Feed Drop: Masters of Scale: President Bill Clinton in conversation with Reid Hoffman

Ahead of the U. S. presidential election, we’re bringing you a bonus episode from Reid's Masters of Scale podcast. A few weeks ago, Reid sat down with former President Bill Clinton at the Masters of Scale Summit to talk about the current state of American democracy, polarization, and what’s at stake in this election. Their full, unedited stage conversation is presented in this episode. To hear more conversations like these from Reid Hoffman, subscribe to Masters of Scale wherever you get your podcasts: https://mastersofscale.com/follow

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

• 0:00Aria Finger?

  Hey, possible listeners, it's Aria. Today, we're bringing you a bonus episode from Reid's Masters of Scale podcast. A few weeks ago, Reid sat down with former President Bill Clinton at the Masters of Scale Summit to talk about the current state of American democracy, polarization, and what's at stake in this election. I was there in the room, and it was awesome to hear. We'll be back in your feed on Wednesday like normal with more Possible, but for now, tune in to hear Reed's full conversation with former President Bill Clinton. Thanks so much.

• 0:34Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, listeners. Tomorrow is Election Day. If you haven't already cast your ballot via early voting, please make sure to go to the polls on Tuesday. There's so much at stake. At the Masters of Scale Summit, I welcomed a very special guest to the stage to share the gravity of this year's election. The 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, offered his insights on how we came to this current moment of divisiveness in the US and what could come next. The consequences couldn't be greater, and he landed on a message of hope. I hope you enjoy this special stage program from our summit, presented in full, unedited, here on Masters of Scale.

• 1:28Reid Hoffman?

  You've got to have incredible talent at every position.

• 1:32Reid Hoffman?

  There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it?

• 1:35Speaker 03

  Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing.

• 1:39Speaker 04

  There are so many easy wins. I have no idea what to do.

• 1:43Speaker 05

  Sorry, we made a mistake.

• 1:44Speaker 04

  But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment.

• 1:48Speaker 05

  Stuff that just seems absolutely nutballs 10 years later, like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it. Just how you do it.

• 1:58Reid Hoffman?

  This is Masters of Scale.

• 2:12Speaker 06

  Whoa.

• 2:15Reid Hoffman?

  Mr. President, it is a great honor to host you here at this conference.

• 2:18Speaker 06

  Thank you, I'm honored to be here. I'm glad to be around people who are happy.

• 2:26Reid Hoffman?

  I know that one of the things that everyone here wants to hear about is, kind of, how do you see the current state of what's going on in America? And what should we be thinking about? And how should we be... What should we be doing to try to help?

• 2:39Speaker 06

  Well, first of all, if you're confused about where we are and why we are here, I want to join your crowd.

• 2:49Speaker 06

  But here's how I think you should think about it. In the larger historical sweep, we are in a period that is somewhere between the run-up to the Civil War, but earlier, like 10 years before, in President Taylor's administration. And the condition in the country after Rutherford Hayes became president and bought his way into the Electoral College by promising to withdraw all the Union forces from the South.

• 3:29Speaker 06

  So we exposed all these cultural and other differences. And we became fodder for those who could profit immensely by exaggerating our differences and trying to rub salt in the wounds. And that's where we are in a modern sense. We also have been building toward this for a very long time. I mean, when President Eisenhower finally was able to dispatch Joe McCarthy and the whole "everybody's a communist" and all that stuff. He said presciently that we may be the longest lasting continuous democracy in

• 4:14Speaker 06

  human history, but he wasn't sure we could continue it. Because it required so much mental discipline and so much trust in our institutions and willingness to defend our constitution and the way things are done. And the willingness to live under the same set of rules, even though the people who make the rules and enforce them, like all humans, are subject to error. But we had to believe it. And he wasn't sure we could make it forever. So we made it a very long time. But at least since the mid 70s, there has been a fresh assault on the whole idea of

• 4:58Speaker 06

  government and an attempt to profit more from our differences than what we have in common. And then when Newt Gingrich took over the House of Representatives, he made a decision to basically try to make the white working class outside the South like the white working class in the South. And he was good at it. And we've talked about it all the time. And one of his sometime allies, who was a senator from the southern states, said, I said, I knew the answer, but I said to him once, I said, "Why do you guys hate me so much?" And I was out of office at the time. He said, "Oh," he said, "those in any sense hated you way more than Obama."

• 5:43Speaker 06

  And I said, "Why?" He said, "'Cause you betrayed the culture. You were a white, Christian, heterosexual Southerner who was pro-gay rights, pro-civil rights, thought we could all live together in harmony." And like he said, "It was really bad for our brand."

• 6:05Speaker 06

  And one Republican Senator once said to me, I said, "Do you think Hillary O. did anything wrong in that Whitewater deal? Not illegal, even wrong?" He said, "Oh, God, no." He said, "Anybody with a piece of a brain would know you didn't." He said, "That's not the point. The point is to make people think you did something wrong." And he said, "You know, I hate the way we treat you. I really like you, but if we fought you fair, I'd lose every time." So, I mean, I've been living with this a lot longer than many of you have. And I think the consequences now will be grievous if we continue down this road.

• 6:45Speaker 06

  Because, to use the term in common parlance now, there are no guardrails. If you watched the vice presidential debate the other night between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz, I almost had a coronary. You know, we weren't... There are no fact-checkers now. God forbid we should have them some days. But Vance actually said there was no big deal when Trump got elected on the Affordable Care Act. I mean, he actually helped to stabilize it. And I said, "Dear God, this was just a few years ago."

• 7:27Speaker 06

  When they tried to repeal it for the 60-something time with no consequences, you may think that's a great deal, but they did try. And it meant the end of protections for people with pre-existing conditions from excessive rates. And only John McCain stood up. And I think it's one reason his wife and a lot of other people in Arizona are supporting Kamala Harris now. Because President Trump said he was a loser. Because he got captured. But he stood up, and the people noticed.

• 8:10Speaker 06

  And as late as 2018, they gave the Republicans the worst beating in midterms they'd had in a hundred years. Now, they didn't lose as many seats as we did, Obama and I, in 94 and 2010, because of the radical gerrymandering, which this Supreme Court has now said is just fine.

• 8:33Speaker 06

  The new gerrymandering rule, I don't know if you guys paid any attention to it, but basically, the judges said, yes, you have a right to vote, yes, you have a right to vote, your vote counted, yes, your vote should count about as much as everybody else's. But there's always been some gerrymandering, and it's just impossible to tell how much is too much. And after all, the Constitution gives that authority to draw a district lines to the states. In other words, forget about the 15th Amendment, or the 14th Amendment.

• 9:10Speaker 06

  I mean, it's unbelievable. And Elena Kagan, who once worked in my administration, wrote a brilliant dissenting opinion, said, this is the first time in American history ever that the Supreme Court has found a right that has no remedy. And California, it just finished with its computer and bottles that gave the Republicans three more seats. And New York had a court order the same thing. So it's okay if it goes one way, but not the other. It bothers me. So that's where we are in history. Now, in this campaign,

• 9:54Speaker 06

  we have a specific set of challenges. About 44% or so of the people really want Trump to be elected. They were for him all the time, all three times, and they believe as he does. But there are about 5% of the voters that are genuinely, genuinely undecided about, you know, the mega issues. And Trump's argument's pretty straightforward and slick. It's basically, I was president for four years. We had two really good years. I'm not responsible for anything that happened in the pandemic. And we didn't have this inflation.

• 10:40Speaker 06

  And we are planning new jobs. Then Biden gets in. And we have inflation. So you got to vote against them and for me. And it's basically. And if you listen to people. And this especially affects millennials. Across racial lines. And especially people with families, they have a hard time. Buying groceries, they have a hard time. Maintaining their consumption habits. Even if they've gotten pay raises. And there had been unusual increases in food, fuel and housing.

• 11:18Speaker 06

  So what do we have to do? We have to, my side has to explain that without being defensive.

• 11:26Speaker 06

  Acknowledge, yes, prices have gone up. And in the. You know, over a year ago, we had. Nine percent inflation. Totally unsustainable. And then they had to say why it happened. It happened because we destroyed all the supply chains in the COVID epidemic. And we had inflation in every advanced economy on earth. That's a reason, not an excuse.

• 11:54Speaker 06

  So then what happened? As we rebuilt the supply chains. Inflation started to drop. Fuel prices went way up. Aggravated by the Russia Ukraine war.

• 12:09Speaker 06

  But we kept on with our all of the above strategy, which is not quite all of the above, it's basically. Safer natural gas harvesting and all the green options and efficiencies. And a lot of people. Make that's a mistake, but. We're in a period of transition. And we can't make it all up. In theory, we could without any. Natural gas, without any carbon. Related energy, but in practice, we can't. And the third thing is housing. That started with the crash in 2008. I just came from Nevada. They were, they were the third hardest hit state then. People fled the state.

• 12:53Speaker 06

  And financial institutions came in and bought up all these empty units. And now they own them and the rates are sky high and there's a shortage of housing. So what I think we should do is admit the truth and say, this happened. And this is what we want to do. What do they want to do? What we want to do is have a federal price gouging law, which we should have and should have had years ago. Because we don't want to sit prices, but we don't want to be gouged either. And we know how to enforce them because lots of states have them. We should have, continue our energy policy. And if all possible, accelerate it.

• 13:36Speaker 06

  We have unlimited potential to support solar and wind. We're trying to improve battery technology. We do, can do geothermal. We can do all this other stuff. We have now small scale pellet nuclear technology where you can protect the fuel with ceramic balls, which will give it a much longer half-life before it will be dangerous. And we can dramatically improve the efficiency of fracking if the standards are high enough and regularly checked. And what's their policy? And on housing, she wants to build three more, three million more units and give people

• 14:20Speaker 06

  help with their down payments. And it'll increase the supply and drop the price. So what's their policy? Their policy is they say nothing about the price gouging law. They, Donald Trump promised in a meeting with the oil companies, which was widely publicized, that he would repeal every single clean energy reform measure that had been adopted by President Biden. And the third thing is they've said really nothing about housing.

• 14:56Speaker 06

  So I think Kamala Harris has got a more compelling case. And I think affirmatively, they're better. You don't have to say anything bad about Trump. You just say, this is what we're for. And they're not for that. And he's actually promised to repeal a lot of what has given us cheaper power every day. Elon Musk is so determined to do it, that his greatest public service, I think, was the Tesla. It's a great car. And the people that have tried to copy it. My daughter and son-in-law are driving our grandkids to the house this weekend in Rivian.

• 15:39Speaker 06

  And you know, and now Musk likes being on the power side so much, that he's canceled all his recharging stations. And I have a friend who's a, lives in Connecticut, but he's a neighbor, a college classmate of mine, and he's from the Dominican Republic. He just won the contract to put up all the recharging stations in Queens that are gonna regularly recharge the New York City taxi cabs, because we're gonna have, we have to be all green in just a few years. That's what I think. I think we should run on, yes, there's a problem. Everybody had it. We're doing better than most people. And you will feel it if you just hang around here.

• 16:23Speaker 06

  Because what happened, Trump thinks he's gonna get a rerun of what happened in 2016. Where he told us, for a year, the economy, for two years, the economy was terrible under Obama. And we were producing eight million jobs a year with no inflation. It was not terrible. But, it often takes three years before people will admit that things are getting better, and before they can feel it. So, in 2017, when actually the rate of new jobs started going down a little bit, people felt it. And you know, Donald Trump is a genius at claiming credit. I mean, he is, he's good at it.

• 17:07Speaker 06

  I mean, we had a really sunny day today. I did that. It rained yesterday. If I had been president, it never would have happened.

• 17:23Speaker 06

  I mean, that's the world we're living in. So we're about to make a decision in an election that will have massive consequences for at least 30 years, based on people's perception or lack thereof. If you're getting better. There was a great article in one of the publications about five days ago, which measured Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on eight important economic questions, undecided voters. And hers positions were substantially more popular than his. But they don't know it yet, in spite of all the money that's been spent.

• 18:08Speaker 06

  So if you're interested in this election and you want to have any impact on it, I recommend we toot this horn as loud as we can for the 13 days that are left. And one final thing. There was a group of 170 economists from right to left that analyzed all of their proposals, including President Trump's proposal for 10% across-the-board tariffs. And we know that if we buy things that we're not going to start producing here, that it's just being added on to the price.

• 18:48Speaker 06

  So it amounts to a $4,000-year tax increase for most families. So I think it's a lay-down who's got the better plan for the most people. His plan costs $7.5 trillion over a decade. Hers costs $3.5 trillion. So his is twice as expensive and helped less than half as many people. But it takes time to get that out and to get people to absorb it. And we're asking them for somewhat of a leap of faith because the only thing that I see people saying is they do notice when gas prices go down, right away. So a lot of people are saying, "Yeah, gas prices are down."

• 19:32Speaker 06

  But they haven't felt the other stuff. So our job, those of us who support her, is to get out and make this argument. Then, on the terms of the threat to democracy and a woman's right to choose and all that? The real problem is that people have baked all that in. But they think, "Well, it wasn't so bad last time. McCain stopped it." But there are no guardrails now. The Supreme Court has literally said that the president can do anything to anybody at home in America if it's tied to his duty. Well, I've written this speech a lot in my mind.

• 20:17Speaker 06

  I swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. I think Bill Clinton's a real threat to that. I mean, after all, he opposed me. And, you know, his wife ran against me. How dare her? And so I'm gonna send him to the Colorado supermax, where he can't do any harm. He's the enemy within. Their idea of the enemy within is anybody disagrees with them. Now, you're laughing, but if you were me, it wouldn't be quite so funny. But I'd have done this little petition.

• 20:55Speaker 06

  I'm gonna handwrite this petition and say, "Look, I'm almost as old as you are." And, and, and my blood's running thinner. And can you please at least send me to jail in the South somewhere? I'll even go to Guantanamo. I just want to be warm. Now, we're laughing, but you shouldn't be. So we'll just see what happens. My gut is I think we'll eke it out, but I have no idea. We could lose all these close states. We could win them all.

• 21:34Speaker 06

  But the fundamental problem is she remains an unknown quantity to people. And they don't know... A lot of people who are still trying to make up their mind don't know what she has plans to do and had been given a chance to compare it to what he has. So in the last 30 days, whatever I can do to stop that, I'll close that gap. I'm gonna do it.

• 22:13Reid Hoffman?

  We'll be right back after a break.

• 22:20Reid Hoffman?

  Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find video of this talk from our Masters of Scale Summit and more at our YouTube channel.

• 22:32Reid Hoffman?

  So, Mr. President, I think you made the most compelling case. And among other things, you've demonstrated that unlike former President Trump, you can conclude in cohesive argument, coherent sentences, and do an in-depth analysis.

• 22:55Speaker 06

  Apparently, it's a disadvantage. I thought about trying to dance around on stage for 30 minutes, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

• 23:07Reid Hoffman?

  We appreciate the intelligence and the honesty. One other thing, I think, is the only point I'd add to your amazing descriptions, I'm going to ask it as a question, is, you know, he keeps promising to do these tariffs. What do you think the impact on the American people would be of Trump's tariffs?

• 23:27Speaker 06

  It would cost them about $4,000 a year, the average family. According to these studies, you know, it could be off a little bit, but if you ask them about it, they just miss it. They said, "Oh, there were a lot of economists that weren't for us before. Look how great our economy was." When he just rode on the back of Obama's last two years. And they think that you're going to give it to them again. This time, inflation's coming down, it's going to come down more, and we've still got a lot of benefits to reap from the infrastructure bill.

• 24:08Speaker 06

  There are 60,000 projects more or less underway, there'll be 100,000 before you know it. They both promised an infrastructure bill, but only Biden delivers one.

• 24:20Speaker 06

  And they think they'll get credit for it. And they'll be out there claiming credit.

• 24:25Reid Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 24:26Speaker 06

  It's only because I got elected that all these people decided to finish. Did I come up with the money? No. Did I come up with the... No. I mean, it's crazy. And they think they'll get the benefit of the CHIPS bill.

• 24:37Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 06

  And that CHIPS bill is really important because I think it also... It'll not only make us more competitive, but I think it will... Well, it gives us a chance to stabilize our relationship with China and to minimize the incentive they have to take over Taiwan.

• 24:57Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 06

  But that also relates to what we do in Ukraine, so we'll see.

• 25:03Reid Hoffman?

  Indeed. So, because I think you so compellingly and decisively answered the election question, I'm going to move to a Silicon Valley favorite, which is how... And we mentioned CHIPS. What's getting you curious around artificial intelligence? And how do you... From your position, how do you think we should think about it?

• 25:27Speaker 06

  Well, we talked about this a little before I came in, but I... I made three decisions when I was president that I thought worked out really well. And I made all of them in less than 10 minutes. Not all three at the same time, but when they came out. The first was I made a loan to Mexico when they were about to go broke, and 80% of the public was against it. And we had just lost the Congress to the Republicans. And on the day I had to make the decision, to be fair, Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole were both for it. And they were both told when they read the paper that morning that 80% of the public was against it, that they would be deposed unless they withdrew their support.

• 26:10Speaker 06

  So I had to do it alone from a little-known fund available for currency stabilization.

• 26:17Speaker 06

  I did that and it worked out great and Mexico paid the loan back three years early and we made $600 million more on the loan than we would have if the government money just wasn't put into government bonds. The second was when I decided we needed to accelerate the human genome project and we finished the first map. And we got the best return on that investment that you can imagine, it was just about hundreds of multiples. And the third was deciding to put GPS into the public domain. And it's hard to imagine it not being in the public domain now, but at the time I had

• 26:58Speaker 06

  to listen to a brisk argument about how the government had paid for all this research and it was defense related and national security. I said, first of all, you cannot keep this genie in the bottle. So why don't we put it in the places it'll do the most good and see what happens? And we all live with it without thinking about it now. So that's, I think that whatever happens, we need to think about AI in that way. For example, for me, you know, I'm from Arkansas and I spent an enormous amount of time when I was president trying to close the gap between the economic opportunities

• 27:41Speaker 06

  available to rich and poor communities, to rural and urban ones. And you're in a position now where you can take everything that's been learned about this locally and nationally over the last 30 years and put it into a system that will give us feedback and figure out what we should be doing to harmonize the economic and social development of America. It's not so easy to do, but I mean, to whatever extent you do it, you will be cutting down on the intensity of all this social conflict we've got. So I wish I knew enough about it to know how to do that.

• 28:23Reid Hoffman?

  Well, part of the thing that I can attest to personally is you have the depth of intellectual curiosity that continues for how to navigate these things. So we only have, you know, basically a couple of minutes left. What would you say that people could do? You're spending time, you know, helping people understand, you know, Harris's package, the policies, why they're intelligent, why she's dedicated to all of the American people, why they have a long-term impact. What would you say to an audience of entrepreneurs and journalists and so forth about what they should be doing to try to get that message out?

• 29:05Reid Hoffman?

  What's the, what's the, what's the, what's the thing that we can do to help row the boat?

• 29:09Speaker 06

  Well, I think in all the swing states, I would make sure that all the major publications understand why you think it would be better for the economy if you want long-term. Like I said, it's hard for you to imagine, but she just showed up in people's lives. I mean, I ran four times as long as I told you in the primary in 1992. And I was about to go to New York for the convention, and I got a survey that showed that a majority of the American people didn't know Hillary and I had a child. After I'd been out there and, you know, won the nomination and everything.

• 29:48Speaker 06

  And they also thought we were both from wealthy homes because we'd gone to Ivy League schools and spoken complete sentences.

• 29:57Reid Hoffman?

  It's a feature.

• 29:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I, I think anything you can do to get people who are in business, particularly businesses they created themselves, to understand your perspective about who is better and why is good. The other thing you can do is do what I'm trying to do on an individual scale. You can phone back into Nevada and Arizona and the other close states that are further east. We do have pretty good telecommunications, you know.

• 30:36Reid Hoffman?

  Indeed. Well, Mr. President, I speak for the entire audience and thanking you for the presidency, for the Clinton Global Initiative, and for your work on this election.

• 30:48Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 30:49Reid Hoffman?

  Thank you.

• 30:50Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 30:52Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 30:55Speaker 06

  But I just want to... One more thing. One more thing. I just want to say one other thing before we leave.

• 31:04Speaker 06

  If you look at it, what are you uncertain about and what are you certain about in the future? Let's think, forget about your policy. We don't know how long we have before we weep an even bigger whirlwind because of climate change. Yes. Therefore, we should be less intolerant of ourselves for delaying what things we know we can do that will also diversify and strengthen the economy. But we do know one thing. There is no country on earth in better shape than we are for the 21st century. That is, we have more people creating more things that are relevant to our future.

• 31:50Speaker 06

  A lot of it happening up here. Right? We have, and contrary to the rhetoric, our diversity is an enormous advantage.

• 32:05Speaker 06

  But most Americans in both parties are not anti-immigrant, they're anti-chaos. Yes. And you can help people understand what happened. We reformed the immigration laws in 1983. We've had more people moving across national borders, not just to America, but all over Europe and the Middle East and Asia and Africa in the last few years than any time since World War II. And that's a lot for people to absorb. So you need to explain that to people. We cannot give up on our diversity. And we cannot forget an even more important thing about diversity. Diverse groups make better decisions than homogeneous ones are long years. 1000%.

• 32:50Speaker 06

  So...

• 32:54Speaker 06

  I want you to be upbeat and optimistic. But the next few years will be either quite challenging or a runaway success for America, depending on what we do in two weeks. Bless you. Thank you.

• 33:19Reid Hoffman?

  Former President Clinton offers up his experiences as insight for the future of the presidency of the United States. He views his own party's challenges as substantial but surmountable, and sees the path forward as one that must include a hopeful future for younger people around shifting norms for climate, jobs, and technology. Thank you for listening, and vote this coming Election Day, Tuesday, November 5.

• 33:52Reid Hoffman?

  Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our senior producer is Tricia Bobita. The production team includes Tucker Legursky, Masha Makatunina, Brandon Klein, and Timothy Lu-Lee. Special thanks this week to Jay Punjabi, Jeff Berman, Jodin Dorsey, and the entire Masters of Scale summit team. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Vastinelli and Brian Pugh. Original music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Lital Malad. The scripted narration of Reid Hoffman used in this episode was produced using Reese Becher with full consent and permission.

• 34:37Reid Hoffman?

  Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter.