Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder and Armenian-American tech activist, traces the platform’s rise from a 2005 link-sharing site to a cultural hub, crediting Steve Hoffman’s algorithm and accidental self-posts like AMAs. They debate internet culture—from Google Glass’s niche potential to Dogecoin’s viral charity (Sochi Olympics bobsled sponsorship)—and warn net neutrality’s collapse could stifle innovation. Ohanian highlights Aaron Swartz’s tragic prosecution for downloading JSTOR articles, pushing for legal reforms like Aaron’s Law to curb disproportionate penalties. Rogan jokes about replacing courts with Reddit but agrees: systems built by flawed humans demand constant questioning and transparency to evolve. [Automatically generated summary]
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I've talked to Nicaraguans about this, and he got very involved politically after his fighting days, and there are a lot of people who believe there was more to that story than just a suicide.
I mean, that's what everybody admired about Alexis Arguello was the same thing that anybody admires about anybody who is involved in the creation of something cool.
And you're involved in the creation of the coolest fucking website on the internet.
Having, I mean, right there, yeah, certainly from the Armenian side, you know, they came out of survival.
My mom actually came for love to marry my dad, very romantic.
But both of them, right?
The reality was, leaving her life, she was on track to be like a pharmacist in Germany, but coming to the States, she was just an ignorant, like, degree-less immigrant, right?
In quote-unquote.
And so she worked jobs that she had to work just because it was paying the bills.
Like, she worked as an au pair, she worked in...
I'm so incredibly, like, I'm proud of what she did to leave a life behind, a comfortable, great life in Germany to start fresh here.
And then obviously my father's family, like, you know, when you grow up with a bunch of Armenians, you know real quick how lucky you are to have that sort of genetic lottery of being born here instead of over there.
Isn't it crazy how one event like that It's not that Armenians wouldn't have nationalistic pride or pride of origin before that, but that one event has everybody bonded together so much more.
And especially because a lot of folks don't even know about the Armenian Genocide.
And it has been so co-opted by money and it's frustrating.
It is.
And I am an optimist.
Don't get me wrong.
I think the internet, I mean the reason, in part I wrote the book, the reason I campaigned against SOPA PIPA was I really believe the internet can be a way for us to get the government that we deserve.
I remember getting my first PC. It was a 486SX. My parents...
I was lucky enough to get that when I got it in middle school, right?
My parents didn't have a ton of money, and they didn't know shit about technology, but they knew enough, and I got that chance, and that has provided everything for me.
But there are kids coming up today who, by and large, have known this technology from jump.
And they've known, they don't even know what a dial-up sounds like.
And so they think of knowledge as being something in real time.
Like you were saying earlier, you know, we're sort of developing this attitude of like, oh, right, we can go seek out this information.
We can squelch gossip on Snopes or we can go learn how to do, we can learn string theory on Khan Academy.
But this generation coming up, they just, they take it for granted because they just know, oh, I have a problem or I need to figure something out or I want to create something and share it.
Like, The internet.
And that's how all of us got to learn the programming languages that helped us build things like Reddit.
But it's helping filmmakers right now.
It's helping artists.
It's helping photographers.
It's helping comedians, right?
Like, think of the wealth of knowledge that the up-and-coming comic now has to learn from, to look, to share.
Like, I was doing something about almond milk, and somebody let me know on the podcast that, what's his face, Louis Black has a great hunk on soy milk.
It's basically the same joke.
And, like, you find that out because of the internet, too.
But the good thing is, I wouldn't have known that unless that joke could have made it into my arsenal, and then I wouldn't have even known that Louis Black had it, and then it would be...
I would be accused of plagiarism, and I would feel stupid.
The speed with which you can learn shit, this brings everyone up.
It forces us, and we see this in tech all the time, just because of the nature of writing code and creating applications, you know competition is as efficient as it gets.
There's new stuff coming out every day.
And it forces you to stay up and to be innovating and to be pushing.
And now I think of it as there are so many more, in this instance, like comics who are connected, who are watching, who are seeing what someone is doing and they're like, alright, I'm not going to take that joke, but now I just got to, I have to push harder, faster.
And on the whole, I think we all benefit because we'll get better content.
The real problem with plagiarism, whether it's in that or blogs, you see it in blogs a lot.
I mean, people still are getting busted for it.
Yeah, rightfully so.
Yeah, absolutely.
But the difference between the mindset is what's really important.
Like, the guy who's an actual writer, the guy or the girl who's an actual writer, the girl who's an actual comic, What they're trying to do is figure shit out.
And they're trying to find ridiculous points in things and then make funny observations about those points.
If you're just copying stuff, then you're not exercising whatever it is that tunes you into those ideas in the first place.
So that you're lost when you're done.
If you get busted stealing jokes, and then you have to write your own, you're like, holy shit.
I don't even know how to do this.
You're like an open-miker.
That's why you see the guys who've been accused of plagiarism.
There's just like...
High period in their careers and then this massive drop-off where you look at it and you go, oh my god, who the fuck is writing this?
This isn't funny at all.
You went from being this guy with these really funny points to this monkey with dog shit coming out of your mouth.
Like, basic forum software where someone creates an account, usually with, like, a pseudonym, right?
They create an account.
They post a link or they have a discussion.
This stuff is as old as the internet, as the World Wide Web.
What Steve and I got right was we adapted it, modernized it a bit, because we let people at large upvote or downvote.
And essentially, I hate to simplify it that much, but Reddit is like a next generation forum platform.
And then what we realized that Dig and all the Dig clones didn't realize...
Was that they were just one front page.
We knew if we were going to win, we would have to be a platform for communities.
Dig was a platform for a community, right?
The front page would only have so much stuff on it.
But we knew, you know, Steve and I knew that we had a, you know, there were things we were interested in, right?
We're interested in technology.
We're interested in the Redskins.
We're interested in like...
Just football.
We might have a certain audience, but what's going to make this work is if anyone who has a particular community or a following, whether you love My Little Pony and want to create a Reddit about that, a subreddit, which there are lots, or you want to create about your favorite team, or you want to create about your favorite TV show, or just about science, or asking questions about science.
Ask Science.
Amazing sub.
All these things exist because we knew this has to be a platform.
Just like Twitter is a platform for individuals, this would be a platform for communities.
We constantly fight against ring voting, all that stuff.
But Steve built a really smart system with a really smart hotness algorithm.
And by the way, we're open source.
So if you want that, go take it.
It's there.
And I think it is, for what it is, it's one of the best on the web.
And I think that's why our content is so good.
It used to be, right?
We started with just people linking stuff out.
The first link on Reddit, fun fact...
Was a submission I made to the Downing Street memo.
Remember that?
It was showing this leaked memo during the run-up to the Iraq War, the English government kind of saying like, hey, we're going to drum up some support here to support America going into this war.
But this was the first submission to Reddit, and it wasn't that new at the time.
But I was just thinking, like, hey, if this thing actually worked, like, what would we want Reddit to be a place to, like, find and have people link to?
And this seemed like the perfect thing, right?
The internet enabled some person to put this image of a leaked document online and shared the world, right?
Massive printing press.
But what's crazy is we thought that's how it was going to always be.
Maybe like three years in, some user, because users are fucking clever, linked to a comments page.
Like they knew when they hit submit what the link would be, like the number, the random number, well not quite random, the sequential number we would generate.
And so they linked to it.
What they effectively did was create a self post, which is now a feature in the site.
But basically Reddit only used to let people link out to other sites.
One user hacked it and learned you could just link to itself and create this amazing comment thread.
So you wouldn't, you know, when you click on it, when you do an AMA, right?
You're not creating something that links somewhere else.
You're creating something that just creates a Reddit comment page.
And what that user did by hacking the site was show that there was a tremendous value in just saying, hey, people, have a discussion about whatever it is.
And today, I believe it's a little less than half of our content is actually linking to Reddit.
So it's actually an AMA, or it's an Ask Historians post, or it's just people talking about shit.
It's not even linking to other content on the internet.
It's like some people use it in a negative way, but some people use it in a positive way.
Like, dude, I fucking hacked the system.
Someone's saying I hacked the system.
That's in a positive way.
But, oh, these hackers broke into this website and put dicks in everybody's picture.
That's how we look at it.
we also have this weird sort of connection to adolescence like adolescent pranks hacking being some sort of an adolescent prankster type behavior which I don't think is fair either you know what it is that's an interesting point there are There's always been a spirit of pranking.
I'm talking OG hackers, like MIT, building the internet early, like Steve Wozniak being an example.
And I think what's cool is there's that childlike wonder.
I think a lot of that shit usually gets beaten out of us as we get older, especially in a lot of traditional industries and whatnot.
And so I'd like to believe that that can even be an excuse for people to think about stuff a little differently and think about stuff a little more like, take things a lot seriously.
The amount of information that's available now, the world is so wired that it's like we're standing in this crazy river of ideas that are just constantly flying by us.
And a few people are looking around, poking their head up out of the water and just looking at each other going, holy shit.
I mean, I want to be hopeful enough to think that there is a chance for someone to get into it for the right reasons and then be able to stay in it for the right reasons.
I don't know how much of it was a hustle, you know what I mean?
I mean, whenever you have a story and the guy who, it's his life, it's based on a story, it's probably going to make him look a little bit nicer than he was, a little bit more innocent in the beginning of the movie, but it's that system where You see Leonardo DiCaprio.
He starts out.
He's a family man.
He's a nice guy.
He drinks water.
He doesn't want anything to do with drugs.
And he gets co-opted by the Matthew McConaughey character.
And then he becomes a part of this system that's fucked up.
And so he's a victim.
He becomes someone that you can sort of sympathize with.
Yeah, so I think equal system, once you incorporate yourself into it, like a lot of these politicians who probably do go into it with good intentions, I think you find along the way that if you try to buck the system completely, you probably get blackballed.
There's probably going to be a lot of blowback against you by your party, by competing parties.
You're going to be in a tough situation, you against the world.
And that's how they survive.
They survive by sort of attacking each other like this, and then propping up these individual candidates that differ only slightly from each other, and all of them supported by the same giant hood of money that comes from corporations.
So if you're a young guy and you're a senator from Delaware and you decide that I'm going to make some changes in this world and if you elect me, I'm going to blah, blah, blah and blah, blah, blah and then you get in there and you're like, oh, fuck.
But the funny thing is, there's this kind of like, okay, at a certain point, there'll be mutually assured destruction where the president is going to have photos of herself from a party in high school.
We're going to get to a certain point where everyone's got shit on everyone from all the stuff we did ever.
But that's going to take a little while.
And in the meantime, I mean, I hope that the thing that still makes me hopeful is coming back to the finance side of things.
Money is the corrupting influence in Washington.
One of the biggest.
And right now...
There are a few people who can put in a lot of money and have a lot of an effect.
What I hope the internet can do, and we've started seeing this happen, is in the same way that it's given a voice to people through social media, we can start using small amounts of money and in aggregate start having a really big impact.
We've seen these money bombs before in 08 and in 12, but I feel like the software is going to keep getting better and better with crowdfunding and with these models that are going to really inspire people to want to give to a candidate and know that there's actually going to be accountability to with How that's spent and who they are and whatnot.
One of the big ones, one of the really big ones that people think is kind of frivolous, especially people who don't smoke marijuana, is the legalization of it.
The legalization of marijuana in Washington State and Colorado is fucking gigantic.
Those are the impacts that it's had on their economy.
It's been so big that everyone's forced to step back and go, wait a minute, we'll...
Okay, alright, so now we know.
Sweaty hands, rubbing on their pants, and a lot of fucking late night meetings, and a lot of guys pacing back and forth, and a lot of people yelling, John, they're going to smoke pot, okay?
I see the discrepancy between the federal law and the state laws, but if you're not having feds knocking down doors in the District of Columbia, I think maybe everyone's in agreement here.
And you see so many ex-law enforcement, so many ex-DEA people come out in support of legalization because they realize if the goal...
If we have a common goal here to actually make our streets safer and actually curb the criminal element that comes in with this, legalization is the way to do it and make a lot of money and help a lot of people live better lives because they don't have to be treated like criminals for a drug like marijuana.
It, uh, and it's, it's, it's just, it's so interesting because now there are enough, basically, right, 10 years ago, the culture of people who were spending a lot of time communicating on forums online was pretty small.
Like, it has reached a point where, uh, it's nearly a, it's so, so ubiquitous or so close to it that, yeah, these, these memes, these funny, interesting image, whatever they are, can catch hold and Literally millions of people can see it.
I mean, it gets a little weird when you see, like, Rick Astley in the Thanksgiving Day Parade a couple years ago, Rickrolling everyone.
It's a strange thing when something just catches on like a virus, like a real disease, and spreads across, I mean, or an organism, almost like a thing with a lifespan.
And what's so wild is, you know, because of that hyper-connectivity, because of how fast these ideas now spread, right, these memes, like, humans are sort of naturally really good at this, but now we can spread this shit faster than ever before, right?
Within hours, within minutes, millions of people can see an interesting photo of a cat or an interesting video or what have you.
But there's a lot of people that still believe that it does something negative, that it slows you down, that it removes motivation.
I think people have to realize the motivation for motivation in the first place.
Why is that so inspiring to you?
What is motivation?
You want someone to get off their ass and get a job and get to work?
Well, they just have to be excited about something.
Most likely, they're more excited about sitting on the couch than whatever it is they're being exposed to in their life.
It doesn't mean that marijuana removes motivation.
It means that if you're one of those lazy bitches that doesn't think outside the box, and you're stuck in a spot, and you're discontent, and you like to get high and sit on the couch, you're probably going to be like that for the rest of your life.
And the idea that all the benefits reported by people like, I'm not saying you smoke a little weed, but I'm saying you probably smoke a little weed, or me, or anyone else who does, that's all discounted.
The fact that it's still around in 2014 is really a truly unbelievable story.
Because if you looked at it logically and factually and said, could you imagine a culture in which information is sent instantaneously all over the globe to which the answer to virtually any question a person can come up with?
Can be answered on your phone in a matter of seconds.
That you truly have the information, the current information of the world at your disposal.
Could you imagine that it would be one of the most beneficial plants that grows easily, contains essential amino acids, it's very high in protein, It can make you think about things differently.
It's based on these reverberations or these vibrations from the past.
It's all like this scramble when people were retarded.
When they came over on boats and this is just how they did things.
Get him in the clink!
Throw him in the jail!
You fucking scoundrel!
You were smoking marijuana!
Or whatever the rule that you broke is.
That they realize that they can do it so they do do it and they throw you in some fucking cage.
In 2014, the fact that that's still going on and that people are actually profiting from it, these are more things that the internet has a huge fucking problem with because the internet has guys like you.
There's young fellas that are very smart and unconventional and seeing the system and being like, you know what, I don't buy it.
I think there's some shit that people I knew growing up that were adults, I knew they were fucking idiots, and I knew they made bad choices.
And now I'm looking at the repercussions of this everywhere.
I'm looking at it, and I'm saying, no, this is dumb.
So this is one of the things, especially talking to college students, that I love bringing up, which is that, and I'm the first to admit it, like, I have no fucking clue what I'm doing.
99% of the time, especially when I got started, I still don't now, and I've come to realize, like, And I've been lucky enough to meet some pretty successful, impressive people.
But you dig onto the surface, we're all just hacking it.
We're all just expertise, experience.
Those things all help.
But every one of us is a fallible human.
All the conventions and rules and status quo we know were created by other fallible humans.
And there's no reason not to look at that and go, huh, does it have to be that way?
Or why is it that way?
And if the reason why is, well, that's the way it is, well, that's a terrible reason.
And when you see the world as being that hackable, so to speak, you start to realize, all right, let's actually question stuff.
I remember I was a freshman at UVA when 9-11 happened.
For this generation of millennials coming up, nearly all of us, one of our first really vivid memories of the world was 9-11, this awful tragedy.
And then we get into these two wars, and then think of all the authority figures we've had in our life since that moment.
They've all at one point or another either misled us, This sort of deceived us.
You've got the financial crisis.
You've got the housing bubble.
All these conventions.
Oh, trust us.
We know what we're doing.
This is the thing.
The American dream is buying a home.
Go to college.
Take on that student loan debt.
Don't worry.
There's a job waiting for you.
Every single one of these conventions from all these people in power have not held up.
And so I think in particular, millennials look at that very skeptically because we're like, all right, you know what?
So the conventional stuff didn't work out for anything.
We have no choice but to realize, you know what, we're all just hacking it.
So let's dive into the passion.
Let's figure out a better way to do something, not settle for the way it's always been.
I don't want to name any names because it's sort of like someone who got tricked by a guy who said he was in the military so they had sex with him and then it turns out he was just a liar.
And the girl feels bad.
I don't want to shame anybody.
So I won't say any names.
But yeah, there were some comedians, for sure.
There was definitely some comedians that listened and changed their persona and came up with a plan and it never worked.
Because once Jeremy's got you dancing, first of all, now I control the dance, buddy.
I mean, allegedly it was Mitzi's idea, but obviously we're not pals with that dude, so we probably shouldn't tell his life story without checking in with him.
He probably doesn't even know at this point.
Yeah, well, I don't hate the guy.
I just hate what he's doing.
there's been a lot of those club owners that come up.
The best club owners are like Wendy from Denver, who just stands back.
She's, you know, if you're doing well, you're doing well.
She encourages originality.
And her clubs have built like a real scene in Denver just because of her.
Like if there's one person that like is important for the, the, the entire Denver comedy scene, It's just one lady, Wendy.
Yeah, so the joke was that he was going out in style with this big fat Kentucky Fried Hooker, and it was just this horrendous old man, young buxom blonde bit that just was so disgusting.
And Mitzi would go, it's disgusting, it's not funny.
If you got it down, and not in the beginning, god damn, it takes a long fucking time to not be on shaky legs every time you go on stage.
But, once you get good enough to where you kind of like, you understand yourself better, so he's not as insecure, you're not as concerned about acceptance, and you can kind of relax, and you're more comfortable in your own skin, and then you kind of understand the roots of humor better as you get older, and then you become a comic.
So then, boom, you're a comic.
And I think from there, it's all just about maintaining.
It's about continuing to do it.
And once you do that, it's fairly easy.
It's like once you're doing that.
But it's like once the train is moving downhill, it's going well.
But if the train stops and you've got to get it uphill, oh, you're fucked.
That's why guys, when they take time off, something weird happens to comedians when they take like three years off of comedy and then get back in because their prospects are slim.
Those are some dark sets that you watch.
You can see the bottom of a man's soul.
You can see some shit, man.
Because they forgot how to do comedy.
I mean, they just fucking forgot how to do comedy.
But one way that I like is to sit down and listen with a notepad and write down shit that I shouldn't do anymore or write down shit that the front end is clunky and it works over here and I'll just keep doing that.
So instead of using it like, instead of having a notepad, but I always still have a notepad anyway, because I still, for whatever reason, I haven't let go of the nipple.
But the notes, like written notes on that are almost just as good.
A tip on the iPhone is you turn it sideways so it's the wrong, you know, like when you have it pictured the wrong way, and then you take a screenshot of that so it keeps the black bars on the side, and then you add it.
And they actually just had a bunch of press in the globe.
They're building software specifically for industries.
So they're working with doctors at Beth Israel who can use them to help check in folks, get their records, because they need both their hands free, right?
They're working with energy companies so that people out in the field can...
Have real-time data on what's going on at this random oil pump.
Like, if they gotta, you know, check settings or updates.
Like, basically, they're targeting specific industries where people need both their hands free.
And so it's not the sort of obnoxious, like, walking around on the street, ordering a latte from your face.
It's like, this is a very specific task where I need both my hands free and this is helpful.
Cow tipping, at least as popularly imagined, does not exist.
Drunk men do not on any regular basis sneak into cow pastures and put a hard shoulder to a cow taking a standing snooze, thus tipping the poor animal over.
While in the history of the world, there have surely been a few unlucky cows shoved to their side by boozed-up morons, we feel confident in saying that this happens at a rate roughly equivalent to the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.
YouTube, the largest clearinghouse of human stupidity the world has ever known, where you can watch hours of kids taking the cinnamon challenge, teens jumping off rooftops on the trampolines, and the explosive results of fireworks set off indoors, fails to deliver one single actual cow tipping video.
And there would be cows that would sit there perched up on their legs, just sitting there sleeping.
We would come over and just push them right over.
I don't know if that's the cow tipping that you heard everybody doing, people saying that the cows tip over, but that's what we used to do because that's what we thought you were supposed to do.
See, they would sit like this, and then you just go over there and just push them over, and they would roll over and wake up and freak out, and it would be scary, and you would run away.
Now, cow tipping, what I think they're saying is not true, is actually tipping over a cow that's completely standing up, maybe.
While cows may doze off for a few minutes at a time while standing up, they typically lie down to sleep or simply to rest.
Okay, I'm calling bullshit on the people calling bullshit.
I think Brian's right.
I think Brian is right.
He went cow tipping.
And that's how you really cow tip because what everybody says is that cows are sleeping and you go up and push them.
Well, obviously, if that's not true, if they only take a little nap standing up and usually they sleep lying down, then their whole premise sucks because they don't understand what cow tipping is.
Well, Duncan went to school in Asheville, North Carolina, and when I went up there, I understand Duncan so much more after visiting Asheville, because it's just a hippie mecca.
They were getting...
And there's apparently the mushroom flora or whatever it is.
The spores are so healthy up there because it rains a lot.
And there's so many of them that they had to start giving the cows some sort of an antifungal diet to kill the mushrooms.
I still flinch whenever I watch the YouTube videos of the crash tests and those things, because they are more resilient than you'd expect, but I would not want to be in one at a top speed.
There's a guy who used to fight in the UFC, Matt Grice, and he got rear-ended.
Someone was going like 60 miles an hour, and his car was parked, and he...
anything just the impact of the car he had a brain surgery and they to remove a plate on the top of his head for this one see this one yeah and then put and then connect it back on it ended his UFC career it's you know the guy would been had been in like all these crazy fights like really action-packed wars and a car accident took him up anything in a parked car yeah Boom, you see that thing here?
But it was on the 5, which is kind of a sketchy freeway, and apparently it's just a giant collision, nine people dead, like one of those horrible fire situations.
That's totally true, but will you long for freedom?
One of the things that I've been thinking about when we were talking about you're saying, like, oh, I wish I was...
I'm jealous of these kids that are born today.
I don't buy it, because I'm very...
I think that I'm very, very fortunate to have been born in a time where the internet didn't exist, to grow, to be a young man without it, and then experience it once I've kind of...
When I understand myself and the world a little bit better and got to see two different worlds, get to see the world pre-internet and got to see the world post-internet.
The people that are growing up just post-internet, like there's a certain something we're all going to miss.
We're all going to miss just getting on a motorcycle and driving on the highway because eventually that's going to be illegal.
It's going to be illegal to be in a fast car.
It's going to be illegal to do anything that propels you on your own.
But if you look at what's going on with technology, if you look at the idea of self-driving cars, at a certain point in time, what's the justification for letting someone drive their own car if their ratio of crashes is even 10% higher?
There would be bits of that, but it's still not as bad as, like, if it's 1% of the people doing it, which I think is still pretty high, but, like, then you still have 99% of them being efficient robot cars.
I think, without this sounding too, you know, into the future, the hope is, though, humans are resourceful.
Even if you had it mandated where every car was just, it only knew how to self-drive, someone would hack it.
Someone would figure out a way to get a wheel on there.
The highway flooded with these self-driving cars and other people are standing up while they're driving their continental convertible screaming at the top of their lungs.
I mean, I know a little bit of the pre-internet world.
And I'm still jealous, but I will have...
You know, I'll have my own transition.
This is all a process, right?
The generation coming up will take the internet for granted.
They'll have that.
But like...
There is inevitably going to be something else that displaces them and blows their minds.
Maybe it's like the Gattaca baby situation.
I think...
We're already at a point now where we can better understand human DNA. It's the point where it's like, alright, it's not unreasonable to imagine a world where like, hey, if you don't want this genetic disorder, we can make sure your kid doesn't have that.
Dude, I always tell people, fuck getting an MBA. I got a job doing public speaking as a teenager, being embarrassed routinely, and then my next job was in the service industry, and I waited tables and cooked at Pizza Hut.
And seriously, that will teach you...
So much about entrepreneurship, right?
Because at the end of the day, you're on the front lines for...
I mean, your pay is coming from that tip.
And it's a matter of balancing, you know, satisfying the customer.
A customer is not always right, but almost always right.
And dealing with it and solving problems with other humans.
And if you can bridge that gap of, like, empathy...
Man, I use that every single day as an entrepreneur.
But that is top flight advice for any, especially because, look, I know those of us especially getting into tech, it's a hot industry right now, right?
There's more money than ever going into it, making a lot of people rich.
There are a lot of kids coming out of college who want to be the next Zuck or the next whoever.
I think for a lot, I think I'm just getting a sense, and I'm generalizing here, but I think a lot of the kids right now who are trying to get into that maybe never had that job, maybe never had that bit of perspective because Right.
That I think has helped me a ton, tremendously.
I think it's obviously helped lots of people over many, many centuries to just understand, get a bit of sense.
I mean, I know I live in a bubble now.
As much as I wish I didn't, I know I to some extent live in a bubble, but I still try to...
Keep that perspective as best I can, which is hard, but it's the fact.
And look, what you're talking about, that's skilled labor.
Like, speaking of things like with the robots, skilled labor is something that still, like, when robots can do that, they will enslave us.
So those jobs, or what I'm trying to say, are going to be really, they're fundamental already, but they're only going to continue to be important because humans have to do them.
And they are shitty, hard work, but we don't have enough people.
I know Mike Rowe has a really good campaign, actually, for getting more young people interested in the trades, because there's a huge demand for welders, for carpenters, for all these people, because we don't have a generation coming up now that knows how to do this stuff.
I mean, I can barely put together IKEA furniture myself, and I'm lucky because I'm good with, like, a laptop, but...
Well, not only that, I mean, doing carpentry, like building a house, is really kind of fun.
Building a house is very rewarding.
If you're a guy that has developed, like I grew up, my stepdad was an architect, and so I grew up around a lot of work developers and a lot of construction guys.
I got to see the pride that they take when they've completed a job and built a building that they designed.
They all work together on this.
It's a cool thing.
It's a cool thing to see and watch.
And the fact that that's sort of like a dwindling part of what kids are looking to do in tomorrow's age, it's kind of sad.
When you look at the future, when you see what's happened just in the short amount of time that Reddit's been around, you see what happens in the time of your first computer when you were on...
But when you look at that and you look at the future, do you think the future is going to be in some sort of like an implant or some smaller and smaller device that lets you interface with the web?
One of the things that actually really intrigued me about the world...
is that, you know, you have people who have lost limbs, for instance, or were born without them.
And replacement limb technology basically hasn't changed at all.
Like, it's the same Civil War, Revolutionary War replacement up until very, very recently.
It's basically just like, here's a stick.
And there's been so much innovation on the last couple of decades to help with limb replacement, right?
Where you can actually move digits on fingers based on impulses from your armpit.
You obviously, there's the Blade Runner, and to see the improvements on feet where you can actually run faster on these artificial limbs than on the real ones.
There are people who are living through this right now because of whether they were born this way or some injury that happened.
But you're also seeing people who are deciding to enhance themselves through this technology.
An artist is born literally colorblind, is able to hear different colors through an iBorg antenna that he has now had implanted into the back of his head.
Whoa.
Just for colors.
Just for colors.
He's just colorblind.
He's not even blind.
31-year-old Nir Harbison.
This guy really wants to see colors.
From Camden.
How will he know if he's seen them?
If he's never seen them before.
How do we know what the fuck that is?
Maybe he thinks it's colors.
And you're like, can I borrow your eyes?
Bitch, you don't see color.
Fucking shitty ass eyes back.
It's like people who were trying to convince you that the first droids were good.
All this is to say, I think we are approaching a point where these technologies, basically the internet, have a much more seamless interaction with us.
Enjoy this moment because when it hits, it's going to be so fucking weird.
When the singularity does take place, which I personally think is going to be some sort of an artificial creation, whether it's artificial intelligence or a network that can think for itself, a sentient network.
I've got a front row seat, and it's been fascinating.
That's one of the things...
So Y Combinator was the VC firm, the seat stage VC firm that first invested in me and Steve like nine years ago.
And I work as a sort of advisor and ambassador for them these days.
But like...
The companies that come through there, like, I mean, yeah, me and Steve got through with Reddit, but if we'd applied today, we would have just been laughed at.
If we'd applied today with what we did nine years ago, we would have been laughed out of the room because the applications, the quality, the richness, how much they've created and how far they've come is so much further along.
And so we are, you know, companies like Airbnb and Dropbox, for instance, also went through Y Combinator.
Multi-billion dollar companies that started the same way we did, just a couple of founders and pizza and working.
And we're seeing companies now that are doing...
Like, there's a self-driving car company that went through the last batch.
There are a couple of engineers who have outfitted their Audi with a self-driving thing.
It looks like the thing on top of the police car.
It looks like one of those things.
And it's just all the sensors.
And they can do highway driving in this Audi.
You can actually, like, sit in this thing while it drives.
And it's a self-driving car that three engineers have been hacking on for the last six months.
Like...
You can just drop your jaw and be like, holy shit, this is a wild future that is being created right before our eyes by people just like me.
And things like the Google Glass, which I think is just a step along the way.
The gap has to be bridged.
I mean, it's not going to be bridged in one instant application that's an injection of nanoparticles into your body that allows you to interface your retina and your visual cortex with the World Wide Web as distributed through government Wi-Fi.
I mean, that's probably 100 years from now or whatever it is, 10 years from now, who knows how things get crazy?
The 405. Don't fuck around the 405. When you come over that hill, when you're going into the valley, if you're coming from Santa Monica and you're going over that hill, prepare for death.
There's no cell phone coverage when you go over that hump.
And people are not really into the idea of being in a car with a bunch of other people.
Everybody's so self-important out here and so non-integrated.
It's one of the things I was thinking of when I was starting to raise my kids.
I was thinking, maybe my kids would probably do better if they lived somewhere like New York, where they kind of had to interface with people all the time on a regular basis, a bunch of different strangers all the time.
Whereas California, where everybody's like, we go from one box into another box, and occasionally we see people that step out of their boxes, and then they go in their boxes, and we all go our separate way.
Whereas in New York, everybody's sort of like meshing.
Actually, one of the subs, I don't remember, because every subreddit is its own forum, its own community with its own moderators.
One of them actually banned climate deniers.
Like, they basically said, we're not going to...
And then, you know, what typically happens is, this is like any WordPress blog deciding, hey, we're no longer going to post stories about blah.
So if people really want it, they go and create a new subreddit and they're like, fuck you guys, we're creating real politics or really real politics or whatever it is.
So it's a robust enough system that new things rise.
But like, people can create these sort of forms in these communities and run them as they see fit, and if people don't like it, they create another one.
I think there's always going to be someone who tries to do that, but you're dealing with the numbers of humans are so great.
It would be really difficult for someone to subvert that system as a clandestine group trying to intercept ideas.
Throw disinformation into them.
There's just so many really smart people out there that can see through bullshit and that will post contradicting information and show what's wrong with this and then spend a lot of time to make you look stupid.
Those guys are good at it, man.
There's some fucking awesome discussions, whether it's on Reddit or I have a message board that's been around since 1998. You're an OG, man.
Now, how do you keep someone from, like, say, if someone was on Reddit and they were posting something about an ex-girlfriend or being rude about information or photos, how do you stop that stuff from happening?
It's also, I feel like with a lot of the distasteful stuff that people are getting really upset about, I think that it's one of those things that the human race is just going to have to go through.
It's like a phase or a stage in this integration with information that we're going through.
There's still anonymity.
And the anonymity is something that people cherish.
They cherish their quote-unquote privacy and their rights to privacy.
And they have all these ideas about it.
But that's going to be like saying you don't want to see people anymore.
It's really what it's going to be like.
I reserve the light to not see people.
Okay.
Well, if you go in the woods and go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep in the woods where there's no people, you cannot see people.
However, if you want to be in cities, you're going to have to see people.
It's not going to be as simple as you're hiding behind DuckTuck69, you know, that's your name, and you're distributing all sorts of nasty, evil shit.
And then, what did you think about, here's a good example, that one guy that he was on Reddit and he was like, apparently he was very rude and put a lot of nasty shit on, they found out who he was.
And he got fired from his job and it turned out like this is a guy who's got a family and he had to support them and now he's like been publicly shamed.
The price you pay for freedom or for the freedom to post stuff is to have to take responsibility for it as a content creator.
And, you know, it's like at the end of the day, you know, you create the soapbox.
So like we created a kind of soapbox or a printing press or a hammer, right?
Like any kind of tool.
And so at the end of the day, we're not responsible for what Ultimately, someone does with a hammer or a printing press, the vast majority of which is good, sometimes cannot be.
And he essentially paid the price for that.
And it's frustrating because...
On the whole, the vast majority of people who pick up that hammer are, you know, like any random Twitter user or any random person, like just being reasonable, normal people.
And some of them aren't.
And, you know, it's a matter of saying, you know what, we want to have this be that open platform.
There's no, fundamentally, there's no way to stop or police every single thing that gets done in real time.
We make our best effort, and when on occasion there are things that are illegal, we Well, we do what we need to do.
Well, apparently this guy was a real douchebag online, just a real asshole and rude.
And so people sort of justified that he could be taken down because of that.
But in his defense, and it's a sketchy defense, what I would say is that if the precedent's been set, and the precedent is anonymity, And there's some people that get a charge out of using that anonymity to poke at people and be rude and nasty, and they get some weird sort of sick charge out of it.
Okay, yes, they definitely are causing discomfort.
Yes, they are definitely probably quote-unquote cyber harassing.
But that precedent of anonymity is very strange because...
Once we've established sort of what we think is going to be the standard reaction to these things, people are going to get upset, they're going to ban screen names, but what they're not going to do is find out who you are and then go to your employer and expose all your shit.
And once that does happen, it's like, whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
I thought we were playing a game.
He might have gotten out of hand, but he probably thought at least part of it was him playing this game that was afforded to him by anonymity and probably what we understand the laws to be.
So one of the things that is generally accepted is this idea of not...
The challenge is...
So this is pseudonymity, that he had a pseudonym.
He did not, or any one of us who goes online to use a pseudonym, still has some kind of a persona online.
And they probably use that account elsewhere, or maybe they don't.
But there's some acceptance in this new world that like...
All of, one can find out almost anything about sort of publicly available stuff about us with enough searching, with enough sleuthing, with enough phone calls, with enough tenacity, right?
Every investigative journalist has been doing this forever.
But like, there is this challenge that like, there is no, there is no easy answer for this because ultimately there is going to be, right?
That's going to show up as a website.
It's going to show up as blah, blah, real identity.com.
And some really determined person is going to create that thing.
That's going to out whatever it is.
And there aren't, Very clear laws around this, just because it hasn't really...
I mean, there's no precedent for it.
And so for the time being, it becomes, you know, try as much as possible to discourage this idea of like, quote unquote, doxing.
And the kind of a game is they're trying to piss people off.
And they're trying to get people to argue with them.
And sometimes they'll argue both sides.
They're having fun.
And some people take it real deep.
Just like I was saying that if Stan Hope was in the room and I was on stage talking shit, I might say something extra fucked up just to make him laugh.
I think they do that with each other as well.
And I'm not saying that it's all innocent.
But I am saying that if you do look at it all...
Honestly and objectively, you've got to leave room for the entertainment value of people fucking with people on the internet.
But what it will do is open them up for the consequences of such behavior that they may have been unaware of.
And that's what the interaction that the internet provides to the average douche wad from 20 years ago never experienced.
You're not going to experience...
If you're just one of those guys that has some fucking racist thing that you spout out in your neighborhood and nobody calls you on it...
You know, maybe because you're big or maybe because you're important.
Maybe it's because of the neighborhood.
But if you put that shit on your Facebook page and someone takes a photo of it and then puts it on Reddit, boom, Sherlock, lock, boom.
It's coming at you, son.
Fucking thousands of people you never met calling you a cunt, saying they know where you live, saying they're going to find you and smack the shit out of you, saying they're going to shit in your mouth and hold it down.
The whole thing's a mess, but hey, what are you going to do?
It's part of what makes us fun.
I think part of what makes people fun is our folly.
I think if we were all beautiful and perfect and Dalai Lama-esque, come on, man, a bunch of people wearing orange everywhere and no one's getting their dick sucked.
It is the thing, when you hear about Chinese dissidents who are looking at Tiananmen Square Massacre photos, right, even though there's the Great Firewall, it's because of Tor.
And this is, I mean, it's been, like, it is, it really is one of those pure forms of, so it's open source software, right, so you can take a look at the source anytime for...
You know, not only improving it, but also just sort of promoting that transparency.
But it's the thing that lets us actually get through any of the states that want to try their hardest.
I mean, China's spent a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of smart people trying to keep the internet down.
But thanks to Tor and Resourceful Humans, you know, they lose.
Well, maybe not best, but I like explaining it as like Legos.
And so a bunch of people through the internet with pseudonyms who maybe never even met each other in real life brought together their digital Lego kits to build something cool that no one had built before that now lets anyone, like I said, open...
Openly surf the internet in spite of some of the most powerful and repressive states in the world.
What did you think when that older Japanese gentleman who they credited with creating Bitcoin but apparently maybe didn't and they really hounded this fucking guy and Waited outside his house and knocked on his door.
It's just some poor little man that you can fucking harass.
Even if he did encrypt it or whatever, figure it out, code it, if he did create Bitcoin or was one of the people who created Bitcoin, you'd have no right to hound him like that.
Is it safe to put your Bitcoin IP address out to accept Bitcoins?
Meaning, like, I was thinking about doing it, but then I was like, wait, so then I have, people are like, no, you don't want to put your number out publicly.
But you can generate, so if you use Coinbase or use something else, you can generate a key that's free to distribute that people will use to give you currency.
I mean, that is one of the most hilarious stories of all time.
The fact that it's all Magic the Gathering online exchange and then from there it becomes one of the biggest Bitcoin exchanges on the internet and it's totally not coded correctly and people are just sticking knife holes into the bottom of the bag.
It's stealing blood to the point where hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin is missing.
Yeah, but Doge is this satire that people are actually taking seriously.
It's very clearly a joke that everyone's in on, but in that spirit, lots of people are like, yeah, Yeah, look, it's taking the piss out of cryptocurrency.
And like, that's kind of funny.
And its mascot is a Shiba Inu.
And yeah, why not?
And it's bizarrely gotten momentum, in part, on the heels of this tipping system.
So like forever in a day, people have pitched...
Microtips.
Flatter was one, there was another one called TipJoy, where it was like, if you're a blogger, you're a podcaster, one of your users can come on and be like, that was cool, here's five cents.
And that was really the idea.
Saw a lot of pitches for this, none of them took off, for a variety of reasons.
What Dogecoin has been able to do, and it exists on Reddit, it exists on Twitter, is developers have created these tip bots.
So that if you say something cool on Reddit, you just type in a comment with this particular syntax, and it'll tell me, oh, look, Joe Rogan just tipped me 5,000 Dogecoins.
Now, that's actually not a lot of USD, but it feels like, hey, it's 5,000 things.
What is this?
Let me go collect it.
And, like, weirdly enough, it has gotten a lot of momentum, and so there are Twitter bots where people are routinely tipping each other in Doge.
When you look at the potential that places like Reddit and these information sort of distribution networks have, does it kind of freak you out that you're a part of that?
I mean, I think the biggest obligation I felt was during, was it two years ago, these SOPA PIPA bills, these two awful bills that were going to break the internet.
What got me at the time, I was working on another startup called Hitmonk, a travel search website, and then the SOPA PIPA thing happened, and all my friends were like, Explain to people who don't know what Soba PIPA is, please.
The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act.
And the first is a House bill.
The second was a Senate bill.
The entertainment industry basically spent almost $100 million lobbying for these two bills to curb piracy.
That was the intent.
And that's what they said.
Except the lobbyists who wrote these bills were...
The bills were embarrassing in terms of how broad and overreach...
It was like a sledgehammer...
and it would have really fucked up the internet.
It would have made Reddit impossible for me and Steve to start.
It would have made all user-generated content particularly difficult to have.
It would have really, really screwed things up.
And I got involved because everyone in D.C. who knew better than me about politics said these two bills were inevitable.
And I was like, well, that's going to really screw things up.
So I borrowed a tie from my dad and I started going and lobbying and meeting with senators and representatives and telling them, I lived this amazing entrepreneurial life thanks to the open internet.
And if you pass either of these bills, my story never would have happened.
And so many others just like it never would have.
And you're really screwing up one of the most viable technologies we have.
And long story short, we won.
And I say we, and I mean hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who called in, like melted the phone lines.
3,000 websites went dark on January 18th protesting this.
And it was amazing.
I'd never been a part of something like that that was so successful.
Those bills became toxic for anyone.
All these senators and representatives just ran away from them almost overnight.
All right, so first and foremost, so net neutrality took a huge blow.
And let me say this.
Like, I'm fond of saying the world isn't flat.
Sorry, Tom Freeman, but the World Wide Web is.
And what that means is I can start a website with my buddy.
We have no connections.
We just have like an internet connection and some laptops.
And we can build something that nine years later will have more traffic than the New York Times or CNN. And that works because all bits are created equal.
You can get to my brand new website, reddit.com, you know, nine years ago, just as easily as newyorktimes.com.
And you get to decide, do I want to go to Reddit or do I want to go to New York Times?
It's just as easy to get to.
We're now in a position where cable companies, because they basically have oligopolies, right?
There's only a handful of them, want to break this.
They don't want the internet to be flat.
They want it to look like your cable.
They want you to have a basic package, right?
Where you get Bing search for free, because they've made a deal with Microsoft.
If you want Google, it's an extra $10 a month, but it's a really good search engine, so you'll pay for it, right?
But then if you want Joe Sixpack's new search engine, well, that's going to be an extra $50, but you probably don't want that anyway.
And so now, the entrepreneur, the upstart, the nobodies in the apartment, have a much smaller percentage of the market because they're not part of the default internet package anymore, right?
And so what used to be a flat internet will become hierarchical.
You'll have that cable bill, or you'll have that internet bill looking just like your cable bill.
And it breaks the foundation of what makes the internet work, all bits being equal.
And we're at a point now where judges in the federal courts recently ruled that pretty much cable companies can have their way now.
And at this point, my buddy at The Verge, now he's at Vox, wrote an article called The Internet is Fucked.
And Neil, I really nailed it with this.
And he basically had a nice little call to arms that was like, listen, at this point, call the FCC. I know it seems ridiculous.
Call the FCC and let them know they need to give this thing teeth because the internet is a utility.
It is like electricity.
It is the kind of thing where we all know we need it.
We couldn't imagine a world without it.
And every one of us should have the same open, flat internet no matter what.
And we're at an interesting time because there was a time in America when kids in New York were playing by radios with electricity and kids in the South were still using candles.
We've seen this disparity before, but we can change it.
We just have to make sure the internet becomes a utility that we know it is.
Here's the other thing I hope can come out of this.
The first political thing I ever got involved with was SOPA PIPA. And that was a dangerous thing for a lot of us to get involved with because it worked out so well.
Like, we actually did the thing democracy was supposed to do, which is let a bunch of informed citizens take action, phone calls, petitions, letters, all that stuff, and change people's minds in the face of millions of dollars in lobbying.
And we did it.
And it was a great high, especially for, like, a first foray into politics.
But the fact is, there are many more of those fights that we need to keep fighting.
And, like...
I hope a more connected citizen feels entitled to this kind of stuff.
I hope we feel entitled to more transparency from our government.
I hope we feel entitled to pick on Kim.
We can look on Kim's Instagram right now and see what she's having for breakfast or what she had for lunch.
And that's ridiculous.
That's absurd.
But it's accessible to millions of people right now 24-7.
I want that same level of accountability for the people who represent me in government.
So he was in the same round of Y Combinator that Steve and I were.
He was working on a startup called Infogami.
We didn't talk a lot then, but maybe six months after, his company pretty much folded his co-founder and went back to Denmark.
And Paul Graham, who organized Y Combinator, was like, Hey, Steve, Alexis, you guys need more developers.
Why don't you work with Aaron?
And we acquired his company.
He moved in with us.
We worked together for a little bit.
We, gosh, not long thereafter got acquired.
Once we got acquired, it was clear Aaron was not really that into it.
And he left.
And we stayed in touch for a little bit thereafter, but not long.
And then he got really into politics.
Really started getting involved in a lot of that great work for the open internet.
We shared a lot of common friends.
And, you know, he, he did some very, he did some very unfairly punished things.
Like, he, the entire thing, he broke into a storeroom in MIT, downloaded using MIT's credentials, a bunch of these documents, research papers, JSTOR, like these are academic articles.
What it is, this is one of those really unjust things.
There's a lot of research that's done, like federal research for instance, that's funded with our taxpayer dollars that end up getting locked up in these academic journals that you have to pay a subscription for.
So in this case, MIT had paid the subscription for it.
It's a non-trivial amount.
And he was able, anyone on the MIT network, anyone at probably any major university network or anyone who wanted to pay could view these research documents.
He argued that, you know what, this is content we paid for, right?
This research was funded by our tax dollars.
Why should I have to pay a subscription to some random company who has the monopoly on access to this content?
Like, there have been a handful of developers or hackers that have been sort of made examples of by the government where you have these instances of doing things that were not, like I said, the severity of the punishment did not even come close to the actual crime.
Especially in this instance where, like I said, this was not actually distributed.
He was just downloading them.
Which, again, he could do within the network.
But it was technically breaking the, I don't know, the license, I guess, of JSTOR. That seems crazy.
And that takes us back to what we were talking about earlier about...
Private prisons and about people making sure that there's jobs for wardens and prison guards and they're making sure that certain drug laws stay illegal or stay on the books.
God.
It's the same thing.
People profiting off of other folks.
The idea of someone just wanting to win when they're a prosecutor.
And I understand the role of laws and I understand the role of a justice system.
And when you see things like that, that seem to go so far astray from the intent, from the point of having a justice system is really important, but to have it be so just fucked up like that is sad, is very, very sad.
Yeah, it's another symptom of this mad, mad civilization that we're a part of.
The good things and the bad things, they all come together.
Law as it is and things, these really rigid ideas of what's legal and illegal, what the punishment can and can't be, those things are so goddamn archaic.
Mandatory minimums.
Mandatory minimums are fucking archaic.
I mean, it's one thing if it's violent crime.
I understand that entirely.
I understand when you're making a victim out of someone or you're stealing things from them with violence.
I get that.
But something like this, where the guy's just, it's information.
The fact that we're using this archaic system of a judge fucking has a mallet and slams it on a piece of wood.
What are you doing, asshole?
You got a mallet?
Get the fuck out of here with you.
Why don't you have a fucking bow and arrow, too, and shoot a flaming arrow through the sky to let us know that the games have begun and the guy next to you has a conch shell.
And put your powdered wigs on, you fucking assholes.
Get the fuck out of here with a mallet.
You can't keep using a mallet, stupid.
Bang, bang, bang.
Get the fuck out of here with that stupid, archaic nonsense.
But you would run into the problem if there would be somebody that had a stutter or something like that, or if the joke turned on them, then everyone would vote just because of the wrong reason.
Meaning, what if there was somebody that had a court case, and they were being voted on Reddit, and the guy maybe had a stutter or talked like he was gay or something like that, how that could turn and unfairly vote for the wrong reason on the internet.
It's from 2010, and it's by a guy named Charles Ferguson.
And what's interesting is this Charles Ferguson guy is, I believe he's the guy that's doing all of...
All of the questions, I shouldn't say that because I'm not really sure, but whoever the guy is that's the narrator, you don't see him always questioning people, but always questioning people, he's so knowledgeable about how the system actually works that he catches these mathematicians and these economics experts being really arrogant.
And then he faces them with the truth, and you see them scramble and start to sweat.
And I should have never agreed to this interview.
You see them realize, do what you're going to do with this.
And you see them fall apart and panic, and they fall into this really sort of aggressive state.
It's like, oh, do we want to rethink how the front page looks?
There have been small improvements.
We just added trending subreddits, which are pretty damn cool, to try to help people realize that there are these thousands of different communities they should dive into.
But I wouldn't expect any big changes.
I mean, for the reasons we were just joking about.
Oh, I was in the library, EVA, Alderman Library, Wahoo Wah, and I was trying to come up with something that involved the word read, and I was like, Reddit, like I read it on Reddit.
And then I tried different ways of spelling it and R-E-D-D-I-T worked because no one had it.
And I also registered R-E-D-I-T-T. But then I asked my friend Melissa, I was like, which one of these makes more sense for a bastardization of Reddit?
And she was like, I'll go with the two D's, idiot.
Well, listen, what you guys did was nothing short of a cultural revolution, I think, in my opinion.
I think it's one of the key components today online as far as like...
Like an asset to distribute information, to spread cool shit, and to let people have intelligent discussions about it in a really rational way of filtering out the fuckheads.