When AI's builders sound the alarm

Can America lead in AI while making life better for everyday Americans? Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger weigh in on Dario Amodei’s call to pace the frontier, and Reid makes the case for America’s dual mandate: leading in AI while delivering prosperity for the many. Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger puts his personal estimate of AI-driven extinction risk above 10%. They unpack that warning alongside Sam Altman’s support for slower development and David Sacks calling Anthropic and OpenAI a cartel. Reid identifies biological threats, cyberattacks, and job disruption as the real risks, makes the case for steering over pausing, and explains why kill switches matter. From data centers that don’t raise local electricity bills to a free AI medical assistant for every American, they explore what rebuilding public trust could require. Read “AI for All Americans” on Substack: https://reidhoffman.substack.com/p/ai-dual-mandate

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

• 0:00Reid Hoffman?

  Dario, welcome back from a summer extravaganza of sabbatical with the family in Europe. It's awesome that you're back.

• 0:07Aria Finger?

  Reid, I am so delighted. And wouldn't you know, the first weekend I was back on the job, the AI world, of course, explodes with news and Twitter posts. And so we are going to jump right into that. So as everyone saw recently, there have been warnings from researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI that have brought concerns about losing control of advanced AI to a much broader public. Such a broader public that last week, my mom, my 75-year-old mother forwarded me an email from Heather Cox Richardson and said, have you heard about this Anthropic AI news? It's a big deal. So it has certainly escaped the tech world. Everyone is talking about this.

• 0:46Aria Finger?

  Anthropic Head of Alignment Evan Hubinger even put his personal estimate of AI causing human extinction within the next decade above 10%. And now that's his assessment. It's not a scientific consensus. I don't know how he is so sort of certain and particular about above 10%. And it is not an official company forecast. But of course, that sort of raises concerns. And the warnings concern more advanced self-improving systems, rather than a claim that today's chatbots pose this extinction risk. It's just how fast things are improving. Then Dario Amodei, he proposed pacing the frontier, giving safety work time to catch up with advances in AI capabilities.

• 1:28Aria Finger?

  And we've heard this before. You and I have discussed, should we pause? What does that mean for the US versus other countries? Dario's proposals include embedded outside evaluators, coordination among AI labs and democratic governments and international agreements. And so Anthropic has committed to these embedded evaluators. Sam Altman from OpenAI has said OpenAI will implement them too. Super interesting to see the heads of the AI labs actually agree on this. Other industry leaders have expressed support for this general idea, but not something specific. So with the accelerationist and de-accelerationist crowds, they've had a field day arguing in public and private on Twitter about what we should do.

• 2:09Aria Finger?

  So when you think about all of these warnings and proposals, does this feel like meaningful progress? And what is missing from this discussion?

• 2:20Reid Hoffman?

  As you know, what I tend to say is, hey, it's less about acceleration, de-acceleration. And that actually frequently is a false dichotomy of various sorts. And either one, especially in extreme, being deeply wrong. But more about steering. Now, part of steering is sometimes when you get to a particular curve, you slow down when you go around that curve. But you're slowing down with a purpose of where you're going to. Like not, I'm just slowing down, I'm kind of going around. Now, obviously, you push the metaphor and you say, well, if you're heading towards a cliff, you stop, if it's a cliff. But this gets to what are the actual ways I think we should analyze, what are the, call it, safety concerns?

• 3:05Reid Hoffman?

  The first is X risk, existential risk. And I think that actually, in fact, the X percent in a decade, et cetera, et cetera, are all in the histrionic category. And they may be, in some cases, deeply well-meaning. Like, e.g., I don't know how to call the percentage. And it's a little bit like you're exploding the Hiroshima bomb, and it's going to split the Earth's core, and we're going to be one molten thing. And I don't know how to articulate percentage, so I just put a solid number on it as a way of doing it.

• 3:42Aria Finger?

  And if you say 10%, people will pay attention.

• 3:44Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, exactly. And so whereas, when I chart out the existential risk, I kind of go, look, there's only a very specific set of scenario where it gets there in that kind of time. There's multiple checkpoints along the ways. There's multiple things we can do. There's multiple telemetry. And so I tend to think that the X risk is the way of saying, the existential risk is the way of saying, look at me, look at me, it's really important. This is a key moment in history. It's really important you talk to me about this. And so I broadly, across the whole set, including the Anthropic people who are driving the frontier along with OpenAI on this,

• 4:28Reid Hoffman?

  which is part of the well-commentated irony of all this thing. I didn't go, no, I didn't think that's well-meaning. But the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Now we get to the three real ones, which is bio risk, cyber risk, and jobs. Bio risk is the closest that you get to existential risk of various forms. And by the way, it's doable without AI. It gets amplified with AI, but also the only defense to bio risk is I can say AI. And so one of the reasons why you go, this pause stuff is malformed, the de-accelerationist, the extreme de-accelerationist,

• 5:10Reid Hoffman?

  is that basically by being ahead and by formulating the defense is the basic way to counter the bio risk side. So that's the first reason why I'm kind of pause opposed. Right? And steering, steering with a general sense of acceleration and speed, not the precautionary principle. The second one, cyber, is the one that we have real line of sight to. We know from Methos and we know from other things that there is a real upping of the arms race in capability. And part of the problem is we have so many frail systems.

• 5:52Reid Hoffman?

  And the frail systems can be hospitals and utilities and banking, a whole bunch of other things. And again, you say, well, why not pause? It's like, well, the real risk from cyber is the open weight models and their deployment in ways. Because, yes, like, hey, we haven't trained the frontier models. They are perfect and never do anything wrong on the cyber stuff. And we can come back to the hugging face side. That's not, that's, by the way, there's one way of telling the hugging face story, which is, sure, that was a startling way of doing rewards hacking and all the rest. But also, what they had is bad password security that the AI discovered.

• 6:35Reid Hoffman?

  It was not undiscoverable by a human. It wasn't a superhuman cyber hack.

• 6:39Aria Finger?

  Right.

• 6:39Reid Hoffman?

  Right? And by the way, that means that it's demonstrating what the open weight models, which are not that far behind, six to 12 months, can be doing and can be doing in the privacy of iterating offline in a non-internet-connected cluster and then be used, whether it's by rogue state actors, whether it's by criminals, whether it's by crazy people, just people who want to do, who just want to fuck shit up in the parlance. And so that, we know, we see it. It's line of sight. It's not like, oh, let's speculate. It could be A, it could be B. Let's tell some science fiction stories. It's there. Once again, when you say, well, why do you say not pause? Why not de-accelerate?

• 7:23Reid Hoffman?

  It's like, well, what we need to be doing is taking the fact that we have a lead on frontier models and doing the hardening and the rewriting and the defense side of this in a really intense way. So that's another reason why I tend to be a smart accelerationist. Right? Strategic optimist about the way to do this. Now, the third, which is roughly, Bill Gates most recently said, hey, we don't have anyone working on what the job transformation will be. We don't know what the job transformation will be, but it could be sudden and quick and important. And I think that's right. And we use careful point out that there's all these positive features

• 8:06Reid Hoffman?

  around AI for this kind of, what can be done, including agriculture and a bunch of other things. And I think that people should be thinking about what is a combination of two things on jobs. One is kind of telemetry. Like, where do we see that it's actually, in fact, measuring? Where it's actually beginning to really happen? And we should go to that area, customer service, sales, et cetera, and really try to help a lot in particular. And the second is, what does a toolset look like? And the key thing on the toolset is, and I think there's a few people who've begun working on this. Former Secretary Gina Raimondo is doing some really great work here.

• 8:51Reid Hoffman?

  There's a few people. But one of the key things that I think is lacking here is your solution has to have the same speed, scale, cost of the problem, of which the only thing I see right now is AI. So you need to have AI on the ledger. It has to have the same impedance match. The AI has to be on the solutions ledger. So it's like, what are we doing to shape AI to be helping with a job transformation? Now, part of the reason I don't say, well, why don't you just slow? Or why don't you just do the Bill Gates human reserve thing? Where 90% of human beings are going to argue, my job should be in human reserve. Hell, venture capital should be in reserve. Like, everything should be in human reserve.

• 9:33Reid Hoffman?

  And so it doesn't really solve any particular problem, other than you might... Slow a specific thing down for a bit, you know, it's kind of like the equivalent of like auto work changing and all that kind of thing. But the, uh, but I think that the question is like, okay, we're gonna have job transformation. It's gonna be, people don't per se like to say, I have a job. I don't want job transformation. And it's like, yeah, you know, look, same thing for the, the weavers and, and, and in England, you're gonna have job transformation. How do you make that easier? And I think there's two vectors.

• 10:11Reid Hoffman?

  One vector, which is really under commentated, is that you must be giving people something that they're at least getting something. It's not like, oh, you're gonna create job transformation that's gonna make your tech companies rich and give me a bunch of problem that I don't really want, and I'm getting nothing other than having to scramble. Of course, people are very opposed to that pitch. So you say, okay, um, how about a medical assistant? So only really, really wealthy people have 24/7 good medical assistant. How about that for everybody? And how about that for free for everybody in terms of navigating the stuff? And it's you, your kids, your parents, your, your pets, the whole thing. Like, okay, how about a legal assistant, right?

• 10:55Reid Hoffman?

  Oh, most people can't afford lawyers to look at their rental agreement, to look at these other things. Now you have that. How about, you know, educational tutors? And now all the obviously help a lot with not just, uh, having an AI system to help you do new jobs, but also to help you learn stuff and help you find things. And by the way, how about, you know, AI for, uh, government services? So you don't have to go to the DMV anymore. You know, it can, it can all be handled. So all of that, I think, is really important to go, oh, look, I'm getting some things. I still, I'm unhappy about my job transformation, but I'm getting some things while I'm doing it.

• 11:33Reid Hoffman?

  And, and then I think the other part of this is to say, how do we, how do we kind of put in some fact that we're, you know, the advantage, this is why the industrial revolution parallel to the fact that we're leading to say, hey, let's create some incentives for tech companies, creating things that help, uh, you know, your kind of middle-class Americans, you know, like make the job transition work well, right? In terms of things and, you know, that, that will be invented as we go. You'd like to know, it's gonna be exactly this. It's gonna be like, we're gonna have care jobs and the care jobs for, for 30% of people coming on a sale will be helped this way. And then we're gonna have, you know, kind of like, um, other kinds of like, you know, kind of like, um,

• 12:17Reid Hoffman?

  context awareness and, and kind of AI training jobs and that work. The problem is, look, you could say those things. The real thing is we have to be adaptive in terms of where we're going. So I think that's the key thing. And I'll, I'll say one last point. Part of the reason why, when it gets to the jobs thing, I'm still a, you know, uh, you know, kind of a smart accelerationist, this kind of a steering accelerationist is that, um, when, uh, America is getting, or country of your choice is getting the, the prosperity of the, of, of having intelligence at the scale and speed and, and cost of electricity, applied to a whole bunch of different things.

• 12:59Reid Hoffman?

  That creates the economics by which we can sort this problem out. If we don't have those economics, then we're unable to sort the problem out. And, you know, uh, this isn't a, hey, you know, help the tech people get rich while everyone else suffers. I think it's really important. We have this dual mandate where like 60% plus of Americans are having challenging times right now. We need to be helping them. And you say, well, what's your return to manufacturing jobs in the, the US? It's AI and robotics. It's the only way we're gonna get there. See, as a, as kind of an instance probe. Look, if you look at the data centers, all the unions are going, this is creating a bunch of great, great union jobs. We're positive on this. We want to do this.

• 13:43Reid Hoffman?

  This capital inflow gives us a bunch of work while we're doing it. That's actually really important. And that's the, that kind of prosperity is an important thing for the 60-plus percentage Americans who are, you know, in turbulent times right now.

• 13:58Aria Finger?

  I mean, to your point, people make trade-offs on everything. They make trade-offs between crime and security and personal privacy. And it feels like right now, we're not giving people any other side of the trade-off. We're just telling them all of the bad things. And to your point, they can't see, feel, touch, they haven't seen the benefits yet. And, you know, you mentioned one thing about the irony of, you know, Dario and Sam sort of making these calls when they're steering the ship. And I think I've seen, you know, hundreds, thousands of memes of everyone saying, you know, like, I'm running the boiling people factory and I'm deeply concerned about boiling people. Like, people are just like, you guys are running the show. Like, how are you sounding the alarm? And even David Sacks over the weekend responding to Sam and Dario, you know, he said, and I quote,

• 14:42Aria Finger?

  "Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel," end quote. You know, he warned that failing to slow voluntarily would reveal another bid for regulatory capture. And a lot of people talk about that. Oh, this is just regulatory capture. And his argument was like, you can already do this. You don't need us. And so my question for you is, do you think that's a fair criticism? That sure, they can just already do it. And do you think doing it would sort of lock in any, you know, regulatory capture mode would sort of just be putting them far ahead of everyone else?

• 15:15Reid Hoffman?

  You know, maybe for the first time in a decade, I partially agree with Sacks. I mean, since most of his, uh, activities have been, uh, pretty, um, shall we say, suboptimal for society, to be polite. The, uh, and, you know, he's also kind of like, is a kind of a sociopathic political actor, you know, those, those, those, those,

• 15:39Aria Finger?

  Those concerns?

• 15:40Reid Hoffman?

  Those concerns. But what he's right about is to say, look, the, the people who are sounding the alarm are the people who are out on the frontier and on the front. So you go, okay, um, why are you saying you need us to slow things down? Because you could slow down, right? Um, and if you wanted to put a particular point on it and say, how about we say, we define the frontier where you're at? And we say, this is the point where everyone has to slow down and gives other people a chance to catch up. Are you happy with that? And the answer will be, not really. And so that's, I think, the substance of his position. Now, that being said, I think part of the more detailed thing is to say, look, part of it is, there's this question about,

• 16:21Reid Hoffman?

  you know, OpenAI and Anthropic not just being the world leaders, but also national champions. And to say, if you're doing a slowdown, you should get at least China bought in, in some kinds of ways. And so it doesn't really make sense, given that China is, you know, call it six to 12 months behind us, to, to kind of do a unilateral slowdown just for that. And so it's a call for, you know, kind of international treaty on this, which, you know, Sacks and his normal, like, completely political, uh, you know, uh, call it, um, disinformation.

• 17:03Reid Hoffman?

  It makes it entirely an internal thing versus a, actually, in fact, this is, this is what they're substantively trying to kind of say and kind of call for. And that is a thing that fits within it. And it's not a antitrust law. It's a question of international treaty. And, you know, you know, this is what both Anthropic and OpenAI have been calling for, for a year or two. Um, in terms of, you know, and then Demis Hassabis came out recently also in this as a way of navigating. And in particular with recursive self-improvement. You know, that's, I think, the thing that brings the urgency for why they're calling for it again. Because you go, well, we, you know, recursive self-improvement, we don't know.

• 17:47Reid Hoffman?

  And this is part of, gets back to, you know, uh, who, uh, who, Huben Jer's, um, you know, kind of call is like, well, we don't know where the recursive self-improvement fully goes. It's a unique thing. And it's one of the things where you say, well, you're steering an acceleration and de-acceleration metaphor has some challenges because it's like the car is doing itself accelerating and it's accelerating and it kind of is taking over the steering a little bit as it accelerates. So what's that? And it's like, well, and we don't know how to 100% like completely do that. Now, we still do know how to pull the plug, you know, like requiring a kill switch, requiring telemetry. Those are good things for governments to do.

• 18:30Reid Hoffman?

  This is one of the things that, you know, I've been trying for eight years to kind of say, this is how government should plug in. And it's not the same kind of thing as regulatory capture. It's not the same thing as slowing everybody down because those things can be done with the minimalist, you know, kind of, like, it doesn't really affect your speed at all and gives you at least some ability to do that, that. And so I think those are, you know, uh, good things to do. But it's, you know, um, here, you know, historic moment, you know, I don't 100% disagree with. I, I double-digit percentage disagree with Sacks and disagree with his, his actual intent, uh, intent here by mischaracterizing the other side.

• 19:13Reid Hoffman?

  But, um, you know, like, there's, there's a point here.

• 19:17Aria Finger?

  Right. There are some things they can do.

• 19:19Reid Hoffman?

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• 20:07Aria Finger?

  In your responses, you've been talking a lot about the 60% of Americans who are struggling right now and sort of, we want to make sure that the future is better than the past. And so last week, you came out with an essay arguing for a dual mandate, economic prosperity for the many and American AI leadership. And your essay begins with Americans existing economic insecurity that you've discussed paying utility bills, affording medical care, saving for retirement, finding and keeping stable work that's going to be here in a few years. And you argue that people have heard these promises about the prosperity that new technologies will create. And new technology has created a lot of prosperity, but right now, people aren't feeling it and they're not seeing

• 20:52Aria Finger?

  it in the future with AI. And you've said that the next several years are really the time. They offer the opportunity to set these terms and it's going to be these decisions about infrastructure, oversight, access, support for workers that will sort of determine the course of AI and American prosperity. And so you say that we can and must do two things at once. Secure America's lead in AI and deliver this prosperity, not just for the few, not just for the tech leaders, but for the many. So talk about why you wrote this essay about the demand, the need for both at the same time.

• 21:29Reid Hoffman?

  The first is, if you say, hey, we want to do stuff for the broad base of Americans, you have to have the money to do so. And as at least some people have tracked, one of our problems is we've been for the last few decades with crazy government spending. And it's under both administration, both red and blue administrations. I mean, one of the things is, I think it's a thing to do that's really important is to kind of say, we have to grow our way out. We have so much debt. It's kind of like your average American should think of ourselves as having maxed out two of our three credit cards in terms of how we're doing this. And I think that the only way to do it is grow.

• 22:13Reid Hoffman?

  And if we don't, and if we fall behind, then all of a sudden, not only are we not getting the economic prosperity of this, but if comparatively we've fallen well behind, then with the debt trap, then it just becomes, we're like Argentina in the 70s. I mean, it's like a really, really serious issue. And so, and this is one of the things that obviously I criticize people who are articulating support for the Trump administration saying, oh, we're business people. It's like, we're even spending more like drunken sailors. We're getting into wars with Iran. We're increasing oil prices. We're doing tariff

• 22:55Reid Hoffman?

  wars to reduce our economic prospects. It's just massive slaughtering of American business prospects under a kind of an attempt to kind of claim American glory and supremacy and having the exact opposite. So I think that's why being in the lead and at least amongst the leaders, if not the leader in AI for the economic benefit is super important. And by the way, that's the only thing that's currently propping up our economy is all this capital coming in, investing in AI, isn't just for the tech companies. This is one of the reasons why most of the labor unions are strongly in favor because they're

• 23:38Reid Hoffman?

  like, we're building out things. It's massive amounts on the grid and in construction and so forth. Let's make this happen. Like, let's take this investment and it creates a whole bunch of middle-class jobs, which benefit lots of communities. And by the way, most of these data centers are not in the middle of cities. They're other places. So it's prosperity there. So that's the reason why continuing to win from the AI kind of economic investment boom, which will turn into the kind of intelligence everywhere economic boom. And there may be some turbulence and there may be some, oh, look, it takes a couple extra years to play out. That's just timing in short end form is super important to us.

• 24:23Reid Hoffman?

  And then you go, okay, well, what's other people's other complaint is like, well, are all the people going to benefit from this? Or are all the tech people? Right? And I've already said some things, but like ongoing endurance is like, well, that's why you need to be doing things to help with the 60-plus percent of Americans. And what do Americans really most want? They want to have work that shows their value, that helps them provide for their families and their community. That's what they want. And so providing good work that is well-paid there is what's really important. And we need to make that a national priority as well. And frankly, both parties should come together on this.

• 25:07Reid Hoffman?

  This should be a thing that both parties want, right? It shouldn't be a, let's see how well we can sink the other party. Like, this should be something that says, look, we're going to have arguments on various things. And on this one, we both agree, it really, really matters. And so then the question is, how do we take our leadership in AI and convert it to help with that? It's like, we've got a train that's going. We want to put the right cars on the train and bring along the 60% plus Americans. Now, that's part of the reason why leadership in AI is so important, because it gives us the money and economic prosperity in order to do everything. Now, where are we at with 60-plus percent

• 25:47Reid Hoffman?

  of Americans? The answer is, it's difficult, right? Can we fill the tank with gas? Can we afford groceries and eggs? And obviously, mishandling of global things like the starting the war with Iran and closing the Straits of Hormuz and like everyone for decades has realized that would be an indication, causes gas prices to go well up. And that's on us for having, making that happen on the Trump administration. But like, it's a decades-long problem too, that that's just a recent acceleration on. And so, this is not a kind of like, oh, we should do something for middle class. We should just kind of raise minimum wage

• 26:32Reid Hoffman?

  a little bit. There's some fundamental problems of both kind of causing raises for 60-plus percent of Americans and reducing prices. And this is a critical problem. Like, this is not discretionary. Oh, am I taking a holiday overseas or into a different state? This is a, I'm trying to make my family work, my children work, my communities work. And it's really important that all of us as Americans kind of steer into this. And that's part of the reason why it's so clear that America needs a dual mandate. And part of that dual mandate is, kind of like, continue to win at AI and also, and that's the kind

• 27:17Reid Hoffman?

  of the train engine, attach the cars that make this go for 60-plus percent of Americans. Now, some of the job stuff will be, it will be figured out as a go. Everyone would like to know, we know exactly what's going to happen, but we don't actually even know where the full job transformation will hit and what percentages and will it be in customer service and sales first, which is what I expect. And when you begin seeing that as the kind of telemetry, we don't know what other kind of new jobs we open up, say, hey, with all of this AI thing, maybe there will be for a decade, a whole bunch of like, training AI on a whole bunch of cognitive and physical things in order to make that work. Maybe

• 28:01Reid Hoffman?

  there will be kind of things around like, oh, the care economy, which most people say, oh, you think we're all becoming nurses? No, no. It's like everything from what are we doing with kids? And what are we doing with teaching? And what are we doing with public services? What's going to happen in terms of kind of like, the broadening out of entertainment and physical events? There's all these different areas. And so it's not just like, well, does everyone have to learn how to code now? There's a whole range. And that's the reason why like, people who say, it's one thing is not going to happen. What we have to be is nimble and helpful. And that's part of the reason why starting to build the helpful things now where they see that there is helpful things. They see that

• 28:46Reid Hoffman?

  you are talking to them. They see that, and with them, in terms of, in terms of what's the conversation and what do you guys need? And then what are the kinds of things we're doing? Now, that's part of the reason why the data center side of this is particularly the dialogue has been Bozoville, right? Bozoville on one side saying, ah, like, free market, whatever happens, who cares? Let the local communities be driven into trying to get the contract jobs into like, bad tax deals for 30 years and pay off the rich companies. And then, oh, let's have a moratorium, right? Because you're like, the moratorium folks don't understand like, how much economics flow in with the construction and the grid

• 29:30Reid Hoffman?

  and so forth. What we need is say, no, no, local communities have to be bought in and informed. And it has to be something that's better for them. So if you want something national, just say, no data centers can be built without like, kind of clear evidence that you're keeping electricity costs the same or driving them down for the local area, right? Full stop. And that the environmental impact is handled. Full stop. And then allow the local community to say, hey, well, like for us, we'd like to make sure that you're doing that. You're also bringing some longer-term jobs here. We'd like to make sure that you're doing some stuff, like, obviously, the things like noise abatement, all the rest has to

• 30:15Reid Hoffman?

  be done. But we're making sure you're doing all of that. And that is, I think, why the dual mandate is so important. Because it's both, like, continue to drive forward this economic train of AI and to make sure that 60-plus percent of the Americans who need it are benefiting. And that doesn't mean there won't be job transformation. I'm not trying to be Pollyannaish here. But like, part of the reason I'm a strategic optimist is, you don't get the good of future by trying to prevent the bad futures. You get the good future by steering towards it. And that's what we need to be doing.

• 30:53Aria Finger?

  I feel like so much of this is about trust. You know, you've talked about trust so much and people have lost trust in companies, in governments, you know, in AI companies. And I think that really is what this, you know, the only bipartisan thing we have right now is that people don't like data centers. And again, I think it's because they feel like there's a loss of control. The one thing they can control is data centers. So how do you convince people, or maybe not even convince people? How do we make sure that once we have these mandates in place, oh yeah, don't worry, it's not going to raise your electricity bill. Don't worry, it's not going to cost, you know, environmental degradation in your local community. How do we get people to trust that? Because I think they're saying like, yeah, that's a lot of nice lip service, but I don't even, I don't believe that it's going to happen.

• 31:35Reid Hoffman?

  I think there's two answers. One, maybe three answers on the trust side. So the first is start doing things now.

• 31:45Reid Hoffman?

  That benefit. So medical assistance with some simple, like it wouldn't cost the government anything. Some simple shifting of kind of safe harbor liability law. Like three or four companies would make free medical assistance available to everybody in the US. You could start seeing that. You know, you can already kind of consult Chat GPT and others for medical, but they don't advertise it and they try to turn it down to say, no, no, we're not trying to give medical advice. That's not us. And it already works much better than you expect. But you could say, yes, we are doing it and we're doing it this way and we're making it and we're tuning it to be better. We're specifically investing in it to make it better for you.

• 32:29Reid Hoffman?

  And then, and then unlike, for example, what trial lawyers would want is say, oh, if you're investing in it, then we can, then we can, then it's full time employment for trial lawyers. That's not what we want. We want to help the 60 plus percent of Americans, right? And navigate these kind of key life issues. So that's number one, start doing things now. Number two is, you know, like if you just, you have to reevaluate kind of like you're like, I just don't trust you. And it's like, well, look, the, I don't trust you, you're going to go off a cliff. We have this huge debt. It's a little bit like the fact is there's always things to mistrust government. But part of the reason why we want to be building trust in government is because if you mistrust it, you guarantee you go off a higher cliff sooner, faster. Right?

• 33:13Reid Hoffman?

  And so building that trust is part of what I believe is our national responsibility. It's our responsibility as Americans. It doesn't mean blind and everything and your trust doesn't mean everything you do, but it's like, look, we have to work together in order to make that work. And by the way, like people say, wow, I mistrust big tech. It's like, you mean, you know, and usually what they mean is social media and children. And by the way, so does a lot of Silicon Valley.

• 33:39Aria Finger?

  Yep.

• 33:39Reid Hoffman?

  But then you go, well, like search and mobile phones and like there's like Netflix and lots and lots of things. And like, for example, when I say, hey, social networks can be done well, I point to LinkedIn. So it's like, look, don't kind of go to, I just, I just blanket see red and have no trust. You have to be engaging in the trust dialogue. You have to be saying, okay, how can we move forward? How can we do this and be having a biased disposition to that? And that gets kind of the third thing, which is part of like they say, oh, Reed, you're just an optimist. And they kind of mean that as you're just kind of like, oh, I just closed my eyes and say it'll work out, hit the accelerator. And it's like, okay, yeah, that's pretty foolish.

• 34:22Reid Hoffman?

  If that was actually in fact, what anyone were in myself were thinking. But part of being a strategic optimist is you only like, think about like planning a journey somewhere. And if you said, oh, I'm going to plan a journey and I'm going to, what I'm going to do in the journey is make sure that there's going to be zero chance that anything will go wrong. Zero chance. No potholes, no delays, no possible accidents on the highway. Well, you're never going to get in the car. You're never going to go anywhere. And then nothing's ever happened. You have to kind of say, look, what's a, what's the way that we kind of plan that and go? And sometimes, by the way, you frankly just start going because you don't know, oh shoot, now there's been an accident on the highway in front of me. We have to replan. Fine.

• 35:04Reid Hoffman?

  Or they're like, or it's now real slowdown because the accident happened, you know, 10 cars ahead of me. Right? And so we're, and it was like, okay, you just go, all right. You adjust as you go. And I think that's also really key in trust, which is you have to be trying to build that out. And I think that's important. And I think, you know, like so frequently when you say, hey, trust the tech companies go, oh, you mean trust them and doing everything? It's like, no, no. Trust them to be intelligent about what they're trying to do with the customers, intelligent about what they're trying to do with their employees. Trust the fact that a bunch of their employees will be happily whistleblowing if they think

• 35:46Reid Hoffman?

  there's an issue, you know? You know, and, and, and, and we should navigate those as we're going. And I think that's the, the thing. And obviously, you know, part of, you know, it doesn't surprise me that the Anthropic people are the most whistleblowing on the AI side, because part of the reason they, they left OpenAI was because they were worried about this. So they're predisposed. By the way, to my earlier comments, I do think it's worth being in the dialogue on that. And I think it's a good thing to whistleblow, but that's the reason I went through the detailed analysis.

• 36:21Aria Finger?

  And I think to your point, all tech companies aren't alike. Like there are some bad actors in the space and they have proven to be bad actors because they have child sexual abuse material on their platform. There are other people like Anthropic who have said, hey, we're trying our best here and we're trying to work and they have been a better actor. So let's also reward the tech companies who have said, let's be environmentally positive. Let's try to make this happen.

• 36:44Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, exactly.

• 36:45Aria Finger?

  All right, Reed, we're going to switch gears to something that is near and dear to my heart, a place where we get to talk about all of these things. Like you said, to be, most importantly, be in conversation about the good and the bad and the exciting futures. The Masters of Scale Summit does return to San Francisco, October 20th to 22nd. And for those of you who don't know, it brings together founders, entrepreneurs, technologists, cultural creators, all together to have these conversations about how we can build the future. And, you know, we, we move from AI risks to the people giving Reed reasons for optimism. And so let's talk about a brief summit preview. We've talked a lot about what could go wrong. And like you said, some people call you, you know, a perpetual optimist.

• 37:30Aria Finger?

  Who is making you optimistic right now? And will we see any of them at Masters of Scale Summit?

• 37:36Reid Hoffman?

  Well, we will see a few of them. Among amazing things, we'll see, we'll have, we'll be open with Sarah Fryer from OpenAI. We'll have Mikey Schulman from Suno, which because I've been making, you know, kind of AI music, like a celebratory record for America's 250th. And Suno, you know, plays a good, good role there. I'm, I'm, you know, really amazed. But then of course, you know, old friends, Reed Hastings, Amjad Masad, Meredith Whitaker. And I think we should expect the same thing that we normally get from Masters of Scale Summit, which is some really important business lessons, but also a broader range of what does this mean for our society?

• 38:20Reid Hoffman?

  And how should we be as leader and leaders? And what are the cultural beats that we need to be paying attention to? And, and to try to, you know, kind of collectively create energy. Like, cause, cause, you know, look, we try to get as, as interesting people as we can on the stage and as interesting kind of things, but it's the people to your left and right that we put a lot of energy into making sure they're there. And, you know, the aim is to, is to kind of leave energized and turn serious, real big problems, but into opportunities, which is of course what entrepreneurship is. And the entrepreneurship at scale is how we make a real difference in society.

• 39:02Aria Finger?

  Awesome, Reed. I cannot even wait for it. And for those of you who cannot be here in person, you can listen along on the Masters of Scale podcast to hear all about it.

• 39:10Reid Hoffman?

  It'll be great. Possible is produced by Palette Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reed Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tenasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Imo Zoo, Amon Suri, Danny Garrison, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nima Rundwe.

• 39:29Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sabieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Ralas.