an initial line of virtual obsessions with her. She didn’t see me. We just had a conference call going, and she saw what I was writing, and so it worked with her. I sensed that that will probably work.
I didn’t have good recording equipment. I didn’t have a video camera. And even if I did or even thought at one point about buying one, it’s really difficult. Even if you get a nice video camera, you have to get your lighting right. Then, you have to get your own microphone. There’s all sorts of crazy things you have to do to make it look professional, but if you just do screen capture with a USB headset and I started with Microsoft Paint. And now, I’m using a little fancier stuff. I’m still using Smooth Draw 3. It’s a piece of freeware. It comes off a lot better.
And the feedback I get from people, it’s kind of obvious. Now in hindsight, it’s actually a much more intimate forum factor. It doesn’t feel like I’m on the other side of a room, lecturing to you. It only feels like we’re either beside each other and we’re looking at the same blackboard and the same piece of paper, or it even feels like what my narration is your thoughts on some level.
So, the forum factor both is compelling to a lot of students, and it’s real easy for me. I really just have to press record, start the screen capture going. I don’t have to comb my hair. I don’t have to shave. I don’t have to do anything, and I just start talking and start teaching. And, you know, the question of how I do it – things like, a lot of the algebra content. I do a lot of that real time, very conversational.
A lot of the example problems I do. In the early videos I actually made them up on the fly which I realize that kind of wastes a little bit of time. But I always do them on the fly, and I think that gives students a lens into concepts that they don’t normally see.
In the textbook or the traditional lecture, you always have a finished product. The teacher has seen the example. They’ve done the example. Maybe, they’ve done it six times that day for the last 20 years, and you never see the art of the problem. You never see it solved in real time, and I get a lot of feedback. Students like to see me go down a little path and say, “Oh, wait. That’s not right. I did it because it looked like that. Let me back up and go down this other path.”
So, they really appreciate that informal, conversational kind of thinking out loud style. For the more kind of preparation intensive topics, I did cellular respiration or the French Revolution. These aren’t things – I was exposed to them in my education, but they weren’t something that I would like, if you bumped into me two years ago and said, “Sal, tell me everything, tell me how many APTs are generated by the stage of cellular respiration.” I would have been like, “Well, it was a long time ago.” So, those type of things I do spend a lot of time immersing myself in the subject matter.
Andrew: Tell me about that. Tell me about the process. How do you absorb that knowledge, and then we’ll get into how do you share a tough topic with someone else. How do you teach it? How do you get the knowledge in your head so quickly?
Interviewee: Well, I just try to read as many things as I can. To some degree, I don’t know. Obviously, Khan Academy is dependent on the web. It needed YouTube and all of that, but it also needed the web for my own preparation because in the old days you only had one source. You had your textbook or whatever, and that’s very limiting.
Now, you literally have textbooks. You have things like Wikipedia. You have random professors. You have random people on the web, explaining concepts. You know, 90 percent of them are explaining it the same way, but that 10 percent, they’ll say something and it just clicks in your brain. Oh, why didn’t everyone just say that?
And then, you have all these others. I’m actually a big fan of – well, this is actually a commentary of the publishing industry. I think textbooks are written, not to teach. Textbooks are written to impress school boards and to be these impressive weighty tomes, as opposed to something that a student could digest.
I actually think a lot of the whatever, a teacher sells books that arein the library for $10 or the “Barrons Calculus” or the easy way, “Biology the Easy Way.” These are actually really good text. They shouldn’t be downplayed. You start with something like that, and then when you have questions, OK, that kind of gave me the overview. But I still don’t understand exactly what happens at this stage or that stage.
Then, you can use texts as reference, dig deeper, use Wikipedia as a reference. And when I really get to some really core question, I was doing immunology which I’m not an expert in. In one part of my wife’s immunology textbook, she’s a doctor, so she has her immunology textbook from medical school. And I was leafing through it. In one part of it, it was saying, “B cells, they need to be exposed but they need to be exposed to the antigen to be activated.” And in another part it says, “Oh, helper T cells activate B cells.”
I was just like, “Do both have to happen or just one of them? And I couldn’t find it anywhere. I couldn’t find my answer, so I just literally called up a friend who’s the professor of virology at Duke, and I asked him. Look, I know this is a really stupid question, and you’re going to judge me because why does Sal – I should be doing immunology because if I don’t know the answer to this question, and I asked him. He said, “Actually, that’s a very interesting question. There’s certain types of B cells. It’s an area of research and why that is and this and that. It’s completely not in the textbook.”
And so, very quickly as long as you’re really kind of asking yourself the right questions and you really are focused on getting down to a distilled intuition of a subject, it doesn’t take long before you can really get to kind of fundamental questions that even experts in the field say, “Hey, that’s interesting.”
This is another. I talk to a lot of friends who have PhDs, are professors, or doing pieces or whatever, and sometimes – I’ll meet them at a party and I’ll be do a video on this probably next week, and I have this one question about this, like a fundamental concept, something that a first year grad student should know.
And they’re like, “You know what? That’s something I always wondered, but I really didn’t have time to address it in my education. And I had qualifiers to pass, and I was probably embarrassed to bring it up inside of my department. And so, I really don’t know the answer to that.”
One, I mean, it makes me feel a lot better. But, then we would come on a mission combined to get that question answered, and I would be kind of their lay person to say, “Hey, this guy’s wondering.” I don’t know.
If you want to know where I think I’m heading now, beyond people who have spent more time in the field is that I have the luxury of spending as much time as I want on core concepts. And I think core concepts are the most important because that’s where you build your intuition level on the subject.
When I started doing chemistry, before I even started, I just played with the periodic table for, like, a week just to make sure I understood the nuance of why was it structured that way, why is the pattern. How did it come about as opposed to it’s just there and how do you interpret it? How did the first people even think of making a periodic table, things like that? I get that luxury, and PhDs and grad students and professors don’t have that luxury of really understanding.
I haven’t done mechanics videos yet, and I have a friend who was explaining to me a little bit. He’s like, “Oh yeah, if you have this electron, it’s moving in this chamber, this theoretical chamber.” I was like, “Why is it moving? What is it changing directions?” And he’s like, “That’s a good question.”
It’s like one of these fundamental examples that every first year quantum mechanic student learns, and the teacher doesn’t go over that. They just say, “Oh, you get the equation. You learn to mimic it” and so on and so forth, but everyone’s afraid to ask these very basic questions. I ask them. Eventually, I get an answer to them. And I think when I teach it, I’ll answer those questions and then people won’t have those gaps in their heads.
Andrew: It seems like the Khan Academy is great for teaching Khan, for teaching you because you now are going through the ideal university. Can you talk about how knowing that you’re going to teach what you’re learning, the facts which you’re learning, how it impacts?
Interviewee: Oh, yeah. Well, you know, it puts the bar so much higher. I’m going to start organic chemistry pretty soon, and when you’re taking organic chemistry and I took organic chemistry in college, your goal is really to get an A. And if you’re especially intellectually inspired, maybe, you’ll get another level of understanding. But there’s all these other pressures that are going on in college, your grades and social pressures in other classes and all of that.
Now, I know I’m going to explain it, and I know from the math videos, there’s a certain brand, there’s a certain standard that people expect, that I’m not just going to throw something at you and say, “Memorize this.” Or I’m not just going to say, “This is beyond you. Don’t try to understand it.”
The standard people expect from me is that I will give them an intuition, and I will distill it down to a concept where people say, “Oh, wait. That’s obvious. That’s all that thing is saying about the universe.” And so, that’s the standard I hold myself to when I learn it, so it doesn’t take long actually to learn something of a level where you can get an A on most exams in most schools.
But, it’s a whole other level where you’re getting to the really deep why is this intuitive, or why does that expression look the way it does? Or how is it related to another expression? And so, it’s usually motivating while I’m learning. It keeps me going a little bit deeper than I think most anyone would, if they were just doing it for getting a credential.
Andrew: Don’t medical schools teach by showing, doing teaching method where the student gets to learn it, gets to do it and then has to teach it to someone else because when you teach it, you really absorb it?
Interviewee: Yeah. No, I’m a huge believer of that. When I talk about the virtual school, that’s why I think the peer-to-peer is huge. I think mastery comes, not just from being to do a lot of problems, it really comes from that exercise of teaching it. I found it with my own experience, but if you have kids all over the world teaching each other, that’s why you have that one room school house all of a sudden. I think you’re just going to have a whole other level of mastery that doesn’t exist right now.
Andrew: All right. So, how do you teach? How do you teach tough topics? Teach us how to teach because we’re all going to have to teach our employees, or we’re going to have to teach people who we work with. We’re going to have to teach others online.
Interviewee: Right. Well, I think that there’s a couple of things here. You brought up an interesting point because now when you talk about teaching employees and teaching others. I’m actually advising some tech companies where they want to build Khan type applications of their platform and this and that.
At first, I was writing traditional specs, like you would expect a product manager or whoever would write at a company. This is silly. I do YouTube videos. Why don’t I just do YouTube specs? So, I went and literally made a screen shot and played with what the interaction should look like. It’s ten times better. So, I think to a large degree, just the forum factor makes it way better than if I were to write a white paper, white a spec or even if I were to stand at a white board and use my hands and face.
So, one, the forum factor, the screen capture, hand drawn writing is pretty powerful. Some people told me that cognitively just seeing typing or seeing a PowerPoint presentation doesn’t really stimulate the brain. But seeing someone write something out, handwritten, it actually does. I kind of feel like that. It’s actually easier for me to produce.
Beyond that, what I do is just get as comfortable as you possibly can with the subject, but once you get that comfort, don’t script the video. Make it as relaxing as possible. Have fun while you’re doing it. There’s actually a gentleman who’s going to start translating some of the videos to Urdu.
In my one feedback, he did some great videos, but I was like, “Have more fun.” Our energy carries over in our voice, especially when you don’t see the face. You really have to have a lot of energy in your voice, and if you’re not having fun, the student won’t have fun. And so, have fun. Be relaxed but really know what you’re talking about. Like, don’t throw out buzz words without really knowing what is going on behind it.
So, if you’re at a company, I actually think the way that Khan Academy teaches, it’s actually the ideal. Instead of white papers, instead of a lot of what goes on inside of companies to teach people how to do things, just teach your peers and teach it as it really is. Don’t try to look smart yourself by throwing our buzz words that you don’t necessarily understand or that you heard someone else say. And you think it’s smart to say. Just say it in as down to earth of a style as you can. Be frank if there’s something that you don’t understand, and I think that people will respond well to it.
Andrew: What about the way that you give background before you get into the subject? How do you do it?
Interviewee: Well, I think through this process of making 1500 videos, I’ve gotten very good at being train of thought. I think a lot of people when they teach, they actually close down. They actually shut off a lot of their thoughts that would be, maybe, embarrassing, like, when I do a problem, there is a bit of a neuron that reminds yourself that a negative times a negative is a positive. Maybe, even remind yourself why that is. Remind yourself all of these things while you’re doing the problem. I lay all that stuff out there.
So, even if you’re watching the vector calculus videos, I don’t assume anything. I really doing stream of conscious. Every thought that’s going into my brain, you’re actually getting on paper. So, there’s no skipped steps, if you will. I think there’s that.
Before I do the video, I do try to really make sure I understand the big picture really well. And probably, what we’re talking about when I give the background, that’s me articulating the big picture. So, I have a framework in my head of what we’ve even doing. I think a lot of times in all subjects, once you start getting into it, you almost forget what you’re doing in the first place.
While I’m doing it, I like to, like what have you been doing? We’re on step 50 of this equation. What was the whole point to begin with? So, it’s good to remind yourself at the beginning. It’s not some artificial teaching technique. It’s literally, I’m reminding myself. I’m reminding myself this is why we’re doing this problem right now. I think it’s valuable for the student. I think whatever keeps my energy level up while I do the video will also keep up the engagement and the energy level of the person observing the video.
Andrew: I see. People have to get that French Revolution. I can recommend it before I even finish watching it. It was so good. You even gave us a little bit of background, and you said, “Well, the French supported America in the American Revolution.” Wow, I wouldn’t have thought to have included some like that, but it really does help me understand what’s about to happen here. It’s a great reminder.
How do you make it feel interactive when it’s just you and it’s not even your face in the video? How do you make it feel like you’re engaging the person?
Interviewee: I think there’s a couple things. Once again, when we talked about the forum factor, how it looks, but it’s also the videos are on average about ten minutes. These history videos go a little bit longer than that. But, I think because it’s ten minutes, the person goes into the video watching that video. So, it’s not like they’re getting a 90 minute lecture which may engage them for part of it.
It’s almost like the act of clicking on a video is almost like asking a question. Like, tell me more about the French Revolution or tell me more about the Napoleonic campaigns in Russia. And so, it’s literally just addressing that exact video that you have right there, and the other thing is I think it’s the forum factor. It’s a little bit of a my tone. I’m a little conversational. Literally, the tone I use in the video is not at all different than the tone I’m using right now. It’s not at all like a lecture. The next step of this – it’s not that at all.
Andrew: How many of them do you do a day?
Interviewee: Depends what I’m doing. When I was doing French Revolution or some of the more complex biological, biochemistry type mechanisms, then I’m lucky to be able to do two or three in a day. And there’s other things that are taking up my time now which I’m trying to shut off. Running an organization, I’m trying to automate as much of that as possible.
Right now, I’m doing a lot of worked examples for the Monterey Institute in Algebra I, worked examples where they just gave me a bunch of examples. I said, “Yeah, I’ll do them for you as long as I can put them on the Khan Academy.” These are literally just algebra problems. I’m doing, right now, about ten videos a day for the algebra problems.
Andrew: Who is this for? The Monterey…
Interviewee: The Monterey Institute of Technology and Education. They got a grant to build this course and this and that. This is another interesting thing. Going back to what we talked about in the beginning, a lot of people in the world are talking about making open video content available, and we should get good teachers to put stuff up and we do all this analytics.
When it comes to execution, they had gotten this and I told them, “I don’t know what you’re doing or how much money you’re spending on it. But whatever you’re spending on it, I’m sure I’ll be able to do it for a tenth of the cost as long as you’re willing to donate it to Khan Academy, and I think you’re going to find it more engaging because it’s not going to be scripted.
They were like, “Oh great. That’s no problem. We can send you the scripts.” I said, “Don’t send me the scripts. It will ruin everything that’s good about the Khan Academy. And so they sent it, and over ten videos a day you very quickly turn out about 100 videos in not too long and they’d be done. I think when they started, they thought it was this huge grand project and the little lectures will be done in a couple of weeks.
Andrew: One other question here, and I wasn’t sure if I should ask it or not. But I’ve got to ask it because I think it’s important. You and your wife moved to one of the most expensive parts of the country. Here, you are living in Northern California. You’re living around people who are making tons of cash. I’ve got to believe you’ve got some expectations of lifestyle and your wife does, too.
And suddenly, you come home in September, and you say, “Honey, I quit.” How do you deal with that? What’s the story there?
Interviewee: Well, I think the Sal before marriage and before son would have been much more obsessed with keeping it up with the peers in terms of lifestyle and all of that. When I really seriously introspect on where I find joy in my life, it really does not come from – I have saved enough from my hedge fund days but not a lot from my value standards. But enough for me to not feel like living off of savings for a year was going to kill us or prevent my kid from going to college or anything like that.
So, I’d saved enough there, and we live in a 2200 square foot house in a nice part of Mountain View which is not the fanciest neighborhood, but it’s a really nice neighborhood and the weather’s good.
Andrew: Did you have to convince her? Did you have to explain to her, “Listen, I got to do this” or did she understand?
Interviewee: The first few iterations when I thought about it, she was very like, “Wait, you’re going to give up that job where every year you’re making 50 percent more than the year you made before.” The thing about these careers, like hedge funds or banking or anything is, “Hey, stick around. Next year you’ll be making more than you made the last five years combined.”
My wife is not materialistic at all, but for anyone it’s like, “Gee, that would really like not only allow us to buy a nice house and then we can even support our parents.” There’s all sorts of things. You can always think of more things to do with resources, but when you really sit down and think. I used to play a game with a lot of friends, like how much is enough, right? Like, how much – like, what do you need so that you don’t really need everything and anything above that is just gravy and some type of competitive whatever, who knows?
People out here, they throw out five million, ten million, 15 million. That’s way above enough. For me, it was below seven figures. I’m not taking a salary with Khan Academy. I quit my job, convinced that gee, I’m a complete dummy if I don’t convince someone that this is the highest return on social investment.
I mean, for the cost of a pre-school, we can be educating millions of people for all of time. It’s not even like a school where if the funding dries up the school disappears. No, the content will be there. It will be there on iTunes and YouTube forever. I said, gee, I’ve got to be able to convince somebody.
And being in the valley has been a big benefit there because I think people here, more than anywhere; one, there is capital. People have resources, and they see that. They’re not as swayed by the touchy feely nice picture and please give some money and help. They understand things that scale. They understand when there’s something that has broad impact. They understand a return on investment.
And so, yeah. I kind of veered off track a little bit, but I think the simple answer is I had enough, enough was below seven figures but enough that I could put a down payment on a four-bedroom house in Mountain View. We have two relatively new Hondas, and I’m now able to take a salary from Khan Academy.
You know, I tell people, “If you wrote me a check for five billion dollars five years ago, I would have probably bought a house, maybe, a little nicer than this house. But my day would have been spent making YouTube videos. It wouldn’t have changed, and now I get to do it anyway. So, why chase the five billion dollars which already probably would have been happening anyway, and I probably will just end up 40 or 50 years old just probably with some amount of money in my bank and just say, “What have I done?”
Now, in Khan Academy I come in every day and I’m excited about what I’ve done. These videos, kids are already watching it. This is turning into beginning a momentum. It could turn into a new type of school. It boggles the mind. I tell my wife every day and every night I’m boggled by how fortunate I am that this wide open opportunity to do something really big is just there. And no one’s been doing it.
I want more people to do it. I don’t want it to be like, only Sal. But it’s this wide open opportunity to really change things, and all the technology is kind of falling into place. And I think the way to do it is on a not-for-profit because that’s what allowed all of the inertia and the good will and actually kept me straight in terms of my goals.
I think that if I did it on a for-profit basis, very quickly I’d be like, oh, in order to monetize it. I have to go to this part of the market, and I start charging for some part that I should and that people wouldn’t even learn. You experienced a Khan Academy video. Now, that’s a really good video. If I put even a 50 cent barrier on the video, you would never have experienced it. For me, that wouldn’t have been fun.
Let’s look at this way. If I had ten million dollars in the bank and 5,000 people watching these videos versus I have a hundred grand in the bank and 50 million people are watching the videos, that is a much more satisfying outcome for me than the former. So, that’s why I’m doing it like this.
Andrew: This is an incredibly inspiring story. I’ll leave it there. I am grateful to you for coming here and doing this interview. I know you probably could have whipped up five different videos today for Khan Academy.
Interviewee: Oh, no. I have to catch up now.
Andrew: Sorry?
Interviewee: I have to catch up now.
Andrew: You have to catch up now. A few people, as we were talking, came up with suggestions as to what you should do to tweak your YouTube video panel to get more viewers. I couldn’t understand it well enough to explain to you what they were suggesting. Are you open to those suggestions if they email you directly?
Interviewee: Yeah. Well, there’s a couple of ways. They should email me at sal@khanacademy.org. And the software piece is an open source effort, and the few developers who start working on it, they’re rock stars. I’m very open. They’re, “Hey, your knowledge map that you drew out, it should have arrows instead of arcs.” Forget them, I put arrows in there.
I’m a big believer in stuff out there and keep repeating as quickly as possible. As long as the people iterating it aren’t doing really silly things, it should move forward.
Andrew: All right. Well, thanks guys. If you have any feedback, any suggestions, want to be part of this in any way, sal@khanacademy.org, right? But you also have the dotcom.
Interviewee: No, I don’t. Somebody claimed the dotcom. I don’t own the dotcom.
Andrew: Who is the evil son of a bitch who has the dot com, who does not…
Interviewee: Well, I don’t know. I was almost able to get it, and someone got it. I don’t know. There are people more sophisticated at squatting domain names than I am.
Andrew: I guess so. Somebody get that domain name back for him. If anyone out there is listening, get that domain back. All right. Thank you. And also, thanks for doing this interview. I’m really looking forward to this weekend watching your videos.
Interviewee: Oh, great. Thanks a lot.
Andrew: Cool. Bye.
This transcription brought to you by SpeechInk.com.
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