I guess the first person I have to thank is my sister who bought a book for my father. Then I have to thank my father for recommending me that book. The book was “Rich dad poor dad” from Robert Kiyosaki.

I was pretty disappointed while reading that book. It looked like a random collection of successful stories of a self-made man, without any fundamental and concrete lesson to learn and apply on real life. At the end of the book I understood the message: educate yourself, learn about finance and economics, but not with this book.

I admit I’ve always been curious about economics. I also did the admission test for the Business and Economics Bachelor’s Degree at the University of Bologna. I ranked 57 out of roughly 500 and 50 places were available. 5 people before me went to other universities and were removed from the list. Yes, I was the first excluded student.

So, how to learn finance and economics while finishing my double degree in Data Science and Telecommunications? I was looking for an internship and suddenly the right opportunity appeared. A researcher in computer science offered me an internship in Vienna to work on cryptocurrencies (yes, Bitcoin and the like).

I knew almost nothing about it, as most of the people, so I started reading about blockchain. I understood that it was not enough because something like Bitcoin can be properly understood only if one has a background in programming, computer networks, cryptography, finance and economics. This last part was missing.

Few days later, when I started watching a video about microeconomics from Khan Academy on YouTube, a small red bar at the bottom of the video’s thumbnail reminded me that I had already started watching some of those videos. I think it was around 2012.

And so, the education began or, better, started again with one of the best teachers I’ve ever had: Sal Khan. It has been a fantastic journey and I want to share some thoughts about it with you.

I soon realized I had to take notes, otherwise I would have lost and forgotten a lot of information. I knew about the Feynman technique and I thought: Why not writing a document where I explain what I learn from this course instead of just taking notes? It was a very good decision because not only was I able to keep track of what I was learning, but it also allowed me to stop, reflect, ask questions and dig deeper. That document is now freely available to everyone.

About the “course”

It is not a serious academic course, rather it is an informal explanation of topics that we should somehow know. Some are very basic, some are more advanced. I wish an adult with voting rights knew the vast majority of them.

Sal starts always from very basic concepts and at the beginning he repeats himself a lot. I sometimes thought “OK, I got it” and got distracted by all the different colors he uses throughout his videos. But then suddenly I discovered that I just ignored too many words and I had need to go back few seconds (I hope you’re aware of the J key shortcut on YouTube).

The aspects that I really liked the most about Sal and his videos are mainly two: he explains stuff in a simple but correct way and he always tries to be unbiased and let you judge by yourself.

There were of course some funny moments:

• his baby started crying and he had to stop the video to subdue him
• he tries to scroll up or down on his screen, but he gets strange colored lines and says “Ooops” in a very funny way
• he says something like: “I’m going to use red for the assets”, then he chooses the color from the palette and starts writing and says. “Aw, that’s not red!”
• his phone is ringing and he says: “No, I think it’s junk!”

After having spent so many hours listening to his voice on YouTube, I really wish I could meet him in person a thank him for all what he did and the nice person he is.

Thank you, Sal! See you in the next video!