Feed Drop: Reid Hoffman: Entrepreneurship, AI, and the Battle for Democracy

In this episode of Remarkable People, join host Guy Kawasaki for an illuminating conversation with Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock. Together, they explore entrepreneurship, politics, and artificial intelligence, offering unique insights into blitzscaling, the future of democracy, and how games shaped his strategic thinking. Hoffman shares candid views on Silicon Valley dynamics, the impact of extreme wealth, and his optimistic vision for AI's role in society. Discover how this tech pioneer navigates the intersection of technology, business, and civic responsibility.

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

• 0:02Aria Finger?

  Hey, possible listeners. It's Aria, co-host of the Possible Podcast. As it's election day, we're sharing a special bonus episode from Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People podcast, in which Reid talks to Guy about the US presidential election, entrepreneurship, AI, and a bit about the PayPal mafia. You can catch Remarkable People wherever you get your podcasts. Also, if you haven't voted yet, please do. Now, on to the show.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  So Reid, first of all, you gotta take me back to those PayPal days. So what was it like back then?

• 0:46Reid Hoffman?

  It was an absolutely crazy dogfight time. When the PayPal business started, it was encryption on mobile devices. Max Levchin and Peter Thiel each invited their best knowledgeable startup friend to be on the board. So it was Scott Bannister for Max and me for Peter Thiel. And so it started with encryption on mobile devices, which of course is not what anyone would think about looking at PayPal today. And then part of the clock at PayPal was a very fast iteration. Encryption on mobile devices, cash on mobile devices. You and I will remember what this is. Cash on Palm Pilots.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Palm Pilot.

• 1:25Reid Hoffman?

  Hey, what's that? People are thinking, are you talking about records and LPs? What is the thing you're talking about? And then to a Palm Pilot plus payment service, and then an online payment service. And that kind of iteration, obviously, gave birth to a bunch of different things, in addition to a large public company, but like the PayPal mafia, a bunch of things. We had all kinds of things where the number of things that could have killed the business and made it worth zero, we could literally spend two hours talking about just that. So it was a crazy dogfight of a time, but really amazing.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  You could make the case that if PayPal had failed, democracy might be safer today, but we'll come to that, right?

• 2:06Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, there is definitely some real challenges on that.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  I guess one very obvious question, at least for me as well, you must be an expert in this. When do you pivot and when do you stick it out? Because you just mentioned four pivots.

• 2:20Reid Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah, and there were more. So I actually have a kind of a framework for this, which is you have a theory of what your forward game is with your startup. You could think of it as an investment thesis. It's the following things need to be true, including what I can make happen. Usually you try to keep it to the most essential bullet points. And then what you're doing is you're tracking is your confidence in your investment thesis, your theory of game, going up or down. Now, if it goes down a little bit, you might then kind of say, okay, let's see. But as it's really going down, so you don't wait to zero. A frequent mistake in pivot is wait until you've crashed in the wall. You're just dead then. You have to call the pivot much earlier.

• 3:01Reid Hoffman?

  You have to call the pivot when you have market opportunity, when you still have a team, when you have cash in the bank, a bunch of other stuff. And so you go, okay, this theory of the game is not working. What is a different theory of the game that I can do? And that's what a real pivot is going into.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  And do you think it's worse to pivot too early or too late?

• 3:21Reid Hoffman?

  Almost always too late is worse. And that's one of the reasons why the discipline of thinking about pivoting early. Now, generally speaking, pivoting too early is rarely an entrepreneur's problem. Because she or he has a conviction in what they're doing, a conviction in what the market opportunity is, et cetera. Usually the, oh, I'm really going for something else too early is rarely the problem. It can't happen.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Okay. Are you still buddies with Peter Thiel and David Sacks and Elon Musk?

• 3:51Reid Hoffman?

  I would say that I'm friends with Peter and more challenged than the other two.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  I have what's called a shopping center test. So let's suppose you're at Stanford Shopping Center and you saw Peter or you saw David or you saw Elon and they haven't seen you yet, right?

• 4:10Reid Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  So do you walk up to them and say hello? Do you avoid them or do you go to another shopping center?

• 4:17Reid Hoffman?

  Peter, I would walk up to say hello and Elon, I would go to another shopping center.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  I don't want to go into a cesspool, but can you just help me understand Elon Musk? Because I'll tell you, four or five years ago, if somebody said to me, who is the closest living person to Steve Jobs, I would have said Elon Musk, right? So you can look at his record, so changes the car industry, changes the satellite industry, changes space travel down the line.

• 4:50Reid Hoffman?

  Amazing.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  He could have gone down as the greatest inventor or an entrepreneur and a history man. And now he's a Nazi. So like, what happened? What happened to all these people?

• 5:00Reid Hoffman?

  So strengths and weaknesses can frequently go together. Among the amazing strengths that Elon has is an absolute conviction in the thing he's thinking about the world being true. And so therefore he's taken on amazing major tasks like revolutionizing the space industry, launching like a new satellite industry, and then of course, electric vehicles, all of which, any one of which would be enough for a storied career and just like epic inclusion of the history books. And then the combination is just stunning and amazing. But unfortunately, he applies that same conviction to his view of society, to his view of social media.

• 5:40Reid Hoffman?

  And basically, I think NBC did a systematic story on Twitter and the most frequent retweeter of Russian Times links is Elon. The, the number of conspiracy theories he peddles is frankly, a little nutty. It's X is a microcosm for what he seems to be going on and believing. And so it's a tragedy because this other stuff is just so heroic.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Would you say that if there was a sequence, did being nuts like this enable him to be successful? Or being successful made people tolerate his nutsness?

• 6:15Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I think it's a compounding cycle of both. Because as you know, having worked with a lot of entrepreneurs, a strong conviction of... The way the world could be and a willingness to be contrarian, counter common wisdom, a willingness to take a big risk and try to do something is essential to amazing entrepreneurship. And that's part of what it is. Now, the problem is, of course, if you start drinking your own Kool-Aid and think that you're then just a genius about everything and that everything you happen to think happens to be true, then you obviously can seriously mislead you.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. So, I mean, I realize that I'm asking an extremely rich person this question. Okay, so I realize the contradiction here, but what does extreme wealth do to one's perspective?

• 7:06Reid Hoffman?

  It's different for different folks. There's this old Roman expression, "In vino veritas," which is when you've drunk wine or a person's drunk wine, you see the truth. Or they get drunk, you see them as a true person. There's a part of that that is also true for how wealth plays out. Like, when you make money and you're given this freedom, this power, et cetera, what do you end up doing with it? And so, there is clearly amazing positive examples. Bill Gates with what he's done with the Gates Foundation, solving child mortality and just a host of diseases, a host of other problems. And there's a number of folks who do it that way. And then there's other people who use it for their own greater glory or other kinds of things. And so, I think you see a whole range. But the world starts reinforcing you as you're amazing and wonderful in everything you do.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Because you're rich.

• 7:52Reid Hoffman?

  Because you're rich. And so, you have to have that own internal compass to what you're driving to that's actually, in fact, so critical.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  And how did people get at a good internal compass? Is it your upbringing or how does it happen?

• 8:08Reid Hoffman?

  I think, look, ultimately, that's part of the reason why we have this kind of term "character." So, there's something that's internal to you always. But obviously, it's, do you have friends? Did your friends help you in your relationship with your parents? Even if you had some contention, was it a growing experience? Did you learn good things about it? For me, I'd say it comes down to choosing your friends. I think your friends are part of who you become. For example, you know, in my first book, The Startup of You, what I wrote was, "You are the combination of your five closest friends," right? It's kind of as a way of kind of steering on how you grow.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Okay. So, what motivates such a high level of political activism in you?

• 8:53Reid Hoffman?

  So, look, for me, like a lot of folks in Silicon Valley, I tend to think my best-applied talents are building technologies, companies, these kind of archimedean levers to change the world. But I also think, somewhat unusual for Silicon Valley, that we live in a society, a collective platform of laws, governance, and so forth, like government matters. Government isn't just an organization of inefficiency, but actually what creates the place of talent, laws, other kinds of things, an investable environment, a market to do business in. And I think with power comes responsibility, and like Voltaire in Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility.

• 9:34Reid Hoffman?

  And so for me, my involvement in politics is, because I've been fortunate enough to be in this amazing place, Silicon Valley, the US, etc., and I'm being able to do stuff, how do I help contribute to society? And sometimes the way to do that is to go get involved in politics. Because I don't get involved in politics, ever, for my own business interests. There is nothing for my business interests that matters. My business works just fine, however politics is going, whether my business is entrepreneurship, or investing, or any house. I get involved because I go, how do we help build a better society together? What is the role of technology? What is the role of entrepreneurship? What is the role of business? And what couple pieces of insight might I be able to give our political leaders, who

• 10:19Reid Hoffman?

  are also trying to figure out how to make a better society?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Okay, this is the tackiest question of this.

• 10:25Reid Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  How much have you given to Kamala Harris?

• 10:29Reid Hoffman?

  A substantial number. I don't tend to answer that question, because I tend to, I think it tends to give people to think in the wrong direction. Which is like, it's a numbers game versus a, what kind of society you creating game.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  All right, so, let's just say that I assume it's lots of money.

• 10:52Reid Hoffman?

  It is a lot.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  So, does ActBlue see you at, like, now? You get a text message every five seconds? Because I have given nothing close to you, and I get one every 30 seconds.

• 11:03Reid Hoffman?

  Yes. I try to give out my cellphone as little as possible, and I mark all incoming things as delete with junk, when there are those kinds of things, and opt-out and so forth. I do probably get something on the order of... 200 emails a day.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  From ActBlue.

• 11:20Reid Hoffman?

  In all political campaigns.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Besides the fact that I hope Kamala wins, the next best thing about the election is maybe I'll get less ActBlue. The most common word I type on my phone is "stop."

• 11:35Reid Hoffman?

  Uh huh, yes, exactly.

• 11:39Reid Hoffman?

  I hear you.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Let's say you're not one of these enlightened billionaires and you haven't taken the high road and your greatest concern is long-term capital gains or making crypto successful. What do those people expect to get from Trump if he wins?

• 11:54Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I think Trump is the definition of a coin-operated president. It's basically insert coin, get result. And some of the coins are like, "I'll put justices on the court that will repeal Roe v. Wade because you'll support me in my election." Similar is like, why is he very pro-crypto? Maybe he can make money in crypto. So he launches a proverbial, what we call shitcoins in the technical parlance of the crypto industry. And so I think that basically a huge amount is I am buying something for myself. And part of why I abhor that approach to politics

• 12:38Reid Hoffman?

  is that politics and our democracy should be what's good for us. You should never be buying something for yourself.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  What's odd to me is that at this stage in life, those people basically have infinite money. And if I had infinite money, I would be thinking, how can I make the world a better place? Not how I can get less long-term capital gains. That would not be a high priority for me.

• 13:03Reid Hoffman?

  Look, I totally agree. And also, by the way, it's a question of, is again, how do you have the world be a much better place? Life is not a game of whose bank balance at the end most counts. That is a sad game for life. Friends, loved ones, better society, amazing contribution to society. Those are the things that matter.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  So let's say that you're Tim Cook. And Elon Musk is sucking up to Donald Trump. Trump wins now. Trump makes Elon the Secretary of Efficiency. And because he's Secretary of Efficiency, he says to Apple, listen, I'm going to ban iPhones and macOS and all the US government. Do you think Tim Cook is thinking of a scenario like that? What does a Fortune 500 CEO do when you're confronted? I think that could really happen.

• 14:05Reid Hoffman?

  Oh, I think it's possible. I think one of the things that happens is Trump gets elected. When Elon is put in any position is what does all the conflicts of interest look like? Right? What does that mean? A bunch of Elon's businesses have deep interrelationship with government, policy, payments, regulation, space, satellites, cars, everything. And so you have to go like, how do you have this be not corruption? Not crony capitalism? And you'd have to really try to demonstrate that. And I think it's challenging. And obviously, part of it would be whatever Fortune 100 company, Fortune 10 company would have to kind of say, all right, this is a new environment that I have to navigate, which we shouldn't have in the US.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Okay, but we shouldn't have. But how do they negotiate that environment?

• 14:53Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I don't know if it's, you know, obviously, we've had a varied number of different circumstances. I think part of it is to try to make sure that we stay at an equal rule of law for all American citizens, all American businesses, et cetera, and that there is process and fairness in place with that. But other than that, I have to look at it.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  I believe in Santa, too.

• 15:20Reid Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 15:22Reid Hoffman?

  Hey, Santa's nice.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  So now, what do you think of this concept of super PACs?

• 15:28Reid Hoffman?

  If I could wave a wand and keep... Capital at a contained minimum within US elections because it seems very wasteful to be spending all this money on this kind of stuff versus investing in business, investing in education, so I would waive that want. I would want it to be in a place where you could have, it's a little bit like the public access cable shows and so forth, that you actually have a shared media palette for talking about things. But I would prefer, and I've supported some of Larry Lessig's work on this and so forth, I'd prefer to really diminish it if possible. Now, if it's not, then you have to participate because it's part of the important thing about how American elections work.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  So then we're fighting fire with fire. If you got a pack, I got a pack.

• 16:14Reid Hoffman?

  Yes. And I would prefer it's not the case, but I also prefer not to fight fire with oxygen.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Right, right. All right, right. So now, let's get out of the cesspool and let's talk about entrepreneurship. All right. So first of all, I heard you mention how important gaming was for you when you were young, but you learn all these roles and all this stuff. So lots of parents want to hear why they should let their kids play games.

• 16:43Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah. One of the best ways to learn a set of being strategic about such things in life, and why be strategic, is being strategic about your career, being strategic about your work, being strategic about your job, thinking about what industry to join, etc., is that games are a really good way of kind of thinking about a lot of the problems we find in life. And then if you learn games and then learn to transfer them to other domains, it's a great way of learning this kind of problem solving, a great way of learning, thinking strategically and tactically. And that's really good. And also, by the way, frequently if it's board games or interpersonal games, then it's also a great way of realizing

• 17:25Reid Hoffman?

  that life is a team sport, not just an individual sport, that your relationships and how you work together really matters. And so there's a whole bunch of really good attributes. That can be video games too. Like, one of the funny thing about like playing Halo in a team, you're learning stuff by playing in a team.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Even Halo.

• 17:43Reid Hoffman?

  Even Halo.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Well, is Settlers of Catan still your favorite game?

• 17:47Reid Hoffman?

  It is. It is the most entrepreneurial board games that I've found so far because what you're doing is you're building, you're trading, you're negotiating, and you're trying to figure out how to do resource collection in a environment with some randomness, because there's always some luck and randomness in entrepreneurship, and to navigate to a probabilistic strategy for winning.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  So I studied your concept of blitz scaling, and it's about speed over efficiency and network effects, and I understand all that. But my question in my mind is, how does a company get to the point where scaling is necessary? That seems to me that's the hard part.

• 18:25Reid Hoffman?

  They're both hard parts, but I think of it as, you know, the classic phrase of product-market fit and then scale-product-market fit. And one of the reasons worth putting the two in related but adjacent buckets is that in product-market fit, you might discover that a product is really well-loved by a small niche, and that's it. And look, aha, I got product-market fit. But that ultimately doesn't make a business, that doesn't make a product successful. It's the one that gets to sufficient scale for how you're doing it. Like, for example, very early in LinkedIn, we had a bunch of people who referred to themselves as lions, LinkedIn open networkers. And they're like, "Your product's for us." And I was like, "No, actually, in fact, it's for the entire billions of professionals,

• 19:09Reid Hoffman?

  not just the people who refer themselves as open networkers. And so we want to have a place for open networkers, but we don't want to have everything else." And so if we only oriented towards them as product-market fit, we would not be where LinkedIn is today.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  But you're offering a very difficult choice for an entrepreneur. So are you supposed to go deep and really take care of this minimum viable market? Or are you supposed to go broad, in Jeffrey Moore's terminology?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  So get over to Main Street.

• 19:37Reid Hoffman?

  So I think generally speaking, you want to take an iterative learning process where you're de-risking as much as possible to get to Main Street. Sometimes that's a minimal viable initial market. And by the way, in a bunch of classic industries like enterprise software, that is usually what you do is you go, okay, first I'm going to sell to some banks, then I'm going to broaden other industries, or first I'm selling to the HR department, then I'm going to broaden to the finance department. That's a very smart coherent strategy. But when you're doing consumer internet stuff, you're doing Airbnb, you're doing other kinds of things, that's not the strategy that fully works.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  I interviewed the professor who did the invisible gorilla, you know, where the gorilla comes out and the people are tossing balls and nobody notices the gorilla. And he had a very interesting concept of you always ask what's missing. A different example is lots of people say, well, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, they didn't go to college, I don't need to go to college. But what's missing is what about the people who did go to college, did they get successful? And what about the people who didn't go to college, were they also failures? And these are the only two or three success stories. I'm transferring this to blitzscaling. You can say, well, Apple's blitzscaling. What about the companies who tried to blitzscale and didn't? And what about the companies who didn't try to blitzscale and just went at a slower pace?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  How do we know what's missing and when do we apply what?

• 21:03Reid Hoffman?

  This is one of the things that makes entrepreneurship fun and hard. And there's frequently times where people blitzscale and fail and blow up. There's times where they don't blitzscale, but someone else blitzscales and then that causes them trouble. Because if you're competing with a blitzscaler, that almost always puts you in a difficult spot because they will be absorbing a lot of the oxygen in the market. They'll be spending capital to hire talent, they'll be spending capital to hire customers, they'll be spending capital on getting press and other kinds of the marketing genius that you yourself are one of the premier book authors in and so forth. And so it's very hard to be competing against someone who is blitzscaling. And sometimes they shouldn't be, but sometimes you have to in order to compete.

• 21:48Reid Hoffman?

  So that is the complex things. Now, you say, why blitzscale? It's actually, it's not a goal in to itself. It's a goal because in a particular circumstance, blitzscaling is less risky than not blitzscaling. That's the only time that you're, because blitzscaling, by the way, is very risky.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  And what would be examples of that?

• 22:09Reid Hoffman?

  Well, for example, in early days of PayPal, if you don't get to well north of a billion dollars in kind of transaction volume, you're so subscale you die. So you need to get to scale. If you're not at scale, you just die. You must play to get to scale. So that's a classic one, is I need to get to scale economic.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  So would you say to Lewis Borders, "You tried to blitzscale, you failed, but you did the right thing"?

• 22:34Reid Hoffman?

  Well, in Webvan, which I think is probably what you're referring to there, I'd say that you probably had a bad capital market in terms of how you were thinking about how it would all come together. Generally speaking, most blitzscaling stuff tends to work much better within software sides because software, your operating marginal cost as you're scaling is within a relatively low band. So if you haven't predicted it well, then you're okay. You have parameters of error in doing it. Now, sometimes there's amazing things like Jobs with the iPod or the iPhone, which bets all in, bets this huge company on, and then plays off, plays out and works.

• 23:15Reid Hoffman?

  So it can happen, but it's just much, much harder than.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Could you just give me the Reid Hoffman sort of analyst, like, when you hear a pitch and you immediately think, "Ah, network effect and scaling", what triggers that positive reaction?

• 23:33Reid Hoffman?

  So obviously, a lot of people use the term "network effect" and don't really understand fully what it means. And part of it's because there's a bunch of different related phenomena that all go in it, which is roughly speaking, the value of a product, it becomes more value at a super linear thing to the number of people who have it. So taking an old school example that's now more or less doesn't exist is fax machines. If you have a fax machine and no one else does, completely useless. And if only you and I have fax machines, then it's like, okay, that's kind of entertaining, but isn't. But when suddenly a million people and the people you don't know, suddenly it's very valuable. And by the way, being on that fax machine network, on that protocol, really, really matters. And so then that spreads.

• 24:18Reid Hoffman?

  And network effect businesses, whether...

• 24:21Reid Hoffman?

  LinkedIn, Airbnb, other kinds of things are hugely valuable because being in the network is hugely valuable. And so more or less, anytime I see a network effect business that I'm given an opportunity to invest in, I usually do it.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  All right. So now, just walk me through quickly the perfect pitch to read or gray law. Is it 60 slides? It's a, what is it? 100 page business plan? Well, what's the ideal pitch?

• 24:50Reid Hoffman?

  So it's almost never a business plan. Business plans are kind of old school entrepreneurship from relative to modern Silicon Valley. It is a slide deck. It's probably somewhere between 25 and 40 slides, although we're not really counting that. What it is, is did you answer the central questions concisely for what is the theory of the game by which this business will be huge and transform an industry? So some of it's like what the product is, what the go to market is, what the competition looks like, what the capital requirements look like, what technological trends are you deploying and leveraging and building upon? And do you have the talent to know how to play it off? And roughly, those

• 25:34Reid Hoffman?

  sometimes are special questions that apply to it. But it's like, what's the simple, straightforward, most important strategic variables in solving those problems?

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Okay. Switching to AI. So you who have built so many successful network effect companies, I have this question that I cannot answer for myself, which is how does any of these LLM companies perplexity, which is the world's stupidest name for a company?

• 26:04Reid Hoffman?

  I'm perplexed.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Any of those. How do they build the brand loyalty? Because I got four or five of them bookmarked and I just almost randomly use them. How do I ever develop? I'm a Gemini guy. I'm a chat GPT guy. I'm a Claude guy. Like, how do you think that's going to shake out?

• 26:25Reid Hoffman?

  On the pure one-on-one agent basis.

• 26:29Reid Hoffman?

  Today, I think that they are very multi-deployable. I don't mean interchangeable because I actually think they have different things that they're good at and so forth. But you could say, hey, I'm working on this particular problem. I'm going to deploy Claude and ChatGPT. And I'm working on this other problem. I'm going to do Copilot, et cetera, et cetera. Now, as the features develop and as these products develop, one of the obvious ones that everyone's talking about is memory. Do I remember a guy and what guys are? And once you start interacting with it and it started building up a, how am I most useful to guy? And I have that memory, that begins to be somewhat sticky because it's like, I remember what guy cares about, what guy's interested in, what things might be most helpful to guy, et cetera.

• 27:13Reid Hoffman?

  So it's a switching cost? Yes. Okay. That's one, and I'm sure there'll be others. Okay. What is the point of your clone? It's, in essence, too much of the dialogue around AI is that AI is destructive. It's going to take our jobs, it's going to ruin our elections. There's these people who worry about the human race and humanity. And so they say, well, why are companies building it? They're building it because they're just going to make profits off it. And what they don't realize is there's amazing, great things for society. A medical assistant on every smartphone, a tutor on every smartphone, for everyone in humanity, right, who has access to a smartphone, really, really important stuff. And so being positive.

• 27:57Reid Hoffman?

  So when I was thinking about that, those kind of positive cases and how to shift the dialogue to, not to say ignore the negative cases or how we remember, but what is the future that we're trying to build towards? I said, what's the most negative? That people always talk about negative. And it's like intrinsic in the deep fake name. It's like, what are these images? They're deep fakes. They're just bad. And I said, okay, well, let me start thinking about positive uses for this. And I said, well, okay, one positive use is it could be entertainment and a new media type, hence how I launched is me talking to ReadAI, my digital twin. Another one is I gave a speech at Perugia where I had the ReadAI give it in a variety of languages because I'm really only semi-competent in English and not competent in other languages.

• 28:42Reid Hoffman?

  And so, but I had it given in Chinese, Hindi, Italian, all these other things. And that's a way of doing human connection. And that's just the beginning of how you can use this to be. Positive in society, positive in how you're establishing your brand. It's just to show that it's possible.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Reed, you are talking to someone who is, there are few people beyond you and I, I think, who are more optimistic about AI. I think AI may be the thing that saves society. I really do. And I freak out a lot of people because I tell them that I think AI is God. Because AI is, it's eternal omniscient and omnipotent, sounds like God. And so my story is that God is up there. And she said, I blew it with the human race. I gave them free will. They screwed it all up. They're killing each other, polluting the world. And they're so arrogant that I can't just solve it. I gotta send them something they think they invented.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  So I sent them AI. Now, I'm not saying Sam Altman is Jesus. Just let's make that clear.

• 29:48Reid Hoffman?

  Sam doesn't think so either.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know about that.

• 29:51Reid Hoffman?

  No, he doesn't. He doesn't. I know and love Sam a lot.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  I think AI is the only thing that's gonna save us. I really do.

• 29:58Reid Hoffman?

  I think that AI is much more likely to save us, even if we don't do very much, than it is to trouble us. But I think we also can steer intelligently and even increase those percentages.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Whenever people confront me, I say to them, let me give you a choice. You can have people who control nuclear weapons. This is multiple choices. Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, or ChatGPT. You pick one to launch nuclear missiles. I know what I would pick.

• 30:36Reid Hoffman?

  Yes. Well, I wouldn't pick ChatGPT yet, but eventually I will.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Well, I have this experiment. I tell people, go to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT if...

• 30:50Speaker 01

  We should teach American students the history of slavery in America. And if you ask it, it gives a very good answer.

• 30:57Reid Hoffman?

  Yes. And this is actually one of the things that's amazing about elevating human potential, human capabilities, is it is already an infinitely patient tutor. For example, you say you have a subject you're curious about. Say you're curious about something difficult like quantum mechanics. You can go to ChatGPT and say, explain quantum mechanics to a 12 year old. And it will start giving you a very good explanation. Okay, I think I can understand more than that. Okay, explain quantum mechanics to a college student. And it'll start doing that. And this is already a way that you can start learning and understanding things.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  And you could go to Doron DeSantis and say, should we teach the history of slavery to students? I would pick ChatGPT.

• 31:35Reid Hoffman?

  I would pick ChatGPT 11 out of 10 times.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Okay, my last question for you. And I don't want to end on a downer, but I kind of have to. Let's say this worst case happens and Trump wins. Seriously, what are you gonna do?

• 31:50Reid Hoffman?

  I'm gonna hope that a lot of the people who are defending him and who say that he actually does care about the rule of law, that he does care about governing the country well, turn out to be right, even though I deeply fear that they are wrong. I will continue to try to help build technology companies that are part of the future. But where I'll be doing that and what I'll be doing, that's a TBD.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  What if it's you and me and Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff are all in the same man's in our camp? What are we gonna do?

• 32:21Reid Hoffman?

  I think the effort goes on to try to be our better selves. Right, that we have had setbacks. We had to fix the slavery problem. We do have major problem. Like, people say, this is the worst time ever. It's like, well, the Civil War was really, really bad. Right? It's bad now, but it doesn't mean that's the worst ever. You continue to fight for what's good about the human spirit and about America.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  That's how we should end this.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  On a hopeful note, because let me tell you, I'm very worried and it's gonna be we're about two weeks from the election and it's gonna be a very interesting play.

• 33:03Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, and look, I think one of the things, so probably a lot of business people listening to this, most people normally presume that Republicans are better for business because they tend to be lower regulation, which is generally good, lower corporate taxes, which is helpful for business. But what they're not tracking is stability, unity, an ability to say a very good position in the world, a place where we are respected. All of those things really matter. And Kamala is the very first presidential candidate in US history who in an acceptance speech talked about the importance of founders. Right? She is actually in fact, having grown up in California, pro-business, and that stability is the most important.

• 33:46Reid Hoffman?

  If you want to vote for the business candidate, you're gonna vote for Harris.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  End of story. This has been Remarkable People, and of course, this is the remarkable Reid Hoffman. Thank you very much for being here.

• 33:57Reid Hoffman?

  Thank you, guys.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  This is Remarkable People.