Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Hank Green, cofounder of Complexly, where we make SciShow, Crash Course, and a bunch of other educational YouTube channels. I’m also an author, a TikToker, and what you might call a poster — you might have seen my face on the internet over the years.
You might also remember last year when I turned the tables on Nilay and interviewed him on his own show, because what better Decoder guest than Nilay Patel? That was a ton of fun, and it was so much fun that they’ve brought me back again. This time, I’m stepping in for Nilay to host a few Decoder episodes while he’s out on parental leave. And because I cannot interview Nilay — that would defeat the whole purpose — I instead found some really great people to bring on the show to have conversations with.
Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!
Today, I’m talking with a very special guest — someone who I’ve known for quite a while as what you might call a colleague in the online education community: Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. Sal was actually Nilay’s second guest on Decoder, back in 2020. And, well… a whole lot has changed since then.
You’ve probably heard the name Khan Academy by now. The company was officially founded in 2008, but Sal actually posted his first educational videos on his YouTube account in 2006, just a year after YouTube was created. He even beat my brother John and I by about a year to his very first YouTube upload — so that’s impressive.
Sal has been around for a long time. He’s seen the growth of the online video ecosystem, alongside the online education industry, up close for nearly two decades. That’s precisely why I wanted to have him back on the show: I wanted to ask Sal not just what it’s like running Khan Academy, one of the biggest and most well-funded educational nonprofits in the world, in the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic, but also how it’s about to change due to artificial intelligence.
I’ve been thinking about the intersection of AI and education pretty deeply for a few years now. And as we’re coming up on the three-year anniversary of ChatGPT’s launch, it’s something that has me equal parts fascinated and terrified, especially because it seems like it’s moving awfully quickly, and we’re only just starting to really grapple with the effects of this technology on the classroom.
I think you’ll find some really surprising answers from Sal on these very hard questions, and I hope you’ll learn a lot, too. I know I did.
Okay: Khan Academy CEO Sal Khan. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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