Alexis Ohanian: Why I Left Reddit and Why Greed Can Inspire Good

28:39And people will fear those two letters, like they fear the word nuclear, just because of the times that we're in. If it was 10 years ago or 15 years ago where AI showed up, the debate might have been very different. Totally agree. And it's ironic that now because of AI and its tremendous power needs, we're reopening nuclear in the United States, right? Microsoft's made commitments to this. I know, it's ironic. I think we'll see more plants reopening. And the good news is the technology has gotten, I know everyone thinks about Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. The technology of nuclear has gotten better, safer, all those things.

29:14And I do think we'll see this renaissance. It could use a rebrand. It could use a rebrand, but it is ironic that we're using nuclear to power AI. Yeah, it's coming back. But I want to go down the other path because as I had two thoughts about it when you talked about this race and the winning, right? Which is what has happened in tech that I don't think has ever happened prior to tech. There is a dominant player in a space, right? Google is the dominant player in search. OpenAI is the dominant player, at least so far, in AI. And it's only like four or five tech companies that basically control the world.

29:56Meta is the dominant player in social. And the race, perhaps, there's great irony, which is these companies have become ostensibly monopolies. Careful with that word now. Amazon is the player in retail. It's very hard for anybody to compete against Amazon, whether you're bricks and mortar or online retail. It's just very hard for anybody to be a somewhat close player. Walmart's giving it a good college try. They're probably the only one that can take on Amazon. And I think they're doing a decent job of it. But it seems like the race is to be the monopoly, which is we're all racing in a tech direction.

30:34and the companies are trying to be, the one that's trying to quote unquote win is to be the monopoly. And that's what we have. We have ostensible monopolies in tech and that seems to be the race. Look, I'm not an antitrust expert, but I do think, here's the weird paradox. So Google's a great example. There are, Google certainly has monopolistic practices and characteristics, right? You brought up search, this is a good one. Here's the paradox. Google also invented all of these practices of machine learning, tensor flows. This stuff was actually originated in Google, the papers, the research that OpenAI built on.

31:14But because Google was so paradox of choice, bureaucratic, whatever you want to call it, they didn't want to cannibalize their beautiful search business. There was no internal incentive to actually develop this technology, and it took an outsider to disrupt them. And there's a very good chance. I mean, if perplexity and I'm not an investor, but like if perplexity continues to go grow the way it's growing or some of these other maybe it's chat GPT, who knows, we could actually see a replacement for that list of blue links that we've all gotten so used to because it's just a better experience. And so while at the same time, I can, I agree, there are certainly monopolistic things about Google and what it's done.

31:50In the span of a few years, they are going to get severely challenged, if not upended by technology, they actually invented in house. And that speaks to the nature of tech, which, like, okay, I guess standard oil, again, I'm not an expert on oil things. But like if you own where the oil comes from, you own the things that move the oil, you own the places that sell the oil, that feels like this vertical integration gone awry and you're a monopolist because we're talking about atoms. We're talking about a scarce resource and physical things. But in software, the cost of iteration or scaling and the ability, the rapidness with which technologies can evolve and change makes it a different beast.

32:31And I don't think antitrust folks have really caught up with that either. the SEC was worried about Amazon buying Roomba or something or Facebook no the worst one was Facebook or Meta buying Giphy which is a platform of animated GIFs like it's the time to look at Meta for those types of antitrust practices was like a decade ago guys like getting on them now for Giphy and it's so you have technology which keeps the the stakes get higher and higher it keeps improving faster and faster. And then you have institutions like government that by design are slow and plodding along. And the next five or 10 years, we will see a major collision because the technology will just keep outpacing and outstripping these institutions' ability to think through it and regulate it.

33:19By its nature, government reacts. Something has to break first before they regulate it. And what I also think is so interesting, that Google example, I didn't know that one, that Google example just reminds me of Kodak. Kodak invented the digital camera in the 70s and suppressed the technology so as not to cannibalize, to your point, film, paper, chemicals until finally, and ironically, it was their patents that other digital companies like Fuji and Canon started to use. It was, you know, Kodak made money off the patents until the patents ran out. And then those digital companies put Kodak ostensibly out of business.

33:54And so it's ironic that a Google technology may be the thing that puts it out of business, but it's still a race to replace the monopoly, right? Not coexist with them. Because competition, as Adam Smith defined it, was that if you have choices, we benefit as customers. But if you take away the choice, the temptation for monopolistic decision-making, it's just too tempting. Yeah, this is the power of competition. And I wanna give you some hope because I do think values can long-term align with business outcomes. And I can speak to a fairly specific example without using like border room conversation.

34:32So I seeded a company called Roe Health. It's one of these telehealth businesses started in 2014 when all the laws started changing so that you could be a doctor practicing in one state and speak to via telehealth, like video chat, speak with a patient somewhere else and prescribe something in another state. And this is a big shift because now you could scale a real telehealth business. At the same time, ED meds like Viagra and Cialis were going generic. And so now you're going to get a proliferation of much cheaper alternative brands. And Roe was there first on the scene with a few others and very intentionally built a business where they said, OK, we are going to build integrity into what we do because we know this can be abused.

35:11right if you're pursuing profits at all costs you could see a model that incentivizes not just the ceo but everyone in the business down just hit their goal for the quarter and push as much product as possible even if someone didn't necessarily need it do really aggressive tactics to lock them into subscriptions push notifications all that stuff and they made a decision early on to build that into the culture and where it paid off wasn't just there because they found success kept growing kept growing, kept growing. And there was a moment in time, I won't name the company, but some folks realized they could start writing prescriptions for ADD medications, like Adderall, Ritalin.

35:50And it was a no brainer for the business at Rowe to not get into this, in spite of the fact that there were new entrants who were aggressively growing, because they knew, you know, this is a popular drug, making this drug, which is habit forming really accessible to people like, if you're putting values aside, seems like a great business model. But it didn't align with the values of Roe to really be pushing this product as aggressively as these folks were. And we didn't even bother expanding into it, because there was too much of a downside risk. And not surprisingly, that company eventually got called out by the FDA got into a lot of trouble and has paid the price, as far as I can tell.

36:31And as that whole thing unfolded, What was so compelling from this was Z, the CEO, was there was never a moment of hesitation for him that this was the right thing to do because he was playing a long term greedy game. He knew that the brand of Roe being a telehealth leader didn't just mean making as much money as possible in a quarter. It meant making sure that this was a brand that mattered and was something that customers trusted, but also that the government respected. because at some point in these rapidly growing industries, whether it's AI, whether it's telehealth, doesn't matter. Like you said, government is reactive.

37:05And so at some point, unfortunately, something goes wrong and government steps in and says, okay, what the hell's going on here? And they talk to everyone and they see what everyone's best standards and practices are. And in that situation, you want to be the gold standard because then government goes and looks around and says, oh, okay, like you're the adults in the room. You're the ones who take this seriously. Help us figure out what to make the standard because you're the ones doing it best. And these are the areas where I think being high integrity actually aligns with being high sort of greed because you have the long-term best business outcome because you sacrifice some short-term business outcome for the long-term integrity and values move.

37:43And in health, it's an obvious place. I think you're touching on an insight here that I really appreciate, which is if we look at capitalism the way it was prior to sort of Milton Friedman, Jack Welch, and we look at capitalism the way it is now, where short-termism, quarterly results, shareholder supremacy are standard. And they've done great damage to the middle class. They've done great damage to the nation. They've done great damage to economies. I like to remind people that we've had three major stock market crashes. We had the 1980s, we had Black Monday, we had dot-com, and then we had 2008, right?

38:15Three major stock market crashes. Prior to that, because of the Glass-Steagall Act that was put in after the Great Depression, which we dismantled in the 80s in the name of profit, we had zero. We had zero. Zero major stock market crashes between the Great Depression and Glass-Steagall and the dismantling of it in the 80s. And since then, we've had three. And so this idea of short termism and short term greed and Goldman Sachs used to talk about this. Goldman Sachs is often the poster child for sort of evil business these days. But even the old partners at Goldman Sachs, they used to talk about long term greed as one of their values.

38:49And I think this is right, which is we can't get away from greed. It's a very human instinct. It's one of the reasons communism fails is because people are greedy. But the idea of saying, look, we're not going to get rid of greed because we're people. But if we can commit to having long term greed, we will make better long term decisions, we will take care of employees, we'll protect the environment, we will be ethical, because it's in our long term greedy interest. Yes. And I think what you've said is so profoundly right, so simple and so profound, which is we have replaced long-term greed with short-term greed, and we need to get back to long-term greed because it's better.

39:27Yeah. Yeah. And I could make the case for, I mean, I love being told I'm right. So thank you. No, just hold on. If we just keep talking, I'll find something wrong. Okay. But look, I think, I hope there's a long-term case for it with things like climate that I care about. My family foundation, all the money is going towards young people who are taking big swings to combat climate change. And that's one area where you could say, okay, like, it is clearly in humanity's best interest to make sure the planet is not destroyed by our own action. But it is a really, really hard thing to get folks to value myself included all of us, right, our short term decisions for the that is the ultimate long term greedy move, right?

40:16Let's make sure this planet thrives for a very, very, very long time. And, and that's probably the one that's the most sort of at odds with this, because it's, you know, how long is long, like, thousands of years? Let's go down that rabbit hole. Let's go down that rabbit hole, why that long term greedy seems to stumble even amongst those who believe in it. Right. And by the way, getting worse. Yeah, it is. And I think one of the reasons is, is even with long term greedy, there are metrics that help you measure that you're on the right path. So the growth may be slower, but at least it's heading in the right direction.

40:53And I think that's where we confuse what metrics are because that's all a metric is, which is it's a measurement of speed and distance. And you modulate so that you can stay in the game. If you've ever run long distance, you don't hear go and run as fast as you can because you'll run out of juice. You have to run a long distance, Simon. So this is what happens. What is that like? When people run long distances and the gun goes, you can't run as fast as you can because you'll run out of juice. You have to modulate. If it's a short race, you just run as fast as you can and then the race is over.

41:29But a long race, you have to find a pace so that you can stay in the race. But the point is you're still moving forwards and you can still measure that pace and you can see how tired you feel and you modulate. And I think that one of the problems in climate is we don't have effective metrics that help us measure speed and distance to know that we're at least on the right path. So in other words, so that if we continue in this path, we can see that long-term greedy will work out. What scientists are asking us to do is just go on faith alone. And then every year they say, oh, planet's warmer. Doing worse.

42:06You know, natural disasters are worse. there's no weekly or quarterly metric that says we're on the right path folks let's keep with this or this is going a little slower this going a little faster let's modulate this we don't have regular notions of progress we just everything is yeah you screwed it up again and that sucks to hear the carbon footprint of the average american at least sort of consciously doesn't doesn't feel that, what's the word, bad, like, like relative to entire nations, or relative to I mean, even just the, I don't know, the ships that are moving all the stuff we need to live our lives around the world.

42:51Right? Like there are layers to, to, I think, for a lot of folks to hear, like, well, wait, like, I'm doing my best. I'm, you told me to recycle, I do the recycling, I do the things I can, I walk where I can, blah, blah, blah. And it just feels like such a big intractable problem. And to your point, yeah, there isn't, there's no good news every year. You look for these little glimpses. There's, um, God, there's a nonprofit I've been supporting called ocean cleanup and they have these dope machines. Have you seen this? No, they have these dope machines that eat up, uh, garbage basically. I mean, massive.

43:27So they, they basically clean up plastic that's already in oceans, waterways. And it's so interesting watching this because on the one hand, you know, it feels it and you'll see trolls on the internet be like it doesn't matter like we we need to end using plastics yesterday and all this stuff but there's something for the for the proponents of it there's something deeply satisfying just seeing someone making progress yeah seeing that's it tons of waste being removed from a waterway to get it's a metric you know it's something. And we're very visual animals. We're incredibly visual animals, which is why we're so often metrics obsessed, right?

44:09Because we want to see results to feel like we're making progress. And if you can't see it, I can't feel it. And so it makes total sense to me when you're scooping junk out of the ocean and you see a thing filled with it that you're going to then go process. You're like, we're doing good because there's a metric. And when people just say, you know, turn the tap off. There's no, I don't know. Take a shorter shower. Okay. There's no metric. And I think that's one of the things that's missing from all of this. Just to go off on a little tirade, an aside, I get such joy. I think it's so hilarious when people debate whether the validity of climate change based on whether it's caused by human beings or it's just natural cycles of climate, which is like debating whether you have lung cancer from smoking or genetics.

45:01Does it really matter? Does it really matter you have lung cancer, right? And even if it is just a normal cycle of climate, that's the equivalent of a meteor hurtling towards the earth that is going to hit us and kill us all. And we can all assume safely that that was not made by us. It's just the cycle of big rocks in the universe, and one of them is heading our way, would we intervene and try and push it off course? Or would we say, no, no, no, leave it be. It's just the cycle. Of course we would intervene. Absolutely. By any means. You know? And so these ideas that we wouldn't intervene because it's a natural cycle or debating where it comes from are such a waste of time and energy.

45:46It's a good point. It's a good point because both sides will definitely waste a lot of air time trying to convince the other side yeah and it you're to your point i never thought about it that way it really isn't worth it we acknowledge it's happening so do something it's happening it doesn't matter where it comes from it's happening and it's kind of like it's kind of like god there are some people who who don't really believe in god but they pray just in case and that's like like like okay maybe climate change is a hoax but what if it's not yeah maybe we do like some of it just in case yeah yeah the marketing the why if i will uh that has always resonated with me that i don't understand why folks don't push more especially more conservative folks i am not let's say i don't love going out into nature i'm not out here like Like, you won't find me hiking on a weekend.

46:48You won't find, like, I did do Boy Scouts, though, as a kid. I was a Cub Scout. Well, Tiger, then a Cub Scout, then a Boy Scout. Only made it to life. Didn't make it to Eagle. I'm a quitter. But I loved going camping, and I loved spending time in these parks. One of the things that did lead me to appreciate was the natural beauty of the world. And this idea that you always leave the campground better than you found it. And it was a simple principle. And I just thought, damn, like there is at a minimum, regardless of who's to blame or what's to blame, we have a planet that we at this point only have one of for our species.

47:25And we should be trying to do right by it. And thankfully now I think we're seeing the wonder of what technology can do. I think we're approaching some big breakthroughs here. We talked about AI. Robotics is tied hand in hand to that. Carbon sequestration. like actually like trees are a great way to do it all natural god invented method of you know capturing carbon but we have some man-made versions of carbon sequestration that are actually getting more and more compelling and we have invested in a few like heirloom carbon where where i i i do think in the next 10 years we're going to find some phenomenal ways to actually get better using technology at healing this planet and that's also the stuff that when you're thinking about an enterprising person who wants to devote decades of their life to solving a problem, especially one as big as climate.

48:16I hope that these young people see the chance to build as a much more seductive calling than, and I'm going to get in trouble for this, but then standing on a street corner in New York, trying to get me to stop and sign their pamphlet, it's nature conservancy. and I'm just like, please, like, don't, like, this can't be, this cannot be the best way. Like, I'm on your side. This makes sense why you're saying this, because you're talking about an entrepreneurial perspective versus a corporate perspective. You know, the corporate perspective is this is the way things are done. This is the way things have always been done.

48:52This is the thing that has always existed. And this is the thing that we're going to double down on with all the bureaucracy and complication that come with it, because this is the thing that is familiar and comfortable. And then there's the entrepreneur that says, got it. You can keep doing that if you want, but I'm going to be over here doing carbon sequestration with technology. And, you know, maybe let's just, let's see what happens. I think more entrepreneurial spirit, I agree with you. It is ironic on so many levels. And you're a hundred percent right. Like the politics don't matter. Like we want to protect nature because you know, you're an environmentalist and you care about nature, great.

49:28That's your motivation. You want to protect nature because you're a hunter and you love being out in the woods on a weekend with your mates and I want to protect the woods. You want to protect nature because you're religious and this is God's creation and I want to do what I can to protect God's creation. The motivations are beyond politics and for some reason, in our very American way, managed to politicize them to the point where we're debating about something that is literally not political. Mother Nature gives no shits. It doesn't care how you vote. It does not care. And she has given us a cool blueprint.

50:04And I'm telling you this stuff. You spend a little time. I've been doing the foundation fellowship for three years now. And the most inspiring part of it is, so it's 18 to 24-year-olds apply. So this really is, I feel almost like a college professor seeing these pitches. This is the next generation showing us what's possible. There's a young woman, Maddie, who started this company called Living Carbon, where they are literally breeding trees. I think it was a type of poplar to be even more effective at sequestering carbon and growing even faster. And like, when I think about how, if I were 20 again, and I were thinking about what's that next company I'm going to start, I don't know if it'd be a social media company.

50:45And obviously Reddit's done and served me really well. Thank you for saying that. There is, oh, but there's this generation now that just feel it's, it feels within our grasp to actually make a huge impact on that otherwise very intractable problem. And we've reached a point with the technology and we've reached a point with, I think the youth of society, the really motivated, the entrepreneurial ones, where they know like, okay, like we saw how guys like me were building, you know, for the last 20 years, like, what can I do to take these skills and really build something that I'm going to be so proud of and built in, they'd have a tremendous impact.

51:22And I've got some of these trees literally planted on my farm here. And every time I take a stroll by them, I'm like, hell yes. Like there's an amazing team of hardworking people. It may not work, but there's this amazing team of hardworking people that have, are going to devote decades of their lives to building trees that are going to do an even better job sequestering carbon so we can plant these things everywhere. But this goes full circle to where we started this conversation, which is neither you nor Zuck, All of these big tech founders, none of them imagined in their wildest dreams that the thing that they did would have such an impact in the world.

51:55I think one of the challenges that young entrepreneurs have when they're in the climate space is they can see the impact they need to have. And I think it's overwhelming. And I think maybe to take that more, dare I say, it's not really realistic because it's still idealistic and beyond what most people are imagining. But maybe don't try and boil the ocean, but try and make progress towards boiling a piece of the ocean. Yeah, absolutely. Just like cleaning up, build the first robot that can automatically clean that first waterway and pull out five tons of plastic and then build the next one a little bigger.

52:33And then build the next one a little bigger. The way you clean your house is you start by cleaning one room. I didn't know this was a climate pod, Simon. I don't know. I mean, it's, you know, this is where it went. I love it. I do want to know, though, when you were putting that Y Talk together, did you know it was a heater? Like, you'd probably given it a few times before in some setting or whatnot. But when you were, like, you knew you had something? So the answer is yes. I had been giving the Golden Circle Y Talk for about three years. before somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said you want to do this tight there was no way i was like he knows this thing is a heater and it's so good there's no way it was just like yeah i guess i'll throw something together tomorrow yeah no i i'd been giving the talk for the talk for three years i had everybody i'd had hecklers and people throw stones at me stop and i'd been asked all the questions i'd worked through them already and i the the challenge i had wasn't what i thought about the talk, the challenge I had was my talk was always an hour.

53:42And I had to do it in 18 minutes. 18 minutes. Yeah. And so that was that was the hard part. But I but the the the idea set had already been validated for three years before I got the tap on the shoulder. That's why I got the shoulder because somebody had seen me give the hour long talk and said, you know, you should do this at TED. And so I got this, the opportunity to do a TEDx. Yeah. I love this. And I have to and I make a note of it too one because I had a hunch I needed to ask because I remember I remember watching that talk and I was like this is good I was like this is good feed me this is good but it's also worth noting too I always love for the benefit of your listeners in case they ever had it twisted like the final product never shows the hours and hours and hours and hours of work and stones and all the things that you endured before that point and it's like we so many people myself and and others saw the that final product there on stage that went viral but you you lose sight of the fact this was these were ideas that you were refining that you were thinking on that you were beating up that other folks were beating up that like got to that thing and that's what made it was all of that work that made it so spectacular yeah it takes it takes a long time to become an overnight success.

55:02Yeah. And I just, but like, it's not, I don't know. It can never be said enough. And so I'm glad, I'm glad. But again, it goes back to tech, right? Because, you know, you meet some of these founders, you know, that have built businesses that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars sometimes. And you're like, when did you start? They're like three years ago. So there seems to be the twisted notion for young people that there isn't a lot of work required to be an overnight success. You just need to play roulette and get the right investors and the right valuations and ta-da. And maybe that's true for some, whether those are sustainable businesses or not.

55:40And there are definitely some businesses that came out of nowhere and blew the doors off. But again, that number is – that's like winning the lottery. My favorite thing about those founders is they don't acknowledge that they simply won a lottery. They think they did something and then they go around and give speeches about how to succeed, which is the equivalent of a lottery winner giving speeches about the numbers they chose. And if you choose these numbers too, you too will win the lottery. Sometimes it's just to say, hey, man, I was the right idiot, the right place, the right time. There are very few, if I just think over the last 20 years, there are very few enduring successful tech companies that were truly overnight.

56:21And even the ones, you know, you look at OpenAI was the fastest, biggest consumer launch of all time. Like they were iterating GPT for years. Years. It was a nonprofit when they started. But I think they started in like 2014. Yeah, yeah. And they never expected it to be a business. Well, maybe they did. Yeah. I think you're right. I think you're right. I mean, I saw Sam Altman speak in an event like a week before he decided to leave the not-for-profit and become part of the profit business. And somebody asked the question. He's like, no, I have no shares and I'm just happy in my not-for-profit.

57:02And like literally a week later. So I think you might be right there. Let me ask you a couple of final questions here. Sure. What can you tell us for people who are young entrepreneurs or just in our lives, when is it time to step aside and let others take over? I mean, you did it at Reddit. Yeah. How does one know when it's time to move on and let somebody else take the reins? Like how do we know when we've Peter Principled out? Well, I don't think I Peter Principled. Well, you didn't Peter Principle out, but you certainly came to a place where you're like, all right, I got to go. Yeah, well, that's where I knew one voice out of five on a board, especially for issues that I really felt strongly about, like banning violence and banning hate communities like that, that stuff.

57:55I realized I was in a room that I wasn't aligned with. And these were things that I just knew were right for business were right for society were right for all these things. And I couldn't, I couldn't do with being the front man of a company and a founder of a company where I was just one vote out of five on something that felt so obvious. And so the promise I made, this was four years ago, is I was just never gonna let myself get in that situation again. So even in building 776, which is this is gonna be my life's work, doing early stage investing, incubating but in all the companies I build from this and in this it's just me uh from uh like there's no there's no uh board so to speak where I could ever have four other voices telling me like no no no like communities with violence and gore are fine and that was a that was a it was a frankly it was a moment where I I think I shed some of my own naivete about like how the world actually works and just realized you know what I have enough agency I have enough freedom I have enough, you know, wealth that I've been fortunate enough to accumulate.

58:56Like I can just write my own sort of playbook for the rest of my career. And this thing that was like the big part of my identity for 15, 16 years, read it. You know, it's something my kids didn't know anything about. I think in Olympia was three, Adira wasn't even born. So I could manifest whatever I wanted for them to know me as. I wanted to, they needed to see me working. That was important to me. But I needed them to see me doing really the best work in my career and doing it in a way that I felt was aligned with values. Full circle. It goes right back to values again. Yes. Well, I mean, it's, I think if you find yourself in these rooms and you have the ability, right, obviously, like, if you've got to pay bills, like, there's lots of reasons why to stay in these harder situations, even if you don't really want to.

59:40But that's, I mean, that's a conversation for, that's an entirely new podcast. Like, that's a whole new episode, which is when we find that our values are being violated, we can rationalize putting those values aside to quote unquote pay the bills or everyone's doing it or you know that's what my boss wants you know when when the ethical fading starts to set in and we we can rationalize putting our values aside that can't be good over the long term but that's a different conversation yeah i and i agree and i think there has to be i think as i've gotten older it's helped give me more clarity and and look i'm not i'm not putting myself on any kind of high hours here.

1:00:20I mean, I know the world is gray in so many things. There's some black and white things for sure, but there's a hell of a lot of gray. And so I just wanted to have, you know what I wanted? I wanted the a hundred percent agency to, to be able to make those decisions. And if I made them wrong, that's on me. But if I did something that felt really right and it was the right thing, like I got to do it. I didn't have to ever be in a room like that again. So that's what made me. I love that. I love the accountability. What women's sport are you investing in next? Gosh, I'm actually, okay. So I've been waiting to do something in basketball and it's not a WNBA team at the moment, but, but my alma mater UVA has an amazing women's basketball program.

1:01:05And so I'm putting some dollars toward, I don't know what it's for. I don't really need to call it something. I'll be a patron of a patron of the UVA women's basketball team. And basically thanks to NIL, I can put dollars to work. I mean, college sports is never going to be the same, but in particular, college women's sports are never going to be the same because these women can actually now get brand deals that make them matter more to the NCAA, right? Part of the reason in four years, you went from women's college basketball, not being allowed to even say final four. And that's true because of some trademark thing.

1:01:41They didn't want it to be ruined, you know because it was for the men only and they had that weight room debacle during covid where the women had like two benches and the men had a whole full gym yeah we went in four years from that nightmare to you know caitlin clark angel reese the highest ratings ever women's college basketball in you know this recent march madness tournament did better numbers than the men and and how that shifted was was yes you had generational talent and amazing athletes and And NIL forced everyone else to realize how valuable these athletes were because their social media following didn't align with what the NCAA thought was their value.

1:02:23So they weren't getting TV. And this is unfortunately the vicious cycle that has trapped most of women's sports. They didn't get TV, didn't get promotion, didn't get that stuff because the men in charge didn't think people wanted to watch. but you got assholes like me tweeting for years now that if you just looked at their follower accounts the women of college basketball were way more popular than men and nil allowed the women to monetize that and now that you have athletes making some are making seven figures a year again the free market speaking loud and clear and now you're not making a case about you know equality or feminism or social justice you're just simply saying like the market's spoken like ncaa if you're not supporting these women you're bad at your jobs yeah and and so i i've been just excited to be able to do this especially back uva and i want to i need to do even more back there um but this was a great place to start so it's not really an investment because it's obviously it's donations but um still it's investing in in these young women in the program and hopefully it'll scale not all investments have financial returns it's still an investment that's right that's right we invest in education we invest in the future we invest in our children and you're investing in college women's sports.

1:03:29It's an infinite ROI. Alexis, what a pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time. I really, really appreciate it. Thanks so much. My pleasure, Simon. Big fan. So thank you for having me. Thank you.

1:03:44If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsynic.com for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. It's produced and edited by Lindsay Garbenius, David Jha, and Devin Johnson. Our executive producers are Henrietta Conrad and Greg Rudershan.