Elise Hu

You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Entrepreneur and philanthropist Reed Hastings is probably best known as the co founder of Netflix. But a big part of his life's work has actually been in education. For decades, he's funded schools, supported education nonprofits, and served on the board of Khan Academy. He even after all that, he thinks we're still up against the same fundamental problems in education.

Reed Hastings

I've been working for the last 25 years to try to find ways to make schools work better and have better outcomes for kids. And I would say after a billion dollars in 25 years, we're down below where I started. So it's a hard problem.

Elise Hu

In this conversation with Sal Khan, Ted's vision steward and the CEO of Khan Academy, the two discuss why the classroom model itself may be part of the challenge, especially when one teacher trying to reach a whole room of kids who are all learning at different speeds. For Reed, this led him to AI, which opens up the possibility of something more individualized and not as a tool to replace teachers, but to change what they're able to focus on and what kind of support students might be able to get.

Reed Hastings

I would say the biggest uncertainty for everybody is how fast is the AI getting better and how fast will it be getting better going forward and then that changes your views and assumptions.

Elise Hu

Reid, who recently joined the board of Anthropic, talks about what AI could mean not just for education, but for work, jobs and the future we're preparing kids to enter. It's coming up right after a short break. This episode is brought to you by Dell. Back to school starts now. Get long lasting battery life on the Dell XPS laptop powered by Series 3 Intel Core, so you can work from anywhere now starting at $699 with exclusive student pricing starting at $599. And it's lightweight, portable and packed with enough processing power to make multitasking a breeze. So say goodbye to distractions and hello to more free time because you finished your work faster. Complete your setup with savings on select monitors and more. Must have electronics and accessories, limited time deals and free shipping on PCs and more await you@dell.com deals that's Dell.com deals. This message is brought to you by Apple Card Apple Card puts the power of titanium in the palm of your hand. What does that mean? It means the power to earn unlimited daily cash back on your purchases every day. It means a materially different credit card accepted anywhere in the world MasterCard is accepted. Ditch the plastic, upgrade to Titanium. Apply in the wallet app on iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more@applecard.com this episode is brought to you by Walmart Business. The best leaders might tell you the work that moves an organization forward doesn't happen in spreadsheets or supply chain emails. It happens when you have the space to think big. That's the idea behind Walmart Business. It's built to take the friction out of running an organization so your team isn't losing hours to procurement logistics when they could just be focused on the problems that actually matter. With an ever expanding business assortment, everyday low prices and fast reliable shipping, Walmart Business keeps your operations running smoothly. Shop online, in store or through the Walmart Business app, however, works best for you. Simpler operations, smarter spending. It's Walmart built for your business. Sign up for a free Walmart business account@business.walmart.com. And now our TED conversation of the day.

Sal Khan

So Reid education, which a lot of people, I don't, I don't know how many know how active you are in education, education, philanthropy, charter schools, etc. What are you doing in that space?

Reed Hastings

On board Khan Academy and generally I've been working for the last 25 years to try to find ways to make in particular US Schools, but some international work better and have better outcomes for kids. And I would say after a billion dollars in 25 years, we're down below where I started. So it's a hard problem.

Sal Khan

And what do you, you know, we heard about the, the risks of ed tech, but you are investing in ed tech, you're giving to edtech. What are your thoughts? What's the trade off there? Why do you continue to potentially believe there?

Reed Hastings

In the 18th century, most factories were steam engine driven. So they have a big steam engine, rotating rods and pulleys and belts and drove the factory very efficient. And then electricity came in and they replaced the steam engine with an electric engine, thinking that it was going to help a lot. And productivity didn't increase at all. And they were puzzled. And then they realized the limiting factor is the power distribution system, all these spinning rods and mechanical power and they ripped that out and just put in small electric motors for each device. Then they could move things around, fit them in better because it wasn't aligned to the spinning. They could have variable speed, turn different motors on and off and then productivity increased dramatically. That's a classic economic surprise lesson. It's always stuck with me, because I think that's what we're seeing, which is we keep doing things to improve classroom education, but the fundamental power distribution is 25 kids stuck at the same level. The friction that that creates, which is roughly a third of the kids are behind, a third of the kids are bored and above, and a third you're teaching to is the fundamental friction in our mass education system. And the theory is if each of us had an individual human tutor. So imagine you go to school, you have your normal social activities, but when it comes to learning, you get an individual who's going to sit down with you and then they could do Khan Academy or they could do color book or whatever is appropriate. That learning would be massively increased. There was a famous study 40 years ago, Bloom, that documented this. Now a friend of mine, Ben Summers, is redoing that study, but at much bigger scale. I think what we're going to see is the key to much more learning. Where middle school kids know all of the high school curriculum, high school knows all of the college, much better outcomes will be individualized education.

Sal Khan

How do you square that with what Jonathan Haidt said? Look, these screens, I mean, at least it's a correlation. We don't know causal yet, but it seems to be distracting. It seems to correlate with some test scores going down. Is it for you? A little bit of it? Is it an all or nothing type of thing?

Reed Hastings

I'm a huge fan of Jonathan, totally agree with all his zip up phones and don't use phones. And I think you guys clarified he likes offline tablets. That that's fine. It's the Internet that's the problem, not the physical device. And so I think there's lots of ways to cater to the concerns that he correctly expresses, which is letting kids go wild on the Internet under 16 is not great, but you don't have to do that to be able to do individualized tutoring. So the individualized tutoring we're doing is with humans. They can use some technology if they want, but then obviously that's cost prohibitive because it's about $100,000 per kid per year. So then the hard challenge becomes how do we use AI to approximate that human and provide everyone an individualized education as AI gets better? Current AI is not good enough to do that, but in three years we've gone from ChatGPT 35 and barely being able to do high school math to just incredible intelligence and that's likely to just continue to double, double, double and get better and better and Better. So there is a world where the AI, I think will be able to match and beat the human individual tutor.

Sal Khan

And what does that world look like? Let's just say it's in 10 years. Are you imagining that you're just socializing and then you go to this AI tutor that even maybe looks embodied in some way, but there are. You imagine there's no human teacher. What do you think happens to that role, that profession? What about the adult humans in the classroom?

Reed Hastings

Well, let's think about schools. So three big purposes. One is create good citizens. Another is give economic opportunity to the kids. And then the other is socialization, social emotional, learning how to work with other people, adults outside of your family. So only in the first part is really where online is really good. And what we want to do is have teachers be able to focus on social emotional learning. They become really helping maturity, interpersonal skills, values, clarification, all those kind of higher level things. And then we've got to figure out in the AI age, how do we enhance that role of creating good citizens? Because one of our ways to come together is to have a tighter idea of who we are as a country. And the K12 systems be able to take that for granted for the last hundred or two hundred years, maybe post civil war, because society was working well. But if we're going to go into a period of stress, it's really important for that mission to get attention. Also.

Sal Khan

I just want to double click on that and make sure maybe we have a common vision or maybe it's divergent. You still see a major role for the human teacher and the human classroom. You just see that role shifting, potentially going sort of.

Reed Hastings

Okay, so most teachers today, their pride center is teaching and connecting and, you know, understanding the material. Okay, Some part of that is really connecting on a personal level with the student. So that part is the social emotional. But in terms of transferring information, what educators cynically call sage on a stage, it's eliminating sage on a stage as a teaching modality. Okay. And so it's really just focused on the individual. What would education be if there was no mass teaching?

Sal Khan

And to be fair, you know, if you go to an ed school, if we went to an Ed School 20 years ago, this is what they were preaching. Differentiated instruction, active learning. Don't be staged on the stage. Have a Socratic discussion, do a simulation, have. So it's really potentially, and this is what I say because I get this question a lot, the teacher, I think, moves up the value chain and it's able to facilitate and drive a lot of that active learning, which is better for everyone. I think it's more fun for the teacher.

Reed Hastings

Right. The positive side of it and the other part is once you can do a lot of this in software, you can do it globally. So it's really hard to scale up the teacher force. But if you have incredible software, it's pretty inexpensive to make it globally available.

Sal Khan

No, that's right. I mean, you know, we talk a lot about at the Khan Academy board that the technology can raise the, the safety net, raise the floor. We have seen stories of young women in Afghanistan using Khan Academy. One of them is at MIT now. I mean, so amazing things. But we see also in the classroom most students need that human element. Arguably all of them do, ideally if they have it switching gears a little bit because your other board you're on is obviously very related to this anthropic. Actually, I'm just curious. You could do anything. What made you join that board? What's it like at those board meetings when I'm assuming you all talk about pressures from the White House, how your new model might break all software. Tell us what you can.

Reed Hastings

Yeah, it's a lot like your board meetings, you know, talking about the software and what it can do and how it needs to get better. So the mission of the company is very clear. It's not maximizing profits, it's that we're successful. The humanity. How do we get into the age of AI successfully crossing through sort of this portal. And they recognize it's going to be very challenging and they're very dedicated to having that happen, enrolling out AI and having the incredible beneficial outcomes. Whether that's the waymo self driving, whether that's gene editing, whether that's curing cancer. You know, 10, 20 years from now, it's very likely we'll have pretty abundant energy, we will have amazing health outcomes. I mean so much positive outcome from the AI infusion into science. And I would say Anthropic's very serious about helping us manage or avoid most of the downside.

Sal Khan

And how have you all pulled that off? In closed doors. And I've been in some of those closed doors where people are genuinely afraid. More than 10% chance that this could be an existential threat to humanity. It does seem that Anthropic somehow is, is proving it to be very responsible or that that's what we appears to be and at the same time moving very fast. Hyperspeed. It feels like almost every few weeks there's something new and it's Very tangible in what it might do for work. How are y' all balancing that at Anthropic instead of just saying go, go, go.

Reed Hastings

You know, I think all of the big models are improving rapidly and you know, you're probably going to see them go. You know, certain ones will have the lead in certain areas over time and frankly it's good for the country. If we have three really successful models to choose from, then how do they balance it case by case? I think each one they have to see how accelerated is learning, how powerful is it, what are the downside scenarios, what is the new possibilities it can do?

Sal Khan

I'm curious about Anthropic itself. I had a chance to visit there a couple of weeks ago and I take part pride that, you know, Khan Academy were super nimble and we're innovating, et cetera, and we're obviously trying to leverage AI for, for social good as much as possible. When I visited there, I tangibly felt that they were pioneering completely new ways of running an organization, new ways of developing product. I think it was something that cowork was, what was it, a week or two, that, that it was essentially built primarily by the AI itself. What will an organization look like in the future? I think you'll have a pretty good crystal ball there.

Reed Hastings

Yeah, I don't know that most companies will come to look like Anthropic. I think it really depends on your industry. If you happen to be a pure software company, then might be relevant for that class of company. But broadly across the economy, I think everyone is figuring out it's a bigger version of the Internet wave where all companies had to do things. And we used to talk about our AOL keyword and crazy stuff like that, which was the phasing in this is a lot bigger and more intense, but it's sort of a larger version of that same thing, which is all companies around the world, organizations, governments, militaries are scrambling to figure out how to use AI.

Sal Khan

Well, I guess related to that, people are talking about it with software engineering. People are talking about call centers. I have a friend who has one of his startups, has a call center in the Philippines. They're going to lay off 80%. That's 7% of that country's GDP. How are you thinking about jobs? Just as a thinker? How is Anthropic thinking about it?

Reed Hastings

Well, if you look over the last 200 years, there have been a bunch of dislocations, but they were in. Happened slowly in over one part of the economy. And so the Danger is, are there multiple that happen in multiple fields. If these happen slowly, then people are able to find other roles. So it depends on how fast this all comes. And again, I would say the biggest uncertainty for everybody is how fast is the AI getting better and how fast will it be getting better going forward. And then that changes your views and assumptions. So let's look at self driving cars. I mean, we thought 20 years ago it was going to be pretty vast. And it's 20 years later from when it started, 2007 and the DARPA Grand Challenge, and we're like what, 0.1% of all miles, maybe 0.001%. I mean, it's really pretty tiny. 20 years later, these things take a long time to actually mature and diffuse. Another example is Geoffrey Hinton, won the Nobel Prize for his work on neural nets and really the father of AI in 2016. So 10 years ago he said stop training radiologists now, because in five years, 20, 21, there would be no need for them. So what's happened instead is as radiology got AI boosted, the cost came down. You can walk into an MRI center in the US for $300 and get an MRI now. And so docs started ordering them more and using them more, and insurance covered them more. And so the number of scans has gone way up. And guess what? We have a shortage in radiologists. We have 35,000, we need about 40,000. Wages have climbed to close to $500,000 a year. So even the best intentioned people in the field can prophesy disaster in radiology and have it be not accurate. So again, and it's just a timing thing because in 20 years I'm confident Hinton will be right. Okay, so just think there's two examples there, which is a lot of this stuff may not happen right away, but it's still probably going to happen in a long time. 20 years, some of it might happen in a short time. So you want to be ready for it.

Sal Khan

And that makes sense. Although something does feel different about this time. And all the people leading these AI labs are talking about not 20 years, they're talking about next year, they're talking about two years. You're going to have a data center of, you know, super intelligent geniuses that can do our work. Do you, do you think they're wrong or do you think it's a probability? And even if it's a, even if it's a 10% chance that they're right, are you worried that this can lead to political polarization? What happened in globalization could now happen. What happened in 30 years could happen in two or three. Is that, is that not a concern or should we start doing something about that?

Reed Hastings

If the AI really gets in close in a very short amount of time, starts writing itself and self improving all

Sal Khan

of that, isn't it writing 90% of itself right now?

Reed Hastings

Again, lines of code is a tricky measure. When it's invented a new type of learning, so there's reinforcement learning when it invents something completely new, then you can say that. But so there are cases where it's pretty fast. And so I think it's important to say we should be ready now. Here's the thing. We talk a bunch about unemployment, what it will do. Every other time we've had big unemployment, it's been a recession. And so the stock market's down and government tax revenues are down. This time, if AI is successful in the way we think it will, I think we're going to see high productivity, high GDP growth, high stock market and high unemployment. So we'll have money to do the things. And so think of it like the Alaska fund, which is oil, or the Norwegian sovereign fund. We need some ideas like that. What are we going to do with all these huge tax revenues that are going to be able to come in with big growth? And if we've got a fund which is for the benefit of all citizens, then we may in fact be able to have a path to a glorious and harmonious society. And I don't mean ubi, that's got a bad ting to it, but it's a partial sharing of the rewards, which is again, what happened with the Alaska Fund and the Norwegian fund.

Sal Khan

Makes sense. Well, Reed Hastings, thank you so much and thanks everyone.

Elise Hu

That was Reed Hastings in conversation with sal khan@ted 2026. If you're curious about Ted's curation, visit Ted.comCurationGuidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from ted. This episode was fact checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner and Tansika Songarnival. Additional support from Daniela Ballaraizo, Christopher Faizy Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Greene and Lainey Lot. Learn more at Podcasts. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

Commercial Narrator

With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with capital one. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends it's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. What's in your wallet terms apply see capitalone.com bank capital1NA member FDIC. You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to progressive dot, answer some questions and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings by $946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft.

Sal Khan

Oh no.

Commercial Narrator

That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 30% your first year@lifelock.com podcast terms apply.