Greg Beato on superagency, AI, and the cognitive industrial revolution

In an age of increasingly ubiquitous AI, how do we maintain control of our lives and successfully plot our own destinies? In this episode, Reid is in the hotseat alongside writer Greg Beato, discussing this and more in the context of their new book, Superagency. Greg is a seasoned journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, Reason, Spin, and Slate, to name a few. He and Reid delve into what could possibly go right with our AI future; the cognitive industrial revolution; and the difference between AI Doomers, Gloomers, Zoomers, and Bloomers. Plus, Reid’s AI avatar makes a cameo to join for a few rounds of the game “Overrated/Underrated.” For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/ For more on Superagency, check out superagency.ai. Topics: 2:04 - Overrated/Underrated Round I 5:02 - Why Reid chose Greg as his co-author 6:01 - Why Greg wanted to write this book 8:19 - Why Reid chose this book topic at this particular time 11:21 - How the rise of AI is similar to the rise of social media 16:36 - Agency, superagency, and AI 19:59 - Overrated/Underrated Round II 23:28 - Defining AI Doomers, Gloomers, Zoomers, and Bloomers 28:46 - How AI amplifies agency 32:16 - How ChatGPT shifted people’s relationship with AI 37:21 - Choosing AI vs. AI being baked into technologies 39:28 - Speed and scale in the current AI moment 44:37 - How innovation and safety can coexist 48:49 - Rapid-fire Questions Possible is an award-winning podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Tune in for grounded and speculative takes on how technology—and, in particular, AI—is inspiring change and transforming the future. Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with an ambitious builder or deep thinker on a topic, from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education. These conversations also showcase another kind of guest: AI. Whether it's Inflection’s Pi, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or other AI tools, each episode will use AI to enhance and advance our discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively.

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  We've been using AI since the early 2010s as recommendation engines, as autocomplete, but we never got to choose to use it. The narrative before had always been it's going to make decisions for you and close down your possibilities. ChatGPT came along to me, it really flipped that narrative. All of a sudden, the technology for the first time was democratized and made accessible.

• 0:38Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:40Aria Finger?

  And I'm Arya Fingur.

• 0:41Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know how together we can use technology like AI to help us shape the best possible future.

• 0:48Aria Finger?

  We asked technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers to help us sketch out the brightest version of the future. And we learn what it'll take to get there.

• 0:59Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 1:03Aria Finger?

  Hey, possible listeners. Today's episode is a little different. Reid doesn't get to ask any questions. Instead, he will be in the hot seat along with our teammate Greg Beato, who also happens to be one of my all time favorite people. Reid and Greg are the co-authors of a brand new book, Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right With Our AI Future? And today, we'll be getting the inside scoop. Greg is a seasoned journalist who grew up in Silicon Valley and got into culture writing in the early days of the World Wide Web. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, Reason, Spin, Slate, The Guardian, and more than 100 other publications worldwide.

• 1:47Aria Finger?

  We are so excited to have Greg here with us for this special episode about our AI futures. Without further ado, here's my conversation about Superagency with Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato.

• 2:04Aria Finger?

  All right, Reid, Greg, I'd like to try something we've never done before on Possible, which is to borrow from our good friend Tyler Cowen and play the game overrated or underrated. So here are the rules. I'm going to call out a term or topic, and you'll each take turns declaring it overrated or underrated. All right, Reid, we'll start with you. Autonomous vehicles, overrated, underrated?

• 2:28Reid Hoffman?

  Underrated.

• 2:30Aria Finger?

  Greg?

• 2:31Reid Hoffman?

  Underrated, very underrated.

• 2:33Aria Finger?

  Oh, all right. Reid, do we have one sentence? Why do you think underrated?

• 2:38Reid Hoffman?

  I think that we're in this kind of thing where everyone thought it was going to happen two or three years ago, and now it's like, oh, who knows? And they haven't actually, in fact, realized that the entire world of transport, from trucks with Aurora to cities, is in the process of revolution right now.

• 2:57Aria Finger?

  I love it. All right. Notebook LM, Reid?

• 3:00Reid Hoffman?

  Underrated.

• 3:02Aria Finger?

  Greg?

• 3:04Speaker 00

  I've only used the one part of it, the podcast part of it, and I think it's both underrated and overrated.

• 3:14Aria Finger?

  Okay, give us one sentence. Why?

• 3:16Speaker 00

  It's overrated because it really shows to me, like, it's a trick, but it sounds great. And it's underrated because it really reveals how plastic content is in the AI age. One piece of content becomes any format, right?

• 3:35Aria Finger?

  And it's going to put me out of a job, so I'm just going to say overrated. Okay, next one. LinkedIn, Reid?

• 3:43Reid Hoffman?

  Underrated.

• 3:44Aria Finger?

  Greg?

• 3:46Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, very underrated.

• 3:47Aria Finger?

  Yes, I love it. All right, Reid, let's go to you. One sentence, why is LinkedIn underrated?

• 3:53Reid Hoffman?

  I think most people still don't know how to actually use LinkedIn fully. They kind of think of it as a, you know, place to find talent, or finding jobs, or finding sales prospects. And the ability to find experts and expertise and kind of participate in the modern, changing world that we're engaged in, I think most people don't know.

• 4:14Aria Finger?

  All right, I love it. Spatial intelligence, Reid?

• 4:19Reid Hoffman?

  Uh, underrated.

• 4:22Aria Finger?

  Greg?

• 4:23Speaker 00

  Uh, underrated, now closer to properly rated, but certainly if you had asked me 20 years ago, I would have said, what's really going to come from all this location-based data? And a lot came from it.

• 4:40Aria Finger?

  All right, and we're going to finish it out with a sneaky one. New York City, underrated or overrated, Reid?

• 4:46Reid Hoffman?

  O过rated.

• 4:48Aria Finger?

  Ah, Greg?

• 4:49Reid Hoffman?

  Underrated.

• 4:51Aria Finger?

  I'm going to go with underrated, too. Best place to live. All right, thank you both for taking part in our first round of underrated, overrated. And now we are going to get into the show. So Reid, before we dive into super agency, I have to ask you about your choice of co-author. So you co-wrote your last book, Impromptu, with ChatGPT. What made you opt for a human co-author for super agency with your great human co-author Greg?

• 5:20Reid Hoffman?

  Well, Greg and I have been working together for over a decade. One of the things that I tend to tell people when you say, in my writing, you see something that has a witty joke, you know that Greg wrote it. I think I have yet to write a witty joke. Maybe I've written unwitty jokes. And, you know, so Greg and I have been working together a long time. But, you know, obviously, you know, part of it is still GPT-4. And our other AI tools were in the background with super agency because it would be ill-fitting to be arguing that we're going to get superpowers from amplification intelligence and not be using it.

• 6:00Aria Finger?

  I love it, I love it. So Greg, let's, let's get into it. Your background is as a journalist, culture writer. You grew up in Silicon Valley, back when Apple was a local business. Can you share what made you excited to write this book, Super Agency, about technological breakthroughs and the age of AI?

• 6:19Speaker 00

  In addition to growing up in Silicon Valley and being sort of just in that, my dad was a programmer. I didn't really get a computer until college, late college. It was a hand me down from him, but have always been in that world. And a little bit later, in the early 90s, happened to into a job at a web development company in like 1995, at the height of what web 1.0, started writing for a bunch of internet publications in that era. And when all this stuff started happening with AI, in this new

• 7:01Speaker 00

  form of AI, which we talk about in the book, is circa 2021, 2022, and especially with the release of ChatGPT, it kind of started with Dolly 2, but really crescendoed with ChatGPT. All of a sudden, it felt like 1995 again, in terms of how big is this moment?

• 7:24Speaker 00

  What's coming? Like, what is the pace of of development and innovation? And, you know, arguably, is it going to be even bigger than that? But it felt sort of nostalgic to me and also like unprecedented to me. So that's why I wanted to write about it. And of course, what I sort of just alluded to, and I'm sure we'll talk more about, is even with all the coverage of it, I felt like people were missing a basic aspect of what had happened and the way that the products from OpenAI were changing how AI was being deployed and developed.

• 8:03Aria Finger?

  I love how your answer is so sort of moment in time, historical based, because when people read Super Agency, they'll see that that's what you get. You get a ride to see some technologies adapted slowly, more quickly. What was the reception from people about these new technological innovations? And so, read a similar question. You have written other books. You wrote The Startup of You about helping folks navigate their career in life. You know, blitzscaling was all about businesses and how you can have them grow at a hyperspeed. So tell me about Super Agency and why of all of the topics you could tackle, it was like this concept at this particular time?

• 8:40Reid Hoffman?

  Well, it's no surprise to anyone, especially the people listening to this podcast, that we are in a Amazing technological revolution with artificial intelligence, amplification intelligence. And if you look at most of the discourse, whether it's academics, press, journalists, even some technologists, technology influencers, this is enormously negative. It's like AI is coming for your jobs, AI is coming for your, you know, kind of personal well being. AI might be coming for your life if you listen to some of the existential risk people and kind of who've watched the Terminator movie maybe one or one or two times too many.

• 9:22Reid Hoffman?

  And part of the discussion that Greg and I were having was we realized that a lot of these, you know, concerns, this disparate from privacy to jobs to, you know, well being, all come down to this notion of human agency. And if you look at the history of these amazing general purpose technologies, which have an interesting acronym parallel with generative pre-trained models, GPTs, ChatGPT, is the fact that this is always how human beings first encounter general purpose technologies, which is, oh, my God, it's going to destroy society and what it is to be human. And actually, in fact, we're homo technae, and even if we don't intervene,

• 10:07Reid Hoffman?

  the massive likelihood outcome is, just like any other time that we've had this discourse, is a superpower, and there's amazing elevation of human agency. And what's more, the way you get to positive outcomes is by rowing, by driving towards positive outcomes. So let's say what the positive outcomes are with human agency in each of these cases, and say how it is we can get there, how it is we will get there. But of course, be smarter than the previous technological revolutions and try to navigate through these transitions, uncertainties and risks in better ways. And that's why it makes it like.

• 10:48Reid Hoffman?

  Incredibly important now to be addressing that because if you say, look, this is a future that we're that the rushing rapids are taking us to. Well, let's navigate it really well. Get through the slalom course to be on the other side where we've got this amazing future and let's get through it, you know, smartly, fast, you know, minimizing the amount of risks, not to zero. There's going to be a bunch of thunderbenders and and scrapes is getting there, but let's try to minimize that as we get to our more human future.

• 11:21Aria Finger?

  I think a lot of people think in the short term and they think, well, the last big technology that came along was social media. And honestly, I don't, I don't love it. So Reed, can you either rebut me by saying that no, social media was good too? Or no, AI is different. Like, how do you respond to the critiques from those people?

• 11:42Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I think the answer is both. For one, social media, when you get to the big giants, has over a billion daily active users, billion daily daily active users on Facebook, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so you go, okay, a billion out of the, like, you know, if you round up, you got nine billion people in the world, a billion out of the nine billion people in the world are using it every day. And they're not like being hogtied, arm twisted, headlocked into it. They're doing it because of choice. Now, you could say, well, could a choice because it has a fear of missing out? It's could be choice because you have some emotional agitation about current political circumstances and then responding to it and a bunch of other things. And there are, of course, negative

• 12:27Reid Hoffman?

  stories that emerge from this. And anytime you've got a billion people doing this, you've got, you know, tens of millions plus doing pretty bad things in various ways.

• 12:38Reid Hoffman?

  But there's a billion people, they're connecting with friends, their family, they're sharing things and so forth. So there's a huge amount of positive where the negative is all reported. Now, I of course believe that we can modify these technologies and social networking to make them better. And I think that actually the discourse around making them better and diminishing the negatives is exactly the right kind of things to do that. Now, I think that the, on the AI side, you know, AI, anytime you see a technology is a problem, you can also see technology the solution. So people tend to harp on, you know, one of the things that Jonathan Zentrain has just published in The Atlantic is apparently ChatGPT barfs on his name. It's

• 13:21Reid Hoffman?

  like, I'm not gonna talk about Jonathan Zentrain, you know, third rail, third rail, third rail. So he's one of the few people who does that. Like, oh, my God, look at this terrible thing. You're like, look, there's these artifacts, these very complicated things. And you go, this is the one person that, or one of seven, or one of 20 out of the billions of people that you get this weird response in. But you can have AI be like much more compassionate, all inflections pie, than your average human being in terms of how it does. And that could be great for human beings' wellbeing, it could be great for modeling, like, what kind of discourse do we really want all human beings, all, you know, round up to nine billion people to be more compassionate with themselves, with others, within their communities? And

• 14:06Reid Hoffman?

  we model based on which environments we're in. And so I tend to think that, you know, AI is naturally, across a wide range of things, is going to be helping us become even more human in the ways that we aspire to be, even without special purpose intervention, because there's natural incentives in it. So, so the answer is both. Social media is not as bad as people reflexively think, and nor is AI.

• 14:40Reid Hoffman?

  Parallel to social media and has a huge amount of great, superpowered vistas in front of us.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  I think one of the interesting things about AI, we liken it to steam power in terms of the magnitude of the innovation, right? That happened 400 years ago. So this is a once in a, every few hundred years level innovation and transformation of society. It's the first one to ever happen where the internet exists. And you've got this tool where a billion people every day can complain about whatever is happening that's new that they don't like. That's something real that needs to be negotiated and factored into. How does the innovation get deployed, right?

• 15:31Speaker 00

  You didn't have that when automobiles were happening. You didn't have it when the internet was happening. You kind of didn't even have it when social media was happening, was happening at the same time, right? So now we've got this really granular, complex, powerful system to voice dissent, to do all kinds of different things. And that's why such a huge focus of the book is about why it's important to obtain consent of the governed, you know, which basically just means buy-in from the people who are using the technology. And our big thesis is, well, in order to create trust and buy-in, you have to give

• 16:15Speaker 00

  people access to the technology, right? And that's why this iterative deployment mode that OpenAI has been using is what we think is the right way to do it versus let's lock up the technology and perfect it before you give people access to it.

• 16:35Reid Hoffman?

  That kind of thing.

• 16:36Aria Finger?

  You mentioned the internet. Most people would agree that the internet gives people more human agency. And I think people are sort of split on AI. And so, Reid, I'm going to go to you. You guys quoted in the book, you said that the concerns about AI boil down to this quote, "Human agency, informed by the question, in an age of ubiquitous AI, how do we maintain control of our lives and successfully plot our own destinies?" End quote. And so, when and how did this idea of agency and super-agency start forming for you, especially as it relates to AI?

• 17:11Reid Hoffman?

  Well, as I mentioned a little earlier, Greg and I were talking about a bunch of the different threads, because I do think that the concerns and criticisms are good to address, full stop. Whether or not they're because they're transitional issues, whether because they're long-term issues. Because, by the way, having those concerns and fears and all the rest is part of the human condition. And so, how do you address them? And then, as we kind of wove our way through them, and we thought about the history of the printing press, the history of electricity, the history of, you know, steam engine, the history of the smartphone, and said, hey, this is a common pattern. And it kind of comes down to this question of, do I have control and direction over my life and my environment

• 17:55Reid Hoffman?

  and things that are happening with me? And part of, of course, the reason why this is complicated in human societies is because the short answer is, we have some things we're in control of and other things we're not. We adjust them because other people have control and things happen in nature and other kinds of things. So it's like, what's the scope of how I express my homo techne through these, you know, kind of technologies and artifacts and control? And we kind of went, well, actually, in fact, technology is part of it, you know, all the way back to fire and spears and agriculture, give human beings superpowers. And this one also gives people superpowers. Now, part of the question is, you give person X a superpower, you know, give Sue a superpower, you know,

• 18:39Reid Hoffman?

  give Bob the superpower, then, you know, kind of what happens there and what are the kinds of things that play out? And I was like, well, but actually, the really important thing is to give both Sue and Bob superpowers and give a lot of people superpowers. And that's where this super-agency thing came about when, you know, Greg and I were talking, because it was like, actually, in fact, giving a whole bunch of individuals. Superpowers together. And then we realized, of course, that was the chat GPT moment. That was the reason why it kind of, you know, went from a research release. That's how it was released is, hey, we've got this thing we're working on. We're going to do this little research release to a, you know, global phenomena. And you're like, just completely transformed, you know, kind of like, you know,

• 19:22Reid Hoffman?

  everything from what world leaders were thinking to kind of like what people were thinking about the future of work and societies to, hey, have you played with chat GPT yet? But it's superpowers and, and, and the agency. And so, you know, mostly, you know, part of the thing that we're trying to do with this book, with this podcast is like, go engage with it as opposed to saying, hey, I'm terrified of it. Go engage with it and see how we can give you superpowers. And that's, I think, where the kind of idea came from and what it is that's so important for people to grapple with this.

• 20:00Aria Finger?

  All right, let's sneak in another quick round of overrated or underrated before we keep going on super agency. So books, Reid.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Overrated.

• 20:15Aria Finger?

  Greg?

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Books are overrated, reading is underrated.

• 20:21Aria Finger?

  Ah, fair enough. What a good promo, everyone listening to go out and pick up super agency. Uh, next one, AI avatars, Reid.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Oh, definitely overrated.

• 20:34Aria Finger?

  Greg?

• 20:35Speaker 00

  I'm going to say underrated because I just don't really know. I've, we're so early that I couldn't accurately say, no, we need this or we don't need this.

• 20:45Aria Finger?

  All right, well, since we're discussing AI avatars, we're actually going to bring on Reid AI. All right, Reid AI, what do you think?

• 20:55Reid Hoffman?

  Underrated, not a big surprise for me here, but I think there is huge potential for personalized interactions, learning and scaling human presence.

• 21:04Aria Finger?

  All right. So we'll go to Read AI first and then I'll go to Read and Greg for the next few. A big topic these days, AGI. Read AI.

• 21:14Reid Hoffman?

  Slightly overrated. Fascinating and transformative if achieved, but the focus on it sometimes distracts from near term AI applications that matter now.

• 21:25Aria Finger?

  Read?

• 21:26Reid Hoffman?

  I'm going to borrow from an earlier Greg answer and say overrated and underrated. Overrated in that it's, you know, it's intense storm and drawing discussion. Underrated in that the level of amplification that we will get over the next few years with all of us going into super agency together is wildly underrated.

• 21:50Aria Finger?

  Greg?

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think super underrated because I think it's really hard to conceive, oh, what if we suddenly had a billion AGIs? Like, all of the pictures of AGIs that we, we commonly know are usually like, it's one and it's this, this one robot that's whatever. And it's like, no, we're going to have a billion or 2 billion. And, you know, they could be computer scientists who are working on this or virtual chemists working on drug discovery. It's just so hard to conceive of like what that will, what the effects of that might be. So underrated.

• 22:33Aria Finger?

  All right. Next one, Bitcoin. Read AI.

• 22:36Reid Hoffman?

  Slightly overrated. It's a remarkable innovation in decentralized finance, but lacks wide scale utility and stability as of now.

• 22:46Aria Finger?

  Read?

• 22:47Reid Hoffman?

  Underrated. I was per my earlier social media post that we, and I had predicted we'd get to 100K and here we are.

• 22:54Aria Finger?

  Greg?

• 22:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think underrated. I think we're going to really see the value of it. As it gets more broadly adopted, it just becomes more valuable, more powerful. So.

• 23:09Aria Finger?

  I'm hoping for those use cases. I can't wait.

• 23:28Aria Finger?

  All right, now back to super agency. So Greg, in the book, you establish that people generally fit into one of four camps when it comes to their stance on AI and the surrounding discourse. So we have doomers, gloomers, zoomers, and bloomers. And can you start us off with defining each term for our listeners?

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Sure. And like you say, they're broad strokes terms. Doomers and gloomers, I would say, are on the skeptical side of the continuum in terms of, you know, what they think the impacts are going to be. Zoomers and bloomers are on the more optimistic side. Doomers, which is probably the biggest pre-existing category, like that's where we, you know, people are already talking about doomers and then conveniently we're like, oh, there's a lot of words that rhyme with doomers. How can we play this out, right? But doomers are the people who do say, no, this is different than any other technology

• 24:30Speaker 00

  before, precisely because of its capacity to potentially really operate autonomously and agentically. And we could get to this point where it gets the ability to start improving itself on its own, could reach this level of superintelligence that we have no idea. That's the fundamental concern about agency, right? Like on the biggest vector is, are we creating something akin to a new species that will be smarter than us and therefore potentially control us or even destroy us, right? So that's doomers.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Gloomers are much more near term, pointing out,

• 25:22Speaker 00

  you know, the bias that's baked into training data, issues around copyright, all of the sort of near term things of like, how is this product being developed and deployed? Who is impacted positively? Who is impacted negatively? Is it going to be a big data or big tech thing where it narrowly rewards a small sector of society? All of those concerns are the gloomers. It's a wide variety and they're all legitimate concerns, right? But they also then, as we talk about in the book,

• 26:05Speaker 00

  if you're only thinking through the lens of what could possibly go wrong, you're therefore narrowing the aperture of what could go right. And zoomers are the most positive. They think that there's going to be such great benefits that we should full speed ahead, pedal to the metal, no regulation, and perhaps not even a role for the government at all as a partner. We kind of make the differentiating between bloomers and zoomers in the book is sort of like, well, what role is the government going to play in all this? But I'd also add that you might say that zoomers are also like,

• 26:49Speaker 00

  hey, we're going to build this and you, the public, are going to come around to it and adapt to it or not adapt to it, right? A bloomer is someone who is positive on the tech, wants very light regulatory touch because we believe in permissionless innovation more than precautionary principle. But then is also factoring in, how do you substantially involve the public in the development process? And how do you substantially and positively involve government in the process, both as a regulator and as a user of the technology?

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Because That's a big thing. Every country is going to have its own AI strategy and own AI posture. And part of that will boil down to what kind of consensus there is amongst its citizenry over how you use this, right? And we in the US are in the technological lead, in the economic lead. But I think we have a real challenge with how do we get national consensus now? And this is a moment, probably the biggest moment in decades where national consensus matters on a geopolitical level.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  The bluer mindset is sort of like, you can't just say, here's how it's going to be, folks. Let the technologists decide. There has to be a lot of public engagement and some government engagement in the process.

• 28:32Aria Finger?

  And to your point, maybe because of social media, it's one of those times when everyone can have a voice, but it's perhaps the harder than ever to find one voice that the US is speaking with or to find consensus among our citizenry. It would surprise no one that Reid and Greg, you guys consider yourself bloomers. And so Reid, can you, can you talk about like the earliest moments? I mean, I remember talking to you about them, when you really felt like you were witnessing the start of what's described in super agency as an era where AI can work for you and with you instead of just on you. What did that feel like?

• 29:11Reid Hoffman?

  Well, part of the thing for people to realize is that to some degree, taking agency is a, like what your stance is, what you're doing. Like, and you say, oh my God, I'm driving and there's all these people around me like, this person's cutting me off and I'm boxed in by these people and da, da, da, and that's your, that's your angle. You were, you were by your own psychological stance, reducing your agency. And like when you're driving, you go, no, no, actually I'm driving. I control this thing. And sure, there's other people on the road and I have to speed up sometimes, slow down sometimes, sometimes I have to wait when I don't want to. And sometimes this person gets a little closer to me when I like, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And sometimes I think, oh boy, that person's driving really terribly. I want to stay away from them.

• 29:55Reid Hoffman?

  But you still can take agency in your driving. And then, one of the things that's really magical about AI is what it enables you to now do. And one of the things that we, you know, Greg and I describe in the book is kind of this informational GPS, which is, we as human beings navigate this informational space all the time and make decisions about like, what movie are we going to see? Or, or we're going to go to dinner? Or, you know, when should we see the doctor? When the doctor tells us something, how do we parse it? Do we get a second opinion? You know, when we're trying to learn something and we're reading something, you know, it's like, okay, well, do I believe this? Should I, should I get a second opinion?

• 30:37Reid Hoffman?

  And AI can be an enormous asset across everything that you do with information-making decision. People realize that we go through our entire lives, making tons of decisions every day, navigating an informational space in all kinds of things. And this is the superpower. And that's part of when I flipped with impromptu to as opposed to just writing a book saying, hey, it's amplification intelligence is like, let's put in a bunch of the G P T four prompts and answers as infrastructures to show how you actually amplified it, showing, not just telling. And that was part of like, kind of realizing that realization into that book.

• 31:17Reid Hoffman?

  And then, of course, it became the, oh, my gosh, we need to make sure that everybody knows that they can take this super agency stance. And part of the super agency is not just me as an individual, but the society that we live in, when lots of people all have these superpowers. So like, you know, one of the examples that we charted was, okay, when a doctor got a car, that gave you super agency because the doctor could come to you and help you at your house and do a house call, for example, which was only available to the absolute wealthiest people. And now, middle-class people can get access to it. And that's part of super agencies, not just you could drive places with your car.

• 32:01Reid Hoffman?

  But the doctor could come to you. And that's what we see with AI because that's for you and with you, not just you individually, but other people in the society you're engaged in now is giving you these kinds of superpowers.

• 32:16Aria Finger?

  So I think, again, the sort of agency and what you do with it is so critical here. And Greg, you alluded to it earlier, and obviously you talk about it extensively in the book, about the release of ChatGPT. And I remember this so clearly because we and so many people in the tech community were breathlessly awaiting GPT-4. We were awaiting the sort of next technological breakthrough because the technological breakthrough was going to take us to the next level. And not that that wasn't true, we're now all breathlessly awaiting GPT-5. But what the big breakthrough was, wasn't actually the technology, it was the delivery mechanism that all of a sudden, millions of people, probably one of the fastest upticks of technology

• 32:59Aria Finger?

  in history, could now use AI at their fingertips because they had a portal to use that they didn't have before, sort of about this, the simple interface that perhaps changes is opposed to a technological breakthrough. So can you talk a little bit about that sort of shift that ChatGPT represented? And what did you learn about that time?

• 33:21Speaker 00

  I mean, it was a little bit of a technological breakthrough because it also was trained specifically to be more conversational and relevant. Ironically, a lot of people went immediately to the, what's the magic prompt that I can do to make it produce things, rather than what's this conversation I can have about a subject and learn iteratively? Probably in part because of my background as a journalist, I'm used to like interviewing people. So like, I really took to that new aspect of it. But.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  To kind of go back to what you said about for you and with you rather than on you. Again, I'm old enough so that I had a period in my life where I went to CompUSA and made affirmative choices to buy Microsoft Word in a box on a shelf or Photoshop, right? And a lot of people have never had that experience. Everything's just sort of there and it's embedded. AI, we've been using AI since the early 2010s as recommendation engines, as autocomplete. You know, a billion people have been using it every day for over a decade, but we never got to choose to use it.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  And there were also instances of it, and this goes back to like maybe 2015 to 2018, when the narrative was all around facial recognition, predictive policing, algorithmic decision-making and the bias inherent in that, right? And so these were all instances of AI that was embedded in systems, whether positive in the form of, oh, it gave me a great Netflix suggestion, or negative, oh, it turned me down for a mortgage. I didn't have a choice of like, how am I going to use it or not use it? ChatGPT gave me that choice.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  And the fact that Google or Microsoft didn't release it first. So it wasn't just something that was already in a system. I had to go to OpenAI and choose to use it and then figure out what did I want to do with it, right? That was a much different paradigm than anything that existed around AI before that. The narrative before had always been, it's going to make decisions for you and close down your possibilities. And these are fears that go all the way back to the birth of mainframe computers that we talked about in the book of like, and very much, you know, probably 2018 to 2020 was

• 36:04Speaker 00

  sort of peak gloomism in terms of big books about like the age of surveillance capitalism, the atlas of AI. Good books, but it was very much like AI is going to take your agency and hurt you in all these different ways. ChatGPT came along to me, it really flipped that narrative. But no one really mentioned that. And in fact, the opposite thing kind of happened. It was like, all of a sudden, the technology for the first time was democratized and made accessible. And then you had all these things of like, we've got to pause or stop or prohibit this technology in order to save democracy, right?

• 36:48Speaker 00

  And so like, that was when we really first started talking about writing that book was when that pause letter came out in like, March or April of 2023. And, you know, it sort of seemed like people were saying, we need a new federal agency to regulate this, we need this and that. And it was like, wait a minute, we just finally gave people access to this technology to participate in its development in a real viable way. And now we're going to take that away?

• 37:21Aria Finger?

  So I think Greg, you know, I have no doubt that something like ChatGPT will be around for a long time. A general purpose agent that you can interact with. I have also no doubt that they're going to be super specialized agents that are going to come out to sort of meet specific needs. But also, there's definitely going to be AI baked into technologies. So when you're using additional applications, you can't sort of sign in or out of using AI in these additional applications. Does that sort of negate your thesis that right now people are choosing it? But in the future, it is going to be baked into everything we use? Like, how do you reconcile those?

• 37:58Speaker 00

  I think it reinforces my thesis of like, why this approach is so necessary? Because yes, those uses are going to happen. And they're not always going to be default bad either. In fact, we probably want some of them to happen. And part of our thesis in the book is the best way to get consensus on that is to say, So to introduce you to the technology individually, you form a relationship with it. It's valuable to me. Then maybe I can see how it's valuable in other contexts too, where it's not filtered solely through me,

• 38:39Speaker 00

  but maybe on a more society-wide level. Right? Because again, it gets back to that notion of how are we going to play this global game? When, like I said earlier, we need national consensus on this subject, probably more than anything since like the Cold War, when the Cold War was the Cold War. You know? And, you know, we started writing this book while the pandemic was still sort of in play.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  And that was like a great illustration of like, you know, how different countries reacted to that.

• 39:20Aria Finger?

  Absolutely. Right? Culture matters. People will react differently. Technology, everything that's going on in the country, the sort of whether it's a democracy or not. So, I mean, both of you have talked about slowing down and how people have requested that we slow down. And some people who are even fans of AI will say, I agree with you. I see all these incredible technologies, but we're just going too fast. Like, can we just, you know, take a beat? And so, Reid, you know, one of your previous books is called Blitzscaling, you know, talking about how do we hurdle as fast as possible to this technological future? So what do you think are lessons around speed and scale that you sort of take from Blitzscaling that you apply to the current AI moment?

• 40:05Reid Hoffman?

  Why I wrote Blitzscaling was because of, why does global changing technology emerge out of this area of the world that has?

• 40:17Reid Hoffman?

  The number of people, if you round it up to four million people, and that's not four million people in tech industry. That's rounding up to four million people in the entire region. Right? Kids, old people, people, you know, running restaurants, I mean, the whole thing. So very small number, and yet the number of globally changing technology companies that come out of this area are just massive. And actually, even when you compare to China, given the populations, it's by a population, you know, per capita thing, still, you know, massively impactful. And the answer was is because one of the things that Silicon Valley has learned is blitzscaling.

• 40:59Reid Hoffman?

  And blitzscaling is kind of prioritizing speed to scale over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty. That's what blitzscaling is. And the reason why blitzscaling is important is because like people say, oh, you blitzscale because you like blitzscaling is the goal. It's like, no, no, no. Prioritizing speed over efficiency and uncertainty is a very scary thing, but you do that for competitive response. When you have, you're competing in the globe and you're, and you're the, what we describe in the book as Glengarry Glen Ross markets. First prize Cadillac, second prize steak knives, third prize, you're fired. Right?

• 41:41Reid Hoffman?

  That how to get to speed to global scale really, really matters. Now, the principles that underlie this are the same principles as the reason why you kind of think, well, why is AI going to play out? And why do we need to be doing so at speed? Why do we need to be doing so at speed and uncertainty? Because like basically, any theory of human beings that isn't, we divide into groups and we compete with each other, whether it's, you know, sports teams to schools, to companies, to industries, to countries.

• 42:16Reid Hoffman?

  You don't have a good theory of human being if you don't include that as a fundamental. And so when it gets to AI, you say, well, but we'll all just agree. It's like, well, yeah, like we'd all just agree on something very clear and apparent like climate change. You know, how is that working for you? And so, so it's, it's, it's a question of no, no, we do this and people have different views about like, well, how risky is AI and how risky is speed? And what are the possibilities and how does it make humanity better? And how does it make me better and how does it make the company better? And all the rest of the stuff. And so that's what sets the clock all the way back to blitzscaling. Now, in blitzscaling, we wrote a chapter called Responsible Blitzscaling. Because the classic thing that critics who don't care about the truth of how these things

• 43:00Reid Hoffman?

  happen, everything else, go, oh, it's, it's, it's about being irresponsible. It's like, no, actually blitzscaling is the clock that's set by human beings competing with each other on things that they are morally and, and, and allow like, and, and structurally allowed to do, but you can still be responsible. You look at, well, where are things that could be major, uh, you know, kind of faults? Where could you break the system? Where could you cause, you know, like, you know, death, you know, injury? And what are the things you do when you're blitzscaling in order to navigate those while still doing, you know, speed to scale, you know, inefficiently in an environment of uncertainty?

• 43:44Reid Hoffman?

  And so there's very, very deep parallels because of human beings and who we are. And, you know, frequently when I'm talking with these people, oh, you're just, you know, you're talking about, well, China's going to get to it. It's like, well, yeah, China's a really good blitzscaling competitor. It's the only area in the world, other than Silicon Valley, where I've learned new things that I put into the blitzscaling canon. But by the way, every group works this way, whether it goes from Nigeria to Russia to Israel. It's like saying, hey, we're going to play competitive sports, but rather than when we're playing, you know, called World Cup football, our team is going to play without shoes and

• 44:28Reid Hoffman?

  with our, you know, weights tied to our ankles. You're like, okay, see how that works for you.

• 44:34Aria Finger?

  I love the sports analogies, Reid.

• 44:37Aria Finger?

  Greg, you have safety on the one hand and innovation on the other. And one of the things you guys talk about in the book is actually innovation is safety. Can you elaborate on what that means to you?

• 44:50Speaker 00

  So just building on this notion of speed too. Another thing we talk about in the book is how immediately after the release of ChatGPT, all of a sudden you see new urgency from Google and Microsoft. And the way that gets characterized as arms race, it's going to be an arms race. There were so many arms race headlines in the media. And, you know, we, we talk about, why not call it a space race? Like the way that you categorize it is interesting. And then the other funny thing was that even, you know, we got to pause. We need the six month pause. Well, we didn't get the six month pause, but at the end of those six months,

• 45:35Speaker 00

  then people are like, hey, how come GPT five hasn't been released yet? This technology is a dud, it's going nowhere, right? So is it an arms race? Is it not going anywhere? I think what we're saying in the book is that yes, we need to be moving forward and not deliberately hindering ourselves, the way Reid said. But it's also more methodical than it seems in terms of like, how quickly the things are happening, how much research and development is behind it. So the innovation is safety part of it though, comes from this idea

• 46:19Speaker 00

  that again, if you're developing products that people want to affirmatively use, you've got to create good products. And it really wouldn't make sense for a Microsoft or a Google companies that have billions of users, long-term relationships, and their business model is sort of built on having long-term users over time. To do things in a way that create bad user experiences, right? And the analogy we use in the book was in the automobile era. You know, when cars first came out, you had to hand crank them to start them.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  And that required both a lot of physical power and a lot of risk because it could backfire and you'd end up with a broken jaw from trying to start your car. So I think it was like 1912, some inventor came up with the idea of an electric starter. Very quickly, that became a standard feature across the industry, not because government regulated it, it's because, oh, I want to be able to start my car without getting a broken jaw, right? So therefore innovation, that's the premise of innovation is safety.

• 47:38Reid Hoffman?

  Well, and as usual, Greg gives a very detailed human, you know, kind of history. Here's the straightforward like heuristic principle, which is whatever thing you're worried about with technology, technology can be the solution. And so when you think about safety, you go, no, no, we shouldn't try in the past. I was like, no, how should we shape the future such a, what are the key safety things to innovate on to have a more human future, to have a more glorious, superpowered, super agency future? But which, which elements for safety do we need innovation for to do that? And that will be far better, which goes all the way back to the question around like, well, which, how should we evolve social networks?

• 48:22Reid Hoffman?

  You know, and obviously I think LinkedIn is doing a reasonably good job with this and hence underrated. But, but it's kind of the innovation can also be innovation for safety. And the role of useful critics is to articulate which kinds of innovation for safety could be important versus just, you know, very loud megaphone hand ring.

• 48:55Aria Finger?

  All right, we are going to go to rapid fire. And Greg, this is just for you. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 49:06Speaker 00

  I'll choose 1984, which we talk about a lot in Super Agency. And I'll add Brave New World to it because I think both those get invoked quite a bit these days. Oh, this Orwellian landscape we're living in. So much that I finally went back and read 1984 since I think I may have read it originally in 1982, when I was in high school. And I'm like, the world of 1984 is nothing like the world of 2024. And Winston Smith, the protagonist, he could walk down the street of Beijing even, let's say,

• 49:46Speaker 00

  and be, oh, my God, what a free expression utopia compared to what the world in 1984 is depicted. And I would even, I would say, you know, some people then might say, well, the Brave New World, we're all just mesmerized and opiateized by trivial things. And it's like, well, yes, but also people are like engaged in politics in a level like never before. Neither one of those scenarios are anything like what we have, which for all our challenges, I think is pretty amazing what we have at this moment in time.

• 50:26Aria Finger?

  All right, Greg, what is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Well, I obviously love talking, but I hate answering questions. So I would say the question that I would like people to ask is, what do you want to know about me?

• 50:41Aria Finger?

  Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?

• 50:48Speaker 00

  I used a music service called, it was originally called Rhapsody, for many years. Like, I got it in 2002 and- It changed ownership many times, was rebranded as Napster, which had nothing to do with the original Napster. It just doesn't work well anymore. So I finally switched to Spotify sometime this last year. And for whatever reason, because I didn't have my decades worth of playlists, I've actually been using the algorithm with Spotify. And there's just so much great music that I've learned of more new artists in the past year than I had in the previous 20.

• 51:29Speaker 00

  And I used to write for music magazines and do music reviews, but my discovery process had really stagnated. And I think specifically because we have this new generation of artists that have grown up on having access, just like ubiquitous access to the celestial jukebox, that we just have so many amazing performers and talents right now that it's impossible to even really scratch the surface with them. And like, you kind of hear, oh, the music industry got destroyed by technology.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  And it's like, from a listener's perspective, it seems the opposite to me.

• 52:16Aria Finger?

  All right, our famous last question. Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity's way in the next 15 years? And what's the first step to get there?

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Oh, the first step is definitely universal basic Waymo. Because I think that's an achievable goal. Like, we've had this conversation, Reid and I, about like, universal basic income versus like, well, what are the, you know, what might you break down the narrower niches of that? Universal basic Waymo as a first step towards extreme abundance. And my big question is, you know, Reid talked earlier about that competitive urge that's baked into human behavior.

• 53:06Speaker 00

  I think it's absolutely true. My question is, to what degree might extreme abundance temper some of the culture wars that we have? Because everyone has everything they need. So like, you know, if we, if we had fusion breakthroughs and desalinization breakthroughs, so we just have abundant energy and abundant water, uh, do we stop having battles over environmentalism and like, that becomes a political thing or over immigration? Because that's no longer like, you know, we're not competing

• 53:50Speaker 00

  for scarce resources anymore. So, and, and I don't know, I think, I don't know if, if, if technology will triumph over human instinct in that regard. But I'm, I'm curious to watch it play out and hopeful that it will.

• 54:07Aria Finger?

  I love it. Greg and Reid, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it. And everyone listening, obviously go out and get a copy of Super Agency. It'll really make you think.

• 54:22Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schlied, Vanessa Handy, Aaliyah Yates, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 54:44Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Soria Yalamanchili, Sayida Sapieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patel, Margaret Burress, Little Monster Media Company, and Ben Relis. And especially the entire team at Authors Equity, who it's been such a joy to work with this book on.