How did they come two of the most used are academies. We sat in as alex gives superhero origins, fronts page of the internet. Talk to us about hour your geeky childhood flutd your path to reddit success. I was lucky in that neither one of my parents had a bunch of tech background. What was a very powerful computer, a pc that they gave me total freedom with. They just said, as long as you can put it back together, take it apart, put it back toan together, by giving me that opportunity i just fell in love with technology. It started off with video games, i played way too many of them. Saved up money from anchors to build up my computer and learning how to build became a hobby. My friends and i spent way too much time messing around with technology. Although we felt like geeky kids in high school, we could building geocities, and felt like insignificant lives felt significant. We were dorky High School Kids but on the internet we were just people with ideas and we could be respected as such. The geeks shall inherit the earth alexis they poke, they plus one, they upload, they youtube. Now your book is entitled without their permission, how the 21st century will be made not managed. Do you honestly think the new media can disrupt the new power structures . I think it already has, it has started to. Heres the best part, im not sure where it is started. Stories of friends of mine in other disciplines in activism, in the arts, go outside of traditional gatekeepers to get their ideas to the world and theyre doing it, theyre living it, and these are people even five years ago, who couldnt have that kind of impact. Debbie gawr aring guardino, she was a person who by our own admission is not a technologist, but as a teacher she is able to have so much impact that even from ten years ago she wouldnt have had. She has a lot of passion and she made it happen. Speaking of online media, omar, what is the rrnlings exposure . In 2005, steve huff maw and i just graduated from college. We just thought we wanted to plif like College Students for as long as possible. We wanted to make something where anyone could find something new and interesting, 24 hours a day, whatever theyre interested to. There wasnt something very grand, we didnt sit out at this madey table an draft out something wonderful, it looked really jankey. Voting on it having discussions and all that and having it be as open a concept as possible. There was no grand vision. And i think one of the things ive tried to do on this book tour is disabuse people of the notion that world changing big stuff happens like in some dramatic way with a bunch of special people who are different from everyone else. No, its two recent complej grad collegegrads who had no reason r starting reddit, theres no difference, you or me or any of you, carbon base life form. As a carbon based life form i have not why is started my own media group. I wear makeup and ask questions. You said jankey. Thats your exact word. Reddit is a jankey website that has 80 million users. Whats the appeal . Well, its content. If you look at craigslist, we have wikipedia, we have peers that are top 50 websites that arent going to win beauty contests. Thats evidence to the fact that steve and i didnt know what we were doing with the website back then. As long as you prioritize content, and someone hits the project page sees something valuable. Even something wikipedia can continue to be the force that it is as long as it continues to be the force that it is. Really hard for me to see our first version of reddit that we were able to pitch to investors and keep a straight face. Because design has gotten so much better online, the bar has been set so much higher, you can find designer talent or at least inspiration in five. We have geeks at home omar, what are they saying . Gls a question im actually curious about. In your book you talk about the secrets to startup success. Some ideas you think are particularly interesting or important. Sure. I mean the one thing that probably helped us the most was in understanding that we were not necessarily we were not necessarily going to know what we were doing at all times but we were going to try to make the best possible decisions we could on behalf of users. On behalf of user experience. You know its crazy, reddit had 5 billion page views last month and we dont send any single notification email on anything. We wanted to just not flood our users inboxes for instance. We wanted to make sure content was easily usable and shareable. There are things that Large Companies can no longer do, because theyve grown so big that users dont care anymore. Its giving so many damn bts user support, about building a product that people genuinely love, that makes all the difference. When youre an upstart, when you are launching whatever it is, you are going up against incumbents who cant possibly care as much as you do because they are a company of however many, they are so far from their users, youre greafe grateful that one person liked what you did. You just heard alexiss story. What about alexis s view that an exclusive america tonight investigative series we traveled here to japan to find out whats really happening at Fukushima Daiich three years after the nucular disaster, the hidden truth about the ongoing cleanup efforts and how the fallout could effect the safety of americans are dangerous amounts of radioactive water, leaking into the pacific eververyday . Join america tonights michael okwu for an exclusive four part series, as we return to fukushima only on Al Jazeera America welcome back. Were talking about innovators, people who turned simple ideas into internet successes. Take a look and listen as alexis claims its irresponsible and at times misogynistic. That video reddit got a lot of heat from banning the onld on manages gawker. Well its a little bit of a misnomer, because anybody can 83th a subreddit, just like anybody can create a tumbler or, Kim Kardashian deciding she no longer wants to tweet from, whatever. Its an item from the particular subreddit. One of the mechanisms we built into this is because there are now i think 6,000 active subreddits, if enough people dont like the way a certain number of people are running a reddit, usurp it. You talked about civilian, we saw in april last year with the boston bombing there was a tragedy and during you know the man hunt a lot of redditers identified, atlantic article enough moral weight of what theyre doing, their article also says correcting investigatininvestigating bombii know we have had a lot of tweets about this. Listen to this. Im a boston based reporter. The whole incident about reddit and the boston bombing was completely irresponsible. Peeft trust the old school values of adjournment. Credibility is what matters. The pr rbltion media environment has this increasingly fast metabolism. To help in a way that maybe twitter doesnt. What do you think of the idea that reddit is contributing to this trend of people wanting to be out on the first news and weighing in rather than waiting for credible news to come through . I think all social media, reddit is a part of it. It was a few twitter accounts from professional journalists that brought attention to that thread, and spun out of control. We are living in an age this is a gift and a curse. Anyone could be a reporter, they could use that megaphone for good or benign, but im happy how reddit responded saying very publicly were doing our best to squelch, the navy shooting, not long afterwards, there were no threads on reddit but sure enough some twitter accounts from two professional news organizations misidentified someone. They quickly deleted it, but as long as humans are involved whether there are professionals or am chur amateurs, there are mistakes. We have to concede at some level this is a part of the world we live in and like i said its so much more important to have responsible news organizations who are the ones sifting through all that noise for the signal. Lets do 80s pop culture reference, lets take a de delorean. What will reddits place be in the future of social media . It will be a Truly International platform for sharing plirchtion an links and discussions. Reddit is the most popular social media platform among hispanics in the world. We started to realize there are thousands of communities that are not just sort of geographical like people in mexico talking about sort of mexican news of the day or what have you but also around language that we havent begun to tap into. And in all my travels i still meet so many people around the globe tend to use old school news forums, old school even jankeyer than reddit. As a sort of corollary i think can bring out the great discussions and i think its going to be abig push. So hopefully well just drop the social off social media and incorporate it into the broader world of how we perceive media. Anyone with a smartphone is cable of reporting on a situation. What i hope comes along with it are more news organizations doing the really important job of sifting through that noise for the signal and thats going to be more important than ever because i think everyone is a reporter today. That was alexis ohanian, cofounder of reddit. Alexis did share where us one of the things he did, coding. Salman khan, cofounder of khan academy, believes an education should be available to anyone, any at no cost. Anywhere at no cost. Back in 2004 i was an analyst in a Government Investment firm, my cousin and her family were being, visiting from new orleans where i grew up. I was tutoring her with math. I started working her every day after work for me, after school for her. It kind of worked out. She went to going better in math, getting caught up, i started working with her younger brothers. A couple of things happened, two years go by, word gets around, free tutoring going and, i found myself with 15 cousins i was trying to work with, i started to write credit gentleman why software for them, the first khan academy, where i got the fame there. I had shown this to a friend, we had moved out here to sloven, Silicon Valley. Put up tutorial and put it on youtube. Its for dogs playing pianos, and cats on roller skates. But i gave it a shot. And from those first new videos in november 2006, it became clear that people who were not my cousins were watching and by 20082009 i set it up as a notforprofit. By that point there were about 100,000 using the site. At that point, my wife and i sat down and had enough savings that perhaps enough to set it up for a year. Social return, obviously doing it as a not for profit is fairly lark large. It wasnt until about 2010 that we got our first real support from the Gates Foundation from ann and john doer. And we are an horgs of pushing 50, 55, 56 people. Recent khan academy announced that it is partnering with an internet company. Any concern its becoming too commercial, khan lets us know what he thinks, next. Every sunday night, Al Jazeera America presents. Welcome back. Were talking about those who have turned simple ideas to web sensations. Salman talks to us about his online khan academy. One of the reasons i set this up as a not for profit, i didnt want this to be a Silicon Valley super hypergrowth, whatever might happen to it. My dream is in 50 years, 100 years, 500 years, people view khan academy as an institution for the world. One things were always talking about with the board, how is this always, how is this paid for. Right now its philanthropically supported. Large donors like the Gates Foundation. I want to make sure its always there and we never even have to think about commercializing. We never have to think in any way of putting gates for people to access this. We view this as a fundamental human right. That is why we set it up as a not for profit. So sal, this isnt the journey you set out on. What kind of advice do you bring to people to innovate in a really meaningful way . Something i think a lot about. As you know my journey has somewhat happenne happenstance. When my cousins needed help, i kind of viewed that as the opportunity to understand the situation better. Thats the first step, get steeped in the problem. There are definitely the examples of people dont think of the problem, just write up a Business Plan get punding and it works. But you definitely maximize your chances of getting your hands dirty, digging in deep, and saying gee, as i face this in a very personal way, when i was looking with my cousins, id say, i wish they had better quizzes, i wish they could keep track of their issues, better, and you cant just be on the ground, you also have to think about how will this scale, how can this be funded how can this reach people. But i think its that balance thats most important. Ing being we are getting tweets in. Will revolutionize the world, devon actually asks the question, give him a listen, sal. Im interested on your thoughts on how the u. S. Can stop the decline being trend in k12 in terms of our competitiveness, to the rest of the world. For me, people always look at the pisa results, the u. S. Is in the middle, it spends more money on education looking on it as decline of the u. S. , i dont view it that way. U. S. Has always been in the middle in terms of math scores and other test scores. But the level of entrepreneurship and innovation, 20 years from where i am, if you look at the worlds top 10 most innovative companies, they are proportionally getting more concentrated in the u. S. How can all americans participate in that wealthcreation because of that innovation . Its less looking at what other countries are doing, how to increase our pis ascores, thats one thing that matters, how do we bring that inventiveness and that entrepreneur spirit, how do wablybury that into our classrooms. Im ive seen delegations from finland and other countries come, they are not seeing the facebooks and the apples, to the degree the entrepreneurship is happening in the u. S. Whats interesting and i hope khan academy can help here, can we make that investigation more creative, let students work at their own pace, have time to worship on froojt had they think projects that they think, that we can misled to all School Districts whether its finland or singh or wherever else. And sal speaking of entrepreneurs do you see any sort of trend with innovators that theres an increased importance to attach social value to what theyre doing . I think so. You know, i think you know, my you know i grew up in the 80s and we all watched wall street with gordon gekko and greed is good, and its a movie but its amazing how many people took that seriously. What im seeing is my generation and people younger than my generation, theres nothing wrong with making money. Theres nothing wrong with starting a business. Thats not whats going to make you happy, whats going ofill your soul. When youre 80 years old and looking back on your life, whats the impact it had . Is the world better for me being on this planet, is it worst, or does it matter. You start caring a lot more about social impact. James on facebook has a question for you sal. Whats the hardest subject to teach the way you do . The hardest subject is, i dont think theres any subject that you can completely do the way that i do. Even the mathematics. I think its a starting point. Its starting to think about how do you think about mathematic. Here are some problem sets. You should be thinking on proofs, working on projects, starting to create new things. I think thats true in any domains. I think writing is going to be very interesting. Writing isnt necessarily taught, it is something thats much more explored, you work on it, get feedback, iterating, Getting Better and better, really anything in a creative domain, programming a computer, whatever it may be. Our Computer Science platform in khan academy is not about videos, its about people giving you feedback on that profile. So i think there will be many things on its not so obvious how we do it today but were going to at least attempt to do part of it and once again that will allow the physical classroom the go even deeper. As a lowly english major that would definitely helped me. Final question from elizabeth, how does mr. Khan see his curricula interacting or not with other open Online Education programs . The exciting thing is it feels like were in a cambrian explosion of for profit and not for profit. Were very close to a lot of the folks out here in Silicon Valley valley, aron agerwal was one of my professors in Electrical Engineering the folks at corsera, audacity, i think the experimentation is really, really, really healthy. Its not online versus physical, its interesting combination of online and physical. This is al jazeera. Welcome to the news hour. Al jazeera news centers in doha. These are the top stories. A powerful explosion hit southern beirut. Four people are dead. Iraqs bloody year, 2013 recalls the biggest in five years. Fighting continues in south sudan as rebels prepare to begin peace talks in