AI Slop Is Killing Content but It Can't Defeat Community | EP 098 Gina Bianchini on CLIMB

The idea that human beings are going to be satisfied with just a synthetic person, I do not believe that is inevitable. Community is the oldest business model in the world. Every creator who's able to build that asset of human beings connecting with human beings will not be put out of a job by AI. Imagine a world where you as an organizer with a single prompt could basically say, I want to organize from my 100,000-person email list 1,000 dinner parties in 2 weeks on a Thursday night from 6 to 9 PM. Move from real world to digital. I think digital is going to get sophisticated enough to unlock the real world in completely new configurations. And I, for one, cannot wait.

Everybody is, you know, using Claude. They've all got a little buddy in their pocket that they're talking to. At a certain point, why is that connection or the ability to connect not also going to be one of the things that AI gets really good at?

What I think is the most important thing is Hey, climbers, welcome back to this episode of Climb.

I'm Jacob Poor, general partner of VSE Ventures and your host on Climb. We talk a lot about how AI changes the things that we build and back. It's obviously changing a lot about how we work, but also about how we live. And communities are a big part of that. So is content. We're making some right now. So what I wanted to do was have on somebody who has a deep insight about creators, content, communities, and how these come together into paid businesses and networks. Today I'm thrilled to have on Gina Bianchini, who is the founder and CEO of Mighty Networks. Gina started Ning alongside Marc Andreessen before starting Mighty Networks in 2017, where she helps creators like Tony Robbins, Jefferson Fisher, Dr. Mark Hyman build and monetize their communities by bringing people together to engage with each other. Their networks have 84% of the engagement from the members, not the creators. I thought that was a pretty cool thing. So we're gonna dig in on how these communities come together. What's the difference between a creator economy? What's the difference between an influencer and a host? And what the future of communities looks like. In the age of AI. Gina, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for coming to my office.

Yeah, thank you for having me. That's really what we—

exactly.

There's so many places I want to go with this conversation about creators, about communities. But let's start with, you've seen this creator economy, this ecosystem evolve since you started Mighty Networks in 2017. What have been the biggest changes that you have seen when it comes to creators and communities in the last couple of years?

Yeah. I started working in the creator economy going all the way back to 2004. So this has been the weirdest thing of all time because I am a community person. For me, the power of what we do at Mighty Networks is helping people bring other people together to meet each other. The creator economy has really evolved to be, I build an audience, I have followers, I talk out at you, you might talk back at me.

Hmm.

But I do not value people talking to each other. That is not the value that I am creating. And so, what's really interesting to me is, you know, what I fell in love with was social networks.

Mm-hmm.

Not social media. So, what is the difference between the two? Social networking is, hey, let me host a set of people and help them build relationships with each other because What is the most powerful thing in the world is if you can create an environment for people to keep coming back for each other, not just for you.

Yeah.

You build something bigger than yourself. You build something that creates value in your sleep. The way that social media evolved and then the creator economy coming out of that was, first of all, it's very individualistic. It's very much like, what's special about me? Think about even just the language we use, followers.

Yes.

And so what I believe social media kind of on some level bastardized, what I think is the most important thing and is even more important today, is that we went from something that was communal, something that was about creating something bigger than yourself, creating a network that got more valuable with every new person who joined and contributed, to a world where it is about me. They're here for me. I've even had creators say to me, certainly, by the way, the people who have said this are not on Mighty Networks, but said to me, well, I don't really want my people to connect because I think they have bad advice for people.

Oh, wow.

And just, I was absolutely blown away by the arrogance of that. Very clear that that is not why Mighty Networks exists. That is not the work that I do. It is not the value set I have.

Yeah.

So if I look at what is beautiful about this moment is that we have never been able to connect more people around the world than we can today because they've adopted the technologies. It's it's all there. Now the challenge we have, which is different than when I first fell in love with community and social networks and all of the things that we do at Mighty Networks, and also I couldn't be more excited about what is now finally possible, is that it became about parasocial relationships.

Yeah.

Like, I follow you because you have an interest to me, which is fundamentally empty. You are never going to be satisfied as a human being by stuffing your life with podcasts, with scrolling, With people you've never met. And we see this in the numbers. We see this in the research. So community is the oldest business model in the world. It truly is. Like, tithing is a business model for every church that has been created since the dawn of time. Living in a community, whether or not there were formal taxes, you had to contribute to the community.

The betterment of the— Exactly. Yeah.

So, you know, It is only a very recent phenomenon of the early internet when there were like literally a million people in forums that it was communities should be free. This is that they should be free. And what we see time and time again is that people pay attention to what they pay for.

Yes.

They have always paid attention to what they pay for. They will continue to pay attention to what they pay for. And when you have people paying attention You just— the value creation is profound.

So let's pick on that a little bit. So attention is this really interesting thing that I'm seeing become talked about a lot more in the tech community, where you're starting to realize, OK, paid advertising was a business model that worked for a little while. Now it doesn't anymore. The Google AdWords have dropped off. The Facebook and Instagram ads have dropped off. And now everybody wants content as a proxy for distribution and community. As if to make my point, we're recording this the day after OpenAI acquired TBPN, which, you know, that is a meteoric rise from where these guys started a couple of years ago to where they are now. What does an acquisition like that say about the interest that companies and people writ large have in media connecting to audience?

If you Look at where the moats are today. They used to be in building software. You had to have specialized skills. You had to have money. You had to be able to hire and lead engineers. With AI, the cost and the skill set needed to build software has become trivial, which means you have flooded the supply of things people could do. Reed Hastings has always said, our biggest competitor is anything.

Sleep.

Yeah, my biggest competitor is sleep. What I think anybody who is paying attention recognizes is the fact that attention is the absolute most valuable resource in not just this moment, but we're never going back to a world where it is not the most important resource. And here's the thing that I think is so interesting is you You can continue to try to build media properties. If we go back to the initial definition of I talk out at you, you pay attention to me, you might talk back at me, you may show up at a listening party or an event. But even if you show up at an event or a listening party, it's still not the expected behavior that you have something to contribute to that community. Mm-hmm. I, as the creator, am the most important person here, and my access to the other people that I would bring onto stage or I would be interviewing— that is the value. And fundamentally, it is the high fructose corn syrup of relationships. And I passionately believe that the reason we got here was that it was too difficult to build real relationships through software. Real relationships where it is about the value created within the community between members.

Yep.

And again, I just think it's so fascinating if you just think about the language. Creator, followers.

Influencer.

Influencer, audience. It is one of the reasons we use the term host.

Okay.

So what we do at Mighty Networks is create communities that are designed to build a network amongst the people within the community. And that instead of a creator and the hero model, which by the way, this is an incredibly unpopular opinion.

Mm-hmm.

I'm basically saying you as a creator, which is, you know, creating the kind of ego that comes with, look at how many followers I have and look at how many People are paying attention to my tweet or my— what is it? Is it an X?

An X?

An eat? An eat? I think it's an eat now. But it's about ego.

Yeah.

Or parasocial relationships where it's like, I'm following you. You're in my ears. It's an incredibly intimate relationship. But fundamentally, do you see me?

Can I challenge that assumption a little bit, though? I think here's the thing. Some of it is also tied to the business model of of what it means to be a creator or influencer today, right? I brought up TPBN as an example earlier because—

Yeah.

Their model was so interesting. If you look at the viewership numbers, I mean, comparatively not there, right? Great viewership for what they have. It was the value of the audience. It was that every CEO in tech and venture was tuning in, if not for all 3 hours every day, but at least to the clips and the social media. It was that every event that happened from YC to NVIDIA, you know, Demo Days, they were on site and every CEO wanted to go there.

Yeah.

The value of the attention was the business model, not necessarily the number of it. But for most creators, it actually comes down to, okay, what is my YouTube payout? What is my Instagram payout? What is my X payout? It comes down to raw numbers and it skews the incentive of the person creating the content to say, I have to create something provocative or mass appeal or whatever it is. I would love your thoughts on that because you work with content creators or community builders that don't necessarily need to have all these people. So how do you square that circle where the business model is incentivizing everybody to go one direction and you're saying actually the opportunity is somewhere else?

Yeah. So first of all, I've got some data to back this up. So on average, this whole model of if you can create a network of people who are building relationships with each other, you are actually creating a much more valuable asset. And I would argue more people can do it. So you can do it with significantly fewer people, 'cause again, it just makes sense. Like if you can bring 10 amazing people together and they're sharing their stories, their experiences, their ideas, not advice, interestingly. Advice shuts a conversation down. And if you actually are about how do you open the conversation up where people are able to share their stories, experiences and ideas, you will create significantly more engagement, significantly more people coming back, because they're not just coming back for you, they're coming back for themselves and each other. So if we, if we sort of go back to, uh, why I believe this is so valuable is, number one, on average at Mighty Networks, people are paying $48 per month That's the average price. You cannot find those kinds of numbers in the audience business. You have to be incredibly good. And then it's, it's a power law curve insofar as like if you are one of those top creators or you've created a 60,000-person audience of highly influential people, you're great. Like you've built something amazing. But the ability to get that right is much harder than the fundamental human skill, which, by the way, we're getting worse and worse at, which is why this is getting more and more valuable to be a host.

Yeah.

Because we're kind of bad at people stuff. COVID did not help.

Yeah.

Social media has not helped. But the antidote is somebody who raises their hand and they're like, Hey dudes, I'm bringing this group of people together, and it is about how you are able to meet and build relationships with other people. So my team can predict with 93% accuracy whether a community will fail or succeed based on one metric, and that is how frequently are members talking to other members.

Hmm.

And when we, you know, get in a time machine and go backwards into the earliest days of of social networks and that quiet move to social media, it was actually for technical reasons, too. Because try to scale a multidimensional network of people, it's not nearly as easy, especially in 2008, 2009, 2010, as it was to be able to scale, I talk out at you.

Yep.

You follow and talk back at me maybe, but nobody's talking to each other. So—

Or they're fighting in the comments, but I think that's not the same. They're not—

Fighting in the comments is not building relationships. One of my favorite examples, we had a really early, early days for Mighty. We came back after New Year's and we had seen this massive spike of this one network. And it was a yoga, it was like a new year, new you yoga community. that had moved from Facebook. So we reach out to them. We're like, oh my gosh, hi. We should probably know each other given the fact that you just added 100,000 people in less than 30 days.

Wow.

And what we heard from that team was we had to move off Facebook because what we were finding was that we could ask the same question on Facebook as we were doing on Mighty quietly in our own community, and we were getting fundamentally different answers. People were, quote unquote, coming in hot. They were like— because they were showing that this yoga community was showing up next to toxic political posts from people's relatives.

Yeah.

And now if you think about all of the Yep. That AI and the algorithms are like really trying to dial in as quickly as possible. It's like you accidentally click on something and like the next thing you know, you're like, oh my God, what did I—

Flooded with posts from it.

What did I accidentally do and how do I undo it? That is fundamentally different than we are building a culture.

Yeah.

And I believe that as we move more and more into the realm of, of AI-produced content—

Yeah.

AI workflows, that the creator is excited about simplifying their life without thinking about the value that they can even provide. I think we're going to see a continued and even an accelerating move into communities of real human beings that are sharing their stories, their ideas, their experiences with the ultimate goal, I believe, of real life.

Let's talk about that piece a little bit because this is, as you know, the crux of this season is talking about how AI is changing so many aspects of our world. This part about the content generation becoming easier, Taken to its logical extreme, we call it slop. People just putting out more and more content. Again, the incentives to be—

I think everybody calls it slop.

Everybody calls it slop.

Yeah.

It's become the word.

I support that.

And what you're seeing, because again, the existing models for creating content reward novelty, you put out a new piece of content, it gets pushed up in the algorithm, more people see it. So you put out more and more and more and more. And suddenly what you get is people putting out 5 different pieces of slop every day because The incremental cost to create it is so low today. That's not solving the problem of actually connecting anybody. It's not solving the inherent problem of the audience. It's just allowing people to doom scroll on your content a little bit longer. How do you think connection gets easier with AI? We know creation of content becomes easier. How does connection become easier?

Yeah, so first of all, it is a nightmare to try to organize people In 2026, we've actually moved backwards. So it used to be at least over email or maybe a doodle, you could actually get people to connect like, hey, we can go to dinner in two weeks at six o'clock on a on a Thursday night at a restaurant with other human beings, and it will be really fun. Today, try to do that in text message. First of all. text message is going backwards.

Mm-hmm.

So it's like everybody has to contribute all these random things. You finally get— you finally land the plane, and somebody comes in and it's like, ooh, I can't do that anymore. Maybe we could do it the following week. And you're like, whoa, what just happened? So fundamentally, what I believe is going to happen is that we are Going to see that relationships have got to get easier and easier to build for the world to do some really cool shit. And I think we're going to be in this adolescence where we're still thinking that social media feeds content, and we're still trying, and we're told by everybody around us that those parasocial relationships that like. If I listen to enough podcasts, if I read as many newsletters as I need to, I'm fulfilling that part of me that wants connection. What I know will happen is because of things, for example, we're seeing across what we're building next and the demand that we see across our platform is that we will make it trivially easy to spin up a new event and have people show up and all of the things that have to happen for that to be at its essence, the value that all of us are, are searching for, which is imagine showing up in a new place with new people at the right time, at the right moment, and actually being able to build relationships as a group.

These creators that are coming to you that have audiences already, they maybe build them on Instagram. Like Jefferson Fisher is a good example, right? Loved his stuff and just talking about kindness and communication and directness. And so I started following him. And then you would see, okay, his audience is starting to grow. And now he's built something on Mighty alongside you.

Yeah.

What is it that they are offering this community? And I use community, not audience, but what is it that they're offering this this community? And how can you make it so that this becomes the goal of a creator and not let me grow to as many audience members as possible and have it be one-directional as opposed to multidirectional?

First of all, Jefferson is an amazing human being. Many creators start their sort of community journey with, dudes, I cannot answer the same question anymore. Like, I get asked the same question. People want to— they want too much of me. And if you think about, you know, any top creator, they have to get more and more and more guarded, and they are getting more and more and more burned out. So what starts as something really powerful and awesome, like I'm connecting with these people, this is feeding my, my ego, but in— not in a bad way, in a good way. And I'm able to help people, whether it's with Jefferson and communication, whether it's with Dr. Mark Hyman as it relates to health. All of these amazing entrepreneurs and course creators, they are educators and they are people that want those around them to have a better life.

Mm-hmm.

That is where this starts. The problem is that in that model of media, the parasocial relationship is It's about them.

Yeah.

So what we offer people, creators, brands, entrepreneurs, people who also are like, I never wanna do that, I wanna do something else, is this ability to say, actually, the value I wanna create in the world is for you to be able to find other people on the same path, whether you're starting out with communication or whether you are ready to level up into that next, like you've done the basics And now you're hungry to meet more people that are ready for that next level of mastery and that next level of excellence.

But it can't just be about knowledge, right? I'm gonna push back on you a little bit there. We are at a point where there's—

I was not saying knowledge.

Okay. Please continue then. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.

I'm saying that what a host does is create the conditions for people to meet and build relationships with each other.

other. Yeah.

And fundamental to that is this ability to create quests, create challenges, create opportunities to meet and build relationships with people who are on the same path.

Okay.

And so that is a fundamentally different and much more powerful asset to have because then you are not the one who is required to be involved in every action in order to grow it.

Mm-hmm.

And the, you know, the holy grail of community is a community that runs itself, a community that grows itself, and a community that does not require work by the host. And we are quickly getting to that world, certainly on Mighty Networks, and certainly with the things that we are going to continue to roll out here over the next 90 days.

And what's the incentive of the community members to do this? I see this a lot of times with, like, big events, right? And we run an event, not as big as some of the other ones, but you have community organizers, you have, you know, folks that run smaller subset of those, which is, okay, I want to run a women's group for people my age who have kids and we kind of deal with the same problems. A lot of times it comes out of just care and love, and it's not something I had, so I want to put it out in the world. But then over time, you're managing workflows on behalf of some influencer or creator or host. What is the incentive of the community to do this for themselves and for each other?

Yeah. Well, first of all, it is a fundamental human desire for relationships. And we have been, as I said earlier, creating the high fructose corn syrup. So what you're saying is like, well, what would be my incentive of having friends? And what is implicit in that is I have more of an incentive to listen to a podcast or read newsletters or watch my, you know, TikTok scroll.

Let me correct that. What I am trying to say is somebody is charging $48 a month on average, right, to be a part of this community. It's like your membership fee to go and hang out with like-minded people. You are all brought together by a single individual, be it Jefferson or Tony Robbins or Dr. Hyman or whoever. You're brought together around the content created by this person, but then you are engaging with each other around this exact content.

Implicit in that question is that the reason the person is coming is for consumption.

Yeah.

And the creator. Yeah. The best creators The best brands, the best entrepreneurs who are actually hosting understand that people are coming for themselves.

Hmm.

They're coming for their own journey. They're coming for what it does for their identity. So, for example, Jefferson is not building the Jefferson Fisher store. This is about, hey, what happens in your life if you're actually better at communication?

Yeah.

What happens in your life if you are able to define and execute new habits and practices? I'll tell you, the, the, the value of a community right now is the most effective way to navigate rapid change. And so you as a creator cannot help individuals navigate rapid change fast enough. But building relationships with other people who are on the same path.

Yeah.

First of all, there is a fundamental connection and relationship that is not attention. It's not the same as consuming or following where you're sitting in the audience. You are able to create something for members in a community of that member is as important as the host. And here's where I learned this. Very early on in the earliest days of the interwebs, I volunteered at something here in East Palo Alto that was a new online— it was going to be a new online show.

Hmm.

It was on AOL. Happily dating myself here. It was on AOL, and it started as a show. It was a show for teenagers It was called Open Voice. We even— they auditioned and had kids as the stars of this. It was in AOL chat rooms. Within days, the kids who were there were like, no, no, we're the star. Like, we're all important.

Yep.

And so implicit in your question is the world that we live in today, and I believe that this world is going to continue to fall away to something that is much more profound and much more valuable. Which is if you can create a network of people who are on the same path, who typically they are in transitions because people who are in transitions are— they have the biggest need. They are the most motivated to meet new people. Yeah, they are the most motivated to do stuff. They are the most motivated to build relationships, even at a time and a place where more and more of us are getting kind of bad at people stuff. And they are also the most motivated to bring new people in.

What do you think about these platforms that focus on selling courses? One of the biggest things I see just as a consumer of social media is you follow somebody, you get a couple of their videos, and then naturally, like the 4th or 5th video is, by the way, if you're interested in this, come by, come by my course, you know? And I get it. I see it as one potential way to monetize Your community and you, you are maybe giving the 101 away for free, but the 201 and the 301, you know, should be behind a paywall. Yeah. What gets lost within a community when courses become the ultimate goal, and what's the trade-off you're making there as a creator?

Most creators feel much more comfortable charging for a course than a membership because again, the course is about them. Yeah, the course is is about what they are able to provide to people. And, and by the way, we have got literally tens of thousands of successful communities that are selling a million courses.

Yeah.

So it's a great way for people who are just kind of dipping their toe into community to sell something they feel more confident in, like I can sell a course. If you do not think though, about what is the fundamental set of dynamics for members to build relationships with other members, Courses become incredibly high churn.

Yeah.

So you might be able to get somebody to buy the 201, but you're not going to get somebody to buy the 301, the 401, the 501, the 601, or anything else. So that is one problem. The second problem is the one that, like, if you have a pulse and use oxygen to actually survive, you can see that content is going away. All of that time that people would be spending watching your video teaching me something, or if I'm watching your video teaching me something, I'm on Claude.

Yeah.

I'm on ChatGPT.

100%.

I am, because it's more interactive. And so what you're seeing is you're seeing creators try to do like digital twins. They're like, okay, well, I'm going to— I'm going to sell myself as a digital twin, and then they'll be able to interact with me in a more dynamic way. Great. We love digital twins at Mighty Networks, but we're actually believers in quite the opposite.

Hmm.

And again, this is what is coming online next, which is if you can raise your hand and say, I care about communication, or you can raise your hand and you can say, I am passionate about how am I gonna build my tattoo artist business? Very successful Mighty Network, or my floral business, or how am I going to learn how to crochet my masterpiece? But also, I don't want to just watch YouTube videos anymore. I can do that all day long, but I actually want to meet other people who are crocheting.

Yeah.

And maybe it's a virtual crochet shop, maybe it is an in-person, and certainly we will see more and more in-person Experiences. But how do you create those kinds of experiences? Here's the beautiful thing. Every creator who is able to build that asset of human beings connecting with human beings will not be put out of a job by AI.

Everybody is using Claude. They've all got a little buddy in their pocket that they're talking to. At a certain point, why is that connection or the ability to connect not also going to be one of the things that AI gets really good at?

Because I think people are fundamentally wired for the beauty and the flaws and the messiness and the heartbeats and the atoms, not the bits, of human beings and human relationships.

Hmm.

And I think that the challenge that we have seen is that the tools to create and make it trivial to meet and explore and do things with other human beings have been behind, significantly behind the tools that have been created to take more and more and more of an individual's attention and isolate them from other human beings.

Mm-hmm.

And the beautiful thing is that the same technology that turns on the ability to utilize— like, if, if, if the mission of AI is, I want to take up as much time as possible, which, which really was the social media goal, you can use the same technology as technology. We have the opportunity to build something that is equally, if not more attractive, which is what happens if we make it trivial to meet really cool, interesting people? I don't think that that's been something we've had enough people working on.

Can we double-click on that for a second? Because that's one of the things that I think about a lot when it comes to community acquisition, community retention. You know, again, we run it for our events, or we run it through the podcast, right? I constantly think about whether AI is going to make it easier or harder to do community acquisition, community retention. On one hand, you can blast email a lot more people. On the other hand, everybody's blast emailing people, and suddenly, you know, it just becomes noise.

Right.

And so I wonder how you think about that, how you advise the folks that are building mighty networks The actual networks themselves, how do they do community acquisition and retention better in the age of AI?

We are building new products every day. Stay tuned. That is absolutely designed to take advantage of what is now available to build and applied to how do you get all of those people to a place in a way that is radically more sophisticated in the execution and radically easier for you as the host. The idea that human beings are going to be satisfied with just their little buddy, just a synthetic person. I know I am in the minority here, but I do not believe that is a fait accompli. I do not believe that is inevitable. I wake up every day, fortunately with my team, fortunately with a set of people that believe in this future in terms of our hosts, and we are building the ability to make people feel absolutely amazing in hosting and in joining, surfacing the most interesting and relevant people, To each other, being able to create a true— just, you don't have to think about it. Imagine you could actually put on one of your events with a single prompt. We're getting there. This will happen as long as there isn't a set of people that are in the vast majority who are like, yeah, it's inevitable that AI will get good enough that we don't need human relationships anymore. That does not have to be the future.

Well, we're in this moment right now.

Like, it just doesn't have to be the future. Like, I don't want to live in that world.

No, no.

It sounds pretty depressing.

We're more maybe also of a generation that has not grown up with some of this stuff, right? Where I think there— I'm just playing the devil's advocate here. There is a generation of folks that grew up with social media, grew up with these tools. And for them, a relationship with, you know, Claude Opus 4.6 is comparable to that of a human that they met in the I don't agree with that. Okay, tell me.

And one of the things I think you see in younger generations, number one, why are they all in San Francisco living in houses together if their little buddy Claude or Open— like, if that was the case, they wouldn't be—

Hacker houses?

To be in hacker houses or to join teams that are in person. They wouldn't go to college. They wouldn't want to go to events where they are actually in a room with other living, breathing human beings. I passionately believe that the challenge— and this will be solved— is that building software that actually connects and builds relationships between living, breathing, messy, absolutely amazing human beings is just simply harder with more dimensions to it than building the love affair with synthetic humans. And that's okay. That's okay. Like, we need both. But I look at our competition at Mighty Networks not as other community platforms. I look at our competition as that future That you just described where nobody has to go to an event because they can just like stay home with Claude and the other synthetic friends that they've chosen to create. Okay, let's take that as a baseline. I see that as the gauntlet thrown to say, okay, how do we create software that actually makes it so much easier than anything that exists today to find the most interesting and relevant?

Well, and part of it too, I'm playing the devil's advocate here because I fundamentally agree I agree with actually a lot of what you're saying, the biggest part of it being the events, the live piece of it, right? My favorite thing about throwing an event, whether it's something small like a dinner or a big 300-person event, is the creative collisions that happen. People in your world that maybe you didn't really even know that well, they came in as a friend of a friend, connecting with each other, and next thing you know, they've started a company together, or they've gone off and hosted a dinner together.

As it turns out, I've started a company. Actually, multiple companies to make those creative collisions happen because they're so amazing. Yes.

The thing that you mentioned that I really agree with is how do you make it easier for that to happen? How do you remove the friction of finding a place and hosting it and maybe even getting a dinner sponsored or whatever? Those are all constraints, but those can be solved for. I think the bigger thing is, do people want it? And that's the point you're getting to, which I'm trying to understand is COVID really broke a lot of things for people, which is, Oh, we can do events online. We can have Zoom conferences. We can do these things. We come together.

Did you see how fast people moved away from that as soon as they could?

Yeah.

Now, we have it as an option today, but last time I checked, Hopin went out of business.

Oh, yeah.

Nobody really wants to be on Zoom calls unless they have to be on Zoom calls. The hunger for people to to meet other living, breathing human beings, I think, is only going to get more and more valuable. And those experiences are going to be— they're going to need to be heightened. It's not going to be good enough anymore to just meet in person people that are near you geographically, like that you have to be friends with because they moved next door. I think we're going I see, though, as we've moved from real world to digital, I think digital is going to get sophisticated enough to unlock the real world in completely new configurations. And I, for one, cannot wait. I think this is going to be, number one, just the most fun challenge to try to build as a product developer. But second, and more importantly, I think it's going to be incredibly valuable for the hosts who are essentially saying, look, you don't have to think about who you're going to meet. You just have to trust me. You just have to trust me that I can get you in a room with people at that dinner or at that event that you're going to look around and you're going to say, oh, shit. This is awesome.

I'm in the right room.

I'm in the right— this room makes me feel amazing about myself, and it makes me excited about life. You will never find that from a podcast. Bring it, bring it, podcast. So, so, uh, let's bring it, podcast. Nobody who's listening or watching this podcast is having that moment where they are in a room and they look around and they're like, I am in the right place. And that, that is going to be, in my opinion, the future of business.

So what has to go right for us to go live in that future, both from a what the community wants, what the host wants, and then what Mighty has to be able to provide? Maybe let's look at those 3 lenses and say what has to go right for us to be in that future.

I would answer it as slightly differently because I would say that the host and the members don't actually know what's possible.

Hmm. Okay. That's interesting.

I mean, do we have any idea? Like, because when you show up and you're organizing an event or, you know, doing whatever, like you have a set of expectations.

Yes.

And a set of assumptions about how things should be done or what's possible. What I believe is about to happen in so many different areas because of AI And community. And really, this is why we talk about networks so much, is that no one has ever made it trivial to create new and interesting networks with the help of software and, yes, AI. So fundamentally, in the same way that, you know, whenever a new platform shows up, you see emergent use cases that you would never see otherwise. I don't even know what's going to be done. But here's what I know we can build towards, is imagine a world where you as an organizer with a single prompt could basically say, I want to organize from my 100,000-person email list 1,000 dinner parties in 2 weeks on a Thursday night from 6 to 9 PM.

Mm-hmm.

And that there was software that made that possible. Today, you couldn't do that. You could not organize at that scale. scale using existing tools. So, to me, that's like our North Star at Mighty. And we have lots of things that we are in the process of building out to be able to see that future into reality.

Yeah.

But I spend very little time, very little time looking at the limitations. And I spend more and more and more of my time being like, well, how do we unlock things that are not possible today? Because what I just described, you have to understand who the people are. You have to, you have to have a continuous learning loop around who you're trying to cluster together. And you have to have a set of natural language that we're spending the most time on that actually plays that role of host at scale in very interesting ways. Now, we're really lucky that we have a head start on being able to test and iterate and build things that haven't been built before as it relates to creating those networks. And it's because we've stayed in this, in this lane. Like, we love creators. We don't love the creator economy. We absolutely love people who are bringing people together, but we're not that interested in audiences. We're not that interested in how we maintain the status quo of I talk out at you, you talk back at me, but no one's talking to each other. We are pushing absolutely every day to a reality in a world where you can basically take an audience, you can take a list and turn it into true deeper relationships where people are providing value to each other.

Can I, can I push on that a little bit? If you look out into the future, Does the future for you look more like getting folks on board like Toni, like Jefferson, like some of these— let's call them brands. Yeah, let's call these brands, right? Does it look more like getting these brands because they have a volume of audience, or does it look like somebody doing a small knitting group in name your favorite middle of America town that's bringing people together? What does that look like?

I think that's a false Decision. I think fundamentally why Mighty Networks exists is to unlock the ability for people to organize and create relationships for other people at scale in any app, whether it's somebody who's starting small or whether it's somebody who has a big audience. We've been incredibly fortunate to be able to serve both, and the reason is because we have. stayed focused on how are we helping these people build relationships with each other and how do they feel special when they come in the door. You know, so instead of it being, hey, you're here for me, it's how do we turn that on its head. And we have just scratching the surface of this, but you as a member, how are we able to have you show up? And I'm sure you have felt this at your own parties and events. When you walk in, you want your people that might be a little nervous, especially if they're not good at people stuff anymore, to feel warmly welcomed.

Yeah.

And you probably have a staff that is there to be like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad you're here, Jay. And I have wanted nothing else but for you to meet Gina and Micah and Tom and David and Tim. And this is why I brought this group of people together. Do you realize We're not building software that way.

Mm-hmm. It's something fun that we do for our events that I wish more events that I went to did. Sure. We do daisy chaining. So whenever I want somebody on the event, I say, okay, I really want this founder. And I say, who are your 2 favorite investors? They go, these 2 people. They go, okay, who are your 2 favorite founders? And eventually what you do is you get an event where somebody shows up and they know at least 2 people, and that becomes your safe space. And if you want to get away from meeting new people, you can.

Right.

And eventually you get into a room where everybody feels at least somewhat like they have a home base. It's a beautiful journey. It takes a long effing time though.

Right.

At least for us at our event, our size, I send most of the emails, right? And most of my teammates do as well. It takes a long time.

You're never gonna get to a moment where you are able to take an idea and scale it to 1,000 evenings across the country or across the globe. It's so hard.

Yeah, yeah.

That is not something that we are talking about as it relates to what we can unlock with this technology. This is the first time I'm talking about it publicly in terms of the things that we're building next.

Yeah.

So I look at it and I say, we are nowhere near where this is all going to play out. And what I know and have been very humbled to have a front row seat to multiple technology platform shifts.

Yeah.

Is that what you think is the case at the beginning, it never is the full picture.

Yeah.

It never is the full picture, which is why I think it's so important to have a really strong point of view about, hey, you know what, the creator economy is not going to go away. Audiences— there are going to be so many people building so many weird things to try to make AI better for your audience. And like, let everybody do that. That is awesome.

Mm-hmm.

Where I am staying focused, where Mighty Networks is staying focused, is how are we tackling each and every area of friction that is getting in the way of real human beings showing up at an event like you talked about, where they know a couple of people, but they also know the other 10 people who are going to be at dinner, and they know why they're cool, and that the software has also helped them feel like they are bringing something to the picnic.

What I would love to close on, and I'd really just love maybe a broader view of this, some of this to me feels like us as a society making up for the networks and communities that we have lost over the last 50 years. I'm sure you read this book, Bowling Alone, came out some years ago. To me, it started with this idea of third spaces. People used to go to bowling alleys, they used to go to music shops or whatever it was. As this stuff has gone away and become more commercial, we have lost the spaces where we congregate, and I mean congregate, including religion. Then it's not just about the spaces, it's also about those networks and communities as well. The Rotary Clubs, the Boy Scout organizations, the churches. Are we just trying to recreate these things without actually going back to what was, or do you believe that this is just a natural evolution? As societies evolve, they leave behind churches and bowling alleys and they move towards online networks.

Oh my gosh. First of all, I don't think we're going backwards. But there is nothing about the moment in time we're living in that we have to assume is inevitable and permanent. So when— I'm sure you have also read Robert Putnam's book, The Upswing.

Yeah.

So these moves from we to I, to we, to I, to we, they're never set in stone. It is about policy. It is about culture. And it's about technology. All of the fraternity and sorority and civic organizations were all started roughly in a 30-year period of time of each other. High schools were not a top-down thing. They were a bottom-up, community-by-community thing. We can do things. And I believe, and again, I picked this lane because I just think it is so important and also incredibly valuable for the people who raise their hand and say, I'm going to host, that what has been missing has been a conscious decision to build software that enables networks to be built at modest scale relative to a 2 or 3 billion person platform like Facebook or like Meta. And the software needed to get good enough to be able to And now that we can do that, and now that somebody can build $100,000, $1 million, $10 million, $30 million business a year, depending on who you serve, in creating these smaller-scale communities that when you start to add them up, you're building a very valuable business, that will unlock— An ENAB. So I went to Stanford, and at Stanford, for any of the parties that had alcohol, you had to have an equally attractive non-alcoholic beverage.

Yeah.

An ENAB. And so I don't believe that social media or AI or synthetic humans are going to go away. I think we will only see them get more and more sophisticated. But my job and our job and a coalition, I hope, of the willing are building the ENAB to that. They're building the antidote, the counterprogram, the opportunity to have software that is equally, if not more powerful, to bring human beings together in a way that allows for true connection, true humanity. But to me, that is what we are doing. And when you have something— and by the way, we're gonna get it wrong like 4 times or 14 times, I don't know. But we're gonna keep at it because the software is now available.

Yeah.

It's now possible to build these types of scalable networks of networks. And it's too interesting and it's too fun.

Yeah.

And it's too valuable not to try.

Well, I think it's undeniable that people are looking for that connection. And I think what people connect around will continue to change. But I love the phrasing you had there, which is, you know, it's not just you and not just the host that you have, but a coalition of the willing that believe that in-person and community events are important for our success as a species. And so count myself in that coalition of the willing. And Gina, I'm just so thrilled I got to have this conversation with you. AI is changing a lot about the way we work, but also about the way we live. And community is a big part of that. So I appreciate you having this conversation with me on Climate.

Thank you for coming. Thank you.