♪ shery: imagine a global classroom were everyone can learn anything everywhere. got his start as a hedge fund analyst. he posted a few tutorials and became so popular he made it his life's work. it now serves 26 million students. teaching everything from chemistry to computer programming, from kindergarten to catalyst. the best part is, it is all free. today is an education

reinvented. you grew up in louisiana. >> yes. she raised us as a single mother. forhad a bunch of odd jobs managing a local convenience store to 1.2 is a woman who collected change from the vending machines. we had folks that were headed to four-year colleges. there were some kids around of .ulie -- juvee they were headed to college. >> what did you want to be when you grew up.

i got enamored with the golden age of physics. we did not have a computer at home. eventually i got my hands on one of these programming talk of letters. i became obsessed with that. that begin captivating. >> you and i to m.i.t.. >> my guidance counselor said where are you thinking about applying to? i said m.i.t. then he said no one has ever gone to m.i.t. from our high school. i went to a tech startup not far from where we are now. everyone, i was plotting my retirement at age 25. in the nasdaq collapsed. ok, maybe ing

should rethink my future in little bit. i found an incredible mentor and boss. >> you started tutoring your cousin on the side. how did that work? >> in 2004 i had just gotten married. i begin what i call a tiger cousin. school and said i really think she should take that placement exam. here, howomething many kids might think they're but there's some intervention they could just run. emily: how do you end up posting the tutorials on youtube? >> i started working with 10 or

15 cousins all over the country. i started writing practice software. i wanted to keep track of what they were doing. one of my friends says this is cool, provided you make some of them as youtube videos. i thought it was a horrible idea, youtube is for cats playing piano, but i got over the idea that it wasn't my idea and made those videos public. before otherg people were watching. tell me about the moment where you said there was another problem here and maybe this could be my full-time job. maybe this can be my mission. days, when iarly asked my cousins were feedback, they said they like to be better on youtube than in person. they like having no judgment. if there was talk of something

they did not have to call me it was just on demand. the comments, this is the reason i was able to pass algebra, after leaving the military, i was able to go back to college. this was the reason why my children are able to engage with their math class. i set it up in 2008 as a not-for-profit. by 2009 it was all that was thinking about. we figured let's give it a shot. we tried to see if can do it for real. emily: was it scary? >> yes. our first son had just been born. almost have to have a delusionally optimistic mindset. it was the most stressful time of my life. it was not the cat

playing piano. or 10 months into it be got our first major donation. , itmediately e-mailed her was a $10,000 donation. if you physical school, i told them, you would have a building and after you. they said they loved it and wanted to hear more. how we supporting yourself? i said i'm not. she said you really need to be. maybe you can really do this. free world-class education for who we that is key to are. it support from the gates foundation, from google, and others. it is not just me anymore. we have 80 full-time employees.

i know eric schmidt is on the board, how do you get these kind of people to support you? >> a lot of the folks just found themselves using the academy. they were able to directly feel the benefit of it. emily: your employee -- model is no equity right? >> everyone gets the same stock package i do. emily: at this point, do you worry about making ends meet? tech are a high growth thing that is reaching millions, but at the same time we are not for profit. we're competing with the top people like google and facebook and dropbox. silicon valley companies, but we aren't able to give the stock packages. we find we give a good salary,

than othermission, great things to work around, it naturally feeds on itself. emily: what about your own financial position? >> i pinch myself every morning. i level we got to come in to begin by honda accord every eight years. we get to dream about what could the in the future. what is this next date of civilization that could reach a billion students a year. i cannot imagine being in a lock your position. are hanging out with billionaires and on the same list as mark zuckerberg. how do you feel you fit in as an entrepreneur? emily: i don't -- >> i joke that i was the poorest person on the cover of forbes. what is needed but silicon

valley is as much wealth as there is here, it is not about the well. what people in silicon valley care about is what are you doing to innovate. what is the no change the world. that is what makes it silicon valley. i'm still changing diapers and cleaning burp up off the floor. the other myth is that sometimes it looks like these things just happen overnight. i don't think i'm speaking just for myself. i'm sick of a lot of folks you started seeing that you hear a strings success, but of failures get swept under the rug. it is never as clean as it looks in the outside. emily: do you think videos can replace learning in the classroom? ♪

emily: used to create most of the videos don't you? amount ofate a large the videos. it's one of the things that keeps me happy. i've made a run for thousand videos. most of what you are investing in is that software that i started with in 2005. learn atcan go, and their own pace and understand what they know it don't know. college board is the official test prep for the sat. emily: by some measure, khan academy is already one of the largest schools in the world. we view this as a huge responsibility. you can imagine kids in the village and africa who gets access to a low-cost phone or tablet device. in five or 10 years that will be everywhere. every albert einstein we found, how many of them did we not find? how many got squandered because they did not learn how to read

or get a good education. imagine if we could increase by a order of magnitude by a factor of 10 number of albert einstein's in the world. the number of people back at the good alternative energy. this could be a force multiplier like we have never seen. emily: do you think videos can replace learning in the classroom? sal: if learning in the classroom is about information dissemination, videos can do that. in some ways, it is more bite sized and on demand. but i think it is a huge opportunity to allow the physical classroom to move up the value chain. if students get their information at their own time and pace, the physical classroom can now be used for real human interaction. emily: critics have said the videos can be repetitive. i am the last person to force videos on everyone. i think they are the least important part of your education experience.

if you need next place in it is great to build a look at up -- an explanation it is great to be able to look it up. , and getprojects feedback from your peers, that can be the human in the child's life and sit next to them and intervene. not just with the content gaps are, but what are the emotional needs? there was this all body of research that says your brain is trainable if you just push yourself. you can make yourself smarter. emily: you actually have a new classroom that you set up at the academy where you are testing different things. tell me about this. sal: it is always been a dream of mine before the academy. wouldn't it be great to explore with these ideas. the chevy small lab we can test these ideas. a run workaday classroom be.

emily: how many kids? sal: my eldest son is one of the guinea pigs. a lot of the kids are khan academy employees kids. srta is that, and we just -- started so it is a handful of families. emily: do you think all my education will replace visual education? ♪

emily: the u.s. spends more than any country in the world on education. $1.3 trillion a year. in math, we are 25th 17th in science, 14th and reading. what is wrong? went 50 years ago and to give me a list of the 10 most innovative companies in the would've a been american. if you do that list now, maybe 80% would be american. how can we bring that entrepreneurial ship and that

spirit of not being stigmatized to the future? it doesn't mean just a gba, it can be a portfolio of creative works, appear feedback. being a designer is a creative endeavor. show us what you have done. emily: the u.s. is the only developed country with a percentage of top performers and low performers. public schools in san francisco aren't good at all. what is the problem? sal: we're living in a world right now but if we don't fix something, we will have a smaller percentage of people able to participate in these innovations. we lose our most creative engineers base and how we evaluate them in middle school. you can't solve an exponent when you are 14, we don't think you can be a doctor. emily: that is so early. sal: the example is looking at a

12-year-old and saying you can't mix paint we don't think you can be a painter. or you are not so flexible, we don't think you can be a dancer. emily: do you think online education replaced traditional education? sal: not at all. uver to disrupt the cap industry. but i don't think that will be the case in education. i hope my own children use khan academy and other things. i hope they go to a classroom where they are able to interact with their teachers, and told to move around. not told be quiet, but to discuss. emily: decades of now, will people stop paying thousands of dollars for that m.i.t. degree? sal: even today, the return on investment unless you major in a lucrative field is suspect. if you extrapolate the growth

intuition 10 or 20 years you look at >> -- emily: oh yeah. sal: half $1 million. that is just not feasible. over the next five/10 years, the will be other paths. i don't want colleges to go away, but it will be some economic discipline that forces them to locally lower tuition. emily: have you had any conversations with a university about lowering tuition? sal: i don't think it is that simple, but there tools at their disposal to drive this down. otherhink as there are narratives that people can do that might be different. i think that will naturally put pressure on them. this is nothing to do it online, you have things like general accepty where they students and take no tuition. they train them for a year, and

something that society needs. it will be like a recruiting model. they take 20% of your first year salary. that is a way in. if i get placed, and make six figures, i make a good income. i don't have all the answers, but there are interesting catalysts out there. emily: is there a government solution? for there is no equivalent a college degree. to you can imagine someone say that if you can prove to us that you know this set of skills at the same level as a college graduate, we will give you a credential. we will give a signal to society that you are employable along these conventions. at a very high level, this is him and the like in the graduate of harvard would want to do. that will be one of those catalysts that puts the pressure on highridge occasion costs. when we put $200,000 for a

diploma, most parents are thinking the bolt of that we are paying for is a credential. you thinksities, if about the resources, it is going into something else. the campus, the landscaping, whatever else. it could allow everyone to compete on the learning side on equal footing, and allows innovation to happen. it allows everyone to kind of aspire for credentials that it equal weight. that could be a pretty powerful way to level the playing field. sal: -- emily: if the brain is a muscle, does that mean anyone can be sal kahn or mark zuckerberg? is there something innate about great entrepreneurs that can't be learned? absoluten't know the statement here. i do think most people on the planet are capable of mastering countless, are capable of

programming a computer or understanding genetics. i generally believe that. back --400 years emily: can anyone start facebook? sal: i don't know for sure. some of these things, mark agoerberg -- a couple years , he might out of started facebook. instead of going up in new orleans, if you grew up in -- youa, i might have don't know what paths might have been. they do have a growth mindset. they push themselves to learn new things, but also had a lot of opportunity and at the right place at the right time. neverlittle dose of luck hurt. i think mark zuckerberg would've been successful in anything that

he did. i don't take anybody could be him, but i think that are a lot of people that could be mark zuckerberg. emily: what does the classroom look like 10 years from now? sal: kids are able to create things at 10 or 20 years ago you needed an engineering degree to build. schools will be these maker spaces. they could be making art, poetry, starting businesses, who knows what might be. i hope to be doing this until the day that i die which hopefully is not for another 50 or so years. i imagine a world in 500 years, i hope khan academy is still around. what do we need to do to make this a organization that can reach a billion students? what needs to be done? what is at stake here? i hope i keep making videos. emily: thank you so much for

joining us. ♪

mark: with all due respect to john heilemann, focus. ♪ mark: rick perry out of orbit. but first, donald trump's gravitational pull. today he was doing the kinds of things candidates do -- he topped a quinnipiac poll and hired michael glasser, a respected republican strategist, to be his national political director. he also held a's -- heldre