Feed Drop: On with Kara Swisher: Reid Hoffman talks Trump, Thiel & AI

Alongside this week’s riff from Reid on tech journalism and last week’s episode with Kara Swisher, we’re bringing you a conversation between Reid and Kara that originally dropped as a March 2023 episode of “On with Kara Swisher.” This duo has known each other since the 90s, when Reid was fresh off the sale of PayPal and before he co-founded LinkedIn. On this episode, they discuss Reid’s donations to Biden and other Democrats, how his political views have impacted his friendships with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and why he is so bullish on AI.

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

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. I've known Reid Hoffman for a long time, and last year, on March 16th, I interviewed him for my podcast, On. That was right after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis and right as he was launching this podcast. We talked about all that and the new ChatGPT-4, which had just come out, and we thought it'd be fun to share our conversation as a time capsule with Reid and Ari's fans here on Possible. If you like our show, go wherever you get podcasts and search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  Welcome, Reid. We haven't talked in a while, have we?

• 0:54Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, actually, I remember our first time, which I think was meeting in your house in San Francisco.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, what was it for? We were trying to recall that.

• 1:01Reid Hoffman?

  Hey, I think it was just, you know, I had had coffee with Joey Edo, and he'd said, "Come by and, you know, meet my friend." And was you and Megan? I was like, "Oh, hey, I've heard about you guys. You're great."

• 1:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we're going to cover a lot of stuff in your role as key AI evangelist and how your relationship is holding up with your former PayPal bros, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. We're going to talk about your idea of Possible, which is the name of your new podcast, and what it means in a larger sense. You are the hope side of the coin. I am the non-hope side of the coin, because I feel Possible has brought a lot of damage. We can debate that, as we always do. And obviously, we're going to talk about GPT-4 and where AI is going. But first, I want to talk, we have to start talking about Silicon Valley Bank. I was at a dinner last night with some administration figures all through the government, and they paid you, while they insulted a lot of the Silicon Valley bros, they paid

• 1:58Speaker 00

  you many compliments for bringing sensibility and information they needed. Talk to me about what you did. I don't think you solved the crisis, but you know what I mean. What was your role?

• 2:10Reid Hoffman?

  You've characterized it well, which is you try to provide the most accurate information for kind of the healthy governance of society. So it wasn't conversations about like, oh, my portfolio companies are in trouble at Silicon Valley Bank. That's corruption. If you're trying to do that within government, it's more than actually, in fact, what's with the stake here is, you know, not the shareholders of Silicon Valley Bank, but actually all the startups, all the companies that are trying to make payroll, the possible contagion effect within the regional banking system. And Silicon Valley Bank is the 16th largest bank in the US. And one of the things we've learned from Lehman Brothers and other kinds of things is that very first domino is the cheapest domino to do something about.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  It's a good way of putting it.

• 2:52Reid Hoffman?

  And you want to stop the contagion, right? You want people to have payroll. You don't have to want people to worry about it or or payments processing for the for the operations of their business. And so that was the kind of thing I was trying to get them focused on. And I think the a lot of the folks did a really good job of of very quickly upping their game because, you know, Silicon Valley Bank kind of dropped a bomb in their lap when they weren't expecting it, you know, from left field.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  So did you go to DC? You speak to Biden. You obviously have ties and we'll talk about in a minute because you've been a big Democratic donor. But how do you how do you do that without looking like you're self dealing or that it's in your self interest? Everything is in someone's self interest. But a lot of people were like, oh, the rich tech guys want their money.

• 3:35Reid Hoffman?

  What I promptly did is dropped a whole variety of people kind of emails and, you know, other communications saying, look, I have a point of view on this. It's not about, you know, anything with me economically, but, you know, here's a set of things that I think are really important for you to consider. I'm happy to talk at length. And, you know, a number of people called me back and said, OK, what did you want to do? Of course, the reason why you, you know, stay off Twitter and everything else is part of the part of the damage that's done here is panic and and that causes the damage. And so you just think, look, I'm just trying to give you information. I'm trying to help, you know, let me know what to, you know, how I can help. But here's what I would I would suggest. And, you know, and part of it is, you know, roughly speaking, you know, you have this debate about bailout. And you say, well,

• 4:19Reid Hoffman?

  You know, depositors are not investors, right?

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:23Reid Hoffman?

  Depositors are like running their business or anything else. And obviously, you know, the like, if you have, you know, just massive deposits. And of course, by the way, now, small businesses have actually backed millions of dollars in their account and doing stuff.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  And this bank in particular.

• 4:36Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, because our whole thing in a fractional banking system is you want to stop these kind of panics and contagion. Every bank could have a run on the bank because in fact, actually, it's a fractional banking system. If all of a sudden, you know, a huge percentage of the of the dollars in deposit flow out, every bank can fail on that. And so you want to adjust your financial system so that doesn't happen, right? Because of the knock on effects. And that was essentially what we were talking about. And I think, you know, part of what my partners and I at Greylock have been doing is setting up, like contributing to a fund that we were going to loan and actually did a couple of our portfolio companies personally loaned for for hitting payroll to make sure the employees were taken care of and didn't have to, you know, suffer the hiccups, uncertainty and fear.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  If they weren't getting their money on Monday, which they were quite worried about. And I did hear about a lot of the venture capitalists doing this, making sure things didn't go haywire. Do you have a thought on what happened? And you talked about the fear mongering, particularly on Twitter, but the pulling the money out fast, the VCs writing to get your money out. A lot of VCs didn't. They said, keep it there. Let's keep this bank going. And so there seemed to be a split between the ones who want to do a citizen role and getting the stabilization of this thing and those who are catastrophe mongers in a lot of ways. And it further underscored the idea that the rich and powerful want to get, well, the getting is good for themselves. And that's a bad look, I think.

• 6:03Reid Hoffman?

  Well, it's definitely a bad look, although, you know, part of the challenge you have is kind of this classic, you know, prisoner's dilemma theory, which is if you go, oh, my gosh, there might be a panic and a run, you know, the you're. Responsibilities to your employees and company is to say, well, you know, be defensive. It's do a wire and so forth.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:24Reid Hoffman?

  And so, you know, what we were trying to do was to kind of navigate both.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 6:29Reid Hoffman?

  Which was, look, there's, there's risk here and, you know, the panic stampede will cause all the damage. And, you know, we really don't want anyone to be doing that. But if, you know, part of the advice that we gave our companies during the crisis time was say, well, look, if you move it into certain money market funds and other kinds of things where it's off the Silicon Valley Bank banking sheet.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 6:50Reid Hoffman?

  You can still be there and supportive and not actually, in fact, run the risk, you know, legally of, you know, what the FDIC did, obviously, say, well, you know, if you got your $250,000, we'll give it that and everything else, we don't know. Right, which of course caused tremendous amounts of panic.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:06Reid Hoffman?

  Um, and, you know, I think we're still seeing echoes of it.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Do you think that's a danger for Silicon Valley, which has already undergone a lot of knocks, to look like that and to look like, you know, a lot of people do keep knocking the government and saying they're not doing anything. I was on Twitter, I'm not on Twitter a lot anymore, but I'm like, will you calm down? You think they're playing pickleball all weekend? They're, they know what they're doing in this case. Usually regulators around banks are pretty good in crises. And so I was like, calm the fuck down, making it worse by yelling. And the usefulness is helping them understand what to do.

• 7:42Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  I call them screaming Mimi's, but you know what, you get my point.

• 7:45Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, that was obviously what I was doing and kind of trying to lob in phone calls with a, here's the situation as I see it. Here's how I can help. Let me know if I can help more. This reason I didn't call them initially, just sent them information because it was like, look, they're triaging an emergency. You don't walk into the surgery that's happening in the ER and say, hey, let me, let me help. Like, no, no, no, I'm here if you need me.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Here are my dirty hands and to make it even worse. Um, you know, I think this is very typical of, of people who have knowledge and also have skin in the game to be distrusted, right? But you would know more than anyone presumably what was to happen. Did your relationships with the Biden administration help that? You would have done the same presumably if it was the Trump administration.

• 8:26Reid Hoffman?

  I would have. Um, I think probably the relationships is the, uh, they know that, um, uh, you know, that I'm a trusted source. It's actually, in fact, when I, you know, last year, when I was sitting and talking with the president, he said, you know, you're one of the people who really helped me in the election and you never call for anything. And I was like, yeah. That's not why I do it.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  You don't want to be ambassador somewhere?

• 8:49Reid Hoffman?

  No, right. No, it's what's best for our society. It's not, you know, and, and look, here's the areas where I have expertise. So I can be helpful. You've jumped on the public service grenade. If there's something I can be helpful, I think government's super important. You know, one of the places where there's obviously some memes and zeitgeist within Silicon Valley is like, you know, government is the, is the bureaucratic irritating thing that gets in the way. But the government is actually the infrastructure in which we live. We have to be responsive. We have to try to help it. Obviously, there's lots of, of, you know, crud. It's like, what is it? If, if you don't like laws or sausages, don't watch them being made, you know? Or if you like them, don't watch them being made. You know, it's obviously a lot of challenges in this kind of complex human society that we live in. But government's super important.

• 9:31Reid Hoffman?

  And this is one of the areas where, you know, multiple times they've stepped up, not just 2008, but they stepped up and say, okay, we're gonna, uh, we're gonna make sure that the system keeps running in a healthy way. And this shows you the, the criticality of government and the society we live in.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  But how does it look like it's not, you know, tantrums by Silicon Valley boys? Because they're not getting what they want. First they insult government and then they, where is government? Why are they not here to save us? It's sort of like insulting the fire department and saying, it, it does feel like that. And it's quite ugly is what it is.

• 10:03Reid Hoffman?

  It's like teenagers. It's like stay out of my life until I need you. And then, you know, where, well, where are you doing the things I need you to be doing? And so I do think it's important for us to say, no, no, look, this is a clear demonstration of where government's really important. I, I think if we just make it a Silicon Valley issue, I think that, that, that, that's not productive. You know, I think the real thing is how should the financial system work? Generally speaking, for small businesses, entrepreneurial, et cetera. You know, by the way, I think Silicon Valley Bank has played a really good role in helping all the entrepreneurship of the area. I think it's been a great institution. It's

• 10:36Speaker 00

  What do you imagine is going to happen to this bank now?

• 10:38Reid Hoffman?

  Well,

• 10:39Speaker 00

  And what should happen to it?

• 10:41Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I, I don't really know. They haven't, it's an interesting thing. They haven't, you know, so far as I can, just reading the press, have no inside information. Haven't been able to find a buyer for it. The regional banks have gotten under a lot of pressures. And I think part of the reason you want regional banks, same thing as startups, is you want innovation in different kinds of areas that, you know, how do you provide services and, and work with the entrepreneurial ecosystems? And that's not just code for Silicon Valley. Actually, I want entrepreneurship across the entire country and, and, and not just in tech.

• 11:13Reid Hoffman?

  I think that the things that we should be thinking about are what are the general rules that we need to upgrade, you know, just like we upgraded kind of regulation around credit default swaps and other kinds of things to make sure that that isn't a vulnerability in the financial ecosystem. It's like, well, okay, we have these fractional banking. We we won't just have necessarily consumer runs on bank. We might have small business runs on banks. We want regional banks to be kind of a flourishing ecosystem. What are the things that we need to do in order to make that work?

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Sure, but this one was a little cozy with the people, these loans, these no money down loans, these doing risky deals with tech people. It's sort of reflected a little bit of a creature of the place rather than what a bank should be doing, which is being much more conservative.

• 12:00Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, although I don't think anything of the things that you mentioned were any of the things that caused the the failure point.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  But, you know, it could be a cost with the Biden administration of doing this. Again, the Republicans right now are and we're going back and forth with Janet Yellen. Do you think it'll hurt him in the election? You're obviously a big Democratic donor. Will you be backing him in the next election?

• 12:21Reid Hoffman?

  Well, it all depends. I tend to go, I think so. I think there's a good likelihood. I tend to get involved in politics when I think there's a very important difference between the two candidates. I'm frequently on the Democratic side, not only. It's it's it's when somebody is kind of, I think, trying to do the right thing for society and the other party is corrosive and terrible. So obviously, I think, you know, Trump's one of the worst figures in our my lifetime history. And so that was part of getting involved. And I think Biden is a is a very straightforward kind of centrist American values. He's like, look, I what for your everyday Americans is the thing that he he wants to do. And so so likely to be supportive.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, you said, I think so. What does that mean? If it's Trump, yes?

• 13:09Reid Hoffman?

  Trump, absolutely. Yes, no question. And probably a number of others. Now, you know, I mean, say you had Take, I mean, I don't think it's gonna play.

• 13:17Speaker 00

  DeSantis, Biden.

• 13:18Reid Hoffman?

  Well, or DeSantis, I'm almost certainly in the Biden camp. You know, like 99.9999%, unless there's like, you know, an asteroid passes close to the earth, you know, something.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Because that's what DeSantis is good at fixing, but go ahead.

• 13:32Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. No, but like, for example, take, take a Republican that I've supported, Charlie Baker from Massachusetts. You know, if it was Charlie and, and President Biden, you know, I might go, okay, look, you know, I prefer Biden, but, but both could be good, right? Great.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  But you think this money that you, in certain ways, has it cost you friendships? Some, one person noted to me, it's been pricey for you to do this.

• 13:56Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's pricey in lots of ways, but because I feel like I'm doing, look, I think,

• 14:07Reid Hoffman?

  it wouldn't be as valuable doing the right thing if it was just easy. Frequently doing the right thing is difficult. Take some pain and suffering, some diversion, and, and it's one of the things where you, where, where like, when you feel fear or you feel like regret on something, that may be showing you that that's the really the thing you should be doing.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Silicon Valley's gotten considerably the other direction from your politics.

• 14:36Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I think the real price for me is time and money and all the rest.

• 14:45Reid Hoffman?

  You know, I, I think that because I do the things I do, that I think that even the people that I'm on the opposite side of the table of and fighting hard against, don't necessarily disregard me. And, and I think frequently they hope when they try to get something bipartisan done, I'm one of the people they call to say, you know, roughly the number of times I feel phone calls is like, that are of the royal, well, you know, those Democrats, can you, can you help this happen?

• 15:12Speaker 00

  Right, I see. So that's, so you're the, you're the Democratic friend, because they haven't gone in your direction. And again, you and I, one thing we've argued about is Peter Thiel. I think it's been decade, two decades of even arguing about Peter Thiel.

• 15:22Reid Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  From PayPal, but you knew him at Stanford, whereas Business Insider put it, you had a reputation of being a pinko commie, and he was a libertarian wacko. What's your relationship now? Now, you were quite on polar opposite sides of this. He was, you were a big blue donor. He backed Blake Masters, J D Vance, Trump, most famously.

• 15:41Reid Hoffman?

  It's, you know, look, it's, you know, I think it's probably been challenging for both of us. You know, Peter at one point was kind of saying, hey, look, let's stop talking about Trump. This is only getting in the way. And I was like, look, we, until we get to resolution here, we can't talk about anything else. Right? I think Peter was trying to, to, to, you know, legitimately as a friend, you know, kind of like navigate the, okay, we're just hammering at each other on this. It was like, look, if it's hammering at each other about like, you know, Renee Girard or memetic politics or theories, like, great, it's theory. This is like people's lives, the corrosion of democracy is like.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  So you won't give up on that? You said, we're not going to talk about it. Of course he'd want you not to talk about it, right? Cause then you can all have a drink or whatever. Um, you basically said Trump is a fascist threat.

• 16:27Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  You do, so you do not split hairs on this issue?

• 16:30Reid Hoffman?

  No.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  And does that affect your friendship or?

• 16:33Reid Hoffman?

  It does. I mean, Peter and I, uh, talk a lot less, uh, now than we used to. I mean, a lot less, partially because it's like, well, if we're going to talk, we're going to argue about this. Cause, cause I think part of being a moral person and part of actually also in, uh, when you interact with your friends, if you have a moral issue, you do not let go until the moral issue is resolved.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Does he hear you? Do you have an impact? And I'm using him as a whole. There's a whole gang.

• 17:00Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  There's a, there's a gang. There's not a gang of you. I'll be honest with you.

• 17:03Reid Hoffman?

  I don't know. Um, I try, uh, as best I can and, and, you know, people, smart people, it's difficult to change their mind. I mean, you know, difficult to change your mind, difficult to change my mind. Because, you know, you, you think through stuff. But I do, um,

• 17:25Reid Hoffman?

  you know, I guess what I would say is I keep looking for what are the things by which, you know, and frankly, kind of being intellectually open is, look, I, I, if I engage in discussion with someone or I'm trying to persuade their mind, I'm also open to changing my mind, you know, to good arguments. But like, for example, good arguments are not things like.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Better taxes.

• 17:48Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, but also like, for example, like, let's, let's state the absurdity. The theory, as I understand it, is that now President Biden stole the election from President Trump in states that had a Republican Secretary of State or Secretary of the electorate, only for himself, not for other Democrats, right?

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:10Reid Hoffman?

  You know, and you're like, get some help, right? This is like Martians are running the White House kind of theory. It's like, you know, take the tinfoil hat off.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  And do you say that?

• 18:19Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, sometimes.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Okay. Peter, take your tinfoil hat off. If Trump is the candidate, will you spend as much in 24 as you did in 2020?

• 18:27Reid Hoffman?

  The short answer is I will spend as much as I possibly can and it takes and is effective, because I think it would be destructive to our society, destructive to the world. You know, I think the January 6th insurrection that is, you know, essentially incited by Trump, you know, is just the beginning of how bad it can be.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:53Reid Hoffman?

  And, and so I think, I think everyone, it's our duty as, as patriots, as Americans, to stand forward. And so, yeah, I will be, I will be standing up.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Right in the front.

• 19:02Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  So one of the things you also stood up, and this is somewhat on brand for you, is this effective altruism mix, a movement for which Sam Bankman-Fried became the poster child until he, you know, wasn't. Talk about what happened here. Can sure to be as toxic and vanity driven as for-profit investing?

• 19:16Reid Hoffman?

  Well, you know, people can always wrap their, wrap themselves in things that can be, you know, kind of, like effective altruism is a perfectly good theory. It's, it's a how do you do the most good for the most people, measured by quality days of life? And how do you broaden that to, to not just being anthropocentric, but care about foreign animals and much other stuff? And you're like, well, what's not to like about that stuff?

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:41Reid Hoffman?

  You're like, that seems reasonable. And there's a number of very smart, very capable, effective altruists, a number of whom are friends, Will McCaskill, other folks. I think what you take, what's really good and all that stuff. Now, the fact that someone says, look, I, I wrap myself in effective altruism and I'm perpetuating essentially, you know, just again, reading the press, have no inside information, but what looks like a bunch of fraud, right? And misrepresentation as a way of doing that. Well, you know, you know, that's, that's not even what effective altruists would say that they, they should be.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:12Reid Hoffman?

  So I don't, I don't have a negative aversion reaction to effective altruism.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  But you have a negative reverse reaction to Sam Bankman-Fried.

• 20:18Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  So my producer is listening to some old conversations, especially the 2017 one. We had, you and I had Mark Andreessen, I don't know if you remember that.

• 20:26Reid Hoffman?

  I do.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  He was saying he didn't want to talk politics and he kept talking about politics. But there's a clip of that conversation I want to play for you. This was something after Dean McKay had said that about the responsibility of publishers and platforms. I asked you about the responsibility of social media companies to acknowledge and try to fix the problems of disinformation on their platforms, and this is what you said.

• 20:44Reid Hoffman?

  We have to be able to talk, but if you can't have some basis for a conversation which says, okay, this is what we think truth is, this is where we think we should be going, it's very difficult for a democracy to work. So, you know, it's everything from the kind of win the future.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  This is this organization.

• 21:03Reid Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  WTF.

• 21:05Reid Hoffman?

  WTF, with a deliberate, you know, kind of.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  I see what you're doing.

• 21:08Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, exactly.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  I find it juvenile, but go right ahead.

• 21:12Reid Hoffman?

  Oh, well, we specialize in juvenile.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  I know that, though, believe me, after many years of covering all of you, I get that. So where is WTF now? You know, you were talking about the idea of being able to talk and having those things. Are we better or worse, or what do you think?

• 21:27Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I think WTF maybe became what the bleep. You know, look, the experiments, and I believe in entrepreneurial experiments and trying to make stuff happen. I think we are obviously worse on getting the bridges for truth-oriented discourse. Like, I loved when, you know, like during the election, Twitter started putting a box around things saying, get the facts, like on vaccine or, or election denialism or so forth. I thought that was a very good thing to do. It's like, look, look over here, this is an authoritative source of information, right?

• 21:59Speaker 00

  That's over, but that's over.

• 22:00Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, I understand. But I think that was great, that was a great innovation. That's the kind of thing that we should be thinking about to try to get us into a truth-oriented discourse. And, you know, I think that the important thing is to have, look, we've made progress through science, we've made progress through democracy. It's like having the discussion, having legitimate arguments. It's part of the reason why, you know, and to your earlier questions, is there's a bunch of folks who are still, as far as I have found the Republican Party turn to Trumpism to be, you know, toxic and terrible, you know, there's a number of people who are still identified themselves as Republican. We talk and we argue, because, you know, it's kind of like, look, discourse.

• 22:42Reid Hoffman?

  Aim to truth is how we make progress, both as a democracy and as a society.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Presume, oh, you're still hopeful. I think they're gaming us, all of us. But anyway, you were mentor to Mark Zuckerberg. Do you consider yourself a mentor to him still?

• 22:56Reid Hoffman?

  I don't know if I've ever could. I think to be considered a mentor, I think he would also have to consider me a mentor. Like, we'd have to have that relationship. But I think we have a collegial relationship where, like, you know, I learn from him, he learns from me. But I wouldn't say it's a mentorship.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  When's the last time you talked to him? About what?

• 23:15Reid Hoffman?

  Uh, well, I think the last time was a couple of months ago, but it was, uh, we, I serve on the Chan Zuckerberg Bio Hub, um, trying to cure infectious disease around the world. And, you know, I think, you know, in the very strong credit camp for him and Priscilla is that we're investing a ton of money on how do we help fix infectious disease everywhere. So we were last talking about that.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  How do you imagine they're going? They're recovered a little bit, but he's moving out of the metaverse and everything else.

• 23:43Reid Hoffman?

  Well, Mark is one of the most strategic people that I know. And I think, obviously, seeing that, you know, 2023 is the year of AI, uh, metaverse.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  It's a year of efficiency at his company, but go ahead.

• 23:55Reid Hoffman?

  Yes. Um, and I don't have any inside information of that. I read the same news you do. But I think he's like, ah, this is, this tech platform is super important. I think he is, he is, uh, you could just watch the tea leaves and see, see him shifting towards that.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Have you spoken to Elon? You obviously worked with him.

• 24:13Reid Hoffman?

  I have not spoken to Elon since last summer.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  I've spoken to him more recently. That's unusual, since we are having some problems. Um, what do you think he should be focusing on? You, you do know him. You've spent time with him. Obviously SpaceX is running smoothly with, uh, Gwen Chatwell. Um, he has Neuralink, Tesla. Um, I think he should be focusing on those things. Of course, this is what he's been doing, which is a lot of tantrum throwing, et cetera, and worse. LinkedIn is probably the polar opposite of these platforms. Um, how do you look at what's happened there?

• 24:46Reid Hoffman?

  So, you know, I think there's a kind of almost amusing line, which is, you know, Twitter is not rocket science. And you know, maybe.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  It sounds like AI wrote that joke, but we'll get to that in one second.

• 24:57Reid Hoffman?

  Exactly. But you know, Elon, you know, is amazing when it's rocket science and Tesla. And, and, you know, I regret every hour he's not spending on those. I would obviously handle Twitter in many, many ways very differently than he would be. He's an amazing entrepreneur, but obviously the political stuff I, I think is wrong. I think the, the layoff stuff was, you know, kind of careening down the road, you know, flattening things on the way.

• 25:28Reid Hoffman?

  And so I would handle it differently. Now that being said, you know, I, again, I, maybe I would have more information if like he called and asked about something or whatever, but I, I literally, I, I read the same news you do.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  What would you say to him, given this, this other stuff that's happened? Cause I found this to be a real shift, even though he had elements of this always.

• 25:47Reid Hoffman?

  I, I worry a little bit that the, that he is in his own filter bubble of advisors that are kind of giving the.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  Punch, punch, punch, keep punching.

• 25:57Reid Hoffman?

  Not only that, but also kind of like the, the, the misinformation theory, right? And, and you know, one of the things that, you know, Elon's a fighter. And so when he gets attacked, so if he gets attacked by the left, like, you know, I thought it was absurd. He wasn't invited to the Biden, you know, electric vehicles thing.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 26:18Reid Hoffman?

  You know, he fights and I would just like him to be fighting in the right direction.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  I think in that case he got overly mad. It's just one slight and it's fine. It's fine, but he didn't need to then go whole hog the other direction. I think when he, it's not an eye for an eye for him. It's an eye on the whole head essentially.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Let's talk about artificial intelligence. You've been an integral backer of OpenAI since 2015, along with Elon Musk and others, until you recently stepped down earlier this month to avoid conflicts of interest. But talk about why you stepped down.

• 26:59Reid Hoffman?

  Sam and I were talking a lot about how the ecosystem is going to create a whole bunch of startups. And as I started thinking about it and talking with them, I realized that Greylock were very actively investing in a bunch of these things. And like, I literally, today in my email box, got three different requests from Greylock startup companies going, hey, can we get privileged in the queue for GBD4 access and so forth? And like, when I'm on the board, nonprofit responsibility, I have to say, I can't touch that. Right? Because you can't be doing anything that's even remotely close to private enrichment. And it was like, okay, we're going to have to do more and more management of this stuff. And I was like, you know, I think it's, you know, my day job is investing at Greylock. I think it's best if we don't even have

• 27:44Reid Hoffman?

  an appearance of conflict of interest, even though I think we can manage it and don't have to do all the work managing it. And so I stepped off the board.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  Right. You also want to get into this. Like, it's a huge investment bonanza happening right now. I want you to explain some of these technology in a lightning round. Tell me what the use case is and your assessment of how revolutionary it's been or will be. ChatGPT, the old iteration of OpenAI's language processing?

• 28:09Reid Hoffman?

  So, the simple description is it's like an amazing research assistant across a wide variety of things that gives you an instant answer. And what that will mean for everyone who does any professional activity and think professional activity is I consume information, I make a decision. I may make a decision about investing. I might make a decision about, you know, a prescription. I might make a decision about where to go, etc. There will be a co-pilot that will be between useful and essential for you doing that activity, you doing that job, within two to five years.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Okay, so that's a helpful assistant, DALL-E, which was also OpenAI and more focused on visual creation, meaning mushing up pictures and things like that.

• 28:50Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, you know, I wrote essays about DALL-E saying, look, this isn't replacing graphic designer jobs. This is amplifying, whether you're no skill, low skill, medium skill, or high skill. It makes you more effective in what you're doing and gives even no skill people in graphic design like me some graphic, some powers where I can send my, you know, my friend Cara, you know, a birthday card and kind of craft it myself.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Right. All right, GPT-4, this is a new multi-language model that can interpret images along with presumably better answers. It's a bigger language model, et cetera. What about that?

• 29:22Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I published a book, as you know, called Impromptu, and I authored it with GPT-4, and it gives much deeper, richer language information. And it can range anything from, you know, like dad jokes to like deep analyses. Like, you know, like, like in my fireside chatbots with ChatGPT, I talked about, well, how does language mean in Wittgenstein's theory of language and language games? You know, you could do this whole range of things, and that's, that's a lens into the assistant I was talking about.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, you used one with Jerry Seinfeld, which was better than Wittgenstein. DeepMind, which was acquired by Google many years ago, I actually broke that story when that happened. I don't think I realized how important it was.

• 30:06Reid Hoffman?

  Well, DeepMind was one of the organizations that kicked off kind of where the, the new massive scale computing iteration.

• 30:18Reid Hoffman?

  You know, there's Demis Hassabis, my co-founder in Flexion, Mustafa Suleyman, Shane Legg, you know, kind of brought this together and said, look, this, this could be super important for solving a bunch of the world's problems. Like they're working on protein folding, which could mean all kinds of things for medicine and, and scientific advancement. And so, so it's, it's, it's one of the original gang, you know, in, in the revolution.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Search engines powered by AI, like Bing Bot or Google's Big Bard.

• 30:46Reid Hoffman?

  So I think one of the reasons why I think it's fairly straightforward that this will be a major step forward is that frequently what people want is an answer to something versus 10 blue links that they have to hunt through and see if any of that information.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  So that it will be search on steroids in a lot of ways. And this new company Inflection AI, which you did co-found with DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleiman, after 20 years without founding anything, did you go all in with Inflection versus just investing in his vision? Why did you do that? I think that's a bigger conflict for OpenAI's board, to my mind.

• 31:15Reid Hoffman?

  We were navigating that. That's just, you know, kind of classically what you do is you keep me out of certain information flows and, you know, it's fine, doesn't affect the kind of governance. I was lining up financing, right? I was the, hey, you know, Greylock's going to lead the Series A, you know, I'll be on your board. And then we started working through the go-to-market and the product conception. And Mustafa turned to me and said, I really love you to co-found this with me. And I was like, well, look, I'm a full-time investor at Greylock, responsibilities on these boards is already... He's like, no, no, like a day a week. I was like, oh, I can do that. And it's just what's going on with these AI assistants, this what I'm calling amplification

• 31:57Reid Hoffman?

  intelligence in Impronto is transformative for where we're...

• 32:04Speaker 00

  So it's too big for you not to be, to be on the sidelines. Was it okay to remain on the board of Microsoft, which is a major OpenAI partner and not on the board of OpenAI?

• 32:13Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. Part of the way you navigate it in Microsoft to make sure that the board and Satya and others and Brad have, you know, all the visible informations, they can make a choice about whether or not, you know, I'm involved or not. And like, for example, when, you know, OpenAI and Microsoft were, you're doing your deals, you know, I wasn't part of the deal negotiation or the voting, you know, as well as you just navigate it.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  So but you still say you're going to see an ally to them nonetheless.

• 32:39Reid Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, part of the thing that was a little strange about it is what I was on the board of is a 501(c)(3), where the mission is beneficial AI for humanity. I am still 100% committed to that mission. I can still work on that mission with with great vigor and and help. And I know that they are committed to that mission.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  So I was reading a recent blog post on that departure, which you talked about elevating humanity through tech. And it reminded me of a piece you wrote in the Atlantic earlier this year about how technology makes us more human. And then it reminded me of all our conversations where we were on opposite sides many, many years ago, where I was like, this is going to end badly, Reid. And you're like, no, it's not this, this, this, and this. I thought you were a bit rosy, anonymous trolls, disent of information. Talk to me why you keep saying this. Like, I don't think you're stupid. That's not what I'm calling you.

• 33:25Reid Hoffman?

  Thank you.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  But I am saying, you got to be kidding, given where we've gone from, right?

• 33:31Reid Hoffman?

  Look, I think there's a whole bunch of stuff where even a bunch of the technologies that we're having troubles with and working through today have added a bunch of different value to our lives. And, you know, obviously, I could bore you to tears with talking about where I think LinkedIn is super valuable and, you know, helps everyone's lives.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  I don't have a problem with LinkedIn.

• 33:46Reid Hoffman?

  But it isn't that I deny that there aren't challenges with, you know, currently deployed technology or being developed technology. But I think that shaping the technology is the solution, and that the solution can be so much better. So, for example, let's talk about AI. If you say, well, I have line of sight right now to every smartphone having an AI tutor and an AI doctor that could be for everybody, everybody in the entire world who has a smartphone. Delaying that is a huge cost in human suffering, right? Like, that's that's a hugely valuable thing.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  As opposed to the links, like, I've got a cough and this, it says you need to get to the hospital, that kind of thing.

• 34:27Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, could be in order of probability, it could be these three things. Let me ask you some questions, right? Oh, shit, this is dangerous, right? Even Bing Chat today, a guy who's working on some of this medical stuff at Microsoft was showing me Bing Chat live and was showing me how it would go, oh, stop talking to me, you know, call 911.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  Right, right. It can do that. Right. So I know you're an investor, and I believe you're a believer. I want you to argue the other side, the Black Mirror version of AI. In 2020, Elon, when he was speaking to me, told me, quote, AI doesn't have to hate us to destroy us. I want you to argue that side.

• 35:05Reid Hoffman?

  Well, it depends on exactly which one you want to do. The existential threat tends to be very science fiction. So it tends to be, you know, Hollywood, Terminator, you know, Ex Machina, et cetera. But what I would say is, look, what are the real dangers? Real dangers are AI can be a bunch of tools in the hands of bad human beings, cybersecurity, other kinds of weapons. Well, like, for example, in terms of bad governments, it could be an instrument of repression. If not being paid attention to, could be a instrument of systematizing various forms of injustices. You know, whether it's, you know, racial or economic injustice, you know, with credit scoring or paroling, other kinds of things.

• 35:48Reid Hoffman?

  All of those things, I think, are realistically possible. Now, the the kind of thing you were gesturing at was like, well, it just, you know, it's the so-called paperclip is out. You're told to maximize the number of paperclips and it eliminates human beings and trying to do that. And, you know, that's like saying, okay, well, there's one kind of supercomputer that controls the whole world and so forth. And so, you know, I do pay attention to this. It's part of the safety and alignment stuff that all of the different AI groups that I work with, and I don't see anything close to that.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  So you're not as scared. The possibilities are bigger. You're writing books and hosting podcasts. You're you're a media mogul. Tell me what you're trying to demonstrate, because the book impromptu is called Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI. The cover is a giant thinking man made of code, I think. I think it's a little stunt-y, but it is funny. You call it the co-pilot, your author's co-pilot. And you say, how might humanity use GPT-4 to help continue our longstanding quest to make life more meaningful and prosperous? How can we help it solve some of the hardest challenges we face to expand opportunities? This is a very positive person. And your podcast is called Possible, like, not impossible or improbable or get out the way because it's going to kill us, that kind of thing.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Talk a little bit of what you're trying to do here and why you wrote a book with GPT-4, other than it's a great thing to say.

• 37:06Reid Hoffman?

  Well, it is a fun thing to say and causes people to comment on, like you just did. The short answer is, look, technology And very much is part of how we shape it. And part of like, for example, like that earlier existential risk thing is actually, I think we can shape this with work and with diligence and diligence to being really, really good. And like, for example, the general discourse around AIs, oh, it's going to take jobs. The only reason like tech people are doing this is order to make more money from this. And, you know, I think that the, the point is to, to realize what the positive, the possible, like, great futures that we can work towards and how do we go do that?

• 37:48Reid Hoffman?

  And I think that any scale problem between thirty to eighty percent of the solution is technology. Obviously, AI will be an important part of that technology in a number of cases. But I think that that's something that, that we need to kind of be motivated by hope, not fear in doing this. And I think our dialogue, you know, to wrap all the way back to our early conversation, is much more like the, you know, the Silicon Valley bank, don't panic, don't panic. It's like, no, no, like, let's build something good. And that's, that's what I'm trying to, to, to encourage.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  It's growing very quickly. Your first chapter notes that by February twenty twenty-three, OpenAI said the ChatGPT had one hundred million monthly active users. How is that possible?

• 38:31Reid Hoffman?

  Well, because it's, it's, it's new magic, right? You can have this conversation about, like, anything that ranges from here's the leftovers in my fridge. What should I cook for dinner? To like, my friend's pet just died. I'm trying to figure out how to talk to them and what I should say and not say, right? And so that range is like super important. I think that was the thing that everyone, oh, my gosh, this is now new. I mean, you know, a couple of years ago, it was like, oh, we're going to get a computer that passes the Turing test. And like, well, okay, yep, we kind of done that, right?

• 39:05Speaker 00

  So you're giddy about it. I mean, a lot of people are in this idea. Are we building a second floor on top of a crummy house of disinformation? Because social media was ripe with enthusiasm, left to run rampant. We're paying a little bit of the price there. How to avoid that? I mean, liability is one thing. I don't believe this is covered by section two thirty. So there's liability issues. But how do we, this is more powerful, more prevalent, more able to do all these things that we already have a problem with. What should the government be doing right now?

• 39:38Reid Hoffman?

  Well, generally speaking, part of the usual problem with the format of government is it's trying, it worries about risk in the future, so it tries to enshrine the past. What I think we need to do is a different thing is what future outcomes do we want to get to and what future outcomes do we want to avoid? To discuss that in some specifics, so like when I'm asked by government folks what to do, I say, look, engage in dialogue and be specific about what you, what you want to, what kinds of things you want to see and what kinds of things you really don't want to see. Now, for example, take a bit of information. You know, I think that the question would be is like, you know, well, how do you then use technology as part of the solution? Well, I was already gesturing at the kind of Twitter boxing of information of get the facts. Well, you can imagine, you know, kind of AI is a powerful search technology, you know,

• 40:23Reid Hoffman?

  kind of web search like Bing, kind of going, oh, on this, here is the search that gets to the, the higher probability true things, you know, get the facts like, like here's how you could find some information, here's how you could get more information. And that could be, you know, in the browser or in, you know, in the news feed. And that could help, you know, kind of with.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Where it's from, provenance, provenance. So if you were a government official, what would you do right now? What would the first thing that they should be passing?

• 40:52Reid Hoffman?

  Well, look, I think part of it is.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  And don't give the Silicon Valley answer, they shouldn't get in the way of our fantastic innovation.

• 41:00Reid Hoffman?

  Well, look, I, what I was saying, what I, it wouldn't be pass a law right now. What it would be is, like, I would almost do like kind of the equivalent of like a blue ribbon commission, saying, what are the outcomes that are really important to have? What are the outcomes that are important to avoid? Right? And, and, and getting that versus saying, you know, you kind of like, thou shalt not use AI, or thou shalt, you know, use AI, but only for travel planning, that kind of stuff, which is one of the dangers of it.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Right. You still remain positive. And I'm going to end the show by reading, you had said, write an epic poem in the style of the Odyssey about Kara Swisher, Reid Hoffman, and AI. And let me just read this one line, which I think it sort of handles this pretty well. Reid wants to advance the tech unfurled, but Kara wonders if it's all for the best, if we're hurtling towards some unknown test. Reid speaks about the positives, the gains of technology to ease our strain, but Kara's not easily convinced. She doesn't want a future rinsed of humanity and of our need to be thoughtful, to take heed of consequence of our choices. To listen to dissenting voices. And so the two of them debate and AI's role. They contemplate the conversation ebbs and flows. But in the end, Kara knows that she won't back down from her stand. She'll keep asking questions. She'll take her chance to fight the power and make sure

• 42:18Speaker 00

  we all embrace the responsibility before we fall. Not bad.

• 42:22Reid Hoffman?

  Not bad.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Not bad.

• 42:24Reid Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  So I'm watching you, Reid Hoffman.

• 42:27Reid Hoffman?

  Please do. Please do.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  I'm watching you. Really, don't fuck up. That's I just gotta tell you.

• 42:33Reid Hoffman?

  I try not to.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, you're not the problem. And I like our debates and I think you're right. Keeping talking is important with people who are able to talk and able to have discourse.

• 42:43Reid Hoffman?

  Amen. Always great talking with you, Kara.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  This episode of On With Kara Swisher was produced by Naima Raza, Blake Meeshick, Kristin Kasser-Russell, and Raffaela Seaworth. Special thanks to Haley Milliken. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're not already following the show, go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On With Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On With Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. Our next show comes out Thursday.