Bill Gates thought school wasn’t ‘exciting’ when he was a kid—until he met his 8th grade instructor. While in middle school, Gates didn’t find learning “interesting,”

The Microsoft founder recently admitted on his “Unconfuse Me” podcast, to the Khan Academy CEO Sal Khan. “Early on in maths, I was kind of lazy,” Gates, 67, . “And in eighth grade, a teacher asked, ‘How come you’re so lazy?You have the potential to be really good at this.’ ‘But we’re not doing anything interesting’, I remarked. He said, “I kind of had this view that, the less effort you put in, the cooler you were.”

However, the teacher saw potential and used the chance to encourage Gates to put effort into his schooling. “He would give me books to read and help really push me quite a bit,” Gates explained. “The fact that he thought I was wasting my time made a huge difference. It altered my entire perspective on education.”

This is the moment I was able to see Bill Gates talking at an Oxfam demonstration about “Feeding the World”, and below is the recent podcast with Sal and Bill Gates talking about Bill’s early formative years.