Reid Hoffman: Unlocking Limitless Human Possibilities With AI | Artificial Intelligence | E333

Starting as an early AI enthusiast during his Stanford days, Reid Hoffman was eager to explore the potential of artificial intelligence, but the technology wasn’t ready, so he shifted his focus. Years later, inspired by conversations with top tech innovators, he recognized AI’s potential and seized the moment. He became a founding investor in OpenAI and later co-founded Inflection AI. In this episode, Reid introduces the concept of "superagency," where AI enhances human capabilities rather than replaces them, addresses common fears about AI, and shares his vision for a future shaped by AI-powered agents. In this episode, Hala and Reid will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:06) AI as the Next Big Wave (03:30) AI, Jobs, and Concerns for the Future (08:01) Superagency: Amplifying Human Capability with AI (18:38) Training AI to Be a Better Human Companion (22:20) Trust and Misinformation in the Age of AI (25:01) Why Human Expertise Still Matters in AI (27:19) Reid’s AI Twin (30:12) Leveraging AI for Content Creation (31:37) How AI Will Shape the Future Reid Hoffman is an entrepreneur, investor, partner at Greylock, and co-founder of LinkedIn and Inflection AI. He was an executive at PayPal and a founding investor in several companies, including OpenAI. Reid actively supports various non-profits and has received numerous accolades, including an honorary CBE from the Queen of England and the Salute to Greatness Award from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for his philanthropic efforts. Resources Mentioned: Reid’s Book, Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future: https://amzn.to/4g7cfVG Reid’s Book, Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI: amzn.to/4an8J8g Reid’s AI Video, Reid Hoffman Meets His AI Twin: bit.ly/4jzlVeD Sponsored By: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Airbnb - Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host Rocket Money - Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to rocketmoney.com/profiting Indeed - Get a $75 job credit at indeed.com/profiting RobinHood - Receive your 3% boost on annual IRA contributions, sign up at robinhood.com/gold NordVPN - Get 4 extra months on your 2-year plan with NordVPN plan at nordvpn.com/profiting Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new All Show Keywords: Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, personal development, starting a business, Strategy, investing, sales, selling, psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, technology, marketing, negotiation, money, finance, side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, leadership, mindset, health, growth mindset. AI, ChatGPT, AI Marketing, Prompt, AI in Action, Artificial Intelligence, AI in Business, Generative AI, AI for Entrepreneurs, Future of Work, AI Podcast Productivity, Work-Life Balance, Work Life Balance, Team Building, Motivation, Mindset, Manifestation, Time Management, Life Balance, Goal Setting, Goals, Resolutions

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hala Taha?

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• 1:24Speaker 01

  This is going to generate magic. And there will be more agents than there are people. The future is sooner and stranger than you think.

• 1:31Hala Taha?

  You co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman, and you're really creating companions for people.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  We've moved from the computers being the bicycle of mine to AI being the automobiles of the mind. Let's figure out how we want the technology to evolve, how we're going to use it, how we use it together, how we use it individually. Human beings will be replaced by other human beings using AI, and in some cases by AI, but there will also be a bunch of new jobs created too.

• 1:56Hala Taha?

  Why are you so optimistic about AI?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Because I think AI is going to be the... The future is already here. It's unevenly distributed.

• 2:19Hala Taha?

  Yap gang, welcome back to the show. Today, we are playing part two of my episode with Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman is an incredible entrepreneur. He's the co-founder of LinkedIn and Inflection AI. And in part one of this conversation, we focused on entrepreneurship. So if you haven't heard that yet, make sure you stop and go back and listen to that one first, especially for an entrepreneur. We talk all about blitzscaling. We talk about his early failures as an entrepreneur, and he uncovered so many gems in this conversation. You don't want to miss it. If you've already heard that one, go enjoy part two of this episode on AI, where we're going to learn everything that he believes AI will bring to our future, including our own personal AI agents.

• 3:04Hala Taha?

  It was an incredible conversation. You guys are going to blow your mind with this one. So without further delay, here's my conversation with the incredible Reid Hoffman. AI is definitely transforming the world, and I know that you're doing a lot in AI. So let's start talking about that. When did you first get interested in AI and realized its potential impact?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  In one sense, my undergraduate major at Stanford was artificial intelligence. It was called symbolic systems. It was kind of the earliest undergraduate AI major. But then I concluded the time wasn't right, and I went off to do other things. And then it was discussions with a set of different people, Demis Hassabis at DeepMind, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, relative to OpenAI, and some other things that, okay, actually, in fact, now is the time. And the particular thing wasn't so much the invention of an algorithm. A lot of the fundamentals of the kind of algorithms that are being used for the magic of today, there's been a bunch of inventions, but the fundamentals were already somewhat there.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  What the transformation was, was essentially scale compute and learning machines and data to learn from. And it was like, oh, this is going to generate magic. Actually, none of us are quite sure exactly all the kinds of magic that will come out of it and what will happen once it's GPT-5, for example. But we know we're going to be able to create things that are capabilities, cognitive capabilities, that have never been seen before. And that, you know, simple ways to parallel the metaphor is like, well, actually, in fact, every single computational device isn't going to no longer have an interface in a manual, it's just you're going to talk to it, right?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Or everybody's going to have multiple agents and assistants for everything they're doing, whether it's podcasting, or writing, or analyzing, or speaking, or comprehending. And all of this stuff is going to help. Or another way of putting it is anything that has any computational units at all is going to become much more intelligent. All of these things come from this scale compute learning revolution. And that was probably 2014, 2015 was when I really got the vision hit me fully. And I went to my partners at Greylock and I said, hey, look, I think we're going to still make a bunch of money doing this crypto stuff. I did a few things in Bitcoin and other things.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  So keep doing it, but I'm going to focus entirely in AI because I think AI is going to be the next wave and I want to start working on it right now.

• 5:41Hala Taha?

  And I love how you're so optimistic about AI. I've interviewed so many people about it, Mo Gao Dad, Mustafa Suleman, Fei Fei Li, just everyone, from people who started a long time ago on it to the new guys. And everybody kind of has a different mix. Like, some people are really positive about it, some people are pretty pessimistic. Why are you so optimistic about AI? And can you give us some counter arguments to what pessimists typically say?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  I'm familiar with every single pessimist argument. And the frequent thing is something along the lines, like, let's take the most extreme. Can you guarantee me that we won't deliberately or accidentally create terminators? And you go, no, I can't guarantee you. Oh, then it's really bad. We should have a cautionary principle. And you're like, well, that's if you thought that the only thing here was creation of terminators or not. So like, for example, take this is called existential risk, let's take existential risk. Existential risk is a basket. It's not just are there killer robots or not? It's also nuclear war, asteroids, pandemics, climate change, a bunch of other things. So you say, well, if we create AI, is the basket, well, yes, we may add the terminator

• 6:49Speaker 01

  robots is a negative possibility, but is the basket of risk get better or worse? And I think it just gets better because it's the only way I can think of to solve pandemics. I think it's already helping. And questions of advancing certain technologies around climate change. There's just a stack of things where you go, just creating it is better. Next thing is people say, well, what about jobs? And you say, well, okay, there's basically, I think always in the transition, there'll be difficulties and challenges and navigating that transition is one of the things I'm most focused on. But it's just like the industrial revolution with the loom and everything else and, you know, moving to the power loom. And we're going to have that. That's going to have a disruption in society.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  There's going to be challenges with that guaranteed. But on the other side, like when we look at our entire lives today of societies that have middle classes and prosperous societies, it all comes from the industrial revolution. So the other side of that very typically will very much look like the similar kind of amplification of what we've had here. Now you say, what does that mean for jobs? Now, obviously, we know we need them for economy and people's sense of purpose and sense of commitment. And you say, look, what we're going to have is all this transition, why which we have amplification intelligence, right? The thing I described in my last book, Before Superagency: Impromptu, which is AI means amplification intelligence.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  And so, human beings will be replaced by other human beings using AI and in some cases by AI, but there will also be a bunch of new jobs created too. And just like we didn't have a chance of to really envision it in the future, we have to believe it's going to happen. Now, if you said, we've now created our science fiction paradise of Star Trek and no human beings need to work anymore, what happens? By the way, that's called a good circumstance and we'll figure it out. And we've had societies like European and other nobility where there was entire groups of people, classes of people who didn't have to work and we may do with our lives. So even if we get there, so I think there will be difficulty in transition, but like an amazing outcome.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  And then you say, well, why are you so passionate and so positive about this? Well, today, we have line of sight to creating on your smartphone, a medical assistant or tutor that is better than your average doctor and is a tutor on every subject for every age. We just need to make that available to every human to help people. The, you know, eight plus billion of us around the world, just by having access to a smartphone. I think that's one of the things that I think is, is super important. And that's what we're like, all the doomer and gloomers essentially are delaying that future. And that delay has a huge cost in human suffering.

• 9:40Hala Taha?

  Oh, my gosh, I loved everything that you just said. It was just so interesting and I feel like it ties a lot of things together that we've talked about on the podcast before. So a lot of your book is talking about human agency, right? And the concerns around AI and human agency. You talked about it with jobs, right? And the fact that you don't think it's going to necessarily be a bad thing. If AI takes some of our jobs, it's going to add new jobs, will maybe become more artistic or whatever as humans and figure out our time in other ways. But when it comes to human agency, can you talk to us about how technologies in the past, like the telephone and cars actually had similar things so that people can understand that we've gotten through this before?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Thank you for reading the book and asking questions from it. So what people don't realize is every new major general purpose technology has a discourse that's very much like parallel to the one we're having today, which is this new technology is going to destroy society. When cars came out, it's like, oh, men, because it was mostly men wage earners back then, are going to stop getting married and everything else because they're going to be saving up for the car. And it's going to destroy our institutions of marriage. And, you know, these are dangerous for what happens in the streets.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Similarly, for example, when the phonograph had to be pitched, it had to be pitched as it's going to be used for church music. Right? Because it'll help people to like have church music at home. Because the kid like, well, what are people going to do this with? You know, what, what are they going to be distracted? Are they going to be sitting on their couch, just like television, doing nothing? And it's television is going to destroy society, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so, and matter of fact, we had this discussion around smartphones within our memories. And so. The thing to remember is to say, yes, it's going to completely change the future. It's going to change the future in the way that we experience our agency, how we think of ourselves

• 11:42Speaker 01

  as kind of operative agents, what we're capable of doing, what other people are capable of doing. But that change has thus far always ended up being very positive. Now, the transitions have been difficult. The printing press, which was described as, oh, it's going to destroy human cognition by reducing the ability of memory, it's going to create a whole bunch of misinformation, the truth tellers in society, which in those days were priests, are going to be undermined. And of course, since we as human beings are very bad at these kinds of transitions, it led to nearly a century of religious war. So you go, okay, the outcome can be really good, but what do we do about the transitions?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Now, one of the things I'm pointing out in the AI context, and part of the reason for writing Super Agency and part of the reason for doing this is to say, well, in fact, we can use both lessons from the past, these technology transformations, and we can use AI to help us. So you say, well, shoot, you know, my job's now going to be done with a human using AI. Well, can the AI help me learn to be that human with AI? Can the AI help me figure out which jobs would be good for me with the AI helping me to do them, right, et cetera? Can the AI help me with the transition? And so what we need to be doing is learning from the past and these lessons and transitions, and then deploying the technology to help us do that. Because one of the amazing, unique things about AI is it's the first technology that can do that.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Previously, you were like a dock worker, it's like, I'm a big, strong person. Well, that doesn't help me learn how to use a forklift, right? And now the forklift is there, and now the fact that I'm a big, strong person doesn't really matter, right? So my competitive edge in this job knows no matter. It's like, well, but now we have a forklift that will go, hey, sit here, give me direction in doing the following things. Here's the ways that we can work together. Here's the things that you need to watch out for in terms of how to use me and what kinds of things to do. And here's the places where, as I currently understand it, I'm going to be bad and need help, and you can help me with. And now I can... Do the job transition. So that's the kind of thing that I think is why agency is so important to focus on. And if you look at most of the things that people critique

• 13:51Speaker 01

  about these technologies, including AI, including smartphones, including cars, is it's this change in agency, whether it's like privacy or work and jobs or capabilities by the state, by other people, that then get people to be highly concerned. And you're like, well, actually, in fact, if we go through it, if we do it in the right way, it'll be magical, I think, anyway. But it can be less suffering on the path to being magical and better navigated if we do it the right way.

• 14:23Hala Taha?

  So when you say super agency, basically what you're saying is we have human agency with AI. They'll be helping us become better humans, and that's why we have super agency. And then AI itself is going to be able to do things on its own, right? So can you talk to us about how AI will have agency? And then how do you imagine humans actually interacting with AI? I talked to Mustafa Suleyman, who I know is your colleague, and he told me that like every human's going to have an AI companion and it's going to help them, you know, go on job interviews, start companies. So talk to us about those kind of concepts.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Part of what freaks people out a little bit is we are going to this agentic universe, where all of a sudden, as opposed to having phones and PCs, which we'll still have, we'll have agents. And by the way, we'll have more than one. We may have one that we're, you know, is particularly the hollow or read, ongoing companion, always, you know, always around us and helping us with things. But there's going to be a suite of them with kind of different specialties and different engagements. And by the way, your, you know, your office is going to have one, your working group is going to have one, and probably your podcast is going to have one, et cetera. And we're here fairly soon. And people say, well, if they're agentic, does that take my agency away? And the answer is no. The same way that when you work with colleagues and you work with employees and everything else, that expands your agency, that doesn't take it away. So that

• 15:41Speaker 01

  The agency is, I think, extremely important here. But by the way, a lot of it's kind of the mindset. Like, if you think of your smartphone as, well, here's the way that everyone can get to me all the time when I don't really want to. And here is this microphone and camera that's following me around, and I don't know what it's doing. They go, oh, gosh, I'm essentially going, oh, my God, my agency is being slaughtered. Whereas I go, no, here's the way that I can stay in communication with a bunch of the people. I can call out to people. I can hear from people sometimes when I want, sometimes when I don't. But I have choice over that. It helps me navigate and never get lost. Right? So, yes, it always knows where I am, but it also knows where I am. It helps me never get lost. And so therefore, it can be an amplification of my agency, and it changes what the landscape

• 16:25Speaker 01

  of my agency is. And so I think that's part of what's so important about thinking about this new agentic revolution. Now, some of it will also be the, hey, I talked to my agent, and I say, hey, I'm going to go to Rome, figure out what a really good itinerary is, book anything that's really important to book early, you know, etc. And then it comes back to me and does that. And you go, whoa, that's really awesome. And you say, whoa, is that going to mean that the travel agents don't have a job anymore? It's like, well, actually, in fact, travel agents will change because it'll be AI plus travel agent. But like, you know, it might be a little bit more along the lines of, here's the things that's normally seen, like, go see the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Right? You know, that's what you should do.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  But it may be, oh, you're the kind of person who would really like to do the after-hours tour, and this is the way you do it, and da, da, da, da. And maybe agents don't know that much about the after-hours tour. Or maybe there's a midnight bike ride that might be really good that, you know, doesn't necessarily know about. So there's ways of these kind of pulling things together. And by the way, these agents will be making predictions off all the data, which is a lot more than any of us have, about what things will be really good for us. But It's like, for example, play with chat GPT and see what kinds of things it writes. And at least every time I've used it so far, and I suspect this will also be true of GPT-5 and GPT-6, I can always add something interesting to it.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  I can change it, I can make it sharper, more distinct, et cetera. And that's kind of a mode for thinking, well, why will I always have a role in the things that really matter? Is because I'll figure out how to add something to it in a useful way, even as it gets much more powerful. Now, if you look at it today, like one of the things that I'm a little always bemused by is people say, I saw two articles in one day earlier this year, which was, "All that AI is good for is faking homework. AI is gonna destroy all jobs." And you're like, okay. Part of that's like, right now, you're like, look, there's a very long way away from all this implication that everyone's talking about. I mean, there's some that's right here, right now, that's really spectacular.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  But there's a long journey, a long path, a long role for human beings to be participating in various ways and evolving and changing. And I for one, look forward to that path.

• 18:46Hala Taha?

  I have to say, thinking about agents is so mind blowing. And when I think about AI and all the talks that I've had, a lot of people talk about it as being like a great equalizer. And we were just talking about how humans are not gonna work and everything like that. But I'm competitive, right? So like, as I've been going through these conversations, I've been thinking about like, well, how am I gonna be the best version of me? How am I gonna be like a better entrepreneur and compete? But now, as I've thought about it more, I realize you have to be the best trainer of the AI. I kind of imagine everybody being an entrepreneur, having agents that work at their personal company, basically. You basically have to be the best at coordinating your agents and figuring out how to like mobilize

• 19:30Hala Taha?

  all that AI and all your AI support. And so, smart people are gonna be smarter at that, right? And creative and innovative people are gonna be more creative and innovative when it comes to their own agents. And so, I just feel like a lot of people are probably worried that there's not gonna be any room for them, to your point, as humans. But I really think it's gonna be how you manage your AI.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Exactly as you say, in addition to training, it's also deploying, organizing, executing, strategizing, all of the above. And that's part of the reason why with super agency and the other content that I've been trying to get out there in people's hands, like start playing with it, start exploring, because you want to start building the muscles. It's kind of like, hey, what is locomotion going to look like now? We've just invented, we've moved from the computers being the bicycle of mind to AI being the automobiles of the mind. All right, let's all go learn how to drive. Let's figure out how these things work, how we want the technology to evolve, how we're going to use it, how we use it together, how we use it individually. And getting engaged with it is really important, and that's the most central thing.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  And again, part of the reason I called it agency, because it's like, you know, own your agency and go do it. And part of the super agency is when millions of us all start doing that, it benefits all of us, much more than just even the technology benefits each of us individually by ourselves.

• 20:51Hala Taha?

  So I know that you co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman, and one of your big missions there is to create companions that have high emotional intelligence for humans. It's not a workplace tool, you're really creating companions for people. Why do you think that's important? And what gap did you see in the AI world? Why did you get on board with that?

• 21:12Speaker 01

  So that's how we start with Inflection. And part of that was because we said, well, what's the world that we see that necessarily people don't see that could be a very good product to create? Entrepreneur one, right? And we said, look, this agent, eugenic world coming, there's going to be more agents than people. Everyone's going to have an agent that's their own personal agent that they have trust with and is on their side. And what are the key attributes of that? Because if you look at even the very earliest of how other people were thinking about agents, they were thinking about as information processing work. And we were thinking about this as a trusted companion for how you'd operate. And so EQ was as important as IQ. So we trained the Inflection model, Pi, personal intelligence on this. Now,

• 21:54Speaker 01

  We've since then, we spoke about pivots earlier, we've pivoted the business. The consumer application of that is now being run as part of things that Microsoft's doing. And what Inflection, the company is doing now is providing that same kind of, you know, best in class IQ, but also best in class EQ to businesses that want to deploy this within their ecosystem, to their customers, to their products and services. So we shifted to kind of a more of a B to B model where the Pi agent is more the kind of exemplar of one of the unique models that Inflection has that it can deploy for your particular business challenges. So it's a classic startup journey in addition to being an interesting evolution of the AI things.

• 22:36Hala Taha?

  And when it comes to having good EQ, I know obviously AI is not conscious, right? So how do you actually train it to have empathy and things like that?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Part of what you're doing, when you're doing the training of an AI is you're training it to say, it's this prompt completion, like what do you say after this is said? And part of what you're doing, both in data and in post-training is you're saying, okay, here is the kinds of things that count as good saying. So you have a whole bunch of humans who are running the system through and saying, okay, to prompt one, like you say, the person says, how's your day? And says, well, my pet died today. And it's like, well, I respond A or respond B, which one's a better response? And then human beings respond to that. That's part of how it gets aligned with our beings, part of how it gets to kind of an EQ. And you're partially telling your human beings who are training this,

• 23:25Speaker 01

  where you want to nudge and prompt the responses to, so that they're essentially doing the training for this. And so if it said, for example, option A was, oh, that's too bad. You should really look up a grief counselor.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  You know, and option two was, oh, that must be really hard. Oh my gosh, is there anything I can do to help? I feel for you. Or, you know, probably wouldn't say that just because it's an AI, but it's like something else. Because you don't want to make false antipathy or anything, but to say, look, I'm certain that connecting with friends or other kinds of things, how can I be of most help? And shouldn't you want to have a conversation about it? That would be the, the kind of thing is, oh, B is better than A. Right. And so then by that, it learns how to have empathetic, kind, compassionate conversations, because you can do that even without necessarily being compassionate or empathetic yourself, because as you noted, it's not conscious. And by the way, there's a bunch of human beings who are also not there empathetic, who learn to be more empathetic

• 24:25Speaker 01

  just by, you know, kind of go, okay, this is the way you do this.

• 24:28Hala Taha?

  It's really cool that you guys are doing it in Flexion AI. So one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about was trust when it comes to AI, because I feel like a lot of people are worried about misinformation. There's so many deep fakes out there. People are just worried about trust when it comes to AI. So what are your thoughts around that?

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Look, trust is in unfortunately, short supply these days, generally, not just with AI. Trust in institutions, trust in democracies, voting systems, other people's intent, you know, other kinds of things. So trust is challenging. Now, the way that I think is going to be very important to build and maintain trust of AI is for the people who are building it to be very clear about what their goals are, what they're doing, what they're doing to try to build and maintain trust. Part of the reason why, of course, my encouragement with super agency is for people to go try it, because as they begin to try it and learn what kinds of good things they can do, what kinds of things they can be empowered, that will be the kind of thing that builds the kind of positive trust in these kinds of

• 25:29Speaker 01

  circumstances. And my advice to individuals encountering these things, like, you know, a classic suspicion is say, well, big tech companies who are trying to make a lot of money are building these things and they're trying to make money from you. And I was like, well, by the way, I'm trying to make money from you is usually offering you a product and service you really like, that really is something that you come back for, that you keep using. That's good for you. That's the goodness of modern business. So you go, okay, so which things should I trust these AIs on and which things should I not? And the answer is, Well, if you generally should, you should understand that company is trying to have you as a lifelong loyal customer, that generally speaking, most of them are smart about doing

• 26:11Speaker 01

  that. So they're going to try to make it good. If it's something that's particularly important to you, cross checking, it's important. Like, you know, when I go to GBD four and get a prompt and I go, you know, huh, that doesn't really make full sense to me. I'm gonna go look at this a little bit more. Cause it's like, okay, if it said something about like, yeah, your lab, your, you know, your black lab can eat that mushroom. It's like, nah, I really want to know.

• 26:35Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and then I will check that.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  You know, so, um, and so you, you know, that kind of thing. And by the way, over time, these will get better and better for how it operates. And so I think that's the kind of thing. But I think that's the only by engaging and using, having dialogue, having that dialogue match our experience over time, being accountable as creators and companies for, you know, here are the things that we want in the use and here are the things that are still under development and being clear about that so that people have a sense of, okay, I understand it's not perfect, but it could be really good for me.

• 27:12Hala Taha?

  I feel like we're in this transition period where humans that have a specialized expertise right now are at such an advantage. So for example, I have a podcast network and I'm probably one of the most knowledgeable people about monetizing podcasts. And I write a newsletter that I write personally with all my industry knowledge. And sometimes I'll just be like, well, what would chat GPT say? And then it's all wrong. And it's just so basic, right? It's so basic. It's kind of wrong. And then I just love it because I'm like, okay, people are getting my newsletter, which is this human experience that they can't get anymore. And it's making me feel like I actually am more valuable. I think it will

• 27:56Hala Taha?

  transition where that might not be the case in like two years, but I feel like we're in this transition where specialized knowledge from humans is actually like really desirable.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Broadly, yes. And part of it's obviously that specialized knowledge being evolved with how you're figuring out how to use, like you made this comment earlier, how you use these new tools really effectively. And so even with the depth of experience, the early involvement with OpenAI and all the rest. I constantly am asking questions and trying to use a number of these tools myself for real things, not just like create a sonnet for my cousin's birthday or any of this kind of stuff. But it's also things like investment analysis or market trends or other kinds of things. And frequently, just as you said, you know, like, ah, that's not very good. Okay, fine. And sometimes I go, I iterate on it. And sometimes I go, no, no, I think that's just not very good right now.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  I'll, I'll use it for other things, but using it constantly. So I have, I've enabled the voice agents on my phones so that I can point my camera at things and talk to chat GPT about the thing I'm looking at, say mushrooms, right? And so, and you know, that kind of thing as a way of understanding it. And I do think that human specialized knowledge creativity will even grow at a premium, but it will grow at a premium in the use of the tools too. Like you can't just buy, like, I am genius. I don't need AI. It's like, no, I am genius because of the way that I use AI to be an extra special genius.

• 29:30Hala Taha?

  We were talking about deep fakes before and I came across this interview of you interviewing your own AI on your YouTube. You call it Read AI and it's an AI video avatar of you. Talk to us about how you felt in that interview. Did you learn anything from it? Did you help you realize anything about AI in the future?

• 29:50Speaker 01

  It came about primarily because I was like, look, here's a technology that everyone's so skeptical about. Our name for it is deep fakes. It's kind of like, if your name was disaster, okay.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  So I was like, okay, but can I imagine that there possibly be good things that could work with this? And I was like, well, let's explore because we should and let's share the exploration. So we'll have this kind of interview and conversation. And as I said at the end of the interview, I thought I was going to hate this because I'm not one of those people who talks to myself in a mirror. I was like, am I going to feel schizophrenic? Am I going to feel self-engrandizing? Am I going to feel like, I can see all these different ways that I could possibly hate this thing. And actually was more interesting as kind of a palette and exploration. Like if you said, well, I would I only want to talk to Read AI? Absolutely not. But would I want to talk to Read AI sometimes in doing these things and have that as a way

• 30:49Speaker 01

  of having a dialogue with myself and also showing what's good at? Because once I did that, one of the things I realized is I was, after I made that, I was off to go give a speech at the University of Perugia in defense of an honorary doctorate. And I sort of wrote out the speech and then I went, you know, I could actually have Read AI give this speech. And I'm only really fluent in English in all of these other languages, you know, ranging from Hindi to Chinese to Arabic to all these things. And to give the speech in those languages where people are much like, it was bizarre listening to me, my voice, speaking Hindi or Chinese fluently. It's like, what would I sound like if I were speaking Chinese?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Now, one of the things that my French friends told me is my French sounded like Canadian French. And, you know, I don't know what the story of that is, how it is, is there more data audio samples of Canadian French? Or somehow it goes, well, you're North American, so we're going to make you from Quebec rather than Paris? Who knows? But it was humanizing. I thought I would really dislike it and it was humanizing. And it started making me realize, just as I say to other people, hey, you should use the technology to get a sense of it and to reinforce your own agency with the technology. It was like, that was me doing that with that. And we continue to do new things with Read AI. Probably one of the funniest ones was the number of different press outlets that asked, we'd like to do an interview with Read AI.

• 32:18Hala Taha?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  It was like, oh, that's interesting. Cool.

• 32:22Hala Taha?

  Yeah, it's so cool. I feel like in terms of content creation, I've got a lot of creator entrepreneurs that listen to the show. I feel like AI is totally going to change the game. Even with me, I have my AI voice if I'm sick. Or if I miss a commercial, we can use my AI voice as an intermediate step. I'll always rerecord it, make sure that it's me. But it's really close to my voice, like people really can't tell. And we're working on my AI video. And to your point, like, people probably think I'm crazy creating my own deep fake. But I want to be able to scale myself, and this is the future. And you just gave me such a great idea in terms of the translations. You know, people love to watch content all over the world and not everybody speaks English.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Not only do I speak English, but also people most emotionally resonate with content that's in languages that they are native to. And so most people are native one language. Sometimes they're native a couple, but it's within the languages they're native to, which roughly means languages they learned complete fluency before they were 12, for the vast majority of people. It's a human connection. If the person says, oh, I'm hearing this in Chinese. It's warmer, it's smarter, it's more engaging, et cetera. If Chinese is my native language.

• 33:35Hala Taha?

  I do feel like people who have a lot of content out there have a very unique advantage going into the future because we can actually create these advertisers of ourselves because we have all this content.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Yep, absolutely.

• 33:48Hala Taha?

  One last question for you on the future of AI. So you're obviously at the forefront of this. You've thought a lot about it. You've written books on AI. So I just want you, and you can take your time with us because I think it's very interesting. How do you imagine our world to be five, 10, 20 years in the future with AI? What do you imagine the world to be like?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things that's a great way to look foolish in the future is make overly specific predictions. Partially because the usual principle I used to say in this is the future is sooner and stranger than you think. And so people thought in the eighties, we're going to get AI. But if we didn't get AI, we got the internet, we got mobile phone. Well, maybe now we're going to get AI. I mean, you know, we're going to get what shape of AI is the interesting question. What I think is the minimum guarantee is there's going to be, as opposed to like computer interfaces or phone interfaces or else, we're going to have agents. And agents are going to be the primary mode of navigation. What we describe in Superagency as an informational GPS. So in this entire informational digital world, we'll do that.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  And there will be more agents. Then there are people, especially when you consider the, even though there might be just one agent pie, that's kind of then instantiated with what it remembers out of its conversations, interactions with Hala, what it understands, remembers in its conversation, interactions with Reed, et cetera, et cetera. There's kind of this flow of agents. Now, one of the things that I think people haven't really fully tracked yet, but I think will be very interesting, is how agents end up talking to each other. Because when we have that many agents, part of how you and I are going to coordinate, like we say, hey, what should we talk about in the podcast? Well, one of our preps will be, your agent will talk to my agent.

• 35:30Hala Taha?

  Oh my gosh.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  And they'll kind of go, well, you know, these topics will be really good. And, you know, hey, when you ask a question this way, it'd be great. And when you answer it this way, it'll be great. And da, da, da, da. And, you know, that kind of thing. Or this could be a really new, interesting thing to try. And that will be part of the world that we will be in. And I think that part of that will then make the premium on thinking creatively, thinking differently, you know, as you mentioned, will be much higher. My guess is, for example, if you go back 30 years, and you told someone there were going to be these jobs called web designer, data scientist, other things, they go, what are you talking about? You know, crazy person from the future. And I think that's another thing that we're going to

• 36:14Speaker 01

  see even more of, which is like, oh, didn't realize that was going to be the job. Huh. And that's cool. Those are some of the things, but I try not to make overly specific predictions because usually they're, may I'll put it this way, William Gibson, science fiction author, has a really good quote, which is, the future is already here, it's unevenly distributed. He's been a great Neuromancer, it was the internet, everything else. Now, he was being asked in an interview, well, how did you see the future? And he's like, look, thank you for, for the compliment. But by the way, if you read Neuromancer, sure, I got AI right, I got the internet right, I missed the mobile phone. And so that's

• 36:56Speaker 01

  the kind of thing that we're always looking for, is that surprise and delight moment.

• 37:01Hala Taha?

  And who knows with AI, to your point, like, we have no idea what we're going to see. I'm excited to see it unfold. Okay, so I end my show with two questions I ask all of my guests. The first, and you can just answer however you'd like, doesn't have to be about anything we talked about today. What is one actionable thing our young improfitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  So, to become more profitable tomorrow, I guess I won't say literally tomorrow, since it's one day, 24 hour. I would say, the important thing, you know, and this is kind of part of how I think about the world, the important thing is to be thinking about, what do you think the environment your business is going to be in in one, three, and five years? And what do you think that environment is going to be changing based on patterns of technology? What do you think that's going to be changing on patterns of competition? What do you think that's going to be changing in patterns of how you deliver your business? Supply chain, etc. And so, by looking at that probable guess, how do you run the experiment today that informs

• 38:06Speaker 01

  you about which big choices you need to make in that one, three, and five year timeframe? The experiment won't necessarily make you profitable, but the experiment may give you the thing that either gets you to more profit, or also helps you navigate the changes where which, which things are the, the new living creatures and which things are the dinosaurs in the future markets.

• 38:28Hala Taha?

  Great advice. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond financial, profiting in all aspects of life.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Fundamentally, part of why in the Startup PU, I said, "Life is a team sport." Because the Startup PU is actually the advice I give to entrepreneurs, refactored to individuals being the entrepreneur of their own life. So, it actually applies to founders, applies to CEOs, applies to executives, applies to people working. But it's this question about life being a team sport, it's, you are amplified by your team. It's more fun. You learn more. And they help you in both upside and navigating downside. So, the most fundamental thing, life is a team sport.

• 39:09Hala Taha?

  And now, we're going to have agents with our team.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. Amongst our team.

• 39:14Hala Taha?

  Amongst our team, yes. With our team, we'll also have agents, and everybody will have agents.

• 39:20Hala Taha?

  Reid, this has been such an awesome conversation. I really appreciate all your time, all your wisdom. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Well, LinkedIn. You know, I post just about everything there. I also have Reid Hoffman.org. And this year, publishing super agency.

• 39:35Hala Taha?

  Amazing. I highly recommend everybody go get Super Agency. Also get Blitzscaling. I love that book as well. Reid, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  A great pleasure. I look forward to our next conversation.

• 39:53Hala Taha?

  Okay, guys, that's the second installment of my two-part conversation with the amazing Reid Hoffman. He had so many great insights about how we should think about AI and where it's headed. And I've got so many takeaways from this conversation, but here's my most important takeaways from this chat. First, big picture. New technology changes industries. And that's what AI is going to do. And that's what it's going to do to your industry. So you need to get in front of it and ask, what does this technology mean for my business, my product or service, and how will we operate as a company to get ahead of this? Technology also breeds fear and paranoia. And the conversation that me and Reid had about the potential harms of AI

• 40:35Hala Taha?

  is one that society has had for all the other major innovations as well, from the printing press to the smartphone. People are always scared of new technology. And we should be having these conversations, but like Reid said, we should also recognize that most of our fears about these innovations actually don't come to pass. And we live in a better world because of them. And the world we could live in, thanks to the advances in AI, could be truly transformational. As Reid put it, if we do it the right way, it could be magical. Put simply, AI means amplification intelligence. We're going to be having AI agents on our phones and devices that become our personal assistants, our tutors, our medical and financial advisors,

• 41:18Hala Taha?

  and so much more. We're going to be having capabilities at our fingertips that we can't even imagine today. We can't even foresee what the future is going to be like. And when you think about who's going to thrive and flourish in this world of super agents, it's going to be the people who have managerial experience. It's going to be the entrepreneurs, young improffiders. We are the most equipped to handle this AI revolution because we're creative, industrious, innovative, we know how to manage, delegate, motivate, we know how to let go of control. We know how to handle this, young improffiders. AI is going to multiply what you're capable of. It is not going to replace you or your business.

• 42:02Hala Taha?

  We're going to ride this wave, young improffiders. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If you listen, learned, and profited from this conversation with the legendary Reid Hoffman, please share this episode with somebody who'd love it. And guys, I've been loving reading your reviews. So many of you are leaving reviews every day on Apple, Spotify, Castbox, Player FM, wherever you listen to your podcasts, and it just means the world to me. I love to read your reviews. It makes me feel motivated. It's great for our social proof, and I'd love for you guys to drop a review and help spread this podcast by word of mouth. Young and Profiting is a gem for all the entrepreneurs out there. Please tell your friends, tell your family, tell your colleagues, tell all the entrepreneurs

• 42:45Hala Taha?

  in your life that they've got to listen to Young and Profiting Podcast. If you guys like to watch your podcasts as videos, I've been doing all this amazing YouTube content. My YouTube channel just hit 50K subscribers, which is much smaller than my audio channels, but I'm going to invest super heavily into video this year. And I just interviewed Mel Robbins in person, I interviewed Gary Vee in person, I just had Sahil Bloom in person that didn't come out yet. So I'm doing so many more in-person videos, and I absolutely love it. It's making me a better interviewer. It is just so much better for chemistry, and I've just been really digging it. So check out YouTube for all the video content. If you guys want to follow me on social media, I always post like fun stories about my life

• 43:28Hala Taha?

  on Instagram, @yapwithhala. Put a face behind the name, why not? You can also find me on LinkedIn, I'm hard to miss over there, just search Hala Taha. And a big thanks to my Yap production team. If you guys don't know, I have an award-winning social media and podcast agency. It is my podcast agency that runs this podcast. I also have a podcast network that gets me sponsorships and gets 30 other podcasts in the business space, sponsorships as well. We're crushing it on all sides and I'm so thankful for my team. I literally have the best team in the world. We're so picky about who we hire. So we've got the A-plus team at Yap who puts out A-plus work and that's why we got A-plus

• 44:11Hala Taha?

  money in the bank. This is your host, Halataha, AKA The Podcast Princess, signing off.