Sarah Longwell on politics, AI, and elections

What’s driving some of the greatest political divisions and threats to democracy ahead of the 2024 U. S. presidential election? This week, Reid and Aria attempt to unpack this with someone who specializes in listening to American voters and translating those insights, at scale: Republican political strategist and The Bulwark co-founder/publisher Sarah Longwell. Sarah, who also hosts The Focus Group Podcast, joins the show to talk about her experience listening to everyday voters through focus groups — and her perspective on how doing so can help people better understand one another, combat misinformation, and heal some of the deepest divides in America today. She shares her perspective on Donald Trump, the upcoming election, the state of politics in Silicon Valley, AI, the future of the Republican Party, and the value of compromising. Plus, Reid tests GPT-4o’s ability to separate fact from fiction. Note: This conversation is not intended to proselytize or convert anyone. Rather, it is an attempt to learn from someone who has spent hundreds of hours talking to thousands of voters about their lives and politics. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/ Topics: 03:41 - Hellos and intros 04:55 - The state of politics now 06:08 - Inside the mind of an undecided voter 08:22 - What polls actually tell us 10:04 - What’s different about the political attitude right now 12:22 - How focus groups work, and what they tell us 18:08 - The benefits of qualitative research 18:52 - How can technology improve focus group research? 23:12 - How to become a better listener and persuader 28:21 - The impact and use cases of AI running focus groups 34:03 - When a human touch is necessary 36:37 - AI video-based sentiment analysis 41:05 - Sarah navigating being a lone wolf in politics 45:19 - What Sarah learned fighting for marriage equality 47:25 - How does misinformation spread and stick? 54:08 - What’s next for the Republican party? 57:42 - GPT-4o “spot the fake headline” test 01:02:57 - Rapid-fire questions Possible is an award-winning podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Tune in for grounded and speculative takes on how technology—and, in particular, AI—is inspiring change and transforming the future. Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with an ambitious builder or deep thinker on a topic, from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education. These conversations also showcase another kind of guest: AI. Whether it's Inflection’s Pi, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or other AI tools, each episode will use AI to enhance and advance our discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Why didn't you tell them they were wrong? Why didn't you push back on them? Why didn't you correct them? And I say, look, I sit and listen to 10 people so that I can figure out how to persuade 10,000. And it is not my job to tell them they're wrong. I want to know why they think the thing that they do. I want to know where they got that information.

• 0:27Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:28Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finkler.

• 0:30Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way. What we can possibly get right if we leverage technology like AI and our collective effort effectively.

• 0:42Aria Finger?

  We're speaking with technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers across many fields: AI, geopolitics, media, healthcare, education, and more.

• 0:52Reid Hoffman?

  These conversations showcase another kind of guest, whether it's Inflection's Pi, OpenAI's GPT-4, or other AI tools. Each episode, we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.

• 1:05Aria Finger?

  In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it'll take to get there.

• 1:12Reid Hoffman?

  This is Possible.

• 1:18Aria Finger?

  The past few years in American politics and the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election have been wild. Regardless of your personal politics, I think we can all acknowledge that America, on the whole, has been navigating deep divisions between parties and within parties. Divisions within businesses, campuses, congregations, family dinner tables, everywhere.

• 1:41Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is all about envisioning the best possible future, often from the lenses of renowned technologists tackling challenges to help us get there. Today, we're going to talk to someone who is an expert in a different type of challenge: understanding the political and societal divisions Aria mentioned. So, why go here? Because another principle I hold close and deep, absolutely critical to business, innovation, and humanity is democracy.

• 2:15Reid Hoffman?

  No matter who wins, no matter where we disagree, upholding democracy matters deeply.

• 2:22Aria Finger?

  I also think it's important to clarify something. This isn't an episode that's meant to proselytize or convert anyone. Listeners, you can probably pretty easily guess who Reid and I are supporting in the upcoming presidential election. But our hope here is to better understand something we've been thinking a lot about. That is, what exactly is at the root of this division? And the threats to democracy that we're seeing today? We are talking to one of the smartest people we know when it comes to listening to American voters and getting to know them.

• 2:56Reid Hoffman?

  Sarah Longwell is a Republican political strategist and pollster who co-founded Defending Democracy Together in 2018 and Republican Accountability in 2020. These organizations combat misinformation in politics and support some Republican members of Congress, as well as a number of Democrats, who defy the growing trend of anti-democratic sentiment.

• 3:19Aria Finger?

  Sarah also co-founded The Bulwark, a news organization that advocates for democracy through analysis, reporting, and podcasting. She's a leading force in the pro-democracy ecosystem and an expert in how people consume information and make decisions. Here's our conversation with Sarah Longwell.

• 3:41Aria Finger?

  Well, Sarah, so lovely for you to be here. And so, one of the many things that you do is you are in the business of running focus groups. And at the top of the interviews, you like to ask participants, how do you think things are going? What's important to you? So I'm going to turn the tables. How are things going and what is important to you right now?

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Well, look, I mean, the way things are going is considerably better than they were going. And really, when it comes to voters, the thing going into this election that was causing me a lot of anxiety, because I am somebody who believes that Donald Trump represents a unique threat to the country, was that Joe Biden wasn't going to beat him. And it's because I've been listening to voters for the last couple of years talk about their concerns about Joe Biden's age. Like, it just was so, people were so unhappy. With this choice that when you would listen to voters, especially the ones that Joe Biden both needed to win over. So persuadable voters, swing voters, people maybe who voted for Trump in 16, but then had voted for Biden in 2020. And so they were part of the coalition that put him over the edge. Those people were just, they were backsliding toward Trump.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  They were frustrated. And when the change happened, I have, I gotta say, I was a, I was a proponent of Joe Biden stepping aside after that debate. But even I, as vociferously as I felt that, I was concerned about Kamala Harris because I had been listening to voters sort of present a negative impression of her for a long time. And I am as surprised as anybody to have seen how the Democratic coalition has coalesced around her and just decided, we're gonna be pumped. And so the, the thing that has changed is the entire tenor of the electorate that ranges from sort of base Democratic voters to sort of soft Democratic voters.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  And even some sort of persuadably swing voters in terms of their level of enthusiasm. And that enthusiasm gap was what had me the most concerned. Because the thing about Donald Trump is that while he is a repellent to a certain kind of swing voter, and he is a turnout mechanism for Democratic voters who dislike him, he always has a base of support that is very enthusiastic about him. And so that, the chasm that was opening up on enthusiasm just had me, had me worried. And so today, now that we are sort of in this space of, it's just a world of possibilities.

• 6:09Aria Finger?

  Can I just ask the question that I feel like everyone says to me? They're like, there are no undecideds. They're like, how could you be undecided? We like know these two candidates, or at least these two parties so well. So you really believe that there are undecided voters? And so there is persuasion work to be done, sort of things like that? Because I think people are skeptical.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the reason that they're skeptical is because they themselves are high information voters. Anybody who's listening to this podcast is like interested in stuff. They consume lots of these things. Anybody who listens to one of my political podcasts over at the Bulwark or any, they are the ones, these highly engaged political podcast listeners, they're the weird ones. They're the minority, right? But those are the kinds of people who don't believe that anybody could be undecided. But what they, I think, don't realize is that people say, use the word low information to talk about a certain set of voters. I think that those people are just normal. They're just normal people who are busy living their lives. You know, they got kids to raise, they got fun stuff to do, they got jo- or they got jobs

• 7:11Speaker 00

  that are hard, things that take up a lot of time. They got sick parents, they got volunteer things. They are not sitting constantly, like, if they're on their phones, they're scrolling through headlines, whatever. And so, it's not that they're undecided, like, boy, I've thought really hard about this and just can't make up my mind. It's that every four years, because a lot of these people don't vote in midterms, they vote in a presidential election, they believe it's important to vote, but they look up, you know, a month out and go, alright, I'll look at these two, you know, this two evils, and which one is the lesser of two evils, and which poison am I drinking? Because they tend to have a pretty cynical view of politics. And so, that is what an undecided voter looks like. It looks like

• 7:51Speaker 00

  somebody who is a late-breaking, uh, attention payer to the political landscape.

• 7:57Reid Hoffman?

  You know, one of the things that, you know, my own getting into the political arena, which is mostly because I, you know, share your point of view that, you know, Donald Trump is a unique corrosion, I find such entertainment. So, oh, he's the business president. It's like, yeah, he's the business president who bankrupts all of his businesses. Like, it's like, you want business people in the various instruments of government, but ones who are good ones, or at least even B-minus ones is okay. But say a little bit also about like some of the dynamic that tends to be the do you motivate people enough to go vote like in the polling and do you do you persuade the other side that we go well, none of my family is voting Democrat. We're kind of like, we don't vote Democrat by our thing, but we're going to stay home because we think

• 8:39Reid Hoffman?

  Trump is too, you know, just too toxic and too, too fugly about himself.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Fugly.

• 8:45Reid Hoffman?

  And so, and so, yes, it's a, it's a technical term. Right. So how does the, the polling mechanism actually inform us? Because you know, one of the things that I'm amused by is like, people go, oh, and look, the polls moved 1% today. And it's like, well, I tend to not pay attention to that stuff.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, so obviously I do focus groups in part, and I exclusively do qualitative because I find quantitative to oftentimes not give me the information that I really need. And one of the things, just to sort of back up to some of the early, one of your earlier, the way you were framing it, I would say among people like me who are operatives in the space, thinking about actually, how do you win an election? There tends to be almost like a debate between turnout or persuasion. And there should never be a debate about that because you absolutely need both. 2020 is a perfect example. Both sides, because Donald Trump is so polarizing, absolutely turning out every last voter that they could

• 9:45Speaker 00

  get their hands on. And then the race of the election being decided by sort of a critical margin of these soft GOP right-leaning independents in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and, and, and Georgia. And like, that is, that's it. That's the ballgame. It is turnout plus persuasion. You need them both. But the enthusiasm makes an enormous amount of difference to Americans. So in every election, there are big things at play that are part of the human psyche. And one of them is when people think about like how to, how to motivate people. There's five dominant human emotions, fear, love, anger, greed, and sympathy. And the ones that motivate people the most are fear and anger.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Right? And so I actually think for too long, in a way that is to use your word corrosive, the fear and anger that Donald Trump generates has been the turnout mechanism. And I think that that is causing, there's some fatigue in that. Right? And I think that what Kamala Harris coming in has done is it has allowed people to have someone to be for, which is why you've seen surges in registration, surges in enthusiasm, surges in donations, surges in people who are volunteering. Those metrics mean a lot more than polls because when you have enthusiasm, in a human experience kind of way, instead of people saying to each other, "I don't know, man, I'm gonna, obviously I'm gonna vote for Biden, you know,

• 11:12Speaker 00

  but God is he old and I hope he can, doesn't fall over the next time he gives a speech and whatever." Like that, that person who's saying that, okay, they're gonna go vote because they hate Donald Trump. But is the person they're talking to who's much less interested in politics, or, or maybe like cares less, does that motivate them to go vote? Or when the person's like, "Oh, my gosh, I am so pumped to vote for Kamala Harris. I love how she's talking about the middle class. I love how she's a prosecutor," or like whatever it is, or I'm just, I'm high on vibes, I'm huffing vibes. Like, does that translate into the person that they're talking to who's less interested in politics? Being like, "Yeah, I'll go vote for her. Yeah, I'll do that. I'll, I'll take some time out of my day." And I think that that is something that just like can't be captured quantitatively,

• 11:54Speaker 00

  which is why I love talking to voters because I want to hear the tone of their voice. I want to hear the words they're using. I want to know if they're being dragged, kicking and screaming to something. I want to know if they're voting against or voting for, if it's fear and anger motivated, and it's always a little bit of that. But like, is there also something positive? Is there some love in there, you know? Is there something, something to, and because once you've got something to be for and something that you're really against, man, is that a potent combination?

• 12:22Aria Finger?

  I consider myself a data person. I, I, yes, I fervently check the polls. I'm like, give me the numbers on that. I was just talking to someone just this week about a focus group, and they were like, oh, yeah, but that's just a focus group. Like, who cares what 10 people think? So can you tell us, like, how do focus groups actually work? How do we even find these people that either say they're undecided, or, you know, were Trump-Biden voters? Like, give us the run-through about how you do that, because I think some people are skeptical.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  I love answering this question, because I think it is a mystery to some people, and it's actually very simple. There are places, that are firms, that they have, over the years, collected massive lists of people, and they know tons and tons about these people, because most of the time, when people are running focus groups, they're actually not talking about politics. A lot of times, focus groups are like, is the cat food that you buy, do you like it better in a blue bag or a yellow bag? Which one grabs you from the shelf? Or, here's the new menu from Chili's. Like, does the chili double cheese fry bacon thing sound delicious to you or disgusting? You know, like, people use these lists to talk to people about all kinds of things when they're seeking deeper information, and they're trying

• 13:29Speaker 00

  to understand not just the what, but the why. Why does somebody feel this way? We go to those firms, and I'm like, okay, firm, could you please find me people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and are undecided right now? And I would also like them to be college-educated, and I would also like them to be from Pennsylvania. Like, you know, and you give them sort of a deeper and deeper cut. And I think that a lot of the ways that people use focus groups in politics, it is oftentimes campaigns, and they will do a series of focus groups about the candidate, and they'll do like six. And they'll do a bunch of different demographics. They'll do a group of women, they'll do one group of men, they'll do college-educated, non-college, and they'll slice and dice a

• 14:11Speaker 00

  couple ways. And then they'll, they'll learn what they learn, and they'll move on. The reason I started doing focus groups in the first place is that back in 2017 ish, late 2017, we were like into the Trump administration. And I was a sad Republican who was like, what are we gonna do about this guy? And my biggest idea was, well, we gotta primary him, okay? Guys, and I'm like, running around to governors and congresspeople that I like. Larry Hogan, I'm like, Larry Hogan, you must primary Donald Trump. And, uh, you know, anybody that I talked to was sort of like, yeah, maybe. Well, but how about you? Do you show me that it can be done? You show me there's an appetite from voters.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  And the thing, one of the key mistakes that I was making at the time is that I felt like I was a representative of the Republican Party. I thought people were, I, the people make this mistake all the time in punditry. They substitute their own judgment for the judgment of everybody else, kind of in their tribe or, uh, whatever.

• 15:13Reid Hoffman?

  Oh, I never do that.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's an easy thing to do, right? You're like, well, I, I speak for all tech, you know, titans who, you know?

• 15:21Reid Hoffman?

  Exactly.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Uh, there's, and so I, I, I felt that way. I thought surely, okay, that Donald Trump was an accident of history, that it was the product of a fractured field. He's over there all alone in his burn it all down lane. Uh, and everybody else was splitting the normie vote. And so this, most people felt like I did, and they wanted this guy gone. So I started doing some focus groups and some polling to figure out if he could be beaten. And immediately I realized the answer was no. I realized that there was an affirmative interest in people who were there for the burn it all down, there for the chaos, there for, that they saw Donald Trump as a businessman, uh, that, that was gonna help the economy. We all learned a lot of these lessons in 2016, 2017 around, we're like, but you can't say

• 16:05Speaker 00

  that grab them by the lady parts and win an election. But of course you could. You can't say Mexicans are rapists and thieves and win an election or talk about a Mexican judge. Oh, no, you can't. You can't talk about a Muslim ban and win. And it's like, actually your, his poll numbers went up. We were learning in real time, things that we didn't think were true lessons about the American electorate. In doing the focus groups, I realized like there was a real scales from. From my eyes moment of being like, okay, I've spent too much time in think tanks, talking about education reform and debt deficit policy. And, uh, you know, I got like addicted to knowing because talking to voters is cheat code for understanding American politics because that is who drives in a democracy,

• 16:49Speaker 00

  the political environment. What I found was that if you did focus groups every week, which is sort of the cadence that I I started to do, you would hear themes, you would hear voters say that you'd hear a voter in Pennsylvania and a voter in Arizona. And you would be like, okay, they're talking about this the same way. And you could start to decipher what was in different demographics, what were sort of key indicators of the way somebody might think. You could understand which media. I mean, one of the questions I ask all the time is what media people are consuming. When the pandemic hit, I was like, oh, God, I have to keep talking to voters. How am I going to keep talking to voters? And so I went to all of these focus group facilities and I was like, can we do this by Zoom? I'm doing everything else by Zoom now. And it was like a miracle. You're suddenly teleported into all of these people's living rooms.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  And sometimes they're smoking, sometimes they're vaping, sometimes their babies are crying, their dogs are barking. But like, you still get 85% of like the nutritious feedback that you need from them. Like you miss out on a little bit of the dynamic in the room and being sure about some of the ways that people are giving you facial expressions. Like you just miss a little bit of color. But you get still most of what you need by doing it by Zoom, which I was like, oh, oh, we can do a lot of these now. A lot of the times I'm just like, I need more focus groups. You have to feed my focus group addiction. My greatest, most fervent hope is to find a way to make qualitative more scalable.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Because I think it is much denser and more interesting and more actionable to have real people's opinions as opposed to just a number. This many people think this and this many people think this. Because every time I see a question like or an answer like that, I'm like, why was the question written? How was it worded? Because I know from listening to people over and over that two words can change the entire meaning about the way that somebody answers a question. And so I want to know how somebody was asked a question and how they answer it in order to understand what I think is the true meaning of what they're trying to get at.

• 18:48Reid Hoffman?

  You actually anticipated where I was going to go with my next question, which is the role of technology in evolving how we come to the understanding of what Do, for example, in politics or in business, you know, blue or or yellow? Do we understand kind of like, as it were, the will of the people or the interests of the people and the nuanced shape of it? And Zoom, this is transformative force, but the technology and the pandemic came together is obviously one. What are the other areas where kind of technology giving us kind of a better lens into try to having a, you know, kind of like, understanding our human interests, our human needs, our collaborative

• 19:30Reid Hoffman?

  will, our ability to kind of navigate conversations with the body politic? What are some of the things that you do? What are some of the things you're hopeful for? How do you? How do you look at the evolving technology of this?

• 19:43Speaker 00

  So, yeah, I'll give you a couple of examples. So one of the things, when you used to do the focus groups in a room, right? And you had people sitting there, there'd be a camera that would record it. And it would be like, kind of a blurry, like you'd get like this blurry image of everybody's heads at the top and the audio is kind of garbage because people don't have like good mics in front of them, whatever. When we went to Zoom, suddenly we would have transcripts. Like you can use the AI stuff to do really good, whether it's Descript or Otter or something like that, you can get a really good transcript. Okay. Well, now you do hundreds of focus groups and you got transcripts for all of them. And so my, when I think about my hope for what you can do, it is can you take all of

• 20:25Speaker 00

  those transcripts and put them into the machine learning that allows you to ask questions around trends that have occurred, right? So you say, when we ask about immigration, what are the top three answers that we get from two time Trump voters? And have it come back with, right? A basic summary of what you've heard from a lot of these people. That is like the most basic thing that I want is to be able to take the transcriptions and be able to almost make it not just searchable, but able to get answers to what people have said over time and maybe the way that answers have changed, what kind of words have they used? That's the first thing that I would say I'm interested in doing that we've, we've sort of been experimenting with.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  The problem is, is when you do a two hour focus group, a lot of words are generated, a lot. And so to have, you know, many hundreds of those and then make it searchable, that's a, you need a lot of, the machine needs to be able to take in a lot of information. So that's the first thing. Then the second thing you could do that I'm very interested in is like, can you make it predictive, right? So, once you've fed all of this information and it's got hundreds and hundreds of different voters talking about things, can you ask it? So, for example, actually, I'll give you one right now. So, we've asked about RFK in all kinds of focus groups. And we were like, how are two-time Trump voters going to feel about RFK dropping out? And like, will they vote for him? And it will find for us, all of the people who've talked to them, because lots of people

• 21:50Speaker 00

  in a focus group that we may not be able to go back and find ourselves are like, I'll remember, you know, there's one guy who said, if RFK dropped out, that he would definitely vote for Trump if that. Who said that? How many people said that? Whatever. Like, you could ask it that and it could tell you things that, for me, would be actionable with reporters, with my analysis. Okay, that's another way that I think it could be really interesting. The third way, and the way that I, I think I'm the most excited about for the future, is can you ask one question, the same question, to thousands of people and get the answer back in words, right? So, this is like polling. But in polling, right, you can do yes or no, because you can't, there's no way to sort of take the answer in.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  But can you ask it to the same question of thousands of people and then get the summaries back with direct quotes, but also like word clouds? And what were the things that people used the most and make their answers searchable? Like, there is a way to get qualitative so much closer to quantitative from a scale standpoint, but then so much richer in the density of the answers that you're getting with the human inflections and to understand, you know, sort of the more, the richness that's in there. And that is the part that I get the most excited about, because the only thing that I want is just more access to more people and more qualitative data and better ways to analyze it.

• 23:12Aria Finger?

  You know, Reid and I talk a lot about both being truth tellers, but also engaging with people who disagree with us. And I feel like I have a bad quality of being like, yeah, me and that person agreed. Didn't you just hear? And someone saying like, no, no, no. Did you hear the subtext? Or did you hear when they said XYZ? Like, do you have tips for like, how do you actually listen to someone? How do you tease it out what they're actually saying, just that we can all be better listeners and perhaps better persuaders?

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Oh my God, I love this question so much because here's the thing, actually, the biggest downside, if you'd asked me a sort of a different question of like, well, what's the most, the biggest downside of qualitative, right? And I would say it's some version of you, you, you've, sometimes you can like hear what you want to hear from people and you, you do have this sense of, um, yes, I like you filter people through your own frame. Totally, that's what I do. No, and, and, and also, and also you have to be aware of how the people in the groups impact each other, right? So like, you have to be able, and this is where the human element,

• 24:21Speaker 00

  I, I, I'm not sure you can replace this part of it, but it's actually why I like the idea of asking people the same question outside of the room together, because the biggest downside to the qualitative in the room is that people are having an effect on each other. There is always a group dynamic where people want to get along. Uh, and I'll tell you, one of the ways that we tried to do an end run around this early on, one of the things we used to do, people will ask, um, like, why don't you have a bunch of, you know, some Trump voters and some Biden voters or some Harris voters, Trump voters in the room together? And we realized pretty quickly, actually, that was not productive because people didn't trust each other. And so they would either argue or they would, they would change how they

• 25:03Speaker 00

  answered things in order to make it, you know, they do a lot of like, I don't want to offend anybody or I don't want you to throat clearing. And so it's clear they were adjusting themselves for the people in the room. When we do a group, we tell them, the first thing we tell them is you all have a lot in common. You all voted for Trump twice. You all live in swing states. You all are, went to college. Like, and you know, we, we tell them the things that make them say, I'm safe. I'm safe with my tribe here. And they, and, because they are more honest with you, uh, when. They feel like they are around other people who are like, and my best moderators are the ones who are on everybody's side. People get so mad at me when, because I, I have

• 25:46Speaker 00

  a podcast called the focus group and we play the clips of the people talking. People are so enraged by what people are saying. They're like, why didn't you tell them they were wrong? Why didn't you push back on them? Why didn't you correct them? And I say, look, I sit and listen to 10 people so that I can figure out how to persuade 10,000. And it is not my job to tell them they're wrong. I want to know why they think the thing that they do. I want to know where they got that information. And so the moderators, they nod, they don't confront. Now, sometimes they push back. They'll be like, well, what if I told you X? Or, you know, like there's, there's prodding. There's not no engagement, but you are trying to get people to answer as honestly as possible. Cause the other thing people worry about is they, they worry about being wrong. Right? They suddenly feel like they're being asked

• 26:30Speaker 00

  a test. And so we want to make sure that they feel safe to say, I don't know anything about that. If that's the case, because one thing I like to report on all the time is, did people see this thing? I mean, the biggest lesson I'll take away from talking to people is, and it goes back to something we've already talked about previously, is how much people are not paying attention, the way those of us who are doing this work are paying attention. It's like, there was a time, the time that Trump went to Helsinki and got on the stage with Vladimir Putin and sided against America's intelligence community. Uh, I will never forget walking into a focus group in Ohio and being like, what did people think about what Trump said in Helsinki? And everyone was like, what are you talking about? I have no idea what you're talking about. It was like, there was a massive conflagration in

• 27:12Speaker 00

  DC and in the political media. None of these people had heard about it. They didn't care. They're not listening. And when I, when you, when you start to understand that, right? And, and you give them permission to not feel like they have to give their opinion if they don't know something, that's valuable information too. Cause you want to know what's breaking through, what's not breaking through. You do have to be aware of all of the factors. That are impacting the way people are talking and be able to discern. And this is just deeply human because you have to discern when somebody seems like they really mean it. I watch in the groups when we ask, okay, who's if your election's today, are you voting for Harris? You know, hands up, voting for Trump, hands up. The person who goes last and like waits for everybody else. You're like, I don't, I'm going to give that person a half.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  I'm not sure they meant that. There does require some judgment around human nature and behavior. And you try to correct for as much as you can, like making it safe. And then some of it, you also just have to be able to like, I don't think that's a strongly held opinion. And that's why you never want to take some outlier kind of opinion and be like, well, one guy said this, and then substitute that for a political trend or a way a lot of people think.

• 28:21Reid Hoffman?

  How do you think this will compare when we start having AI driving focus interactions? Because we with AI, we've essentially passed the Turing test in terms of language. You know, getting to real time video is still a challenge, you know? But audio is real time now. And so you could do audio conversations or you could do one on one mass. And to some degree, you know, I tend to think you're going to get an interesting lens because that pure individual versus people feeding off each other. And a little bit of like, you know, kind of like talking to the, and you go longer and, you know, do more time trust building, you know, have the thing always be going, yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me.

• 29:04Reid Hoffman?

  You know, as if the world is flat. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me. Because this is an inevitable part of the future.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:11Reid Hoffman?

  Uh, for how this is going to play. And what do you think, what do you think is going to happen? What do you think we should do? What do you think we should steer away from? What, what will be in a intelligent use of this?

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, like I was talking about before, I have my own ways of thinking about how it could be applied to the work that I do and other people do, who are trying to sort of information gather around people. And I think you sort of the square, the circle about a couple of the things that I talked about, which is when do you need a human being to be able to discern something about other human beings? And when are you able to take what the, what AI can do and let it aggregate things for you that you otherwise can't aggregate because it's too onerous? But I'd be interested, actually, in, you're listening to me talk and you are an expert in this. I don't, can't think of all the ways it can be used. I mostly think about as a practitioner of this, like, what do I want more of?

• 30:03Speaker 00

  The thing that I don't know about AI that I think is a challenge with human listening is the tone, like, was this said in a skeptical way? What's a joke and what's not a joke? When was something said enthusiastically and when was it said? If there's not a verbal qualifier, like, I'm not sure, or I'm ambivalent about this. How do you read ambivalence in somebody's voice? Because I'll tell you, when I watch a focus group, I can read ambivalence in people's voices, or when I don't think they're sure. And so I think that that's the part I'm most interested in is that the, the, the key to the qualitative is the human element.

• 30:40Reid Hoffman?

  Well, so the thing that'll be interesting is, I, in the near term, call it X years, one, two, three, you know, very hard to make predictions about AI further than two years out in a lot of, like, not because, oh, my God, it's terrifying or amazing, or it's just a different shape and a lot to evolve. It probably won't be as good as the best human experts, but there's kind of three things that can obviate that. One is, you're probably pretty good at saying, hey, this is one I couldn't read that well. I'm going to pump that to a human. So you get what in AI, we describe as centaurs, human plus machine performance, which I'm kind of broadly optimistic about, like, that's going to be a decades-long and possibly longer kind of part of this trend, which is humans are going to be humans using AI, you know, doing all a wide variety of these shops.

• 31:25Reid Hoffman?

  That's one. Two is, you've also got the overwhelming data, right? So like, it's very expensive to get the expert human to do it in each of these cases. Whereas like, you're going longevity, you know, say, for example, what you did is you say, look, well, you know, the way you compensate focus group people, you pay them for the time. So, look, we'll pay you for your time, but what we want is 15 minutes every week, right? You know, at, at Friday at the end of the week, or Monday at the beginning of the week, or whatever the, the thing is. And 15 minutes of that conversation, and then you get, you know, kind of paid at the end by doing the whole thing. And you have the longevity for each person. With this and you can do that in a way where you generate. So the the raw amount of of data that you're going to be able to generate to start looking at it.

• 32:07Reid Hoffman?

  Now, that's part of the question you have to kind of look at those like, look, is there a systematic bias in the generation of the data? That becomes, you know, something that's that's careful to. But the question of being, for example, sympathetic and human in, you know, and prompting. Um, that stuff we I can already do um and could do well. Like, for example, you know, part of the optimism use case that I see about AI is like having an educational tutor. That is infinitely patient on every subject for every age, right? And it's trying to figure out how to help you learn this thing. And the AI is going to be a lot better than most human beings at that. Because as opposed to, oh, am I explaining algebra to you again?

• 32:53Reid Hoffman?

  It's like, oh, let's try that again, right? You did a really good job last time, but there are a few things that we want to, we want to work on in order to get to in order to make it happen. And, you know, I think as I in in will change these economic landscapes in this way is that? Like, your both volume of data and your ability to interpret and deal with volume of data is like here now. You know, I don't think anyone's using AI as the driver for focus groups yet that I know of. But I think it's an inevitability. And I think there will be strengths and weaknesses about how human beings, like, can you try to read the minds, as it were, through the language, making them feel safe? Saying, oh, I can speak my truth about, you know, why it is, you know, I think, you know, Trump's a deranged narcissist.

• 33:38Reid Hoffman?

  Um, and I can do that here versus, oh, I don't want to create any rent, any, you know, kind of ill will or or kind of arguments in it. One of the things that'll be interesting when it gets to having AI is, in some sense, AI will make that more more easy. Because it's like, well, it's kind of like I'm talking to my computer or something else. It's like, I don't have, I won't have the same protections. But on the other hand, I'll have other biases and I'm trying to figure, like, I don't know yet.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  I can see how separating people out from a community of people would allow them to be more honest in certain circumstances about things. But let me give you an example of where it works in the inverse. So one of the things that we ask about a lot is abortion. But one of the things that I always find super interesting is when I ask people, how do you think things are going in the country? What issues matter to you most? Which is the way we kind of kick off every group. People don't say abortion that often. And that's always really notable to me because when we, at some point, introduce it, and so we say, you know, nobody brought up abortion. How do people feel about abortion? The level of emotion that you get from people then, as they engage on that, is extremely high.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  They'll be, oh, and suddenly they're leaning in and they're having a conversation. And especially if you have a group of women, the same thing always happens. People start telling stories about themselves or their friends where they had a catastrophic pregnancy. They themselves had an abortion, somebody they knew had an abortion. And a tribe gets formed in the moment where the women start to support each other, start to talk to each other with great empathy. And I think that that is something that has been a real lesson for me in, okay, people are not off the top of their heads just saying abortion is a driving thing for them.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  However, if you make it high salience, you give them personal stories, they react very strongly to it. And so you can move people quickly on that issue, but you have to keep the salience high. And so back in 2022, there was a lot of men that I was talking, there was a lot of different operatives who were like, I think we're overdoing it on abortion. I just, I think it's too much. I think we're talking about too much. And I was like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I promise you, you got to keep this high salience. It has to be top of mind. It can drive people, people's emotions, it can drive their vote, but only if you keep it high salience. You let it fall down, people will talk about the economy, they will talk about inflation, they will talk about immigration, because that's where people go much more naturally. They'll talk about crime. And so I just, I think there's lessons in there that would be difficult to, how do you, how do you replicate then where?

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Because we do live in community and form our opinions in community. And so in some way, a focus group can be artificial at times. In other ways, it can be more reflective of how people in the real world operate, which is that they bounce off each other in certain ways that change how much they care about something in a moment.

• 36:37Aria Finger?

  You know, you're talking a lot about sentiment analysis. And, you know, until now, you've only done that with words. And what is that? There's that, I don't know, I think this is true, that there was someone who could watch videos of married couples with the sound off and find out whether they were going to make it or not, because it's all about the body language, or it's all, you know, so much of the sentiment of a person isn't in the written word. And so, like you said, oh, you know what? I've learned, I can watch, I can see, I can hear their tone of voice. You can train an AI to do that, too. So it'll be really interesting. We start using an AI on video as opposed to just words that like they will get, they, the AI will get so good at the sentiment analysis.

• 37:21Aria Finger?

  And I think one of the things that could be exciting or terrifying is using the AI for persuasion. It's like, once we know what works to persuade, is there a way that we can have, you know, a chatbot or an agent talking to someone? Is there a way we can use that to our advantage? And again, that sort of like sounds dystopian and scary. We'd want to be making sure we're using it for the right thing. But just like an educational AI can teach young people, you know, can we teach it to have people be less sexist and less racist? And, you know, sort of all of these things were good. Like, there's values there, but it also, you know, there's some, there's some qualms.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the way that we've used the focus groups strategically, one of the main things that we learned from them early on as a persuasion tool was the importance of messengers. Who was the person delivering the message and how the messenger was oftentimes more important than the message? There's a bunch of key things that we learned going through the 2020 cycle. And one of them, the reason, so I run a group called Republican Voters Against Trump. And our, the, the strategy that we employ is to have real people who identify as Republicans, lifelong Republicans, many of them Trump voters. And they say, I voted for Trump the last two elections, but because of January 6th, or because of abortion,

• 38:44Speaker 00

  I'm not going to vote for him again. And, and you know, they explain it. And oftentimes, the videos that perform the absolute best are people who say, I've never voted for a Democrat before in my life, or I don't like Democrats, or I don't like Kamala Harris, but I'm going to vote for her anyway, because Donald Trump is such a threat, or I hate him so much, you know, whatever, whatever language they use, we do not, we are never prescriptive. But we collect these video testimonials and we turn them into advertising. Now, they are, they test at the top of the persuasion tool. And the reason is because the number one thing, and this is where I want to sort of get into maybe what I, what I would worry about is, it's the authenticity of the messenger. It's the authenticity of the messenger. And when we, people criticize us, when people are looking to sort of diminish

• 39:29Speaker 00

  our program or our project, they'll say, well, these are paid actors, or now, we're starting to hear, these are AI. And it's interesting, because one of the things that you're dealing with, and this comes from having listened to voters, one of the things that's just happening to people, is the absolute collapse of trust. Trust in institutions, trust in, I mean, politicians were never super high, but like, everybody that people used to trust, like, has gone, has dropped in the quotient of trustworthiness. And the number one still trusted group of people is people like me. Not me, Sarah Longwell, but people like them. We work very hard now to test as a persuasion mechanism, like,

• 40:11Speaker 00

  John from, you know, Tommy from Texas is a Christian and it, you know, whatever. And we're like, who does Tommy persuade the most? Like, who does he work best with? And then we target those people. I can see AI helping us get a lot better and more granular than we already are in terms of which person you were like, well, these, this woman works the best with these people. And like, you could just tell somebody, like, we learned all kinds of things, like, somebody with an accent, uh, always codes more Republican for voters. They view them as more authentic. And so the authenticity of the messenger for us is key. And so I wonder what the world will look like when AI is so prevalent that people no longer trust at all the idea that these are the trusted messengers that they want to be persuaded by.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  My challenge, I guess, is I wonder, knowing that authenticity is the key, uh, is the key to the realm here, especially in politics, what do you do with AI around that?

• 41:05Reid Hoffman?

  You know, one of the things that I also thought that I love about your particular story is, you know, you're smart, dedicated, exploratory to technology. But one of the parts of principle, which, um, you know, is too rare in the political environment, um, is this notion of I'm going to try to figure out what is the right thing and stick to it. Like, you are a, you know, kind of diehard, you know, fight the battle Republican on deficits and other kinds of things that actually, frankly, I agree with. But, and, um, and, and you get confronted where your pack kind of goes off the deep end and you're like, wait, right? Like, it, like, truth telling is

• 41:48Reid Hoffman?

  important. Caring about other people is important. Rule of law is important. Not lying through your teeth and being completely narcissistic is important. You know, you kind of ended up suddenly kind of in this very isolated direction. You know, how did you navigate that? What was the way that you found the kind of personal fortitude to do that? Say a little bit about that journey for you.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, the honest answer is that

• 42:17Speaker 00

  Uh, I think it's because I had, like, I grew up in a small town in central Pennsylvania. Um, I, my, my parents were Republicans and I grew up in a very sort of just conservative community. And then when I was in college, I, I, I went to Kenyon College in Ohio, which was a great place and kind of just a standard liberal, lead liberal arts school, but had a pretty conservative political science department. Uh, was a Straussian, kind of people from University of Chicago.

• 42:43Reid Hoffman?

  Or Strausians can't say that they're a Straussian.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  That's true. That's true. I guess I, I mean, it's just a descriptor of the, of the overall program. And the thing that happened is I, I went to work for a conservative think tank right out of college. This is 2004, um, 2005. And so Massachusetts is about to become the first state to legalize gay marriage. Uh, and I was trying to come out to my parents. And I was trying to come out. And, uh, so I was already kind of in the conservative movement, um, had done, um, you know, like had a job in the conservative movement, was, was on the road with Rick Santorum and gay marriage was like the topic. Rick Santorum was famous actually at the time for comparing bestiality and homosexuality. Uh, and it was deeply uncomfortable for me. I was trying to figure that out and I was young and I wanted

• 43:31Speaker 00

  to do a good job and I didn't want to reflect badly on my employer or on, you know, Santorum. But also I was trying to figure out how to like come out and be out. And, you know, I basically had to do it. Like I had to, I had to, I, I, there was actually this moment, um, where there was a, at the, the gay protesters would come to the Santorum events and there were these two moms there. Uh, and I would always have to, cause I was like the young comms person, the junior comms person. I would go stand with the gay protesters. And so there's two moms and they've got their like tween daughter there and she's holding up a sign that says, my two moms take me bowling. And I was like, I quit. Like, I'm out of here. This is, I can't do it.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  It was, it was, and it was this thing that, at the time, I actually made a promise to myself, which is, one, I would do something, I would, I would, I would be out. I would always be out. I would never lie about who I was. That was one promise I made to myself. And then the other was like, I would do something affirmative for gay rights. And so when I moved to Washington, I joined the Log Cabin Republicans, and this is when I learned what it felt like to be hated by everybody. Because Democrats didn't like you because you were a Republican, and said, gay Republican, you're an oxymoron. It's like jumbo shrimp. And Republicans didn't like you because you were gay, and you weren't accepted. And I just had to figure out how to be fine with

• 44:55Speaker 00

  everybody being mad at me, or not really having a place in either tribe. And I think that that experience, and I spent years then working on Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal, on marriage equality. I, I worked on Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry. We did a lot of work on, on marriage equality among Republicans and trying to get Republicans elected who were pro-marriage equality. Doing the gay marriage stuff, the, the, the marriage equality work, also showed me that people can be persuaded. I mean, if you just think about the fact that when I got involved in Log Cabin, it's like 2006 or something like that. Between 2006 and 2013,

• 45:35Speaker 00

  gay marriage happened. Like, all the states, like, 2008 was all the referendums, but I watched it be an enormous issue, a defining issue, something that separated people, and there were just a bunch of groups that tried to figure out, how do you persuade people? And you just saw everybody's mind change in real time. And by 2013, which was the year I got married to my wife, the Supreme Court, that was the year that they decided Windsor, and then there was another, but like, it was happening. It was over. The Supreme Court was ruling, like, we were, we were done. And then just recently, you know, it passed legislatively. Like, it's, and that is because people changed their minds. And so I believe in persuasion. I believe that if you find the right ways to listen to and talk to people, and I spent so much time during that conversation. Conversation around, hey, how do Christians think about gay marriage?

• 46:20Speaker 00

  How do, how do black communities and black evangelical communities think about gay? You know, like, thinking about all these different groups and how trying to understand them, trying to figure out how you talk to them, trying to figure out what it meant to be a human talking to another human? Like, because coming out and love were ultimately kind of the two things that really mattered. Knowing somebody who was gay that you cared about and talking to people not about rights. That is the lesson that, that formed me and shaped me. And so when Trump came along, this was just another instance where I said, Donald Trump is a bad person. Like, that was evident from the start. And sometimes people are like, well, it must have been hard for you. You know, you gave up your community or you did this or that.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  And I was like, you know how sometimes there's just like, you can't do anything else but that thing? Like, I wouldn't have known how to do anything but that because I wouldn't have been able to tolerate it. For me, the hardest part was just finding the tribe that, like me, wanted to do something about it. And like huddling up with that group and being like, all right, now let's go, we're all doing this.

• 47:21Aria Finger?

  I mean, I'm gonna cry, I have chills. It's just amazing and it's so good to remember because especially in these times when we're like, well, it's 50/50. We're polarized, we've always been 50/50. It's like, not only did, Pete Buttigieg said, you know, recently, like, the transition that he's seen in his lifetime is unbelievable. And also the coalitions have changed enormously. It might be 50/50 today and 50/50 30 years ago, but it's not the same 50/50. Republicans and Democrats have taken different, you know, points of view and a lot of positions have changed. And so I think giving people that hope that like persuasion works, like we can move the needle in the good and bad direction, you know, both happen.

• 48:04Aria Finger?

  And so one of the things that everyone is worried about when they think about this, 50/50, how do you persuade, is of course misinformation. And that's both because of new technologies, but also because misinformation, you know, has been around as long as, as long as time. And so I'm sure that in your focus groups, you, you hear this. Like, how does misinformation, what, what is the stuff that's sticky? Like, when are you like, oh, yep, this, everyone this week is bubbling up on this because it's stickier because X? And what is the stuff that people can be immune to? I'm sure you have lots of thoughts and like, maybe, maybe how we can fight against it.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  I mean, the biggest example of this is when Donald Trump said that the election was stolen. So the way that this, the information works and how tribal it is, it was, I'm glad, very glad to have had the experience of living through some big lies, not to, yes, the big lie, but also like big lies, to watch how voters have responded to them over time. Because one of the things that was so interesting to me about the election denialism is that a bunch of Republicans, right after the election, they didn't think it was stolen. Like, that's not something you heard from everybody. Donald Trump was saying it, but there's this phenomenon I call, it's kind of the Republican triangle of doom. And it is the toxic and symbiotic

• 49:25Speaker 00

  relationship between the right wing infotainment media, the elected officials, and the voters. Okay. And they work on each other. And when Donald Trump, right, is, is, is just constantly, and many of his, the, the elected officials, right, they're saying the election was stolen, right? Some of them, the most extreme ones, and Donald Trump are saying it. Well, then there's a certain amount of media that picks up on that, right? And then there's a certain appetite from a group of voters that wants to hear that information, and they seek it out. And that's where, if Fox News isn't saying it, Newsmax is gonna say it, or OANN is gonna say it. Okay, so then they start saying it, and the voters who want to hear it gravitate to those media outlets. Well, then the, the politicians who want to be on those outlets,

• 50:10Speaker 00

  you know, they, they go on, and then they say the election was stolen. And pretty soon, you've gone from, this is a Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump thing, to Kevin McCarthy is saying that the election was stolen, right? The people that you take seriously. And then the more serious the person, well, then a whole other set of voters who didn't think the election was stolen says, well, man, if Kevin McCarthy says that the election was stolen, well, maybe now I believe it too. And pretty soon, you have 70% of the Republican Party who believes that the election was stolen, and they all work together to make that happen. And Fox News has to compete with those other places. So they say the election was stolen, even though they know it's wrong, even though they know it's a lie. And so, you know, I, how you combat it, the only real way is with the truth.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  And it's, it's a tough thing to say, because you can't harness information and like, the human soul.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Is the, if it wants to lie, like if people are gonna lie, um, you, you like, the best way to do it is for us to continue to tell people that lying is wrong and for us to believe that lying is wrong. Uh, like you do have to try to persuade people. And here's another thing. So here's a, here's a good example of something where I think about, how do we, um, recalibrate the way voters are thinking about things that are essential? So right now, voters want an outcome. They want, they want, they want some kind of policy outcome. They do. They want better healthcare. They want, um, you know, they want lower tax, whatever. But they, voters also do not want politicians to compromise, right?

• 51:43Speaker 00

  The, the, the, the mechanism by which policy happens, which is compromise between the parties, voters no longer have patience for. They're no longer interested in it. They want you to fight. They are mad about the uniparty. They do not want any, any amount. And so you see politicians now, it used to be that politicians would say, I'm gonna reach across the aisle. I know how to get things done. I know how to work with people. Yeah. But now everybody's, they say, no, I, I, I won't do anything. I'll never work with Democrats. Well, here's the thing. If you no longer believe in the mechanism of compromise to get to a policy outcome, what do you do? You reach for a strong man. You reach for somebody who says, I alone can fix it. When I think about what is the number one thing that we could do to help with politics? It's that to reteach people that compromise

• 52:26Speaker 00

  is actually a good thing. That it is how they get the things that they want out of policy and politics, which is why politicians go there is to figure out how to solve problems for, for Americans, right? Well, how, uh, like, to me, like, that's the answer. The answer is you've got to, you've got to go back to basics with people because we're in this enormously disruptive moment. And because people don't know what to trust, you've got to like rebuild the fundate foundational building blocks because those things have been eroded. Uh, and we've got to build them for a new moment with a new information landscape.

• 52:57Aria Finger?

  I mean, it's so interesting. I was, uh, I was listening, I think, to Nancy Pelosi and Ezra Klein. And she was actually, she was talking about, um, don't ask, don't tell. And she was talking about how You know, she had said to some folks, well, you're gonna vote and you're gonna make sure that we can repeal this bill. And they were like, no, I'm not. And she's like, well, you are. And then she's like, and then I went to some Dems and I said, well, you're gonna vote for military funding to be upped. And they're like, no, we're not. Yes, you are. You are gonna do that. And some people could look in that and say like, oh, how cynical, how. And it's like, well, no, actually, it's positive. It's compromise. It's how we move things forward. And so some of these sort of the brilliance of reaching across the aisle has been lost. And we have to, we have to get back there.

• 53:40Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think one of the really key things, how do we talk to each other? How do we get compromised? It's actually in fact bipartisan compromise to get shit to happen, right? Like, let's get the the Senate Langford bill through, rather than have Trump kneecap it because he wants to run on it as an election. Let's have it in place for a year, helping Americans. You know, that kind of stuff is, I think the compromise and and kind of work together should be the top virtue.

• 54:08Aria Finger?

  So Sarah, you said, you know, you have been a lifelong Republican, and now you are someone who is trying to get Kamala Harris elected. Where do we go from here? What happens next for the Republican Party or for politics more generally?

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, I think one of the things I try to explain to people, and oftentimes I am the one person on the panel that that nobody's ever heard of. And I'm like, look, if you remember one thing that the girl you'd never heard of said on the panel, have it be this, that the Republican Party is not going back. There is no, because people ask me this all the time, like, well, how do we get back to the Republican Party that I knew as a as a younger person, the one of Mitt Romney, the one of Liz Cheney? And I just think it's really important that people don't spend their time thinking that the Republican Party is going to return to a thing it once was. And the reason that it's not is that the voters don't want it. And what's like, right now, Donald Trump has actually been in our lives for almost a decade as a political figure. He's obviously much

• 55:06Speaker 00

  been there much longer than that. And so people who have come to the Republican Party in the last 10 years. Have done it because of Donald Trump. They're not staying in spite of him. They're there because of him. And so especially young Republicans today, they don't even understand like why Nikki Haley would be a thing. They're like that she doesn't believe what Republicans believe. What Republicans believe are we're isolationists and we believe in tariffs and we're America first and we don't want any immigrants here. That is not what the Republican Party used to stand for. But a Republican in the mold of the Republicans that I liked when I sort of became a Republican, those people,

• 55:45Speaker 00

  they're all gone. They're gone. And maybe you can still sneak one through here or there in a state like Maryland with a Larry Hogan or something like that, but mostly not. And so I think it's important to understand that our politics going forward, the Republican Party, you know, is going to look a lot more like some combination of Tucker Carlson, J D Vance and Candace Owens.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  That's a terrifying image. I'm sorry. I know. I know. Now, I will say, I do think there's like a vaguely, there's a healthier version of the Republican Party that is not one that appeals to me, but is one that I think there is a vision among some Republicans that they become sort of a multi-racial working class party, where you sort of have this political realignment that's happening and college educated suburban voters, they tend to sort of politically realign into the Democratic Party and the Republican Party becomes much more working class and much more sort of oriented around populist economic issues, tariffs, you know, much more isolationist, both in terms of wars and in terms of how we do,

• 56:50Speaker 00

  you know, how we sort of trade in the world. And that as long as they abide by the rule of law and election results, doesn't have to be a dangerous party. I don't think it's going to look from an issue set like the old Republican Party, but it doesn't have to be dangerous. And I think that we should endeavor to wherever it's going, have the Republican Party at least not be dangerous, which sometimes people ask me how you do that. And for me, it really is through sustained electoral defeats, because you have to change the incentive structure. And so Donald Trump's election

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Lies have to have consequences, electoral ones, and that adopting these things have to be sort of politically unviable, which is why I find myself working not just to defeat Trump, but candidates like him.

• 57:42Reid Hoffman?

  So, you know, given where, you know, it's kind of possible the tech thing, I kind of want to go to a tech thing for our finale before we get to rapid fire. It's a little bit long, but I wanted to get to this, which is the, you know, kind of the ability for AI to help guard against misinformation. So we gave GBD 40 three social media stories we pulled from Snopes. Two are misinformation and one is real. The results looked promising, but let's quickly summarize GBD 40's responses. And can you let us know, could AI actually help combat misinformation? Or is this wishful thinking? So I'm going to go into the, it's almost like the, two lies and a truth, you know, kind of thing. And then, and then have you react.

• 58:27Reid Hoffman?

  So here are the stories.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  NASA issues an alert for an asteroid that has a 72% chance of hitting Earth in 2038. Schools stopped teaching students how to write in cursive because AI tools cannot read it.

• 58:42Speaker 04

  The US trade deficit with China has reached its lowest level since 2010.

• 58:48Reid Hoffman?

  So first, GBD 40 correctly identified the first two headlines as false. And was also pretty good at providing a justification for that. You know, it's for the first headline, GBD 40 said NASA and other space agencies closely monitor potential asteroid threats and such high probability impact. Would be widely reported.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  Big news. Feels like big news, yeah.

• 59:06Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, and addressed with significant public awareness campaigns. And when the last headline required more verification, it offered to dive into current data and provide citations from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to verify the facts is true. So what do you think? Could this have more widespread applications for debunking misinformation? And, you know, might we do with GBD 40 to make its debunking more convincing for people who need convincing the most? And, you know, part of this is the focus groups? And does it feel like it's talking to me? And is it trustworthy and that kind of thing?

• 59:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of this is the way that when something like this rolls out, there will be an effort among people who want to tell lies. So Donald Trump, one of the... One of the most interesting things I ever saw him do was when he was talking to Wesley Stahl, and she asked him why he beats up on the media so often, why he talks the way he does, calls them enemy of the people. He said, "Well, I don't, I want, so that when you guys say something bad about me, people don't believe it." Right? And so, people who want to be able to lie with impunity will do anything they can to create doubt on any tool that would hold them accountable, right? And Donald Trump does this with everything. So if the courts are holding him accountable, they sow doubt with the courts. If it's the

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  police, then the police are bad, you know, the ones that, you know, it's like, uh, so I think that the question is, is how do you roll it out in such a way that, that gives it widespread confidence? Because every time it gets something wrong, or identifies, and this is like a good example, this is like a human one, but when Meta and Twitter both decided not to, they throttled the, the New York Post story about the Hunter Biden laptop, you know, that on the right was one of those things where it gave a ton of credence to the idea that these social media platforms were censoring real information. And so, you sort of can't mess it up, like, like, the, the, the proof is gonna be, does it do it

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  in an accurate enough way that people come to trust it? Now, it could end up being like a Wikipedia thing where everybody knows, this is like mostly good, and it's good enough for me getting the gist about something, and I can quickly discern whether something is mostly true or mostly false, but like, it's not 100% accurate, you know, it could be like that. I guess I'm not, I'm not sure about its application. I will say, it has always seemed to me that when it comes to AI, the only way to police bad uses of AI is going to be with good uses of AI, right? Like, if it exists, and it's gonna be used by people who have malevolent intentions, that like, if something is an AI-generated

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  piece of misinformation, or meant to, you know, lie to people, that AI is gonna be the tool that somebody else is gonna use to prove that it's false. And like, you're gonna need that. I just, I, I hope that it is good enough and accessible enough to people so that it's not just the malevolent actors who have the most access to it, right?

• 1:02:15Reid Hoffman?

  I think you're very wise. I mean, this is the thing that most technology critics miss, which is say, we'll just stop the technology. It's under you have to shape it to to be in the positive outcomes. And so the question is, what do we do to have AI be helpful here in bridging this understanding of truth and compromise? And what are the things we need to do to instill that trust? How is it built? How is it done? And and people who disagree with it? And I think you're completely right that people tend to attack what are otherwise frequently good institutions or reasonable institutions, whereas whether it's the courts or police or anything else, because they're like, I don't want to be held accountable. Institutional renovation is the ethical thing versus burn it down.

• 1:03:02Reid Hoffman?

  We'll move to rapid fire where well said, Sarah. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  So I will tell you, when it comes to music, I often haven't been a big music person, but I endeavored during this political, like I listened to nothing but political podcasts in 2020, and I found myself on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Like, and I was like, so I'm going to get into music going into 2024. And I've been listening to this young guy named Zach Bryan. I'm a kind of a country music person. But Zach Bryan is this 28 year old who's already put out like seven albums. Every single one of them is a banger. I listened to all of the songs on shuffle, and it makes me so happy, because it speaks to something universal in the human condition, which for me, when I think about optimism about the future, it is like, how are we going to relearn how to connect with each

• 1:03:54Speaker 00

  other? And not in like a silly way, like, well, I'm gonna figure out how to set us all at a table and talk to each other. Like, we just have to remember that, like, we are so mired in our tribalism. And we have got to keep our eye on the bigger tribe.

• 1:04:09Aria Finger?

  I love that. Although I have to admit, I thought you might say, J D Vance's I'm a Never Trump Guy remix.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, that is so funny.

• 1:04:19Aria Finger?

  Every time I see that dance, I just, I smile. Okay, rapid fire number two. Is there a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  My favorite thing is when people ask me about the people I work with at the Bulwark. So one of the great joys of my life now is that Tim Miller, who I work with at the Bulwark, and Jonathan Last, Tim Miller's a very old friend of mine. And I met Bill Kristol and Mona Sharon and a lot of the other people who worked there during this moment. And telling the story about how we all came together and what it's like to work together, like it, I love talking about, they're the smartest, most interesting people, and I love talking about the Bulwark. And so anybody who asks me something about the Bulwark always brings me joy.

• 1:05:02Reid Hoffman?

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

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  So I'll go back to the fact that I'm gay. And one of the things that, and specifically a lesbian. So one of the trends that I have found a little troubling has been as everybody's moved into like queer as like a catchall, that there was like a little bit of a ratio of just lesbian stuff, you know? We like Subarus and softball and being a lesbian. I remember when I, when I sort of moved into lesbian culture, how wonderful it was to like find a group of people who was like, we got jokes, guys, we got jokes, stereotypes are true, they're true for a reason. And so for a while, I sort of felt like the kids weren't really that into like, that like we were like old fuddy duddies, to use the word lesbian and talk about Ani DeFranco.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  But like, there's a whole new world now of Billie Eilish and a bunch of, like, there's a song, like, it's very much in, it's like reemerged in pop culture in a way that I am finding like, the kids are gonna be alright. And I say that a little bit jokingly, but I will say that like the trend, going back to like the way that gay families exist now in the world and the way that we see ourselves reflected in a lot of the culture, has just been, even with the backlash against woke and like the way that Ron DeSantis kind of brought back like, don't say gay, and like, it felt like we were backsliding. I actually still feel like- The world is on the side of people getting to be who they are, love who they

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  love, and like is, is very much embracing the new way that families look, like Pete Buttigieg talks about. And that is a trend that just like a life trend that I feel happy about all the time, to the point where when I rethink about it, it makes me happy.

• 1:06:48Aria Finger?

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

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  So here's the thing that I want people, right now in our polarized politics, what I want them to know about people. So I listen to people all day, every day, and people are the best. People are super funny. They volunteer in their communities. They take care of their sick parents. They're all worried about how their kids are going to do. They're all worried about the country. And we have so much more in common than we do. You know, it's like cliche to be like, what unites us is greater than what divides us. But it's also true. And like, if we can just readjust our frame, like, we can head into civil war if we want and decide we hate each other. But we definitely don't have to and actually really don't want to. One of the things I hear people say in the groups

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  all the time is they're like, you know, I'm on, I'm inside, I'm on my computer and everyone's so mad, whatever. And I go outside. Everyone's so pleasant and they wave to you and they say hi. And it's like, that world exists for us. We just have to figure out how to, how to seize it and bring it back. We do not have to be angry all the time.

• 1:07:57Reid Hoffman?

  I think that is an excellent, excellent way to wrap it up. And Sarah, thank you for joining us on Possible.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  Oh, thanks for having me. It was so fun.

• 1:08:12Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wondery Media Network. It's hosted by Ari Fingert and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schleid, Adrian Bain, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 1:08:31Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sapieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relis. And a big thanks to Tony Frankees, Priya Gada, Natalie Castangue, Connor Kilgore, Megan Leister, Carrie Huang, and Little Monster Media Company.