Possible: Alexis Ohanian on the future of online and offline communities

26:21There's ways around this that we can kind of cobble together in these next few years. And then when I think of the role that they play on the platform, I actually think there's a tremendous role to be played. And assuming you're doing a very good job of finding proof of humanity, then you be very explicit about the role that bots are playing. There's been bots hacked into Reddit for years. There were Dogecoin tip bots on Reddit over a decade ago. I think Twitter has some pretty good examples of it. But Reddit is actually one of the best bot ecosystems, in part because a lot of the tools were sort of cobbled together by users to fix problems in the core Reddit UI UX.

27:03And so we want agents and bots from day one as a part of the dig experience. So what does that mean? A good example is the most powerful force that an AI could provide are the volunteer community leaders, the sort of moderators, who spend a disproportionate amount of their time actually doing janitorial work. It's not very fulfilling work. They go through a kludgy interface to basically say, yeah, this is spam, this is spam, etc. You can imagine in sort of our ideal scenario, the job of being a community leader is inverted. Instead of spending 90 % of your time doing janitorial work and 10 % of your time doing like fun community building work, like, hey, we're doing a giveaway this week, or hey, blah, blah, blah, we got so-and-so to do an AMA, it would be flipped.

27:48And we'd actually be able to use these agents, again, very transparently, but to let these community leaders spend most of their time doing the fun human stuff and not the annoying, very manual today type work. and i think like a lot of things if we create the right framework and again being transparent with users is crucial here um i think it'll also give birth to a ton of other great ideas you know the ama was not invented by any red employee the ama was invented by some random redditor and it's become probably one of the most iconic catchphrases of social media in the last decade ask me anything and it was just some random user well that whole network innovation thing is part of a what entrepreneurship does part of what silicon valley does part of obviously the question around you know kind of like where the amazing thing comes from left field out of field etc say a little bit about how you've been investing in ai you know kind of where you think ai is going to play kind of a role in the next generation of creation and human creation you know i don't know what ai means for women's sports it probably means a lot for trading and collectibles, but like, what's the set?

28:57Oh, AI means a lot for women's sports. The reason there's so much opportunity in emerging sports, which are oftentimes women's sports because they were underinvested in is because it is a blank canvas for innovation in men's sports. You will hear, you know, well, this is the way it's always been done. And there's a ton of infrastructure. There's a ton of people. There's a ton of folks that are going to tell you like, this is the way it's always been done. The one advantage to decades of underinvestment in women's sports is that you can just build in many cases. And so when we think about the next generation of women's soccer, women's track and field, these areas where we're innovating and investing really big, AI is going to have a radical impact on training, player safety, health.

29:44You're going to see soccer has tremendous investment, right? There's a lot of the best teams in the Premier league are using AI for training, for development. They're starting to get a lot better about understanding each player's strengths and weaknesses, again, all through great computer vision tech that we now have using basically off-the-shelf hardware. The women's side has so much less investment. We just think of scouting infrastructure. You look at second tier. I was trying to watch French soccer match, that second division. And over the weekend, it was impossible. I actually tried signing for three or four different services.

30:20I wanted nothing more than to pay money to be able to watch this. But getting the broadcast outside of the countries is nearly impossible. There's just literally no one providing it. That's how bad the infrastructure is. And so you run that down and you realize, okay, now that there's a ton of investment going to the highest levels, Angel City is now a$300 million sports team, the most valuable in women's sports. It didn't exist four and a half years ago. it will take a lot of time for that to flow down to the second divisions third divisions collegiate youth and so where that has been under invested in historically is an opportunity for someone to come in and say okay why would we be doing scouting the old-fashioned way with like dudes with clipboards when we could be running tape through a machine and identifying who had the best you know passes this game who had the best goals this game like there is an amazing revolution that's coming in emerging sports and will largely be women's sports.

31:13I think within five years, you will see software that understands talent and depth across multiple divisions and age groups and all that stuff in a couple of major women's sports. Soccer will probably be the first one that rivals the men where people are like, how is it possible that you have such forward-thinking, innovative software and data for the women's game that's better than the men while the men still are having bigger market caps for their teams, etc. And it's going to be because of that leapfrog. But then there's also been hardware. I pointed to teenage engineering here. They're thinking a lot more about how AI will play a role in their next generation of hardware.

31:54I think industrial design, because it's still very hard to make atoms. It's very hard to do them beautifully. It's logistically harder than ever to get all those components in one place. And taste is still so valuable. And while there are interesting things to build in software, as we get better and richer and richer digital lives, I actually think we'll start to appreciate the hardware even more. Even just seeing my own seven-year-old's relationship to AI. And the ChatGPT app is definitely the one that runs all the numbers for us. And seeing the way she converses with it, seeing the way we do a big question every night at dinner, we started doing this pre-AI.

32:32and so poor Papa had to be the answer. And we'd look it up if I didn't know, but she was also younger, so the questions were a lot easier back then. But now the questions are getting harder. I force her to bring a big question to the table every now for dinner so she can ask it and then we can get an answer. But now we just go right to OpenAI and she's just having a conversation with it. And seeing how natural that is helps me recognize my own biases to even go like this and type because that is not a natural thing for her. I think because I was so hung up with speech-to-text being bad for so much of my life that it took a seven-year-old who's really only known amazing speech-to-text to help me realize like, my God, you're right.

33:11Like this paradigm is here. And this is the fun part. This is where I think hardware is gonna really wow us in these coming years. And it's gonna be fun.

33:24Meet Nicole Nicholas, Capital One business customer and co-owner of Ansett Uncles, a plant-based restaurant and community space in Brooklyn, New York, that got its start from a need for unity. The inspiration, it was born from the desire to create a space that felt like home, where we can connect community culture, good food, and come together with family and friends. That's how we birthed aunts and uncles. Nicole and her husband, Mike, were fulfilling their dream of bringing people together out of their home kitchen. But they soon learned that the demand for community was greater than they knew.

33:55It became overwhelming and we were like, we need home, but not in our actual home. We realized that there was also a need in our community for something bigger in our neighborhood. So we had to find a place. Moving from a home operation into a storefront was a huge next step, but Nicole and Mike were able to take it on with the help of Capital One Business. It's not for the weak. As a small business, finding resources is super important because that's the way you'll be able to manage and scale. We would have never done that without having Capital One to be able to help us along the way. The cashback rewards are very helpful.

34:31You know, it just gave us that runway to be able to breathe a little bit. Then you get to focus on the cooking of the food and making the experience great. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. For all the parents out there who are listening, first of all, tell us a little bit more about this nightly question. Like, what should we be doing to make dinner less terrible? and then two, like, what do you tell your daughters about living in the age of AI? Should they be using it every day? Should they be wary? Like, how are you preparing them for this sort of next generation of, you know, work and life with AI as ubiquitous?

35:06Oh, I want Olympia using it every day. I will make a point to say, I don't know, but you know what? I can find out instantly. And now, okay, the good news is, I mean, there was probably a version of this for Google that I would have done for her 10 or 15 years ago. And there was a version of this that my parents probably did with like the encyclopedia or a dictionary 15 or 20 years before that. But I genuinely am so awed by the fact that super intelligence will be a commodity for her. And I love that in my work life, but I also still have the baggage of being 41, almost 42 years old and trying to keep up, but not like we all aspire to be first principle thinkers, but there's nothing like actually seeing the world as a child, as like a blank canvas.

35:51And so, yeah, no, I want her to use it every day. I want her to use it as a tool for her creativity. We started with the latest Chat Chabu T release. I dug up some of my old sketches. I was an only child, so my dad and mom thankfully saved everything. And so I have a notebook of my old sketches from when I was a kid. And I took some photos of them for her to show her and had them convert these pencil sketches into full-color illustrations. And even some half-finished ones. And it was just so wild to see her reaction to it. Now, when we do our drawing classes, we're watching a YouTube video of there's this great father with a bunch of his kids and they do his art for kids YouTube channel.

36:32It's great. And he has these beautiful tutorials. You can draw anything. And so we'll do these drawing classes together where we've got this YouTube instructor teaching us fun little things and we're drawing it side by side. And then now I can take a photo of it and bring it to life. And my daughter is still engaging in the creative pursuit. she's still literally with a physical marker drawing on a physical dead tree paper but then we can level up that art with the playfulness of taking a photo and then seeing the photorealistic version of it and then you know make it flying through space and again these are the crappiest version these tools will ever be and so i encourage for parents is like please be using these we're on synthesis school as well to buff up on the math homework that's been going pretty well i want her to understand this is a superpower that she should have and i still need her to know the fundamentals of reading and writing and arithmetic for sure but i want her to know that the raw intelligence part has been solved for and now it's going to be about her agency and her grit and her creativity and that's great yeah and and by the way i completely agree with the breadth of enablement I do think that actually it's not solving the raw intelligence.

37:46I think it'll still be elevating intelligence in all different ways. But I want to particularly focus on this intersection between the land of bits and the land of AI and the land of atoms, the land of physics. And you do a lot of stuff about the future of physical products. You've invested in startups creating new physical artifacts like monumental labs, you know, AI and robotics that modernized stone carving, co-founder of Mantle, a social network for collectibles. So how are you thinking about physical products and the value in this digital world how is the ai intersection with that obviously what you're doing with art and parenting as a part of that but give some lens of that combination of bits and atoms so this is where i think things get really exciting the monumental story was an easy one i i saw a tweet and i have a bust well it's the head of a sculpture of an athlete, like maybe circa 600 BCE.

38:43So I couldn't get 776, but it was pretty damn close. And I thought, gosh, I'd love to know what this whole sculpture would have looked like. And here's this random startup doing this combination of AI, robotics, and sculpting. Like, hey, maybe the CEO can help me out. And that led me to a number of conversations just to better understand the state of stone carving in 2025. And the fact that we have all the buildings we have in America, because glass, steel, concrete are just so damn cheap. And we know the environmental impact of the concrete part is especially bad. And aesthetically, you could argue, things started looking a lot more cookie cutter versus you take that wonderful trip, go to pick your European city and you see beautiful stone carvings on building facades, not just sculptures, just everywhere.

39:29So enter robotics and AI and being able to do the stone carving for much, much, much more competitive prices. it still has humans in the mix. They actually do the last 10%. Humans design it digitally, right? And the robots get to work, knock out the first 90 % or so of the sculpting and the last 10 % is human. And if you love Michelangelo or pick your favorite sculptor, the reality is they actually literally only carved a small portion of that sculpture. They had their team of people, a studio that was actually doing a lot of the work. So it's actually a nice sort of comparison to the way it was done in the olden days.

40:05and here's an opportunity now to further human creativity not replace it but further it and it shouldn't surprise you that in even just the last year and a half two years as they've brought this technology to market artists sculptors in particular have now started pushing the boundaries of sculpture using monumentals robots to do sculpture that they never could have done before literally because there are certain movements and certain designs that only could happen robotically and they've actually integrated that into their art and i think you're going to start to see more and more playful remixes of this where you're taking an age-old human craft like chipping away at a stone and blending it in with technology and creating something that is beautiful creating something that is way more environmentally friendly by the way and creating something that is timeless and i really believe these screens that we sit in front of and that we take out of our pocket will just keep getting so damn good.

41:03Not just in their fidelity and their size and their cost coming down, but the things it will know because of AI to show us when we want to see it will just get so, so, so, so good. And again, the optimist in me believes that as a species, humans for whatever, hundreds of thousands of years have spent way more time around campfires, you know chasing gazelles holding physical things than we have in front of screens and there is some part of our fundamental species that will long for the atomic world as as good and in fact i think ironically as good as this digital world gets which i love don't get me wrong i love a good digital world i think for the vast majority of us it will actually make our yearn our craving for the physical atomic world even greater.

41:55And that's why I'm so bullish on live sports. I know I'm never taking my daughter to go see a robot have a perfect weekend at the Masters, right? The reason you're paying attention to that is a fundamentally human experience. Now, AI robotics will make that experience better for us as fans, for the training, for everything, but it's not going to replace that fundamentally human experience. I'm actually very bullish on theater. We will get a very different looking Hollywood 10 years from now. I don't think it's going away, but it'll be very different looking and what's on a movie set and all that.

42:24And the production quality, all that stuff is going to look very different. And I actually think again, because these screens will get so damn good, it will be more compelling than ever to go to a space and for a couple hours, have the lights go dark and have humans on stage. Maybe they're telling jokes or maybe it's Shakespeare. Maybe it's a Broadway musical. That live in-person stage experience, I think it's even more important and even more seductive for us. Because again, as a species, we have listened to someone in our tribe tell a story over a campfire way longer than we've seen a screen in our room showing us, you know, Iron Man.

43:00And again, love me some Iron Man. Big fan. But I actually think these human experiences, these atomic experiences don't diminish. I think it actually becomes even more important to have great ones and we will seek them out. You're hitting all my greatest hits. I mean, beautifying cities, in-person interactions. literally in the last 24 hours, my husband and I booked a magic show, a comedy show, a Mets game and a Liberty game. And we're like, F it, we're just doing it. Like we just got to do it. So I love it. And I couldn't agree more. So again, I'm a default optimist. I think the majority of people this will vibe with, and this will be the future.

43:36I do think realistically, there is a minority of people, I don't know, 10, 15 % for whom I think this does become the like, like the black hole of like, this is where I can go. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad anti-social experience, but I do think realistically there is some percentage though, that actually gets everything they need out of these screens. And for, I mean, not literally, but like there is a societal question there where if you have, I don't, I don't think it goes, Oh God, ready player one, but there is undeniably some dynamic though, where it goes in that direction too.

44:10And so look, part of the way to win there again, I really believe is keep making better stuff that gives people that reason to have community and that sense of belonging. And again, just having a laugh in a dark room or escaping whatever is on your mind for a few hours at a Taylor Swift concert. Like those are things that are still going to be durable. Now the other 80 % of music that's like one hit wonders, probably going to have a bad time, right? But I mean, Taylor's a religious experience. That will be an exception, but we're going to see a lot of change. I love your discussion of the real world.

44:43And I feel like of all of our podcast guests, I will say you probably have the most interesting background. So if you wouldn't mind, just tell us a few things you got there, maybe like a Russell Crowe mask from Gladiator. Like what do you got back there? So it's, I've got a little gentleman's farm here in South Florida. It's like four and a half acres and it was all just land. And I told my wife, I was going to build a farm. And she was like, you don't know anything about that. And I was like, I don't, but I'm a VC. So I can, I'm supposed to be pontificating on things I know nothing about. And I was like, trust me, I can do this.

45:18Turns out way harder than I expected. It was a very humbling experience, just like even building up the farm team house, all this stuff. Anyway, we got to set up and I've built this, this is like giant garage, but I've made it, it's my office. And so it is full of all kinds of collectibles that I would have, I think, dreamed of having as a kid that I just can get now. So yeah, that's, that is the helmet from Gladiator. Like when he takes it off and he's like father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I have my vengeance in this life for the next. And, uh, and then I've got this Iron Man that was from the end game.

45:51They made like 30 that they placed in like movie theaters and stuff. That is an actual, I don't know if you can see, that's an actual Captain America shield from first Avenger. That was the one of the hero shields. Got a couple of signed jerseys. Alex Morgan, got to give her props. When I rage-tweeted about how undervalued women's sports was in March of 2019 and said I was going to buy a team and it would one day be worth a billion dollars, she was the one who responded in my replies and was like, I can help. She took an hour out of her day. I brought her down from Orlando. I was just taking notes trying to understand the opportunity in women's sports.

46:23She's technically signed that for Olympia. I've been holding on to it, keeping the office. I got a Brady jersey too, but But, you know, sorry, Tommy, you didn't get me into women's sports. And gosh, what other stuff? I got some Kaepernick jersey. Oh, there's Alexis Arguello. So he's right behind the helmet there. That's my namesake. He's a Nicaraguan boxer. I think he won titles in three different weight classes. Gosh, there's just a bunch of random stuff. I got my little mon-retro chromatic for, you know, gaming sessions in between here. I've got my Michael Jordan rookie card. I got, obviously, the most valuable Serena Williams rookie card ever.

46:55i kind of have the largest collection of her cards i quietly started buying them about five or six years ago when they were horribly underpriced and uh and then so we had that collection all vaulted with alton it's all for my kids and you know maybe grandkids one day um so yeah no shortage of collectibles

47:19all right so let's start with the rapid fire is there a movie song or book that fills you with optimism for the future? Movie. I only watch dystopian. You know, there needs to be more. Can I make a request? I would love to see the white mirror. I would love to see the tech optimist version of black mirror. I think, look, I think the cautionary tales are very important and it makes for some great storytelling. But I'd love to see the more optimistic take. I feel like I haven't seen one of those in a while. So yeah, that's my humble request. Not enough. But book, I don't know. You know, Unreasonable Hospitality keeps coming up all the damn time, and I give it to every one of my founders and CEOs.

48:01Such a good book. Big fan of EMP, the restaurant. And even if you're a tech CEO, you might be thinking, well, what the hell could a fancy vegan restaurant teach me about my business? But Unreasonable Hospitality is fantastic. At the end of the day, now having worked with a wide, wide range of successful and also the unsuccessful founders and CEOs from the very beginning, I see this common theme of the ones who really care, who give so many dams when it comes to the user experience, the customer experience, all this stuff. That's not a guarantee of success, but to me it feels like a necessary requirement.

48:35So that makes me optimistic. I think if we take a minute and realize just how many of the things we use every day are made by people who just don't care. It's fine, I get it. You just go home and pay the bills. I get that. But humanity lurches forward every time some fairly small group of people are so unreasonably concerned with doing the very, very best and just going that extra bit. And it makes such a difference. And again, it doesn't have to be some Michelin star restaurant. It could be the Taqueria down the street. But you can tell it when you see it, when you taste it, when you feel it, whether it's the products you use or what have you.

49:09And I love – I always want to champion the builders. If you care that much, consider me a fan and supporter. What is the question you wish people asked you more often? Why did you choose not to play in the NFL, Alexis? And the answer to that is, you know, I peaked in high school. Thank you for asking. There you go. No one has asked me that, as you can imagine. So where do you see progress and momentum outside of your industry that inspires you? I mean, am I technically in the women's sports industry now because of all these teams I own? I mean, I'm a tech guy, but the reason I love this job is we get to be true generalists.

49:49So I don't even know if there's an industry I'm not somehow a part of through some investment. So I'm going to cheat a little. I think space tech is definitely one I never could have fathomed when I got into this back in 2012 that I could be doing an investment in a rocket company like Stoke or just any company. space tech type company and now let's see these decks all the time and almost take it for granted and i got look at this here's a flex so i was obviously not fit to be an astronaut or my parents also never sent me to space camp i guess it was expensive but i love the fact that we're entering an era where this is normalized because look i love i love planet earth that is definitely the the plan a and and i do actually think lots of this new technology can help us live better lives right here on earth, which I think is paramount.

50:44That is very important. And it just gets me so fired up. There is a part of me, probably the one who loved, I mean, there's a prop pulse rifle from aliens. Also probably not the best advertising campaign for going out into space, but growing up loving sci-fi, I think it is, I feel so, so fortunate to live at a time where we're just starting to see this start to come to life. And it makes me excited for my kids who should reap some tremendous benefits from all of that. And look, AI plays a crucial role here, whether it's going to be those first robots that end up colonizing Mars, whether it's the space robots that are going to be floating around outside of our orbit.

51:25Who knows? This really feels like such an exceptional time. And I definitely will never be confused as an astronaut or a rocket scientist. Of all the industries that I'm really, I can't say I'm truly in, this one just fires me up so much. Like again, I think it's a good thing that we're pushing the boundaries of like colonizing Mars. I also think there's a lot of work to be done here. And what's great is Space Tech's going to help in so many ways. So let's go. I mean, so many people talk about what a terrible time we're in, but like you really do exemplify the possible attitude of like what an exciting time to be in.

51:59And so our final question is, can you leave us with a final thought on what do you think is possible in the next 15 years if everything breaks humanity's way? And what's, you know, what's the first step to get there? Wow. 15. I mean, look, we're looking at tremendous breakthroughs. Health is the first one that comes to mind. You know, it's very fortuitous that we have the capability of now affordably sequencing an entire human genome and doing it pretty quickly, which is just basically saying, hey, we've got a ton of data now. What do we do with this data? Oh, hey, AI. We've got your solve for that.

52:36And that was my thinking behind Nucleus, which is a company we seeded a few years ago. I am so optimistic about what the future of healthcare looks like the next 10 to 15 years when it comes to not just identifying, getting ahead of, and then even treating, I mean, personalized medicine. We are doing our job well. Everything breaks right for humanity. If 15 years from now, my kids are like, your medicine was barbaric. like it will look crazy how ham-fisted and inelegant our medicine was oh you've got cancer like we'll just nuke it with a bunch of radiation i don't speak about this lightly i lost my mom to brain cancer like i really feel very very strongly about finding these cures and i think it will be a testament to the success of this technology if our kids get to look back in a short window and just be like my god look how far we've come and if that can mean you know again not just for the wealthy, but for everyone, access to tremendous life-saving care or life-improving care, wow, that will be massive.

53:38And I'm less hung up on the, hey, if we can solve for energy and solve for work and money is meaningless, all that other stuff. I think we will always find something to do. There's some part of us that will just invent new jobs. And I don't mean that in like, hey, go dig this ditch and then, hey, you go fill that ditch the next day. But I'm not worried about us wanting to keep ourselves busy. When I go to how can the world be amazing in 15 years, I think about health and I think about the effect that it has on so many of our lives, how incredibly inequitable it is today. And yet still, even for the very wealthiest among us, they all fear the same call from their doctor.

54:24And yes, money can get you much, much better treatments and much, much better doctors. But again, if we get this right in 15 years, even those treatments that the wealthiest among us have access to, like those should look like amateur hour compared to what we'll be able to do and what the average person will be able to get in 15 years. And that, that to me would feel like a huge, huge win.

54:49Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schleid, Vanessa Handy, Aaliyah Yates, Paloma Moreno-Gimenez, and Malia Agudelo. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor. Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sepieva, Thanasi Dilos, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relis. And a big thanks to Jenna Birch, Nefitieri Moncur, Ashraf Shemarani, and Maggie Comon.