Alexis Ohanian
speaker
292 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 12 Jun
Alexis Ohanian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And it gets easier and cheaper and more efficient and more dynamic. You will see a big shift in that industry. And it's not going to go away. It's going to elevate so many things. But every screen we look at, for sure, our phones, our televisions, whatever, will be so programmed to show us what we want, when we want it, how we want it.
A part of our humanity will miss thousands of years ago when we were sitting around a campfire. And that great storyteller was doing the voices and the impressions. We were like, oh, that's hilarious, Jimmy. Do the story again at the time we tried to catch the gazelle, right? That's ingrained in our species. So I actually bet 10 years from now, live theater will be more popular than ever
Because again, we'll look at all these screens with all these AI polished images, and we'll actually want to sit in a room with other humans to be captivated for a couple of hours in a dark room to feel the goosebumps of seeing live performances of human performances. And so I think we'll see this across a number of different sectors and areas that'll feel anachronistic.
It'll feel crazy that in 2040, the hottest ticket in town will be a live performance. But I actually think, I think there's some truth to that. I think that's why I'm so bullish on sports because no one's going to pay money to cheer for and cry for a robot kicking a soccer ball. Like we need humans doing that. We need, we need to feel their pain and their success and their triumphs.
And those are the areas that get me most hopeful because it's, it's kind of a nice throwback to when we were just hunting or growing the things we needed to live when, you know, the distractions we had were literally the humans around us and the community we had were basically the only people we all knew for our entire lives.
And there are parts of that that I actually think will nourish us even in this, you know, future. Have all parts of you always been that optimistic?
i've definitely always been a tech optimist i i think look building reddit i mean you know how i resigned in protest in 2020 because i was despite being the face of the company spending you know 15 years building it turning it around you know i found myself in board meetings this is all public now but i'd find myself in board meetings where i was the only person out of five who was advocating for banning
like watch people die literally a community of you know hundreds of thousands of people sharing videos of just or horrible usually uh like closed circuit television or close-circuit camera footage of just awful stuff people dying suicide murder all this accidents and and then again it comes up again around communities like explicitly built on racism and things that i just
I knew we're bad for business, we're bad for society, we're just not things that we should be fighting for. When I did part ways, I was so pleased to see the response finally was, okay, we're going to ban these things because it shined a light, right? And what it also taught me was, this was four years ago, was that I had... I didn't have enough agency, and that was my own creation.
That was my own doing. But I was never going to put myself in a situation again where I couldn't be doing not just the best work of my career, but also in a way that aligned with my values. And what's been a phenomenal result is for the last four years, I've had so much wind at my back. from making that decision, from aligning those values.
And I still think the internet can bring out the best in us. I do really believe that. And I can also accept the conflicting view that it enables the worst of us. And I obviously want to be on the side of the former. And so I try to use my platform as best I can for those things and to curb the worst. I think I have to remain an optimist because... I'm still optimistic about humanity.
And to the extent, these tools are just a reflection of society, of our world. And I need to believe that, you know, there is hope for us to figure this out, to get a line that at the end of the day, nearly all of us still want the same things. We want to live decent lives. We want our kids to live hopefully better lives than we did.
Like there are some practical needs that we still have from hundreds of thousands of years ago that I think we need to meet. Like I said, I want to spend my years supporting all this stuff that I know my girls will be proud of.
Yeah. Well, look, early on, these really radical communities almost never exist. Certainly back then, because there were just fewer people online, you know, 2005 starting Reddit, I was just hoping it would work. There were so few people online actively creating content that, you know, for early years, it wasn't even a thing. It never even came up.
And when it did, it was just an easy ban because it was a one-off post. I left, so sold the company in 2006 to Condé Nast, stuck around until 2010. Then I left, became a partner at Y Combinator, started a venture fund, and I came back in 2014 as executive chairman. That was in the wake of a previous CEO infamously defending revenge porn. This was definitely Reddit's nadir.
He'd written this infamous blog post defending keeping these horrible photos up. And that was, not surprisingly, one of his last acts as CEO. And I was asked by the board to come back. I said, great. First thing we did, shocker, ban revenge porn. Pretty easy, very obvious thing to do.
And then it was a task of, one, rebuilding the business, rebuilding the faith with users, with brands, with everyone, and then starting to just modernize all the things. And then as this stuff started coming up and once it got to the board levels, you know, I'll give you the steel man version of the argument that I heard was these are communities that are important because of free speech and.
The one argument that I really didn't necessarily believe, I didn't believe, was around the therapeutic value of having communities like this for people who have PTSD, like soldiers or medical folks. And I pushed back pretty hard on that one because I just still didn't believe that it was real. Probably the most elucidating takeaway for me was once a spotlight was shown on it,
The thing I would have respected more, even though I disagreed with it, would have been taking that same argument and making it publicly and just saying, yeah, look, this is a free speech issue. We feel like this should be here. And even though I would disagree with it, I'd still respect that it was consistent. But we know that's not what happened. What happened was, okay, yeah, are bad.
We're going to ban it now. And, and that for me was when I just, I realized, no, this isn't this. I can't, I can't spend, I don't know, however many decades I got left on this earth doing this and being a part of this. And, um,
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