[Applause] this should be a really fun class is all i can say and it says classes without quizzes but we may do a little quiz or two for the audience just to keep you guys sharp um but first i want to introduce uh my uh three uh fellow panelists uh three additional panelists um because they are each in their own right pretty remarkable folks and i think we're gonna have a great discussion so this is my friend sal khan um and sa you guys all probably know sal because of his extraordinary work in the hedge fund industry because when i met him he was working as an analyst at a hedge fund do you remember that cell that's hilarious and my younger brother tom was in the hedge fund world and he's like slightly more successful but anyway and then and when i first met sal he was he had started khan academy in his where he'll tell you where he started and it just rocketed to success and i remember having conversations you had that little office in mountain view upstairs in that place in mountain view and we were talking about whether or not khan academy should be a for-profit or a not-for-profit because it had become so successful so quickly and as you all know it's become this extraordinarily important educational institution in the country i'm sure many of your kids and grandkids have used have seen sal teach them you know whatever cell teaches them and among but it's it's what i think is most interesting about cell other than the fact i will tell you tiny bit of background he grew up outside of uh new orleans his parents are immigrants from bangladesh and india um he was the high school cartoonist newspaper cartoonist at his high school um he graduated from mit and got an mit uh mba from a school somewhere in near boston um and he has and he has little kids and uh who uh he and his lovely bride are very good parents do and he's really one of the most important figures in american education now which is pretty good for a hedge fund analyst okay so next next to south is nick kristoff so i'm sure many of you are used to reading uh nick and his lovely wife cheryl wu dunn's columns and books um so i always i first met nick when he was a op-ed columnist for the new york times as you may know he lived in you lived in china he's done all sorts of international reporting uh in earlier in his career um he's had he's won a couple of pulitzers he and his wife have written best-selling books the two that i think are most relevant to what we're going to talk about today are the book that they published in 2020 tightrope which is about nick's experience growing up in the town of yam hill oregon because he is from a small town in oregon where he and cheryl now live um and uh it's the story of the the challenges of working class america today uh the book pro well one of the books that they wrote together prior to that is a really terrific book called a path appears which is about early the investment in early importance of investing in early childhood and it's sort of a road map for how we as a society should be investing in kids and young people and we're going to talk about that a lot today and as you may know nick recently stepped down from his post as a columnist at um the times to announce that he was going to run for the governor of oregon as governor of oregon so hopefully phil knight will pay attention to that by the way um and uh and he he will not root for the oregon ducks against stamford he's already promised me that um and nick is from this small town in oregon he also went to a school near boston um and uh is just one of the really remarkable thinkers and and leaders in this country and we're going to talk he has also been a really close colleague of mine talking about kids in education issues for many years he's really one of the most thoughtful people on those topics and we're going to be talking a lot about that today so welcome nick okay we're leaving out things like road scholar and all the other things you could you can read its full bio later just like you can for our next guest julian castro so julian he had the wisdom to go to stanford is what i would really like to say with his brother joaquin who was also here this weekend um and they have a remarkable story they were raised in san antonio texas their mom they were uh is a political activist and um based i think you're julian can tell us but he started taking julian and joaquin to rallies and other political events when they were kids in san antonio and uh you know the story from there is just quite remarkable um he went he came out to stanford i think our good friend jim montoya had the wisdom to admit julian and joaquin they came to stamford uh did really well here they both then went back to san antonio where uh shortly after i think at age 26 or something julian got elected to the to the city council in san antonio then he became the mayor of san antonio texas um he was a also an incredible leader on kids in education issues um that's when i first really got to know him professionally because they were doing really important stuff around early childhood education in the city of san antonio uh he um he and his wife erica have two kids two two kids eric is here to today too um and after being mayor for a couple of terms secretary uh president obama uh asked julian to be the secretary of housing and urban development so he was then the hud secretary um very effectively we worked on a bunch of stuff there like wiring housing projects around the united states for broadband um and then uh julian now is back in san antonio doing a variety of different stuff and as you may know he ran for president in 2020 along with some other people that we know well um and uh he is also one of the extraordinary leaders around kids and education in this country and that's what i really hope that the conversation will focus on today the three topics that we want to cover in general are and i know it's we framed it uh which side of history the impact of how technology is reshaping democracy in our lives so we are going to talk about the state of our democracy today and i have a question for you at the beginning for you all at the beginning before we get into the question but we're also going to really talk a lot about kids in education and where does what is where is this country going um and uh we have three of the wisest and most thoughtful people that i know to discuss that topic so we'll launch in but i did say there was going to be a quiz so here is the quiz for all of you you can please put up your hand how many of you are worried about the state of american democracy today and the second question is how many of you think that we have under invested in america's children in education system for the last 50 years and the reason i say that is i think that's what we ought to talk about so let me start by asking the group i think a a an opening question that relates to the pandemic because we're all educators and the pandemic had this incredible impact on kids in education um i our we have four children one of whom is still in high school and he spent much of last year studying in studying and going to school in veg in his room he did and um and and so we've all been through this really traumatic 20-month period and it's obviously impacted every single person in this room continues to impact our lives but i think that the impact on kids in education has been extraordinary both from a negative standpoint but also from an opportunity standpoint about how we could remake education in this country so i'll start with you sal and then nick julian you guys go talk a little about what the pandemic did to kids and families in this country and also specifically how it impacted education and how it will impact education going before sal sure yeah thanks for that jim um so we we first caught wind of what was happening february of 2020 i remember we got a letter from a teacher in south korea saying hey i'm using khan academy to keep my kids learning during the they had nationwide school closures in february of 2020 and i remember us thinking that's wild that a whole nation would shut down at schools physically because of a of a pandemic and then many of y'all know this was the first area santa clara county was one of the first areas to have community spread and that's where it came on our radar wow this might not be so wild it might happen here and we started to realize as one of the moments where you look left and you look right like i think this might be us because people are going to need something that can work in a classroom environment could work in a home environment and so we started stress testing our servers and figuring out what we can do and we saw that that march uh when the whole nation and really the rest of the world 1.4 billion kids were out of school physically from our vantage point we saw our traffic go from 30 million learning minutes per day to about 90 million learning minutes per day because there's just a whole bunch of people just didn't know what to do they just needed something to keep kids learning and what we saw in that phase is we started a lot of people have talked about the k-shape recovery in the economy you saw that in stark contrast in the school system as well where smaller school districts which tended to be more fluent school districts that tended to be able to rely on people having internet access at home they were able to flip the switch within a week and the kids kept learning and large urban school districts where they couldn't assume the kids had internet access where they had all these other services that they were doing for families they had to take more time to coordinate to get devices out and it was just more political too and so even that first phase you had two or three months for them to get started and you already saw the differences that the divergence that started to happen and frankly it just continued through through much of last year as much as we could tell it's interesting when you're an online platform you can tell in real time how much people are learning you can literally count to the second as far as we could tell if we could measure learning time in the system as a whole it was down dramatically if you could take a stopwatch into every classroom or every zoom in america because it was all online last year the actual amount of learning time was probably down 30 or 40 percent and it would disproportionately hit kids who didn't have sufficient access at home a large urban school districts and now we're seeing it in the test scores the test scores are on average and math is worse it's about 10 to 15 percent down from what you would typically see and what makes that even more stark is that the kids in in more fluent areas all of our kids actually they've had trouble too social emotionally being isolated but they're doing just fine on the test scores they actually kept learning so that fifteen percent's the average so that means the other half of kids got way worse than 15 and it's even starker than that because in a lot of these school districts they don't even know where 10 of the kids are so those kids didn't even show up to take the test so if they showed up to take the test we suspect that it would be it would be that much worse so the picture isn't good uh now the silver lining i'd say is that you know a lot of what we've been talking about for many years and it's not our ideas is the reason why so many people struggle especially in stem subjects and subjects like math is it's cumulative and even before the pandemic we saw 70 percent of kids when they go to community college they don't even place into college algebra which is essentially 10th grade math they place into remedial math which is usually sixth or seventh grade math so we have a system even before the pandemic year after year everyone goes through the motions but their gaps accumulate they get to college and there's like no you have to go back to middle school that's just gotten that much worse now and we've always said the solution here is let every student have the opportunity incentive to fill in any gaps that they have and learn at their own pace and obviously you couldn't do that without some help from technology the good thing is that's now a mainstream idea every school district we talk to is saying yes we have to address this we have to do high dosage tutoring we have to do personalized learning we have to do whatever to get kids uh caught up and you know there's two other data points we we started a new tutoring platform because of the pandemic it's called schoolhouse.world it's also not for profit it's all free we're leveraging volunteership so any of you all could actually volunteer to be a tutor we have a whole vetting process but you can tutor kids not only all over the country all over the world for free and it's it's a pretty fun experience it's a pretty shaky group i'm not sure it's a shaky i think i think i think they'll be able to get through the vetting uh but but i'll say one last thing even though it looks like we're coming back after this 20 month period every educator and it might not just be educated might be everyone but educators especially there's a straight not strange actually i understand it there's a deep fatigue in the system right now uh there's been so much change that's been happening and people going left and right and uncertainty about in school out of school masks no mask you know all of the stuff any any person you talk to in education and just one data point we've been exploring after school programs and we're trying to find teachers for it so there's all this federal funding that's coming to do after school programs to do tutoring to do this can't find anyone to do it you go to the teacher say 50 an hour no one's showing up 60 an hour in previous years people would have showed up for that 70 they're just saying we're tired we can't do it so it's an interesting phenomenon where right now the resourcing is actually there is the human capital's a little bit harder and the ideas amazing by the way just so you know and i think a stanford audience needs to know this there's 17 million you all know the term digital divide actually created by a stanford law school graduate named larry irving 17 million kids in the united states did not have adequate broadband or devices during the pandemic that was not the styre children it was probably not your children but 17 million kids in the united states were still part of the digital divide and what sal just said is correct there is going to be dollars for broadband we've got seven or eight billion dollars in the american rescue plan for this there's more money in the reconciliation package which hopefully is going to pass in the next couple of weeks but we are at an extraordinary moment in the country so nick julian sal laid it out pretty big what do you think so some of those 17 million kids who didn't have broadband are my neighbors in yam hill oregon and some of those not only didn't have any broadband access in this rural area but also didn't have any cell service reaching their place in the hills those kids are at home there's no in-person schooling what are they supposed to do how are they supposed to learn and i do think that my tribe liberals made a a deep mistake when uh it when we as a group became uh so hostile to in-person learning usually a pretty good heuristic was that if president trump said something it was wrong when he supported uh in-school learning that was actually a case where he was right and i think we instinctively because he said because he said that we took the opposite chorus in fact looking back um you know in-person schooling was necessary for so many disadvantaged kids who didn't have access to broadband who didn't have parents who could support them who didn't have books at home and i saw that in my community um two you know two two two stories about families i care a lot about one family a guy who'd been um he'd been off drugs for four years uh his wife as well um they had a baby shortly before the pandemic and this was the first trial born in three generations in that family who was not born with drugs or alcohol in the system we were so full of hope this family had broken that cycle then early in that pandemic he and his wife relapsed because he was no longer having to submit urine tests for accountability no longer had in-person support for support when they were high then the baby found their mustache and ingested some and had to be hospitalized they became homeless uh they have actually now they have recently uh recovered they're they're getting support again but that child that infant went through some really really tough uh times and another family in next town over mcminnville oregon the mom was out of the picture she she had substance abuse problems the dad was a single dad who was really trying to to support his two daughters and but he lost his job at a restaurant early in the pandemic um his kids were home because there was no in-person schooling small home they were getting on each other's nerves in early this year he was on the phone for an hour with the employment office trying to get through he could never actually get through to a person after an hour he gave up he slammed the phone down he's irritated he's not always a good manager of his emotions he the girls were nagging him about being hungry so we went to the kitchen to make some food for them and one of them started talking about how mom would have had food ready for them and he completely lost it and he began choking one strangling one of his daughters the other girl jumped at him to rescue her sister he then hit them and he also he cursed them and said the worst things about them they ran out neighbor called 9-1-1 he was arrested they are now in foster care that family has been i mean destroyed is too wrong a word but they are going through uh this horrible situation and those girls i don't know to what extent they can recover from what i mean their dad strangled them they're in foster care which as you know has terrible outcomes and there were a lot of contributors to that including you know their dad's emotional lack of lack of ability to handle that but if he had been able to get through to the employment office if the girls have been able to be in person schooling there was less of a risk of that kind of thing and i think incidents like that happen to so many of the people that i knew where all kinds of risks that kids face were magnified during the pandemic and we as society didn't do enough to support those families to mitigate those risks to provide outlets for families who desperately needed that education to continue that mckinsey estimates a million additional kids will drop out of school because of uh the pandemic impact on education a million extra dropouts the total of that is going to be felt for decades and decades and decades to come because in the pandemic we blew it and didn't adequately support american kids america's kids julian yeah i mean this hits home for me just like i'm sure it does uh a lot of folks in the room whether it's a parent a grandparent uh my wife erica is here we have a 12 year old daughter and a six-year-old son and so we watched like a lot of other parents and participated in fully this total transition into virtual learning um coming out of it i mean my impression was that they didn't get nearly as much out of it as we would have hoped and also that the systems the operationalization of virtual learning was so rudimentary they asked so much from the educators who were not used to that environment the tools like i still don't know how to log in properly to seesaw which is one of the apps that they use you know like the apps themselves are rudimentary and then connecting folks uh much less i think folks that of course that don't have access to broadband aren't familiar with these apps um so it asks a lot of everybody from parents to educators uh to the kids themselves um and i i think that going forward that that's one of the the things that um we have to learn from and work with because i have since and you know sal is a perfect example of this virtual learning is here to stay that's not going to change it's only going to expand and including in the public school setting and in other settings that it didn't used to take hold in and i feel as though there's a lot of work that has to be done in these school districts to implement a better system so that you can effectively educate in that platform through virtual learning because right now i mean teachers and and my wife erica uh is now in charge of the virtual learning for the elementary schools in her public school district she was conscripted to do that she was usually curriculum coach the lead curriculum coach in her district but because there's a teacher shortage they made all of the curriculum coaches this title one funded school district the curriculum coaches do virtual learning become teachers again basically classroom teachers because they have a shortage of teachers in that district this year and so all of a sudden she finds herself supervising the virtual learning element for elementary schools in that district and that's just one example of how scrambled things have gotten if this is here to stay i think that both in terms of resources and policy and understanding we need to make a lot of advancement or else what you're going to get is just kids that are not learning at the clip that they should right you know whatever percent they get out of it that we saw with our kids so when you all think about this by the way we haven't even talked about really the social emotional impact on kids on on all of us but on young people as a as a father of four the biggest thing that i saw was this the social emotional impact of the pandemic and also you know running the biggest kids media group in the country we have all these lessons about screen time and there's certain limits here's the common sense formula for screen time all of that went out the window right because your kids are and that's how they are a and and we loosened up i don't know if you guys did this with your kids on how much time particularly our youngest son jesse could spend with friends we let him because he was going crazy because the teenagers my gosh their whole existence is about interacting with their friends but they were spending so much time in front of screens platforms like instagram snapchat youtube became incredibly important and they lived that's why i said i literally used to watch my son in his bedroom but but huge impact so comment on that and then i want to talk about some of the stuff we ought to do about this yeah i was just going to say that i mean kids are just incredibly clever in the best of times about evading restrictions and when they're empowered during a pandemic boy they get even better in china early in the pandemic schools around the country were using a particular software to provide kids with homework and lessons and then kids all across china uh realized that uh that software got dropped from the platform if it had a really bad rating and so all of a sudden hundreds of millions of kids began giving it the worst rating and it briefly dropped off the platform and homework could no longer be assigned in china never unsure made america's kids by the way how about world's kids how about china just set a rule about how much time you can play video games right which is really interesting because this is that we're gonna get we're gonna get confronted with this right so here in the we have the common sense about how much screen time china they just said from up up on high no actually whatever it is half an hour a week that's it and we're gonna and they actually have the ability to look how much time you're spending so let me ask questions you guys are have you looked at all at this so other than as a parent at the social emotional side of this is there anything you're doing that i'd say the same thing leon and then i want to talk about okay how do we inve how do we change some of this if we look out over the next year but have you looked at that at all i think people are going to look a lot more at it now everyone knows that the social emotional is important but the problem is it's very traditionally hard to measure and so when all we're measuring is the math the reading comprehension and the writing well that's what everyone indexes on even science is oftentimes ignored especially the elementary and sometimes middle school level because it's not measured as much i think now it's becoming so glaring especially because of the pandemic what we're seeing is the first we're seeing actually online usage is down system-wide right now because because schools are spending so much time getting kids back into the the social emotional group of things there's a school i started not too far from here it's our lab school and we are we are spending two three months and we've always had a focus on social emotional learning but that's all we're doing for the last especially the last month and a half uh so and we've been talking to some of our assessment partners that you traditionally assess all of you know your test scores on math and reading they're coming up with measures for for social emotional it could be survey based it's interesting problem to brainstorm how you can actually do a reasonable standardized test about where people are in this dimension but people are taking it really seriously because just anecdotally just observationally something is clearly going on i know you know we'll probably eventually talk about the depression and the anxiety and the epidemics that you're seeing at the university level at the end i don't think it is just facebook i think there's many things that are uh playing into it but we need to figure out a way to measure it uh to understand how we can make it better julian any i mean you see it in your own kids oh for sure i mean especially our 12 year old daughter right yeah she's engrossed completely in that world if she's not i mean a couple months back i walked into a room and she has her laptop in front of her is listening to something off her iphone and then also has an ipad near there and he has you know netflix on and whatever is on the laptop and something else i mean what these kids do to multitask you know and but how engrossed they are in all of it you think about when television emerged you know a couple of generations ago there were a lot of the same concerns that people had right about what this would mean and attention span and all of that but as much attention as people fixed on the tv i think it's it's amped up 10 times in terms of how attached they are to their phone and everything else and and that the research on this there's some but i think it's still developing and how do you put that you know how do you put that to best use in schools i know for us as parents i mean and really erica has led the way on this is putting limits on screen time like a lot of parents and just trying to do what we can so i will tell you something interesting from the standpoint of common sense politically because i want to talk now about about some of the solutions and also a little about democracy before we go to questions from you guys i mean one of the things very interesting is so we have take at common sense our we take on the big tech companies uh sometimes on mass usually one by one um and we have really hammered them over the past five or six years around the fact that this is an arms race the reason i say this is the stanford audience says half of the people went to stanford right half of the people who built these products went to stanford a bunch of them have been in my classes and sometimes i have arguments with them about this by the way is did you not listen at all in civil rights and civil liberty about no because it's a i have had that conversation with some of the most significant executives if you literally go down the companies one by one you will see that stanford is the dominant sorry for you harvard people but is the the dominant university in all of this but there's an arms race for attention i mean attention and data are the holy grail they're the new oil and so part of what has happened is that we have built products i mean you look at the guys who started um instagram right both of whom left by the way because they were really not happy with the way mark was running the company if you haven't figured that out why those guys left and you start to see people who've started peeling away from some of the companies now when they understand the implications of what some of those companies have done but basically they are so sophisticated the kids are really sophisticated but the kids who graduate from here are pretty sophisticated and they build all these different designs their design techniques to keep you addicted they're basically designed to keep you on the platform because that's how you monetize it particularly the ad based models are completely based on how much time you can get somebody to stay in the platform so when julian is talking about his 12 year old that is intentionally built by engineers at places like instagram or youtube or snapchat and so you have to think one of the things and i we always used to talk about this at stanford is for years stanford was turning out all the engineers and computer scientists building these companies and there was no class about the implic the ethical and sociological implications of what you were doing it was just how can i get a job at google or facebook or wherever and so and then finally now in the last couple years i'm quite critical of this or this university that i love and went to and have been a professor after years about why we didn't ask our students to think about the ethical implications of what the products they were building and why it's a very and i think by the way i think alumni have got to ask this question and that the and that from mtl on down we have to ask that question because the platforms now are so powerful and pervasive in all of our lives but particularly in young people's lives and so a question i want to ask you all is because there is a legislative agenda you know washington has been out to lunch on this for 15 years nothing has passed and want no privacy laws no so uh no platform accountability laws no uh no reining in of or guard rails around the major tech platforms but i think you're about to see that change hopefully on a bipartisan basis so and and we have a fairly significant legislative the reason by the way just one example that is we passed the caliph we wrote and passed the privacy law in california that all of you benefit from the ccpa in 2018.
why because we could not get it done in washington dc even though ed markey and dick blumenthal and other people would introduce privacy legislation and europe was doing gdpr at the time the first five thought we haven't passed a privacy law in the united states since mark zuckerberg was in diapers and that's true though and so and and by the way we had a period where the tech industry told us that privacy was an old passe norm and it didn't matter anymore so my question to you guys is when you look at issues like particularly in the context of kids in education what if giving you the magic wand what do you want to see happen in the next two or three years and what do you think it'll take us to get there you know i'll start and this is not a popular thing to do i'll start slightly defending facebook and instagram sure then and then i'll i'll double down on everything you said [Laughter] you know this this isn't a new problem uh me this is this is you know right now we're saying the machine learning algorithms have figured out that if you work people up they're more likely to keep watching well people have figured this out in the news 50 60 70 years ago the difference is if you go 70 years ago there were three networks and everyone was watching those three networks but they also knew i mean you know the news has all will always make you slightly depressed they're gonna you know world of at the time three billion people now seven or eight billion people they're going to take the five worst things that happened on that planet and then feed it to you and get you agitated about it so that so that you watch ads and this has been going on for 70 years then if you go into the cable period now the sudden it wasn't just three networks you could get a little bit more specialization and you saw as you got more of that specialization people got better triggering i could not trigger people on the right i cannot trigger people on the left the guard rails started to get get a little bit wider and so they got better at doing that and it was and it was good business the social media environment they're going two things happened now they can super micro target and they're using machine learning algorithms they're just doing the things that the media companies would have dreamed about doing 50 50 or 60 years ago so i don't think they're somehow more evil it's really the same human instincts that are doing it but the the one really new thing that's happening here is is that they have kind of a plausible deniability like that's not my content i just put it out there for people to connect and someone put it up there and the algorithm thought that this person would enjoy it and they're doing it and then that's what's really causes the because we know now people with very little accountability oftentimes very fringe folks on in any dimension of the political spectrum or any any spectrum are now able to get an audience they know how to trigger people everyone's figured this out the better you get at triggering people the more audience you're going to get and then you're left with uh people getting triggered in some way it can be triggered politically it could be triggered feeling bad about yourself wanting to buy certain clothes changing your body image and that's messing with everyone's brains i i think china i mean i i i i normally don't say this type of thing but we regulate we regulate drugs we regulate alcohol we regulate firearms i think this is as significant especially for younger people they don't have a developed frontal lobe uh i mean and we could argue whether at some point do we you know do any any of us can really control ourselves that much but i think especially for younger people where there's already an example where you can't drink until you're 21 you can't et cetera et cetera some type of reasonable uh guidelines around best practices how much can you use et cetera et cetera i think i i don't think that should be that should be off the table it is a complicated issue i had a friend who's a actually a machine an ai specialist at facebook he's actually a stanford professor who's doing a sabbatical at facebook uh and i was giving him a hard time about this about how he might feel about himself and he i know but in his in his defense and his and in facebook he says they are thinking about it but there are a lot of there are a lot of competing interests there but it is not an easy problem because i even told him i'm like why don't you just regulate it in this way and he had some good good rebuttals but it does feel like you can't because you haven't don't have the perfect solution you just say oh well let's not have any solution we'll have our 12 year olds spending 10 hours a day getting fed this highly polarizing thing and we know what's happening with anxiety and depression and polarization in the country nick and julian you you get the magic wand for a year or two what do you do so i'd pick up the point that cell made about uh regulation and accountability you know if you look across in any industry whether it's the lead pain industry or the cigarette industry uh the the pharma uh industry with opioids then uh in the absence of regulation and public accountability in the form of pressure then companies will periodically just try to monetize everything they can and one of the lessons to me is that one has to provide both that uh accountability through public pressure and that regulatory uh accountability at section 230 would be uh part of the the wand i would uh i would wave can you explain to them section 230 in like 30 seconds yeah so uh section 230 from the communications decency act it basically gives legal immunity and protection to a platform that allows people to post whatever they want on it so that includes everything from facebook or instagram to pornhub to the new york times comment section for example and the idea was that in its infancy that's really useful to protect these platforms these are not infants anymore and when they engage in egregious uh behavior post material that is um you know really horrible there was a woman who'd had a rape video of herself on twitter for six years and couldn't get twitter to remove it and then i called up uh twitter and asked why they wouldn't remove it it was gone and you know in in a minute or two but if there had been legal accountability i think it would have been removed a lot earlier um but if if you give me a mad a wand then i think what i would weigh what i would want even before uh dealing with the tech industry in terms of helping america's kids would be just some policy interventions that are now actually at stake in washington and you know there are a lot of issues around america that are really hard and we don't exactly know how best to solve them on kids we actually have really good evidence about what works and you know child allowances in the form of a tax credit would probably reduce child poverty by about half we may be able to get that now in washington if the biden social infrastructure plan goes through high quality pre-k slash child care another intervention that is this enormous amount of evidence about the impact that it will make and the return the returns economic returns that it will achieve it's not an expense it's an investment and again that may we may be able to get that now um and um you know since cory booker is in uh uh is in the reunion i should say you know the baby bonds that he has championed um would be a very effective way to reduce race gaps in america to get more kids to college and to to help reduce some of the profound inequities in america there's pretty good evidence when a kid has even a small you know baby bond even a small education account in their name even if it's not really enough to make a difference in college affordability it makes the family think about the possibility of college and significantly increases college attendance rates so we know what to do we have the toolbox the question is do we have the political will to open that toolbox and use it and julian if it was you instead of your friend joe biden in the white house what would you be doing about it well and i think he's doing a lot of good stuff i hope that his spillback better plan gets passed and then implemented no i mean i think that we're at this very special moment of opportunity that unfortunately has we've come into the hard way through losing more than 700 000 people during this pandemic the economic recession the racial reckoning after the murder of george floyd but i hope that one of the things that that more people are feeling right now is that we're all in it together right that what happens to the most vulnerable people affects all of us what happens to somebody else's child affects me and my child and that that gives us the opportunity to do things like build back better and and to me get on a path of treating health care as a human right housing is a human right education is a human right and basic sustenance is a human right working in that direction you think about how much progress bernie has made over these last few years of and obama with the affordable care act of getting more americans to see the wisdom of investing in health care we can do that on other things when it comes to these platforms if i had a magic wand i mean i think to begin with that we need to empower consumers a lot more with privacy and other things and move from an opt-out system to an opt-in system right so you empower yourself instead of them from the beginning and create much greater incentives for them to put the public interest ahead of profit which is you know they're doing profit right now over and over and over again and three stanford professors i think uh sahami jeremy weinstein and was rob robbery have written that book system error about where big tech rent went wrong it's a great book um and i think that they hit the nail on the head in a lot of ways but yeah if i could wait by magic wand those are some of the things that we would do i'm going to ask one question you guys do which is this on the democracy front right and the impact of the tech platforms on democracy any particular quick thoughts about that you know i gave a a very simple potential solution which is time uh which you couldn't regulate i mean you could say no one can and i actually think it applies both for the 12 year old who's getting a horrible body image of themselves but it also could apply to i mean my mother the amount of time she spends watching cnn and gets worked up it's it really i mean it really isn't good for her mental health like it's it's it's uh so so i don't think it's just the 12 year olds i i do think there's some more sophisticated things i don't know if it could be done through legislation but you know it might not just be how do we mitigate the harm it actually could be some of these platforms could be part of the solution where i actually think you could and i talked to my friend about this he thinks that as well you could actually look at behavior on a platform like a snapchat an instagram and detect much earlier when someone is starting to get depressed detect much earlier when they're starting to have suicidal ideation when they're starting to become extreme in some way and there might be an opportunity to make some some inter interesting interventions one thing that i've always talked about at khan academy the internet's out there is kind of the wild west we see what's happening you know one of my dreams is can we be an institution that can help you know show that it can uplevel people we're seeing with the schoolhouse where people can tutor each other that's developing their social emotional it's developing other skills so i am overall hopeful that eventually some of these platforms can also uh not just be negative they can and there are positive things that they are doing but there can be even even more positive part of the solution i wouldn't have said this uh even a couple of years ago i mean historically i very strongly believed and a marketplace of ideas and best ideas well went out et cetera et cetera but um i really have been shaken by some of the uh i don't want to call it reporting but what passes for reporting on you know some of the the networks and i've come to think that there should be more discipline imposed in terms of advertising and in terms of what uh cable companies convey on their on their platforms and that when a channel systematically engages in incitement or you know for that matter on vaccines spreads messages that are going to lead a lot of people to be to die unnecessarily then i think that there should be pressure on advertisers to uh not monetize uh to to to not support that and on cable systems uh not to um you know to try to impose discipline on on those networks that carry messages that i think profoundly undermine democracy one of the one comment i will say is freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach and so and i think that's a very important thing because the platforms are really amplifiers and they're not currently held responsible for the amplification through algorithmic processes largely by the way and i think that's one of the big discussions that we're going to have to have as a society over the next few years because we're so committed to free speech and that's what half of my classes at stanford about but freedom of speech is not freedom of reach and when you're amplifying misinformation on an ongoing basis that is undermining public health undermining democratic norms and institutions that we all took for granted since we went to stanford then then there's something that has to be raised as an issue okay i am going to wrap up and i just want to say the following number one thank you all for letting us go 15 minutes over time number two i think reflecting what our three panels have said we are at this huge tipping point moment for this country there's so there's a downside to look at but there are extraordinary opportunities to look at and the same tech companies that that we're concerned about some of the downsides are also can drive us to the positive side so i would end for all of you and just say the following which side of history do you think we're you our countries come on what side are you going to be on and what are you going to do about it because i think it is now a question whether you go and become a tutor with sal or you go help nick's campaign in oregon or you go help julian and his brother rebuild texas which side of history want to be on thank you to these people thank you thank you guys thank you very much
2021-11-20