YouSaid · the spoken record

Sal Khan

lines on the record: 103
first: 2020-09-21
most recent: 2020-09-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We were renting a house that the rent had gone up because we had to move to larger house. My mother-in-law had moved in with us as well. I'm like, there's no way I could do this right now.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there's this guy, Jeremiah Hennessy, who's the founder of BJ's restaurants. He got my email address and emailed me, and I was like, oh, this guy runs a large restaurant chain publicly traded. Yeah, it seems legitimate. I should talk to him. And I started having like these therapy conversations with him almost like on a weekly basis. And he would just keep calling me and say, Sal, your purpose in life is not to be a hedge fund investor. I'm sure you're good at it, but that's not your purpose in life. You don't realize the content you've made, what it's done for my own family, what it could do for the world. You need to be doing this. And he's like, there's got to be some way that someone will fund this as a nonprofit. The impact on the world could be so huge. And so when a legitimate person tells you that this is a legitimate thing to do, you start saying maybe, but then you go home, you look at your son was born in February of 2009. I'm like, okay, no, I have another mouth to feed.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that just felt a little queasy to me. But even when I set it up as a nonprofit, I said, you know, I'm not going to quit my day job. I have a great day job. You know, this hedge fund thing I can make a lot of money. What I can do as a nonprofit is maybe get other volunteers who want to help. Maybe if we get some philanthropy, maybe I can help hire other people. And maybe if, you know, if I could be on a trajectory like Dan was, Dan, if he kept at it, could have easily become the next Warren Buffett. But he decided to kind of pseudo-retire at 40 to focus on his family when if he kept going, he could have easily become a multi-billionaire.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did have some folks who were reaching out to me by 2008 saying, hey, our kids have been using your stuff. We think it's great. We think this is going to be the next big play in ed tech. Can I write a check? And we'll start this thing. I'm sure. And it was tempting. But then by the second conversation, it was always like, okay, we'll give this stuff for free, hook people, and then you have the freemium content.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my mind it was almost initially an emotional thing to do, which I was getting these letters from folks saying how it helped them. And that was such a precious thing, people's trust in me, that I never wanted them to even suspect that I'm doing it for any other reason. Now, look, there's a lot of for profits in many industries that do incredible things. And even in education, there's for-profits that do good things. You know, obviously I was working at a hedge fund. I believe in capitalism. I believe in markets. But while I was at a hedge fund, I saw how much capital structure and incentives can really drive what an organization does. And the only organizations that really do stay true to some social bottom line over long periods of time are nonprofits.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were many moments, you know, you could imagine in the investing world, you have your share of not so great days. You're like, maybe this is not what I should do. Maybe I should be, you know, this virtual tutor. And then you're like, okay, stop dreaming, Sal. You know, look, you got to pay off your debt, pay off your mortgage, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, I'd had multiple cycles of that over the years. People in Silicon Valley, they do understand quitting your job. Some angel investor writes a hundred thousand dollar check and you're off to the races. I did incorporate it as a not for profit in 2008 to protect it.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had moved out to Silicon Valley. Dan's wife had become a professor at Stanford, which is why we had moved out here. And so my wife was able to finish her fourth year at med school doing a bunch of rotations out here in the Bay Area. So we, you know, and now that we were on the West Coast, I was working from 5 a.m. till about 2 in the afternoon. So before our first child was born, I had a lot of time on my hands. So I was spending about, you know, that four hours, four to five hours that I was spending after work. I was spending about half of it making videos and about half of it continuing to write code, right? That software, that practice software for my family, that other people were now using. And by 2007, 2008, it was in the tens of thousands of people. And by 2009, it was in the hundreds of thousands of people were using it on a regular basis.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was hoping that something like that would happen. I mean, you know, when I put it on YouTube and it asked whether I want to make it public, I was like, yeah, I guess it would be pretty cool if other people could benefit from this. But then when you start getting, you know, not just the views, but for, I would say, the comments, especially people like opening up on the YouTube message boards or opening up on they can do the private messaging on YouTube and they'll tell you their life story and how that one video unlocked their perspective. I'm like, oh my God, this is. This is for that person, that video is a big deal, and I didn't really have to do anything extra for that person. It's really inspiring. And I just got more and more hooked on it.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the way to preserve civilization is really through knowledge. That is what defines a civilization and that is what defines human potential. And so, you know, while I was working on this in 2006 and now 2007 and I started getting thank you letters from folks around the world, people who are soldiers in Iraq saying I'm using your content while I'm in Iraq to prepare for college so I can go back to college people who dropped out of high school I was like maybe this project could be like the foundation it could be this thing that keeps us from going to dark ages or maybe entering into a new age who knows”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he decides to do something about it. He can't stop it from happening, but he can shorten it to a thousand years. And the way he does that is by taking the galaxy's knowledge and putting it into a foundation at the periphery of the galaxy. And I remember when I was seventh grade and I read that, I thought two things. One, why don't more people think on those scales? Like that, it feels so inspiring and epic to think on that scale well beyond ourselves. And when I went into the hedge fund world, I realized most people don't even think beyond the next earnings period much less, much less generational or over centuries or over thousands of years.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not hard to imagine that if you make something that can increase human potential by 10%, 20%, or 100%, and if it scales, like technology can, there's no reason why it can't affect all of humanity one day. And, you know, I was super inspired when I was young. In seventh grade, I read the foundation series, Isaac Asimoff. And the protagonist is someone named Harry Selden, who's kind of a new form of academic that's a combination of mathematics, economics, history, psychology, and he's able to predict large-scale historical movements. And he sees through his science that the galactic empire is about to enter into a ten thousand year dark ages.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was for sure something my brain oscillates between these mega, delusional, you know, space operas science fiction ideas and like Sally are being crazy, focus on what you can do in the here and now. And so the reason why I was always fascinated by software, technology, and education is that”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. They just really liked having an on-demand version of their cousin that they could watch as much as they want. There was no shame in reviewing a concept that they should have learned in fourth grade. And I started to realize, you know, this type of thing, especially math, and I was doing math and I started doing some physics and chemistry and biology as well. It's pretty evergreen content. If once you have a good explanation of adding fractions with unlike denominators, pretty much everyone in the world could use it and you don't really have to refresh it unless you figure out a better way of explaining adding fractions with unlike unlike denominators”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I should make a video on least common multiples for my cousins. And then it was just a how do I make the video? I mean, back in 2006, cell phones weren't particularly good. I didn't have a video camera. And you do a Google search, you realize, oh, there's something called screen capture software. And so I downloaded some free screen capture software and I started just essentially recording some of my digital scribbles using my pen tablet, but you can hear my voiceover while I'm talking. And they were done very extemporaneously. They were from my cousins. And I started uploading them onto YouTube and telling them, watch this at your own time and pace. And then we can dig deeper when we get on the phone. And after about a month, for feedback and they famously told me they like me better on YouTube than in person.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And I remember, you know, a lot of my friends was like, well, is this a business? I was like, no, no, not a business. I'm not a startup guy. I'll never do that again. This is my family project. That was my way of, frankly, protecting it emotionally. And I was at a dinner party, and my friend, his name, gave him full credit. He's like, well, this is cool, Sal, but how are you scaling your actual lessons? And I said, you're right, Zuli, it's hard to do with 10 cousins what I was originally doing with just Nadia and her brothers. And he says, well, why don't you record some of your lessons as videos and upload them onto YouTube for your family? And I immediately, you know, my technologist side said, well, that's such a low-tech solution. And then I vocalized him. I was like, no, that's like YouTube's for cats playing piano. It's for dogs on skateboard. It's not for learning. And I went home that weekend and I think I probably had explained least common multiple to a cousin for like the eighth time. And I was like, maybe Zulie's got a point.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“could give me as her tutor data on how they're performing and how long things are taking them. And I wrote it as a hobby, and that was the first Khan Academy. I set it up as a website.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, actually, even before the videos happened and around late 2005, this background in software. And in the back of my mind, I have always been fascinated by, can software play a role in improving human potential? And when I was in college, almost every job I did was in some way related to education or how tech and education could be useful. I remember I worked for some Spanish professors to help teach people Spanish. The next summer I worked on some software to help kids with attention deficit disorder learn math. And I created this little thing called math planet. So my brain was there throughout for a long time. And so when I started working with my cousins, I was like, wow, you know, it's hard for me to find good practice problems for them on the internet. Let me write some software for them that could generate practice problems and that then can give them hints and solutions and immediate feedback.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know having the appearance of motion, it's not about just churning yourself and tying yourself out because then you're just more likely to make bad decisions. Our whole goal is to avoid bad decisions. And the best way to do that is when you're at work, you know, have your game face on, have your game energy, but to do that, you're going to have to have other things in your life. You should read interesting books, you know, recharge. And actually that recharging is going to keep your mind open and keep you creative and not fall into the groupthink that a lot of people do. And so Dan kind of forced me to have a life. And that's what gave me the space in my life to offer to Nadia. Say, yeah, you know, aftermarkets close, I'm actually pretty free to work with you.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was, and I have to give extra credit to Dan because in the early days when I was working for Wool Capital, Dan's startup hedge fund, it was just me and him, I had bought into the stereotype that you have to work 80 hours a week to make it in finance. So I was ready to do that. And I remember it was probably a month or two into starting my job, Dan's like, why are you still here? Why aren't you going home? I was like, no, no, Dan, I'm ready to, you know, I'm going to look for more investment ideas. He's like, no, go home. I was like, okay, I was like, okay, I'll go home and I'll look for investment ideas. He's like, no, Sal, you're not going to help anybody by just...”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On a given day, yeah, they would all get on the speaker phone together. I would answer questions they had. The way that math is often taught and especially learned is it's like these fragmented concepts that you have to memorize formulas and patterns and things like that. And the thing that really served me well growing up is that if you just ponder the math a little bit, it all connects. It all makes intuitive sense. It's all just a way of thinking. And so I was really trying to do what I could to support them all.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, exactly as you described, words spread that free tutoring was going on before, you know, and I was getting requests from family members all over the country. And by 2006, I was tutoring on a given day, anywhere between five and fifteen cousins, family friends around.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would love to believe that I'm some type of supertutor or something, but I think the reality is there's actually a lot of research to back this up, that if you do have one-on-one tutoring and that tutor is able to identify what your gaps are and fill in those gaps, especially in subjects like mathematics, most kids can actually, probably all kids could be accelerated dramatically. And that's all that was happening with Nadia. I mean, there was some of it was just motivational. She had almost given up on herself. So I had to just re-motivate her a little bit. And I think a little bit of the secret, you know, this might sound a little bit of like a, once again, a tiger cousin or tiger parent thing to do, but when you allow a student to get a little ahead of their class, two things happen. One, when they see it in class, they're like, oh, I've seen this before. So it builds a little bit of cushion. And it also builds confidence. There's just, you know, once you start to realize that you can actually get a little ahead of your class, you're like, oh, maybe this is my thing. Maybe I'm a math person.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was doing it every day about 30 minutes getting on the phone. And after, frankly, a few weeks, Nadia, the first few weeks was just deprogramming her own lack of self-esteem. But then after she got through that, she started to believe that she was capable of learning unit conversion actually came quite easily to her. Then she got caught up with her class. She came a little ahead of her class. At that point, I became what I call a tiger cousin. I called up her school. I say, you know, I really think Nadir Rahman should be able to retake that placement test from last year. They said, who are you? They said, I'm her cousin. And surprisingly, they let her retake that placement test. And the same Nadia, who was only a few months ago put into a remedial class, was now put into an advanced math class. And I was hooked.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was over the phone. And we used Yahoo Instant Messenger to type messages or to type questions. And Yahoo Instant Messenger at the time had this feature called Yahoo Doodle, where you can actually, with your mouse, scribble something and someone on the other side could see what you scribbled. And you could imagine writing math equations with a mouse was pretty painful. And so I got myself and I got Nadia a, I think it was $60 pen tablet so that you could write. But it was on a little part of your Instant Messenger window, but that's still enough that you could write things like 3x is equal to 6. What does x equal? So that's how we did it.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a cousin. It was a year. I was a year out of business school, had just gotten married to the Umama, the person that I was trying to move to New York for. And the wedding was in New Jersey, which is where my wife grew up. But then family was visiting from New Orleans and they wanted to visit Boston during 4th of July. And so I was showing them around town. And it just came out of conversation that my 12-year-old cousin Nadia, her mother, Nazrathanti, was telling me that she was having trouble in math and she's like, Sal, if there's anything you can do, I know, you know, you're more knowledgeable about these types of things. And so I talked to Nadia, and Nadia said that she was having trouble. She took a placement test at the end of sixth grade. It had a lot of unit conversion in it. She felt that she just couldn't understand unit conversion. And so I told Nadia, I was like, I'm 100% sure you're capable of learning unit conversion. How about when you go back to New Orleans? I'm happy to tutor you remotely. And she was up for it.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every day, I mean, it's kind of like being a journalist. You're able to really dive deeply into these. And my job was actually to be kind of a hyper learner. Because, you know, the first half of the calls, I would always say like it was a little bit of like, gee whiz, so how does this work? How do logistics work and all that? And then the second half of the call, I would turn up the novel a little bit. And I was like, what you're saying doesn't make sense and push the management teams a little bit harder.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I got to say, it was a fascinating job because what we would do is we would screen the market for things that looked just intriguing and we would try to understand that business. And the best way to understand that business was try to get the management team on the phone to explain their business to us. And so it was intellectually, I was a kid in a candy shop because I was able to”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a girl at a crush on from MIT. She was now in med school in New York. And so I was also like, I need to work in New York. And so I literally went through the directory of any hedge fund in New York. And I was getting one rejection after another. And then eventually there was this guy, Dan Woll, based in Boston who was apparently kind of getting his hedge fund off the ground. And Dan at the time was 32 years old, I think, or 33 years old. I interviewed with him and he hired me. And he later told me he hired me because I didn't have a background in finance. He liked that I seemed to be kind of an out of the box type of personality. And, you know, it's one of these ironies that I had been fallen back into essentially a startup because it was me and Dan and we were looking for office space and making sure that the office was dog friendly because he had this large dog.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I got my application got rejected hundreds of times and my resume did not look like a hedge fund resume. I was getting people in tech who wanted me to be a product manager or something like that. But at that time, I”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me go to business school and maybe broaden my resume a little bit so people just don't perceive me as the tech guy or the quant guy. And it was while I was in business school, I started taking finance classes and started seeing that, wow, there's a real beauty to finance that it has its quantitative aspect, but it also has a huge psychological and historical aspect to it that I loved. And I remember taking a capital markets class, and that was probably the math heaviest class offered in business school and the professor's name is George Chaco. I remember going to him after class one day. I was like, you know, I really like this class. And he's like, yeah, you really have a knack for capital markets and things like this. I was like, well, what should I do with it?”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, if I'm really honest, I was lonely. I was out in Silicon Valley. I mean, the male female ratio in Silicon Valley back then was horrendous. I also felt traumatized to a large degree by my startup experience because it was so painful and political. And I actually told myself that I didn't have the fortitude to be an entrepreneur, that it is, it's just so emotionally taxing.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, while the Nasdaq was roaring, was doing quite well, it grew to 40 employees, it raised its first fund, which I think was several hundred million dollars. But then I still remember that day in, I believe it was spring of 2000 when the Nasdaq collapsed. And with that, I saw the other side of the startup world where every week we'd have to lay off a few folks. And it was incredibly, incredibly painful and political and stressful. And that was around the time that I was like, yeah, maybe I should take shelter someplace. So I started looking up applications for business school.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was the startup, and it was going to have a tech aspect of it where people could see the investments, et cetera, et cetera. So that was what I was supposed to build and did build.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, moved out to the Bay Area, and you get to about a year into my tenure there. It's 1999 now, we're at the peak of the dot-com bubble. I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine who was on an H-1B visa from India. And he said, Sal, why are you here? I was like, well, you know, pays really good. He's like, I'm here because I have to get my immigration. But like you're a citizen. Like if I were you, I'd be starting a company right now. This is the late 90s. And so, yeah, I ended up joining a startup. It was a startup to, it was going to democratize venture capital. It's called MVC, where the idea was, you know, you had all these IPOs that were popping. So a lot of people were trying to get into the venture capital market, but obviously it was hard for people to get into it. And so these two bankers from Robertson Stevens at the time, they had come up with a structure that could be a publicly traded venture capital fund.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I need to finish the masters this year. And they all thought I was a little bit crazy. But it happened. And I actually ended up working at Oracle. It's my first job.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My mind was blown. My mom was making $16,000 a year. I had about $25,000 in debt, which at the time felt like all the money in the world. So I was getting stressed about it. And I literally remembered thinking like it would be irresponsible for me not to try to make that type of money, pay off my debt, help out my family, and just get a little bit more financial security. So I remember that's when I went to my advisor and saying,”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I remember my senior year, this was about November of my senior year, I talked to a friend who was a year older and he had just gotten a job at Oracle. And I was kind of nosy. I was like, well, how much are they paying you? Yeah. And he said a hundred thousand dollars, and for me at the time, I was like, what”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was starting to become very relevant to society as a whole. So MIT was and I think continues to be an incredibly exciting place.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was for me. You know, when I got there, I was, it did feel like heaven on so many levels for me. It was the first environment that I had been in that really are like, you know, you shouldn't be ashamed if you're getting excited in an organic chemistry class. I still remember one of my friends to render who I actually met in the organic chemistry class. I literally saw him getting excited about what was being talked about. He was having epiphanies as we were talking about like the aldol reaction. And it's the closest thing to Hogwarts in the real world where, you know, science is magic and you can walk down the main hallway in MIT is called the infinite corridor. And you're just seeing people with like that some of them are a little bit unusual in their affect and all this, but they all have these magical superpowers. And there's professors who are inventing things and building things. And this is right in the late 90s where the internet and computer science”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would often tell us stuff like you know, you should be valedictorian just like Thuhen. Thuhin was this kid we knew who's 10 years old or who had, I think by the time he was 18, he had a PhD from Tulane. So, you know, I think he now has two PhDs and an MD. So I remember there was a lot, I heard a lot about Thuv”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I give a lot of credit to my sister. You know, she was always a little ahead of me. And, you know, I looked at the schools that she was applying for when she was graduating from high school. I was in middle school or freshman at the time. And she was applying to places like Brown University. And I was like, Farah, have you looked at the tuition at Brown University? There's no way we're going to be able to afford that. And she's like, no, there's something called financial aid and you can get loans and all of this. And she ended up going to Brown. And that completely opened up my mind of what's possible. And to give my mom fair credit, she definitely, you know, I think South Asian culture, Indian culture, whatever you want to call it, you know, there is this very, you could call it positive or negative peer pressure of like, oh, so what are your kids doing? So-and-so's kids going to med school. So-and-skid got a perfect GPA is Valictorian. Is your kid only the saludatorian? So she kind of.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was a kid that kind of did just whatever it needed to do to get a decent grade. And it was about 9th or 10th grade that I started getting really serious about studies. And I remember in 10th grade, I kind of lived this double life where I was on kind of the academic teams and quiz bowl and science Olympiad. And I was chosen to be representing Louisiana at national academic games. And it was the same weekend as our first big gig as a death metal band. And so I had this kind of choice that I had to pick.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Original name, and I cringe when I say these things now, it was malignancy. But then we had to change our name because there was abandoned Florida called Malignancy. Anyway, it was me and...”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that true? Yes, I was a lead singer, but singing is being very generous to what I was doing. It was more of yelling or growling.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I genuinely think it was a rich and colorful childhood. And there was definitely hard aspects of it, but I think everyone has their own flavor of hardships. And for the most part, I think whatever hardships or constraints we had helped grow me. And it gives you a perspective on life. And I wouldn't describe my childhood as idyllic by any stretch of the imagination, but I would. I would describe it as colorful and rich, and it definitely I had experiences that a lot of kids didn't have, which I think were actually in hindsight quite incredible.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of my uncles, they had a food store in a really rough neighborhood in New Orleans. He got shot, we thought he was going to die. I think I was about eight years old at the time. I was just like, I don't want that life. I'd rather have the life of my other South Asian friends whose parents are professionals.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, my mother definitely did instill some really strong values, you know, just seeing her operate. My mom is a very courageous person. And, you know, we were the only family that in our friend circle where, you know, we were kind of not well off or at least not middle class. But I think that was helpful too because the family friends we had, many of them were the stereotypical doctors and engineers. You know, you obviously can see where you live and you see where those kids live and you can see kind of our financial insecurity. I still remember, I must have been eight or nine years old at Kmart and I was being a brat. I really wanted to be, you know, by this hot wheel set. And I was throwing a tantrum in the Kmart. And I remember that was the first time that my mom kind of just kind of broke down a little bit and says, don't you realize we have no money?”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All like folks were in any way biased or racist against me. If anything, I have to give the school system, the Jefferson Paris school system, a lot of credit. I think a lot of what I am today is because they gave me opportunities. There were teachers that believed in me. I had a really good friend circle. So I have no You know, I don't feel like it was a tough childhood.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The part of Metri where we had our store, it was called Seminole Convenience Store on Seminole Avenue, and it's called a part of Metery called Bucktown. That was kind of the heart of David Duke's base, so to speak. I remember right outside of our store across the street was the largest David Duke for President Sina I've ever seen. And so it was the folks who lived in the neighborhood who were frankly super David Duke supporters. In some ways it was lucky this was pre-9-11. They didn't really know what to make of my family at the time. You know, we've had a few conversations, I remember, with people at the store where they openly told us that they were trying to decide whether we were white or the N-word. We were confusing them. But, you know, growing up, I was the only brown kid in the classroom, but I never felt in school at all.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first job that I remember her having, she was the person who takes the change out of the vending machine at the local hospital. Actually, the hospital where I was born. And she took me to work a couple of times because she didn't have childcare. And I thought at the time, I remember watching her do that and think it was like the coolest job on earth because you have this key that you can open up the vending machine and like quarters just pour out of it. So she did that for a little bit. And then essentially she was a cashier at a series of convenience stores just kind of doing one minimum wage job after another. And then I was in high school. She had remarried her and my stepdad at the time were able to kind of cobble together to get a small convenience store in Metri.”
2020-09-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Khan Academy: Sal Khan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT