BONUS: Conversations with Coleman: Big Tech, Politics, and Trust in Institutions

This is a bonus episode from the Conversations of Coleman podcast, featuring Reid Hoffman as the guest. Here are the show notes from that episode: My guest today is entrepreneur and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. He’s now facing something most tech business people never imagine: being personally targeted by a sitting president’s Department of Justice. Reid and I talk through the rise of politically motivated prosecutions, the erosion of trust in institutions, and how social media and AI have accelerated our collective slide into suspicion. We get into deepfakes, vaccine skepticism, the inequality debate, and whether billionaires should exist at all. Reid also walks me through what it’s like to wait for an indictment he believes is purely retaliatory. This is a conversation about democratic guardrails, not partisan talking points—and about what happens when political power becomes personal. A big thanks to The Free Press and Conversations with Coleman podcast, available at theFP.com.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  A big thanks to the Free Press and Conversations with Coleman podcast, which can be found at thefp.com.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  My guest today is Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author, and podcaster, best known as the co-founder of LinkedIn. A former PayPal mafia member and one of Silicon Valley's most active early investors, he's a longtime partner at the venture firm Greylock, where he has backed companies like Airbnb and Joby Aviation. Reid is also a billionaire donor to the Democratic Party, which has landed him in hot water with Donald Trump, whose DOJ has signaled that they'd like to indict Hoffman as they recently attempted to do with former FBI Director Jim Comey. In this episode, we talk about the rise of politically motivated prosecutions on both sides. We talk about why trust in institutions and in media

• 0:52Speaker 01

  has declined so steeply, not just in America, but throughout Europe. We talk about declining trust in vaccines and the medical system. We talk about whether billionaires should even exist. We talk about whether our democratic institutions are successfully holding their ground, and much more. So without further ado, Reid Hoffman.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Okay, Reid Hoffman, thanks so much for coming on my show.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  My pleasure and honor. I've been looking forward to this for a month or two.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  So we met at a conference years ago. And I don't know if we've ever crossed paths outside of that, but obviously you will be known to pretty much my entire audience as the co-founder of LinkedIn, as a major donor to Democrats, as a billionaire tech guy.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  And there's a lot to talk about. First, I want to just get for, you know, assume there's a slice of my audience that doesn't know who you are, however small, and give them a one or two minute version of who you are, how you came to be in the position you're in, and what you care about most right now.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  So originally, I was thinking about

• 2:54Speaker 02

  being an academic philosopher, in fact, because I'm most interested in how we as human beings kind of understand each other and understand the world, kind of thought and language. So I did artificial intelligence at Stanford and philosophy at Oxford. And then I realized that I was kind of interested in this in a kind of non, call it scholarly, scholastic way, but in a how do we influence the the path of the kind of evolution of humanities, societies, etc. Maybe he's reading too much science fiction as a child. And so, and had the benefit of going to Stanford, so realized about kind of software entrepreneurship as a way of shaping that and creating that. And so went back to the valley, did a bunch of jobs,

• 3:38Speaker 02

  helped create a bunch of different companies, LinkedIn being obviously one of the more notable one. And part of the way that I kind of look at this is how do we have technology help us towards

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Kind of how we evolve as human beings. And so, you know, in a couple of my books, Superagency, Impromptu, etc., I've, I've, I've kind of described us more as homo techne than homo sapiens. Because the way that we evolve is through technology, the way we become our more human selves is through technology, even though when we first invented technology, it tends to be something we, we, we kind of go, oh, that's kind of alien. But then we integrate it, you know, whether it's, you know, printing press, or cars, or planes, or electricity, or any of these things, and part of how we, um, uh, part of how we evolve. And that's, that's the kind of the journey I've been on as an entrepreneur, as an investor,

• 4:36Speaker 02

  you know, as a kind of a technology co-creator.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, that's, that's interesting, because I think, you know, I'm, I'm very much pro technological progress. I'm someone that follows Steven Pinker in believing that science and reason and enlightenment values are the reason why you and I can expect to live to 80 or 90 years old.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  You, you, we can expect our children to live past the age, uh, to live full lives, which has been an expectation most human beings have not been able to have throughout history. We can be pretty sure there's not going to be a famine in the country that we live in, and that would hold even if we didn't live in America. There's so many things that we take for granted, because they're right in front of our noses, and it is the, uh, it's, it's the human way to take things for granted. At the same time, I think some of the problems you devoted yourself to, like political trust in institutions is, is a big one, from what I've seen of your public worrying out loud.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  You know, th- those problems seem to be, in my view, side effects of technology, right? Like, you you mentioned the the printing press, obviously a fantastic step forward for humanity. In the near term, it created a, you know, it created the Protestant Catholic split, which killed countless, you know, hundreds of thousands or more in in Europe. And certainly reduced, one way of looking at it is that it reduced trust in the Catholic Church, right?

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Which was, which was a high-trust institution before that. So one way of looking at what's going on right now is, you know, is technology, whether that's even, you know, something as simple as the TV, which we now take for granted, and then, of course, social media, is that reducing trust in in our institutions in the same way that the printing press reduced trust in in the Catholic Church? And if so, how do you square that with a general pro-technology bent that seems like is the core of your motivation?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Well, the the simple headline answer is I completely agree that the transition times actually cause, you know, kind of, challenge and problems and suffering and so forth. And, you know, the printing press, which I also covered in Super Agency, you know, did create nearly a century or facilitated a the creation of nearly a century of religious war. And so what we should learn from that, I don't think, is not stop technology, but try to make these transitions less painful, less suffering, you know, kind of more,

• 7:36Speaker 02

  I agree with you about the the the technology, correct, so reshuffle, the reshuffle, you know, facilitates in human nature, kind of a degradation of trust. It's one of the reasons why I think part of our, you know, kind of moral requirement and our intellectual requirement is to to focus on renovating institutions versus, you know, tearing them down as a kind of a general principle for these things. And I do think that, you know, for example, You know, like one of, you know, two of the areas where I tend to think, for example, social networks are very legitimately criticized. One is children. And then the other one is,

• 8:19Speaker 02

  you know, like things that that facilitate, you know, anti-vax conspiracies and misunderstandings as part of it. And those are instances of erosion of trust and, you know, kind of creation of it. And so actually, in fact, what we need to do as a society is to say, hey, we need to get through these transitions to rebuilding to a newer, you know, hopefully, truth-seeking, you know, kind of more accurate set of trusts on the other side. But I don't mean to underplay at all, whether it's artificial intelligence, social networks, the internet, mobile phones,

• 8:57Speaker 02

  the fact that transitions create real, you know, challenges for people, for societies, and so forth. And, you know, part of what we need to be doing is figuring out how to navigate those challenges. And we can go in any of the challenges that, you know, you would like, or you're, you think your audience is most attuned to. But I, you know, like long-term optimistic, short-term challenge navigation. That's the, that's the, the high line of it.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the anti-vax one is that's an interesting case study. Because, you know, in the, in the 1970s, I think it was, I forget if it was bird flu or a different, oh, it was swine flu. I don't know if you, you remember this. There was an actual, genuine vaccination crisis, where there was a bad vaccine that was created, 60 minutes covered it, thousands of people took unnecessary vaccines, and many of them are believed to have gotten, was it?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Well, what's it called? Uh, Guillain-Barre syndrome?

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Something like that?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Uh, it was a really nasty situation and it's something that someone like RFK Junior points to. And he says, look at what the medical industrial complex is capable of. Look, look at how vaccines can harm us. And he has a point in that instance, obviously, this is, you know, now 50 years old. But I don't recall there being a, a sort of a generation of anti-vaxxers created as a result of that genuine scandal.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Yet during COVID, there was, to my knowledge, no scandal with the vaccines similar to that in scale. Right? There were, there, obviously there were vaccines that were recalled because they caused blood clots. But the system by and large, um, caught issues and responded to those issues. And the vaccines saved far more lives than, uh, than, than they, than they injured. And by the way, I have a lot, lot, many criticisms of how COVID vaccines were rolled out and

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  And how the booster was, um, the booster, you know, people were pressured to get the booster, even though later CDC data came out saying that people didn't need it, at least people of a certain age. Um, but those relatively minor problems compared to, for instance, what happened in the seventies caused such an enormous level of mistrust in vaccines that now you have people just like going back to basics and saying, does any back, does any vaccine work? Like this is like fairly to, just to be, to be skeptical of vaccines in general, including, you know, like smallpox and like just these fundamental vaccines that nobody really disagreed about for.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  You know, 70 years has now become popular. And so this is an interesting case study in what is actually causing the mistrust. Is it that the mistrust is well calibrated to the scandals that the government is imposing on us? Or is it that we are now living in a media landscape where unlike in 1970, you know, 60 Minutes did a really good expose on what happened with that vaccine. What goes on now is that anyone with a YouTube channel and some charisma can spend every single day exposing both good faith and bad faith criticisms of the system, building

• 12:45Speaker 01

  audiences specifically built around skepticism on these particular topics and feeding them one side of the issue and never the other side of the issue. And that just wasn't possible in the 1970s. If you were a consumer that wanted that, there would be nowhere you could go to get it. And so, and at the same time, what is my podcast other than something that's enabled by this very same ecosystem, right? People are a fan of me. I get the guests that I want to get. I give them my perspective on things and they could legitimately worry that I'm not giving them the other side of an issue, right? I tend to be better than average at that and I think I cultivate an audience that actually wants that from me.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  But nevertheless, I'm part of an ecosystem and I love having that, having access to these influencers and information and something more than just 13 channels on TV. And yet I can see how it's contributing, maybe the main contributor to the lack of trust, which is not just an American phenomenon, but has also happened to varying extents in the UK, in Canada, in France, in Japan. I mean, you know, so, so, I mean, not, I don't know where the question is in there, but if anything I said provoked a thought, go ahead.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Well, absolutely. And look, I think you said it very well. I think you're substantially above average. One of the reasons I'm, you know, honored and delighted to be on the podcast for it. And I do think that it's important to be considered and thoughtful. I mean, the thing that I've

• 14:23Speaker 02

  I mean, a general principle that I tend to think about is wherever technology is a problem, how do we shape it to being the solution? Because it does create a shift, as your earlier comment, Prinig Press others. And then the question is, how do we then make it into something that that that kind of creates a much better elevated human condition, you know, truth in media, society, institutions, other things? And here, you know, my tendency is to think that we should enable as much freedom of voice as possible. For example, you know, even if you wanted to say the moon landing was faked and, you know, other kinds of weird conspiracy theories that that come up, or, you know, the fact

• 15:08Speaker 02

  that, you know, a vaccine can have a side effect for an individual means that it's it's the doesn't understand the statistics of actually, if 70% of us take it, then thousands of lives are saved, even with a weird side effect or two. And you kind of run through these things and you say, well, what's the way we could use technology to help solve this? And so like, one of the micro things that I tend to think that would be a good thing within, call it the freedom of voice for all individuals, is to say, hey, if you're publishing through platforms that are trying to maintain trust, if, for example, you and

• 15:49Speaker 02

  I were to say, oh, you know, and I've seen medical evidence that it's proven that these COVID, those COVID vaccines actually caused much more autism, you know, or autism in equal quantities with the the lives they saved, or autism at all, you would say, oh, actually, in fact, we have to add a note to this to say, medical experts disagree with this. This is why, here's where you get the information. And if you're going to publish this, we have to add this note to what you're publishing. Because, you know, it's it's it's trying to orient people towards a truth oriented discussion. It's not saying you can't say.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  You know, autism and vaccination, you can't say the moon landing never happened. But you have to say it with a reference to where there's a canon of truth discourse that disagrees with what you're saying. And that that might be a good way to kind of blend the virtues of every voice is enabled together with platforms that enable truth seeking about, well, you know, when we do have something that's kind of through, call it a scientific process of truth, which I think, you know, generally speaking, the way that we do that in all kinds of society is is groups of human beings in considered format studying something.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  It's everything from scientific method to, you know, juries in court systems to try to be orienting us towards truth in that. And you use that as a way to reflect with technology back into a general discourse that, you know, someone can claim whatever they want to claim for whatever particular reason they are claiming it, but still have that. That would be my orientation on this kind of topic within obviously a lot of discourse for how to make sure that works, doesn't get overly abused by political interests and other kinds of things. But that would be the, that would be a, that's been a reflex that I think would be a good evolution.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that too. I think, and what that is an alternative to is the ever-present human instinct towards censorship. And I think we've seen over the past 10 years, all the people that have been censored, whether it's from YouTube or Twitter before Elon Musk took it over, or, you know, kicked off of payment services like PayPal and Venmo, people like, I'm thinking of people like Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones, they've all come back with a roaring fury and the halo of martyrdom, at least to their fans.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  And, and most of the misinformation and lies and in Fuentes's case outright bigotry that he's pushing have become more influential, it seems to me, as a result of the censorship.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  In the long run, and and I think we we constantly learn, relearn and forget the lesson that when you censor somebody, you do make them a martyr. And when they come back, people just listen to them regardless of what they have to say. And and so what has worked, it seems to me, is the community notes and sort of Grok checking tweets model, right? And this this almost goes back, I mean, I remember every teacher I had in school would say, don't use Wikipedia as a source, which is, yeah, it's not a primary source, obviously. But it is actually fairly good on most things because it goes through a process of competitive

• 19:39Speaker 01

  editing by partisans on on both sides. And what emerges is actually fairly decent. And and so the community notes, I think, has worked on on Twitter. It doesn't make the person who gets community noted into a martyr, which is key. It just if they get something provably wrong, it just makes them look like an idiot. And what's more, the ability to use Grok to check every tweet, which reply guys are using on on, you know, every controversial tweet now, you could just look into the replies and see what Grok has to say about it, is really important and adds context and checks people who are pushing, you know, BS in a way, again, that doesn't make them into a martyr, that just makes them look like a

• 20:23Speaker 01

  fool if indeed they're wrong. So I'm very happy with the way community notes and AI have influenced this. On the other hand, you have people who sincerely believe, and you know, I'm not one of them, but I want to put the question to you, you have people who believe that AI has enabled and or is going to enable misinformation at scale, right? If we thought misinformation was a problem now, wait till AI fully gets going on it. Maybe it's already happened. And they have certain valid points. The the fact that you can now make, I think we can say this with confidence now, you can now make

• 21:01Speaker 01

  deep fakes that are indistinguishable from reality to the typical human eye. And I've fallen victim to some of them on Twitter, and I usually rely on the Grok replies to tell me if this if this thing I saw is is real or fake. So what do you make of the threat from AI to the

• 21:24Speaker 01

  The trust problem that we're talking about and how do we preempt it or fix it?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  So it's obvious that there is a

• 21:36Speaker 02

  there is a deep fake problem.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  And

• 21:42Speaker 02

  again, kind of the general principle is less, let's stop technology, let's stop the ability to make deep fakes. You know, Coleman, I don't know if you've seen that, you know, one of the ways I've kind of played around is I made my own digital twin, Read AI, and did various things with it just for entertainment purposes. And also to kind of show that a deep fake is not, even in the case of a deep fake technology, there's good uses of it other than just kind of call it Hollywood, you know, kind of a character illusion and movie creation. I think

• 22:12Speaker 01

  You are the real you right now, right?

• 22:13Speaker 02

  I am the real me. Yes. Although, by the way,

• 22:16Speaker 01

  That's exactly what you would say if you were a digital twin.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Yes. Although if you ask me a question in Chinese and I replied in Chinese, then you would know it was Read AI. Because, you know, one of the superpowers that Read AI has is being able to to speak a number of different languages. So when I

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Ni hao ma?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Exactly. I'm fine. Thank you. That is actually how happens to be a piece of Chinese that I that I that I know. But the

• 22:45Speaker 02

  but like as an instance of it, I gave a speech in Perugia about the importance of humanism in the age of technology and then had a Read AI give it in Italian and Hindu and Japanese and Chinese and you know, everything else as a demonstration of the kind of pro-human characteristics for this. Now that being said, the deep fakes is a real issue and we need to then say, what's the way that we we navigate that? And the answer is, you know, as part of, as opposed to slowing down technology and trying to stop deep fakes from happening, because I think that'll be actually very difficult to do. You have open source models, you have a whole bunch of things. Open source models also coming from China and other places makes it very difficult to say, we will simply

• 23:25Speaker 02

  make it, you know, the technology unavailable to create a deep fake of Coleman, of Read, of, you know, someone else. Actually, in fact, I think the deep fakes will be constructed and what we need to do is say, okay, well, how do we you know, and Grok and Community Notes can be a can be a useful tool in this. But like, actually, in fact, I think part of what we'll need to be able to do more of is to create some kind of, as it were, network of certification. It's almost like the crypto, um, uh, uh, kind of, um, like, part of what I like about, you know, Bitcoin and the crypto stuff is there's actually certain kinds of distributed

• 24:09Speaker 02

  protocols that need to be added to the foundation of the internet, which include identity and certification in various ways. And so you can begin to say, hey, um, this is the certificate that Coleman and Reed used to sign the things that they, that they said, I actually did, you know, like this podcast and so forth. And then that certificate could then be used as a, which of these videos, which of these audios, which of these, you know, kind of things are actually, in fact, legitimate as a instance for how they roll. But I think we need to go technology forward to solve the deep fake problems.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Now, there's hacks in between it, even if you don't say we don't have to reinvent the firmament of the internet for making this happen. You know, the hacks are, you know, um, you know, one of the things you already see happening with deep fakes is the use of, um, phishing, you know, on, you get a, your, your, your grandma gets a call saying, oh, Coleman needs money desperately, please send it. And, you know, and it sounds like it's Coleman's voice and so forth. If you have a AI agent on your side that says, oh, wait a minute, this sounds like something that's potentially of risk, why don't we cross check this? Like you're in this, this, this phone call. What's something that only, you know, you and your grandmother know?

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Ask that before you, you, you, you proceed in this conversation. And so I think there's various ways to also set up AI as the defense. Like it says, you see, um, a video of Coleman saying, you know, I've come to believe that vaccinations are the work of the devil, um, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, well, that doesn't sound very believable. And the AI agent says, yep, that's not very believable. That, that, that doesn't, like, we should really look at that to see if that was actually the case. Um, and so, anyway, so those, I think, are the gestures towards the solution, but it isn't trying to say that the problem doesn't exist. And it isn't, I think it's always a mistake in technology to say,

• 26:16Speaker 02

  The way that you try to prevent the challenge of a technology is to simply raw forbid the technology versus shape it.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Let's move on to some other topics. I think every, every time I have a billionaire on the podcast, I have to ask them the billionaire question, which is, should billionaires exist? And, and, you know, there are many ways to object to the framing of the question, but this is how the question generally gets asked, especially on the progressive left. So I just put it to you, should billionaires exist?

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Well, given we're on a philosophical podcast, I will start in a kind of a first principles basis, which is, I don't think anyone knows how human society works without inequality. Right? That, that we have inequality and access to certain kinds of educational opportunity. We have inequality in terms of, you know, you prove yourself as an athlete and you're, you know, you're LeBron James or you're, you know, or else. So like, like the whole thing is a combination. Now, we want as much opportunity spread across the hundreds of millions and billions of people as possible, but like the end results have unequal results.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  You know, person one is paid more than person two. You know, the, the kind of the Harrison Bergeron or the, or the dumbass, you know, kind of sometimes communist thing and say, well, everyone should be paid exactly the same. It's like, no, that's not actually the fact that we have inequality. So then the question is, is how much inequality is too much? Because it's not the thesis that there is no level of inequality that's too much, but what are your principled bases for doing so? And, and then what kinds of inequality and how it gets there? And I think that the question, and like you can put this as like, well, should there be

• 28:12Speaker 02

  a hard number between, in a corporation, between the least paid person and the CEO or the most paid person? And that that ratio should be 100 times. And you're like, well, how do you get to that magic number? Is it because of your grumbling of your stomach and your intuition versus someone else's? It's like, well, actually, in fact, you should, you should allow kind of market mechanisms and other kinds of things, you know, be the determinant of that. There may be biases in markets that we need to fix. Markets are not perfect. They, they do need some, you know, systemic kind of things. Again, not with magic numbers, but kind of ways they operate. And you could imagine that you say, well, individuals get so powerful, like the age of the robber barons, where, you know,

• 28:57Speaker 02

  JP Morgan and Rockefeller and everyone else were, were running the society and it took a Teddy Roosevelt to try to re-correct it to being where the instruments of democracy were more important than that. And that could be something. And now, by the way, people assert, yeah, that's what's happening now. And it's like, well, you know, other than maybe in particular Elon's interventions, it's not clear that that's what's happening right now at all. And, and so I don't tend to think I have, I think that the argument about whether or not millionaires, billionaires, you know, multi billionaires should exist. We shouldn't do it on a magic number basis. We should do it on a first principles functioning

• 29:41Speaker 02

  of the system basis. And in particular, you know, I tend to be maybe because this is, you know, self describes, I tend to be more sympathetic to, you know, kind of billionaires who made it through creating things that were very useful for society than like inheriting it. And by the way, that's also of course sympathy for Elon and other folks because it's like, you know, SpaceX and Starlink and Tesla, you know, massive contributions to society. And so, you know, so I tend to think on a first principles basis, it seems that they should in the current configuration.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  But, but I'm, I'm willing to engage in the discourse on a first principles, not on a political rhetoric, you know, the grumbling of stomach one versus stomach two, you know, kind of basis, because I think that's just, you know, kind of the equivalent of ad hominem name calling.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I also think about this on a first principles basis primarily, but a different principle, namely, you know, the, the real question is, do we care about inequality per se, or do we care about poverty? And what the floor of a society is? So for example, if I was like, like in the movie Soul, I'm like, I'm a soul, I haven't gone into the human world, right? I'm choosing what society to live in. Society A is a society where the, the lowest people are earning $20,000 a year. That's like bare minimum entry level, you're working a janitor job, whatever it is, you

• 31:22Speaker 01

  have, you can afford three meals a day, let's say, because of the price of food is cheap, there's no famines, you can afford basic entertainment, you can afford education for your family, like that's, that's the floor of one society. But the ceiling is extremely high. There are Reid Hoffman's that have a billion dollars and fathomless wealth that I'm unlikely ever to attain. But then there's another society that doesn't have any billionaires, but does, the, the floor is even lower. The floor is, say, 10,000, half of what I would be. So there's far less inequality in society B, but.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  The poorest members of society are doing significantly better in society A. Like, to me, it seems obvious that society A is a better society. Um, even though it has more inequality. Not only that, I would say ninety-nine percent of migrants, given a full information choice between society A and B, would choose society A. So I'm, I'm making a deeper claim than that it's my value system. I actually think it's everybody's value system when they think about it deeply. And so, to me, looking at a society and asking how much income, say, or wealth inequality,

• 32:44Speaker 01

  uh, there is, is actually asking the wrong question vis a vis human flourishing and what we should actually care about. And then, when you actually look at that question, and I, I put this, I had a socialist on my podcast recently. And, you know, I, I made the point, which is, you know, even at the height of, you mentioned, you know, the, the, the Gilded Age, when you had Rockefeller and all these people making all this money. Well, at that very time, what was the number one destination for the poor migrants of the world? America, that very same gilded society that the, that the rich were supposedly running into the ground.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  That was the society that Italians and Irish and Jew, Jews from Russia were pouring into by the millions with nothing through Ellis Island because it offered them the very best opportunity in the world at the time to live a middle-class life, a better life. And so, if you look around the world, it looks like, it, it quite often looks like the societies with the billionaires, like America, also are usually the societies with the kind of structures that help the working poor succeed as well. So, that's how I view the whole issue. I think people look at it backwards.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  By the way, I completely agree with the principles you just mentioned, because I do think that the...

• 34:10Speaker 02

  The question is, how do we create both the best rising of that floor, plus the opportunity to make as much wealth, make as much progress, do as, do great work as possible, which can go as high as possible? The one place I would kind of, as it were, steel person, the, the one place is if you say, well, actually, in fact, and this is one of the reasons why I think kind of questions around monopoly, power and so forth are good ones for society to address is if you, if you get somebody who is so powerful that they're corrupting the system to lock themselves in a position of power, either individually or collectively, that's gets to be a place

• 34:54Speaker 02

  where you should examine that some. And it's part of the reason why I think, you know, like, for example, the anti-trust stuff from the Gilded Age and, you know, Teddy Roosevelt and so forth, was actually, in fact, you know, actually, in fact, good for society.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Right. So anyway, so that, but that, yeah. So where I think we're in, we're in, we're, we're coloring in an area of very, very broad agreements within the philosophy of create human prosperity and human opportunity. And that's the most important thing. And you're going to have societies with a lot of inequality as part of that. But that's actually, in fact, the functioning of a society that creates a lot more, you know, kind of humanist, you know, like medical systems and, and elevating poverty and, you know, to elevating people out of poverty and so forth, which is, which is the most important thing.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, medical research is one of the prime examples of this. Like any given year, if you look at where all of the new medical breakthroughs are invented, it just so happens to be America. Why? Because, and this is the uncomfortable truth, I guess, is that

• 36:08Speaker 01

  In America, there is an opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to make oodles of money by inventing things that people will want to buy in order to cure or mitigate disease. That opportunity to make that much money is restricted in Europe for various reasons. And so, only in America is it worthwhile for pharmaceutical companies to put up the billions of dollars required for the uncertain result of making that huge bag of cash at the end of the rainbow. And it might seem unseemly to someone without that bag of cash that people are making that

• 36:49Speaker 01

  absurd level of money, but not only do we benefit from the medical innovations, eventually the whole world benefits from those medical innovations as they condemn the system that allows people to get wealthy creating them. And so, there is something very dark in human nature, in my opinion. And, you know, I've been seeing it just more and more on both sides of the political spectrum lately. I've been noticing it more, which is the reality of envy. Like envy is the emotion, I think, perhaps more than any other, that has led to the destruction of otherwise good societies, right?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  If you look at every time the Jews have been expelled or pogromed in a country, or not just the Jews, you know, the Pakistanis and Indians in East Africa, or the Chinese, the overseas Chinese in Malaysia and other places in Southeast Asia, they get expelled from these societies because they're doing too well, because they have too much money. They control, quote unquote, "too many of the businesses," right? And then, like clockwork, when you expel them, the country does much worse off. It's just cutting off the nose to spite the face. And that's, you know, that's just one example of envy, but obviously, every country that

• 38:12Speaker 01

  has willingly elected communists, like true capital C communists, such as we rarely see anymore, was a case of, you know, of basically of envy. And You know, in those cases, the electorate gets what they want and they get it good and hard as the quote, as the quote goes. But so there's a left wing version of envy. There's a right wing version of envy. And, you know, in my view, that's what motivates a lot of the anti billionaire rhetoric rather than a deep concern for the country per se.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  By the way, the other thing I, just as a general principle, I think is worth saying because I agree with that as a instance of where people say it's better to tear the whole system down, is that the, the impulse to kind of tear the system down versus renovate the system is a extremely expensive, very difficult thing. It's the kind of thing that leads to like the French terror, it's leads to the, the culture revolution, it leads to the year zero. It is to say that, you know, sometimes that may be the only path out, although frequently it's not. And it's, and the cost in human suffering and the collapse

• 39:30Speaker 02

  of society is huge. But I agree with your envy point. And I think that it's also a, you know, kind of think about how do we renovate our institutions versus how do we tear them down as a good general principle?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, right now, a lot of people feel that the, the threat to institutions is coming first and foremost from the Trump administration. And I'm of two minds about that because in, in the first instance, I do believe Trump's personality tends towards authoritarianism. He is exactly the kind of president that the founding, founding fathers were worried about and designed the system in order to contain. There's just no doubt about that, that if it were up to him, he would grab as much power as he possibly could.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  He would run roughshod over every rule that constrained his power. That seems obvious to me. On the other hand, it seems equally clear to me that the institutions are successfully holding him to account. And I, and so I, I see some of the rhetoric.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Which suggests that he is already sort of taken over democracy or already turned America into an authoritarian state to be alarmist. And, and, and I also think that there is a disturbing phenomena where the media actually stands to gain by convincing Americans that basically we've already lost our democracy or we're at the five yard line with our democracy and we're about to lose it. And so there's a, there's a systematic, especially, you know, I live in New York City and most people I encounter are liberal. There's a systematic under-reporting of the instances that happen almost every day, you

• 41:26Speaker 01

  know, recently in the news of Trump's ambitions, you know, being thwarted. Whether it is, you know, the Supreme Courts look like they're about to rule against him on his signature tariff proposal, which I've been against since the beginning. The National Guard had been removed from two of the cities they were deployed to. And in general, the hyperventilation about the National Guard going into DC hasn't really borne very much by way of imposition on the citizens of that city. You've got federal court challenges to, you know, all kinds of things. His lawsuit against CNN and appeals court ruled against it and, and the attempted GOP

• 42:09Speaker 01

  redistricting of Texas judge ruled against that. And so the judges are doing their job, not only at the federal circuit level, but also at the Supreme Court level. And to me, it seems like a case where you have, like I said, a classic authoritarian wannabe that is successfully being held by the institutions. And that should make us feel, if not good, then at a minimum, we should not feel like we're losing our democracy. And I hear that tone quite a bit. So where do, where do you feel we are right now? And where, if at all, do you disagree with the picture I just sketched?

• 42:49Speaker 02

  So probably not surprising to you, I have broad brush agreements with the picture you just sketched, but perhaps a little bit more.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  You know, critical of the Trump Foundation, the Trump administration than you than you sketch. Look, I do think that a number of Democrats get a little histrionic, like, "Oh, we're not going to have elections next year." And it's like, that's like, I think, frankly, misleading. And and then when people say, "Well, look, there were elections and you were just, you know, everything that you said was just a bunch of histrionics and we shouldn't pay attention to you," I think is a destructive thing. And what's more, you know, when this kind of lefty progressive goes this histrionic, it covers the actual more relevant issues. And I do think that there is a certain amount of

• 43:47Speaker 02

  of of the, you know, the of the tripartite, the judiciary kind of holding the ground, which I think is important, although, you know, the fact is, it's kind of like in a number of the instances is like, stop breaking the law, like, stop, you know, invading blue cities with National Guard as a kind of way of doing it. You know, the kinds of things you didn't cover that were also very alarming to me was the politicization of the military, you know, kind of firing 31 generals as a function of it. I think it's important that the military, like, I think one of the subtle genius things that that of the American

• 44:26Speaker 02

  system was that the military doesn't do its oath to the president, it does its oath to the Constitution, is kind of the way that it operates. And I think it's one of the things that we have, you know, our, our, our forefathers and other folks have have made a great system. And so that the firing of those generals, I think, was a problem that The fact that, um, yes, I understand that this was speeches and so forth, but kind of the environment of, of risk where you've got everything from Trump, you know, kind of advocating for the execution of a chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff on Truth Social

• 45:08Speaker 02

  to, you know, kind of doing the, you know, Democrats should be executed for making a statement about, um, don't follow illegal orders. It's kind of like, you know, like the, you know, apple pie and vanilla ice cream. Don't follow illegal orders. Like, great. Yeah. Don't follow illegal orders. Um, you know, as kind of a way of doing it. And so I think that the, um, that the, that the attempts to erode our system, um, are, you know, serious. I think words are actually in fact serious. I think they create a whole environment, um, that, that, you know, kind of part of how society works is by belief

• 45:53Speaker 02

  in the, in the fact that laws work and the fact that elections work, et cetera. And I think doing a variety of things to keep those reinforced, I think, important. And so I'd say that the, that the critique of the Trump administration is being very corrosive to our democracy is accurate. I also agree with you about the Trump, you know, tariff policies and so forth. And I hope that the judiciary keeps that because that is a power of Congress, not a power of the executive and the attempt to erode the powers of Congress, I think are, is bad for the American system. Um, but anyway, so I, I'm more critical than your, your, your,

• 46:36Speaker 02

  your, your picture of the Trump administration, uh, just outlined. But I do think the judiciary has, you know, elements of showing the, um,

• 46:51Speaker 02

  The kind of resolution despite, you know, Trump's, you know, best efforts to, you know, contramound what the founding fathers were trying to limit the powers of the executive for, you know, domestically for very good reasons.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you think that Trump is a singular threat as a result of his personality, and also his cult of personality? That is to say, the level of loyalty that he commands among his followers that is unlike anything we see from anyone else in the Republican Party, but also anyone at all in the Democrat Party? Do you think that his, because I agree with you, when he, you know, all of this, all of this normalization of, of the language, whether it was from lock her up to, I'm gonna, you know, you know, everything you mentioned, that just the loose way he is with language,

• 47:49Speaker 01

  with threatening political opponents, with threatening violence, all that stuff, it all bothers me. But at the same time, I am sympathetic to the argument that if that stuff doesn't happen, we should judge people more by their actions than by, than by their, than by their rhetoric. And, and so it, it does bother me. And do you think that he is a singular threat? Or do you think that because of his success, the success he's had with the Trumpian style, let's call it, that we will be seeing politicians try to emulate that?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Freewheeling, say whatever the first thing that comes to your head, even if it's violent, even if it's nasty, push as hard as you can on the system, challenge every norm, don't respect, you know, do, do whatever you can get away with. Do you think we'll be seeing politicians emulate that style for the rest of our lifetime?

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Well, it's certainly possible. And, you know, it should concern the various MAGAists. That, you know, by the way, we don't want the left to be emulating that style too. The, you know, the, the far left. Like, like, I think what we want is much, you know, heads towards centrism as we can, whether it's, you know, kind of pro-business, or whether it's pro-institution, or anything else, and like, we don't want that. I think that's one of the concerns that it will create that. I think also that the, you know, the, the kind of the questions around, you know,

• 49:37Speaker 02

  even as the judge appropriately throws out the, the inappropriate indictment of Comey, you know, the question is, is even like bringing that case as a form of, you know, kind of autocratic persecution of an individual to create fear in other individuals to not counter the executive authority. Because even, you know, it's, it's extremely costly for a, for everyday citizen to try to defend against that kind of stuff. And so that kind of fear of, of political abuse and persecution is the kind of thing

• 50:22Speaker 02

  we don't want either legally or normatively to things. And I think that the use of those kinds of things, not just words, are, you know, kind of extremely, you know, dangerous. And then, you know, you know, pardoning people who assaulted police officers in an effort at an insurrection where the, you know, a bunch of the people were trying to see if they could kill Vice President Pence, or Speaker Pelosi, or so forth. I think those are all instances of, you know, actual, in fact, corruptions of the system that are beyond just words.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  So I think we're actually already, it's not just the emulation of the word side, but the emulation of the activities and the furthering of the activities for political power. You know, I think the genius of the American system, the, the wondrous of our- Of our, you know, kind of earliest democracy was the peaceful transition of power and the acknowledgement that that the election is what works. I mean, for example, like one of the things I find completely nutty about how the administration works is you can only serve in the administration if you make some public statement to the fact

• 51:48Speaker 02

  that the 2020 election was stolen, which if you look at it at its outset is when Trump was president and there was a Republican Senate and there was Republican state of electors, sleepy Joe Biden stole the election. But when Biden was president in 24, he didn't. That's the thing you need to publicly testify to, to be part of this. And that, that is a huge, I mean, it's just, it's, it's like, it's bonkers. And it's a huge erosion of, you know, trust and media ecosystems. And anyway, that's, that's, that, that kind of thing, I think where that goes is nowhere good.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think one of the best criticisms of Republicans that I've heard in the past year is when Trump won in 2024, there were actually Democratic Party insiders that asked a few questions. A, how did we mess this up? What did we do wrong? Was it simply not having a primary? Or does it have something to do with the way we talk about political issues? Does it, do we have a problem with wokeness? There was, obviously, there was a, a, a wing of the party that didn't want to do any exam, self-examine, examination.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  But there was a wing of the party that was trying to do self-examination, error correction, and look inward and saying, what did we do wrong? When Republicans lost in 2020, there was like zero self-examination. There was like, literally, the, the very few people that tried to self-examine were effectively ejected from the party. And they all got around a total lie that somehow, as you said, the election was stolen when Trump was sitting. But then they weren't able to steal it when Biden was, like, it makes no sense at all from a basic perspective. Trump constantly says, oh, I've got the evidence, but I'm

• 53:45Speaker 01

  just, I left it in my other pants. I'm not going to show it to you right now, but I've got a whole bunch of evidence. And yeah, there is a, there is an asymmetry there with respect to which party is actually willing to look into its, its faults, even if I think Democrats don't do as good a job as they could have, even on that score. But, um, yeah, and you know, when it comes to the political prosecutions, this is, this is the, the point that I always raise to Trump supporters I have on the podcast, is how bothered I am by Trump's retributive instinct.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  I mean, this is a man who will literally file a lawsuit against a pollster who came out with a poll saying he was going to lose an election, that he then won, right? So he was not in any way damaged. If anything, the pollster's reputation was damaged by her failed prediction already. He was not at all damaged because he won the election, and yet, after winning, he's still upset enough to file a lawsuit against anyone who had the idea that he might lose. Right? Like, that, that's a level of pathology psychologically that's actually difficult for me to understand. And at the same time, I think it's always

• 55:10Speaker 01

  important, especially if I have a Democrat on the podcast, to express that I thought the political prosecutions of Trump went overboard at the same time. And I think there was a lack of reflection on that within the Democratic Party. Like, the January 6th prosecution seemed to me totally appropriate. But the prosecutions by Alvin Bragg and Letitia James seemed to me frivolous, and that they wouldn't have been done for anyone besides Trump. And then when it came to the classified documents case, this is in, this is a gray area for me, because...

• 55:52Speaker 01

  You know, there's a very good case to be made that the Espionage Act is just overly broad and that's why it so rarely gets actually prosecuted. It seems like every president and vice president is taking documents home after their presidential term. And, you know, Hillary Clinton, you know, those emails disappeared after they were under FBI subpoena, which is not that different than Trump evading, you know, moving boxes that were under subpoena at the same time. And yet, she didn't get prosecuted for it. And that kind of made sense to me because there seemed to be a certain wisdom about amnesty for political officials,

• 56:36Speaker 01

  not wanting to go down the Banana Republic route of putting people in prison, even if you technically can, even if they did in fact break the law. And I thought that Democrats and, and media outlets that were partial to Democrats didn't do a good job of, of being critical of those prosecutions at the time. That does not justify, to be clear, what Trump is now trying to do to all of his political opponents. But it is something that I think should be part of the conversation.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I agree with that. And actually, I think kind of political retribution, generally speaking, I mean, that's, this is one of the things that I was kind of concerned with myself on the confidential documents case, which is, is this like the mobs, like, only thing we can get you for is tax stuff? We know there's a whole bunch of other stuff, but the only thing we can get you for is tax? Or is this just a, you know, only the confidential document side? And at least the, the, the thing was being done very carefully. But like, I think the notion of, of, you know, kind of what is, it should, like, when it's

• 57:54Speaker 02

  involving political figures, it should be something that is

• 58:00Speaker 02

  You know, kind of fundamental to the corruption of the state versus anything else. You know, it's part of the reason why I thought there was, you know, like the, oh, look, I'm gonna take a plane from Qatar is like, we should be much more careful about this kind of thing. Anyway, so, but it's a corruption of the state more than anything else.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Right. And on that topic, it's been reported that Trump's DOJ is looking at you as a billionaire Democrat donor who has spent a lot of resources opposing Trump through the normal democratic allowable means, and that you're on Trump's hit list. How afraid are you that Trump's DOJ is going to try to find something to indict you over? And what are you, what is it like to be in that psychological state of anticipation?

• 59:03Speaker 02

  So I think it's kind of the instance of what's terrible and kind of anti-American on this. So I've been called out twice by Trump in front of the White House press corps, once to, because I think he's angry at the fact that I called for the release of the Epstein files. And so it was like, we're going to investigate Democrats and Reid Hoffman for their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and calling out the DOJ to do this. And you're like, well, okay, so it's, I've already kind of publicly said that I regretted following MIT's lead in fundraising for Jeffrey Epstein,

• 59:46Speaker 02

  which is my, my, you know, interaction with him. And I wasn't partying with him back in his criminal days, unlike there's photographic evidence of a certain president doing that, President Trump. And then the other one, which is an executive order against Antifa, which as far as I know, is a fictional organization. There is no such organization, and then saying, you know, I'm going to investigate Alex Soros and Reid Hoffman on this. And so I think both of those cases, like, you know, are kind of called out from the White House in an official capacity.

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  With directing investigations with, as far as I can tell, because from my perspective, zero evidence of anything, because I don't have any, you know, any actual truth in any of those cases. And my guess is, is the DOJ is spinning up stuff because they tend to do, you know, like a little bit like the Comey thing, like, okay, no legitimate prosecutor will file an indictment against Comey, so we'll, we'll fire them, demand their resignation, and put in a lawyer who has zero prosecutor experience to, to, to ram one through that doesn't work.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Everything that I've seen is the DOJ will jump anytime that Trump will do something on Truth Social, so I anticipate something is coming from a complete political persecution point of view. And what I think, you know, obviously, that's concerning and, you know, kind of, you know, has a personal story, but I actually think the more bad thing is the corruption of state, the corruption of American values and virtues. And I think that's the thing that we, we as a society, most don't want.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I, I agree with that. And I, I, I hope that, I hope that people see that these, these prosecutions for what they are, even if they are Trump supporters, and I, and I hope that they realize this is, this is the worst part about Trump, right? The best part about Trump is that he can go to the Middle East and get these peace deals and genuinely do get some foreign policy achievements that I doubt a Democrat would have been able to do. For me, the worst part of Trump is he sees a Democrat billionaire donor and says, how can we, how can we make this guy's life living hell just because he opposes me in the way

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  you're allowed to as an American citizen in a, in a democracy? I mean, that's, that's really disturbing to me. You mentioned that, you said Antifa is not a real organization. When you, when you say that, you mean they're not an organized group that has, that goes under one umbrella? Because, because obviously there are black clad people in Portland, you know, attacking journalists like Andy Ngo and, you know, surrounding federal.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Or state courthouses during covid or whatever it was. So when you say that, explain what you meant by that?

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, just the principal place that I've I've seen any references to Antifa is is, you know, right wing or, you know, red media organizations. I've never seen any organization like that was described as organization. I think there's individuals who might, you know,

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  ca- might, you know, kind of describe themselves as Antifa. And obviously, all political violence, you know, is bad. We should be discouraging it in word and deed and, you know, in any,

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  you know, in any mechanism. And so, you know, part of like, you know, I'm just kind of expressing my shock when it was like, I'm going to, like, we have an executive order against Antifa and I'm going to investigate, you know, read often is like, well, like, not only have I never funded anything that ever was anywhere even in the same planetary atmosphere as as Antifa. I was like, I'm not even aware that such a thing as an organization like this. Like, like, the only place I've ever heard it described is in the red ecosystem. And it's never crossed my path otherwise. So.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Right. Right. So, yeah, I think the the confusion there is that my assumption is that it is a network rather than an explicit organization, a network of individuals that meet up and discuss tactics and view themselves as anti fascists as a not as a proper noun, but as a normal noun. And they go out and do stuff like this. And they don't have a five O and T three, obviously, or they don't have,

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  I'm not even sure if they have a national official body or a spokesman or anything like that. It's really a loose network. And so how do you combat a loose network? Essentially, what you're talking about is they're criminals, right? They're criminals and they, you know, cities like Seattle and Portland have done a pretty bad job of just simply applying the criminal law to those people and those networks. But there's, there's nothing to gain by, say, declaring them a terrorist organization, right? Or, or looking for Antifa in other countries and deeming them to be terror organizations as if that's like a real problem for Americans. What really actually has to happen is the

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  police departments of Seattle and Portland need to prosecute those individuals that are committing these crimes, right? I mean, I think, you know, we don't really need, we don't really need to seize emergency powers in order to, to do that. But at the same time, I think those cities have done a, a very poor job of actually clamping down on that issue.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  I agree with everything you just said, and I think part of it is to not try to use the very legitimate case of when we do need to act and on, you know, kind of terrorist groups to try to seize more executive power to kind of persecute your political enemies in an anti-American and undemocratic way.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, Reid Hoffman, we've reached the end of my questions for the time being. Maybe I'll invite you on another time. Obviously, best of luck and knocking on wood that your legal troubles don't actually arise and that if they do, they end up just being an embarrassment to the Trump administration rather than a serious headache for you. Is there anything that you can point my listeners to if they share your general concerns, want to support the work that you're doing? Can you direct them to any of your organizations that you're excited about right now?

• 1:06:48Speaker 02

  Well, I think, generally speaking, I think one of the things that's actually most important is something you were saying earlier, which is we should be raising the, the kind of the, the capabilities and the livelihoods of Americans across the country. So, you know, whether it's the various things that I'm doing with opportunity at work, which is how to get people of talent all across the country able to participate in the tech industry, or the Center for Rural Innovation to create economic opportunity rurally, those would be the kinds of things. Because I think that's, that's what we should really be focused on most primarily as a society. So.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Thank you very much for coming on my show, Reid Hoffman.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Thank you. I look forward to the next conversation, whatever context it is.