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

0:00:13 So, Reed, first of all, you’ve got to take me back to those PayPal days.
0:00:15 So what was it like back then?
0:00:22 It was an absolutely crazy dogfight time when the PayPal business started.
0:00:25 It was encryption on mobile devices.
0:00:32 Max, Levchin, and Peter Thiel each invited their best knowledgeable startup friend to
0:00:33 be on the board.
0:00:37 So it was Scott Bannister for Max and me for Peter Thiel.
0:00:40 And so it started with encryption on mobile devices, which, of course, is not what anyone
0:00:42 would think about looking at PayPal today.
0:00:47 And then part of the clock at PayPal was a very fast iteration.
0:00:49 Encryption on mobile devices, cash on mobile devices.
0:00:52 You and I will remember what this is, cash on Palm Pilots.
0:00:53 Palm Pilots.
0:00:54 Hey, what’s that?
0:00:55 What are you talking about?
0:00:56 Are you talking about records and LPs?
0:00:58 What is the thing you’re talking about?
0:01:03 And then to a Palm Pilot Plus payment service and then an online payment service.
0:01:08 And that kind of iteration obviously gave birth to a bunch of different things, an additional
0:01:12 large public company, but like the PayPal mafia, a bunch of things.
0:01:18 We had all kinds of things where the number of things that could have killed the business
0:01:23 and made it worth zero, we could literally spend two hours talking about just that.
0:01:25 So it was a crazy dogfight of a time.
0:01:26 But really amazing.
0:01:31 You could make the case that if PayPal had failed, democracy might be safer today.
0:01:33 But we’ll come to that.
0:01:34 Yes.
0:01:38 There is definitely some real challenges on that.
0:01:44 I guess one very obvious question, at least for me as well, you must be an expert in this.
0:01:47 When do you pivot and when do you stick it out?
0:01:49 Because you just mentioned four pivots.
0:01:50 Oh, yeah.
0:01:51 And there were more.
0:01:58 I actually have kind of a framework for this, which is you have a theory of what your forward
0:01:59 game is with your startup.
0:02:01 You could think of it as an investment thesis.
0:02:05 It’s the following things need to be true, including what I can make happen.
0:02:09 Usually you try to keep it to the most essential bullet points.
0:02:13 And then what you’re doing is you’re tracking is your confidence in your investment thesis,
0:02:15 your theory again, going up or down.
0:02:20 Now if it goes down a little bit, you might then kind of say, okay, let’s see.
0:02:24 But as it’s really going down, so you don’t wait to zero, frequent mistake and pivot is
0:02:26 wait until you’ve crashed on the wall.
0:02:27 You’re just dead then.
0:02:29 You have to call the pivot much earlier.
0:02:33 You have to call the pivot when you have market opportunity, when you stole the team, when
0:02:35 you have cash in the bank, a bunch of other stuff.
0:02:40 And so you go, okay, this theory of the game is not working.
0:02:42 What is a different theory of the game that I can do?
0:02:45 And that’s what a real pivot is going into.
0:02:50 And do you think it’s worse to pivot too early or too late?
0:02:52 Almost always too late is worse.
0:02:56 And that’s one of the reasons why the discipline of thinking about pivoting early.
0:03:03 Now generally speaking, pivoting too early is rarely an entrepreneur’s problem.
0:03:07 Because she or he has a conviction of what they’re doing, a conviction of what the market
0:03:09 opportunity is, et cetera.
0:03:13 Usually the, oh, I’m really going for something else too early is rarely the problem.
0:03:14 It can happen.
0:03:15 Okay.
0:03:16 Yeah.
0:03:20 Do you still buddies with Peter Thiel and David Sacks and Elon Musk?
0:03:27 I would say that I’m friends with Peter and more challenged than the other two.
0:03:29 I have what’s called the shopping center test.
0:03:34 So let’s suppose you’re at Stanford shopping center and you saw Peter or you saw David
0:03:39 or you saw Elon and they haven’t seen you yet, right?
0:03:45 So do you walk up to them and say, hello, do you avoid them or do you go to another shopping
0:03:46 center?
0:03:56 So Peter, I would walk up to Salo and Elon, I would go to another shopping center.
0:04:02 I don’t want to go into a cesspool, but can you just help me understand Elon Musk?
0:04:06 Because I’ll tell you four or five years ago, if somebody said to me, who’s the closest
0:04:10 living person to Steve Jobs, I would have said Elon Musk, right?
0:04:12 So you can look at his record.
0:04:17 So he changes the car industry, changes the satellite industry, changes space travel down
0:04:18 the line.
0:04:19 Amazing.
0:04:24 He could have gone down as the greatest inventor or an entrepreneur in the history of man.
0:04:25 And now he’s a Nazi.
0:04:26 So like what happened?
0:04:29 What happened to all these people?
0:04:32 So strengths and weaknesses can frequently go together.
0:04:38 Among the amazing strengths that Elon has is an absolute conviction in the thing he’s
0:04:41 thinking about the world being true.
0:04:47 And so therefore it’s taken on amazing major tasks like revolutionizing the space industry,
0:04:52 launching like a new satellite industry, and then of course electric vehicles, all of which
0:04:59 any one of which would be enough for a storied career and just like epic inclusion of the
0:05:00 history books.
0:05:03 And then the combination is just stunning and amazing.
0:05:07 But unfortunately he applies that same conviction to his view of society, to his view of social
0:05:09 media.
0:05:16 And basically I think NBC did a systematic story on Twitter and the most frequent retweeter
0:05:20 of Russian times links is Elon.
0:05:24 The number of conspiracy theories he pedals is frankly a little nutty.
0:05:28 It’s X is a microcosm for what he seems to be going on and believing.
0:05:33 And so it’s a tragedy because this other stuff is just so heroic.
0:05:38 Would you say that if there was a sequence, did being nuts like this enable him to be
0:05:43 successful or being successful made people tolerate his nutsness?
0:05:49 Well, I think it’s a compounding cycle of both because as you know, having worked with
0:05:57 a lot of entrepreneurs, a strong conviction of the way the world could be and a willingness
0:06:02 to be contrarian, counter-common wisdom, a willingness to take a big risk and try to
0:06:06 do something is essential to amazing entrepreneurship.
0:06:08 And that’s part of what it is.
0:06:11 Now, the problem is of course if you start drinking your own Kool-Aid and think that
0:06:15 you’re then just a genius about everything and that everything you happen to think happens
0:06:20 to be true, then you obviously can seriously mislead you.
0:06:21 Oh my God.
0:06:27 So I mean, I realize that I’m asking an extremely rich person this question.
0:06:35 Okay, so I realize the contradiction here, but what does extreme wealth do to one’s perspective?
0:06:36 It’s different for different folks.
0:06:41 There’s this old Roman expression in vino veritas, which is when you’ve drunk wine or
0:06:42 a person’s drunk wine, you see the truth.
0:06:44 When they get drunk, you see them as a true person.
0:06:47 There’s a part of that that is also true for how wealth plays out.
0:06:51 Like when you make money and you’re given this freedom, this power, et cetera, what
0:06:53 do you end up doing with it?
0:06:57 And so there’s clearly amazing positive examples.
0:07:02 Bill Gates with what he’s done with the Gates Foundation, solving child mortality, and just
0:07:05 a host of diseases, a host of other problems.
0:07:08 And there’s a number of folks who do it that way, and then there’s other people who use
0:07:11 it for their own greater glory or other kinds of things.
0:07:18 And so I think you see a whole range, but the world starts reinforcing you as you’re amazing
0:07:20 and wonderful and everything you do.
0:07:21 Because you’re rich.
0:07:22 Because you’re rich.
0:07:27 And so you have to have that own internal compass to what you’re driving to that’s actually,
0:07:30 in fact, so critical.
0:07:34 And how did people get at a good internal compass?
0:07:36 Is it your upbringing or how does it happen?
0:07:41 I think, look, ultimately, that’s part of the reason why we have this kind of term character.
0:07:45 So there’s something that’s internal to you always.
0:07:47 But obviously, do you have friends?
0:07:52 Did your friends help you in your relationship with their parents, even if you had some contention
0:07:56 or was it a growing experience, did you learn good things about it?
0:08:00 For me, I’d say it comes down to choosing your friends.
0:08:02 I think your friends are part of who you become.
0:08:08 For example, in my first book, The Startup of You, what I wrote was, you are the combination
0:08:09 of your five closest friends.
0:08:15 It’s kind of as a way of kind of steering on how you grow.
0:08:21 So what motivates such a high level of political activism in you?
0:08:29 So look, for me, like a lot of folks in Silicon Valley, I tend to think my best applied talents
0:08:36 are building technologies, companies, these kind of archimedean levers to change the world.
0:08:43 But I also think somewhat unusual for Silicon Valley that we live in a society, a collective
0:08:45 platform of laws, governance, and so forth.
0:08:46 Like government matters.
0:08:51 Government isn’t just an organization of inefficiency, but actually what creates the place of talent,
0:08:55 laws, other kinds of things, an investable environment, a market to do business in.
0:09:00 And I think with power comes responsibility, and like Voltaire and Spider-Man, with great
0:09:02 power comes great responsibility.
0:09:08 And so for me, my involvement in politics is, because I’ve been fortunate enough to be in
0:09:14 this amazing place, Silicon Valley, the US, et cetera, and I’ve been able to do stuff,
0:09:16 how do I help contribute to society?
0:09:19 And sometimes the way to do that is to go get involved in politics, because I don’t
0:09:23 get involved in politics ever for my own business interests.
0:09:26 There is nothing for my business interests that matters.
0:09:32 My business works just fine, however politics is going, whether my business is entrepreneurship
0:09:33 or investing or anything else.
0:09:39 I get involved because they go, how do we help build a better society together?
0:09:40 What is the role of technology?
0:09:41 What is the role of entrepreneurship?
0:09:42 What is the role of business?
0:09:48 And what couple pieces of insight might I be able to give are political leaders who are
0:09:51 also trying to figure out how to make a better society?
0:09:55 This is the tackiest question of this.
0:09:59 How much have you given to Kamala Horace?
0:10:01 A substantial number.
0:10:06 I don’t tend to answer that question, because I tend to, I think it tends to give people
0:10:14 to think in the wrong direction, which is like it’s a numbers game versus a what kind
0:10:16 of society you’re creating game.
0:10:17 Right.
0:10:21 So let’s just say that I assume it’s lots of money.
0:10:22 It is a lot.
0:10:27 So does Ack Blue see you and like now you get a text message every five seconds because
0:10:32 I have given nothing close to you and I get one every 30 seconds.
0:10:37 I try to give out my cell phone as little as possible, and I mark all incoming things
0:10:43 as delete with junk when there are those kinds of things and opt out on sort of, I do probably
0:10:48 get something on the order of 200 emails a day.
0:10:49 From Ack Blue.
0:10:52 In all political campaigns.
0:10:57 Besides the fact that I hope Kamala wins, the next best thing about the election is
0:11:00 maybe I’ll get less Ack Blue.
0:11:04 The most common word I type on my phone is stop.
0:11:07 Yes, exactly.
0:11:08 I hear you.
0:11:12 Let’s say you’re not one of these enlightened billionaires, and you haven’t taken the high
0:11:18 road and your greatest concern is long-term capital gains or making crypto successful.
0:11:22 What do those people expect to get from Trump if he wins?
0:11:28 Well, I think Trump is the definition of a coin-operated president, right?
0:11:31 It’s basically insert coin, get result.
0:11:38 And some of the coins are like I’ll put justices on the court that will repeal ROEA because
0:11:39 you’ll support me in my election.
0:11:40 It’s similar.
0:11:42 It’s like why is he very pro-crypto?
0:11:43 Maybe he can make money in crypto.
0:11:52 So he launches a proverbial, what we call shitcoins in the technical parlance of the
0:11:53 crypto industry.
0:12:01 And so I think that basically a huge amount is I am buying something for myself.
0:12:09 And part of why I abhor that approach to politics is that politics and our democracy
0:12:11 should be what’s good for us.
0:12:15 You should never be buying something for yourself.
0:12:20 What’s odd to me is that at this stage in life, those people basically have infinite
0:12:22 money.
0:12:27 And if I had infinite money, I would be thinking, how can I make the world a better place?
0:12:29 Not how I can get less long-term capital gains.
0:12:32 That would not be a high priority for me.
0:12:33 Look, I totally agree.
0:12:37 And also, by the way, it’s a question of, again, how do you have the world be a much
0:12:38 better place?
0:12:41 It’s not a game of whose bank balance at the end.
0:12:42 Most counts.
0:12:45 That is a sad game for life.
0:12:52 Friends, loved ones, better society, amazing contribution society, those are the things
0:13:01 that matter.
0:13:05 So let’s say that you’re Tim Cook.
0:13:10 And Elon Musk is sucking up to Donald Trump.
0:13:11 Trump wins now.
0:13:15 Trump makes Elon the secretary of efficiency.
0:13:20 And because he’s secretary of efficiency, he says to Apple, “Listen, I’m going to ban
0:13:24 iPhones and Mac OS and all the U.S. government.”
0:13:28 Do you think Tim Cook is thinking of a scenario like that?
0:13:32 What does a Fortune 500 CEO do when you’re confronted?
0:13:33 I think that could really happen.
0:13:35 Oh, I think it’s possible.
0:13:40 I think one of the things that happens is Trump gets elected when Elon is put in any
0:13:44 position is, what does all the conflicts of interest look like?
0:13:45 What does that mean?
0:13:51 A bunch of Elon’s businesses have deep interrelationship with government, policy, payments, regulation,
0:13:54 space, satellites, cars, everything.
0:13:59 And so you have to go, “Well, how do you have this be not corruption, not crony capitalism?”
0:14:02 And you’d have to really try to demonstrate that.
0:14:03 It’d be challenging.
0:14:10 And obviously, part of it would be whatever Fortune 100 company, Fortune 10 company, would
0:14:15 have to say, “This is a new environment that I have to navigate,” which we shouldn’t have
0:14:16 in the U.S.
0:14:17 Okay.
0:14:18 But we shouldn’t have.
0:14:22 But how do they negotiate that environment?
0:14:32 Well, I don’t know if it’s … Obviously, we’ve had a varied number of different circumstances
0:14:39 I think part of it is to try to make sure that we stay at an equal rule of law for all American
0:14:44 citizens, all American businesses, et cetera, and that there is process and fairness in
0:14:45 place with that.
0:14:47 But other than that, I have to look at it.
0:14:49 I believe in Santa too.
0:14:50 Yes.
0:14:52 Hey, Santa’s nice.
0:14:56 So now, what do you think of this concept of super PACs?
0:15:05 If I could wave a wand and keep capital at a contained minimum within U.S. elections,
0:15:09 because it seems very wasteful to be spending all its money on this kind of stuff versus
0:15:14 investing in business, investing in education, so I would wave that wand.
0:15:19 I would want it to be in a place where you could have … It’s a little bit like the
0:15:25 public access cable shows and so that you actually have a shared media palette for talking
0:15:26 about things.
0:15:29 But I would prefer, and I supported some of Larry Lessig’s work on this and so forth,
0:15:32 I’d prefer to really diminish it if possible.
0:15:37 Now, if it’s not, then you have to participate because it’s part of the important thing about
0:15:39 how American elections work.
0:15:41 So then we’re fighting fire with fire.
0:15:43 If you got a PAC, I got a PAC.
0:15:52 And I would prefer it’s not the case, but I also prefer not to fight fire with oxygen.
0:15:53 Right.
0:15:54 Right.
0:15:57 Well, let’s get out of the cesspool and let’s talk about entrepreneurship.
0:15:58 All right.
0:16:04 So first of all, I heard you mention how important gaming was for you when you were young, but
0:16:06 you learned all these roles and all this stuff.
0:16:13 So lots of parents want to hear why they should let their kids play games.
0:16:19 One of the best ways to learn a set of being strategic about such things in life and why
0:16:23 be strategic is being strategic about your career, being strategic about your work, being
0:16:28 strategic about your job, thinking about what industry to join, et cetera, is that games
0:16:35 are a really good way of kind of thinking about a lot of the problems we find in life.
0:16:39 And then if you learn games and then learn to transfer them to other domains, it’s a
0:16:43 great way of learning this kind of problem solving, a great way of learning thinking
0:16:46 strategically and tactically.
0:16:47 And that’s really good.
0:16:51 And also, by the way, frequently if it’s board games or interpersonal games, then it’s also
0:16:57 a great way of realizing that life is a team sport, not just an individual sport, that
0:17:00 your relationships and how you work together really matters.
0:17:03 And so there’s a whole bunch of really good attributes.
0:17:04 That can be video games too.
0:17:09 Like one of the funny things about playing Halo in a team, you’re learning stuff by playing
0:17:10 in a team.
0:17:11 Even Halo.
0:17:12 Even Halo.
0:17:16 Well, is Settlers of Katan still your favorite game?
0:17:17 It is.
0:17:21 It is the most entrepreneurial board games that I’ve found so far because what you’re
0:17:27 doing is you’re building, you’re trading, you’re negotiating, and you’re trying to figure
0:17:31 out how to do resource collection in an environment with some randomness, because there’s always
0:17:37 some luck in randomness and entrepreneurship, and to navigate to a probabilistic strategy
0:17:38 for winning.
0:17:43 So I studied your concept of Blitz Scaling, and it’s about speed over efficiency and network
0:17:44 effects.
0:17:48 And I understand all that, but my question in my mind is, how does the company get to
0:17:52 the point where scaling is necessary?
0:17:54 That seems to me, that’s the hard part.
0:17:59 They’re both hard parts, but I think of it as the classic phrase of product-market fit
0:18:01 and then scale-product-market fit.
0:18:06 And one of the reasons it’s worth putting the two in related but adjacent buckets is
0:18:12 that in product-market fit, you might discover that a product is really well-loved by a small
0:18:14 niche, and that’s it.
0:18:15 And look, “Aha!
0:18:16 I got product-market fit.”
0:18:18 But that ultimately doesn’t make a business.
0:18:20 That doesn’t make a product successful.
0:18:22 It’s the one that gets to sufficient scale for how you’re doing it.
0:18:28 Like for example, very early in LinkedIn, we had a bunch of people who refer to themselves
0:18:32 as lines, LinkedIn open-networkers, and they’re like, “Your product’s for us.”
0:18:37 And I was like, “No, actually, in fact, it’s for the entire billions of professionals,
0:18:40 not just the people who refer themselves as open-networkers.
0:18:43 And so we want to have a place for open-networkers, but we don’t want to have everything else.”
0:18:50 So if we only oriented towards them as product-market fit, we would not be where LinkedIn is today.
0:18:54 But you’re offering a very difficult choice for an entrepreneur.
0:19:00 So are you supposed to go deep and really take care of this minimum viable market?
0:19:06 Or are you supposed to go broad and when Jeffrey Moore’s terminology, get over to Main Street?
0:19:12 So I think generally speaking, you want to take an iterative learning process where you
0:19:16 are de-risking as much as possible to get to Main Street.
0:19:19 Sometimes that’s a minimal viable initial market.
0:19:23 And by the way, in a bunch of classic industries like enterprise software, that is usually
0:19:27 what you do is you go, “Okay, first I’m going to sell to some banks, then I’m going to broaden
0:19:30 to other industries, or first I’m selling to the HR department, then I’m going to broaden
0:19:32 to the finance department.”
0:19:35 That’s a very smart, coherent strategy.
0:19:40 But when you’re doing consumer internet stuff, you’re doing Airbnb, you’re doing other kinds
0:19:41 of things.
0:19:43 That’s not the strategy that fully works.
0:19:48 I interviewed the professor who did the invisible gorilla, you know, where the gorilla comes
0:19:51 out and the people are tossing balls and nobody notices the gorilla.
0:19:55 And he had a very interesting concept of you always ask what’s missing.
0:20:02 A different example is lots of people say, “Well, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, they didn’t
0:20:03 go to college.
0:20:04 I don’t need to go to college.”
0:20:08 But what’s missing is what about the people who did go to college, did they get successful?
0:20:11 And what about the people who didn’t go to college?
0:20:15 Were they also failures and these are the only two or three success stories?
0:20:17 I’m transferring this to Blitzscaling.
0:20:20 You can say, “Well, Apple’s Blitzscaling.”
0:20:23 What about the companies who tried to Blitzscale and didn’t?
0:20:28 And what about the companies who didn’t try to Blitzscale and just went at a slower pace?
0:20:31 How do we know what’s missing and when do we apply what?
0:20:37 This is one of the things that makes entrepreneurship fun and hard and there’s frequently times
0:20:40 where people Blitzscale and fail and blow up.
0:20:44 There’s times where they don’t Blitzscale but someone else Blitzscales and then that
0:20:49 causes them trouble because if you’re competing with a Blitzscaler, that almost always puts
0:20:54 you in a difficult spot because they will be absorbing a lot of the oxygen in the market.
0:20:57 They’ll be spending capital to hire talent, they’ll be spending capital to hire customers,
0:21:02 they’ll be spending capital on getting press and other kinds of the marketing genius that
0:21:08 you yourself are one of the premier book authors in and so forth.
0:21:13 And so it’s very hard to be competing against someone who is Blitzscaling and sometimes they
0:21:16 shouldn’t be but sometimes you have to in order to compete.
0:21:19 So that is the complex things.
0:21:22 Now you say why Blitzscale?
0:21:24 It’s actually, it’s not a goal into itself.
0:21:33 It’s a goal because in a particular circumstance, Blitzscaling is less risky than not Blitzscaling.
0:21:36 That’s the only time that you’re, because Blitzscaling by the way is very risky.
0:21:38 And what would be examples of that?
0:21:45 Well for example, in early days of PayPal, if you don’t get to well north of a billion
0:21:49 dollars in kind of transaction volume, you’re so subscale you die.
0:21:51 So you need to get to scale.
0:21:53 If you’re not at scale, you just die.
0:21:54 You must play to get to scale.
0:21:57 Well that’s a classic one, I need to get to scale economic.
0:22:02 So would you say to Lewis Borders, you tried to Blitzscale, you failed but you did the
0:22:03 right thing?
0:22:08 Well in Webvan, which I think is probably what you’re referring to there, I’d say that
0:22:13 you probably had a bad capital market in terms of how you were thinking about how it all
0:22:15 come together.
0:22:21 Generally speaking, most Blitzscaling stuff tends to work much better within software sides
0:22:26 because software, you’re operating marginal cost as you’re scaling is within a relatively
0:22:27 low band.
0:22:31 So if you haven’t predicted it well, then you’re okay.
0:22:33 You have parameters of error in doing it.
0:22:39 Now sometimes there’s amazing things like jobs with the iPod or the iPhone, which bets
0:22:44 all in, bets this huge company on and then plays out and works.
0:22:46 So it can happen.
0:22:48 But it’s just much, much harder then.
0:22:55 Could you just give me the read-off and sort of analyst, like when you hear a pitch and
0:23:01 you immediately think, network effect and scaling, what triggers the positive reaction?
0:23:07 So obviously a lot of people use the term network effect and don’t really understand
0:23:09 fully what it means.
0:23:11 And part of it is because there’s a bunch of different related phenomena that all go
0:23:17 in it, which is roughly speaking the value of a product.
0:23:22 It becomes more value at a super linear thing to the number of people who have it.
0:23:27 So taking an old school example that’s now more or less doesn’t exist is fax machines.
0:23:31 If you have a fax machine and no one else does, completely useless.
0:23:35 And if only you and I have fax machines, then it’s like, okay, that’s kind of entertaining
0:23:36 but it isn’t.
0:23:39 But when suddenly a million people and the people you don’t know, suddenly it’s very
0:23:40 valuable.
0:23:45 And by the way, being on that fax machine network, on that protocol really, really matters.
0:23:46 And so then that spreads.
0:23:52 And network effect businesses, whether they’re LinkedIn, Airbnb, other kinds of things are
0:23:57 hugely valuable because being in the network is hugely valuable.
0:24:04 And so more or less, anytime I see a network effect business that I’m given an opportunity
0:24:06 to invest in, I usually do it.
0:24:07 All right.
0:24:12 So now just walk me through quickly the perfect pitch to read or gray law.
0:24:14 Is it 60 slides?
0:24:15 What is it?
0:24:17 Hundred page business plan.
0:24:19 Well, what’s the ideal pitch?
0:24:21 So it’s almost never a business plan.
0:24:27 Business plans are kind of old school entrepreneurship from relative to the modern Silicon Valley.
0:24:28 It is a slide deck.
0:24:34 It’s probably somewhere between 25 and 40 slides, although we’re not really counting that.
0:24:42 What it is is, did you answer the central questions concisely for what is the theory
0:24:46 of the game by which this business will be huge and transform an industry.
0:24:50 So some of it’s like, what the product is, what the good market is, what the competition
0:24:55 looks like, what the capital requirements look like, what technological trends are you
0:25:00 deploying and leveraging and building upon, and do you have the talent to know how to
0:25:01 play it off?
0:25:07 And roughly those sometimes are special questions that apply to it, but it’s like, what’s the
0:25:14 simple, straightforward, most important strategic variables in solving those problems?
0:25:16 Switching to AI.
0:25:23 So you who have built so many successful network effect companies, I have this question that
0:25:30 I cannot answer for myself, which is, how does any of these LLM companies, Perplexity,
0:25:34 which is the world’s stupidest name for a company, open AI.
0:25:35 I’m perplexed.
0:25:36 Yeah.
0:25:37 Any of those.
0:25:39 How do they build the brand loyalty?
0:25:44 Because I got four or five of them bookmarked and I just almost randomly use them.
0:25:51 How do I ever develop, I’m a Gemini guy, I’m a chat GPT guy, I’m a Claude guy, like how
0:25:54 do you think that’s going to shake out?
0:26:04 On the pure one-on-one agent basis today, I think that they are very multi-deployable.
0:26:06 I don’t mean interchangeable because I actually think they have different things that they’re
0:26:10 good at and so forth, but you could say, “Hey, I’m working on this particular problem.
0:26:15 I’m going to deploy Claude and chat GPT and I’m working on this other problem.
0:26:18 I’m going to do co-pilot,” et cetera, et cetera.
0:26:23 Now, as the features develop and as these products develop, one of the obvious ones
0:26:25 that everyone’s talking about is memory.
0:26:27 I remember a guy and what guys are.
0:26:32 And once you start interacting with it and it started building up how am I most useful
0:26:37 to guy and I have that memory, that begins to be somewhat sticky because it’s like, “I
0:26:41 remember what guy cares about, what guy is interested in, what things might be most helpful
0:26:42 to guy,” et cetera.
0:26:44 So it’s a switching cause.
0:26:45 Yes.
0:26:47 That’s one and I’m sure there’ll be others.
0:26:52 What is the point of your clone?
0:26:59 In essence, too much of the dialogue around AI is that AI is destructive.
0:27:00 It’s going to take our jobs.
0:27:02 It’s going to ruin our elections.
0:27:05 There’s these people who worry about human race and humanity.
0:27:07 And so they say, “Well, why are companies building it?
0:27:10 They’re building it because they’re just going to make profits off it.”
0:27:16 And what they don’t realize is there’s amazing great things for society, a medical assistant
0:27:22 on every smartphone, a tutor on every smartphone for everyone in humanity who has access to
0:27:24 a smartphone, really, really important stuff.
0:27:25 And so being positive.
0:27:29 And when I was thinking about that, those kind of positive cases and how to shift the
0:27:34 dialogue to, not to say ignore the negative cases or how we maneuver, but what is the
0:27:38 future that we’re trying to build towards, I said, “What’s the most negative that people
0:27:39 always talk about negative?”
0:27:42 And it’s like intrinsic in the deep, fake name.
0:27:45 It’s like, “What are these images?
0:27:46 They’re deep fakes.
0:27:47 They’re just bad.”
0:27:50 And I said, “Okay, well, let me start thinking about positive uses for this.”
0:27:55 And I said, “Well, okay, one positive use is it could be entertainment and the new media
0:27:56 type.
0:27:59 Hence, how I launched is me talking to ReadAI, my digital twin.
0:28:05 Another one is I gave a speech at Perugia where I had the ReadAI give it in a variety
0:28:11 of languages because I really only semi-competent in English and not competent in other languages.
0:28:15 And so, but I had to give it in Chinese, Hindi, Italian, all these other things.
0:28:17 And that’s a way of doing human connection.
0:28:25 And that’s just the beginning of how you can use this to be positive in society, positive
0:28:27 in how you’re establishing your brand.
0:28:29 Just to show that it’s possible.
0:28:37 Read, you are talking to someone who is, there are few people beyond you and I, I think who
0:28:39 are more optimistic about AI.
0:28:43 I think AI may be the thing that saves society.
0:28:44 I really do.
0:28:50 I freak out a lot of people because I tell them that I think AI is God that because AI
0:28:54 is it’s eternal omniscient and omnipotent sounds like God.
0:29:00 And so my story is that God is up there and she said, “I blew it with the human race.
0:29:01 I gave them free will.
0:29:02 They screwed it all up.
0:29:03 They’re killing each other.
0:29:04 They’re polluting the world.
0:29:08 And they’re so arrogant that I can’t just solve it.
0:29:10 I got to send them something they think they invented.
0:29:12 So I sent them AI.
0:29:16 Now, I’m not saying Sam Altman is Jesus, just let’s make that clear.
0:29:17 Sam doesn’t think so either.
0:29:19 Yeah, I don’t know about that.
0:29:20 No, he doesn’t.
0:29:21 He doesn’t.
0:29:22 I know and love Sam a lot.
0:29:27 So I think AI is the only thing that’s going to save us, I really do.
0:29:32 I think that AI is much more likely to save us, even if we don’t do very much than it
0:29:38 is to trouble us, but I think we also can steer intelligently and even increase those
0:29:39 percentages.
0:29:40 Yeah.
0:29:51 Whenever people confront me, I say to them, “Let me give you a choice.
0:29:53 You can have people who control nuclear weapons.
0:29:56 There’s a multiple choice this.
0:30:00 Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, or ChatGPT.
0:30:03 You pick one to launch nuclear missiles.
0:30:05 I know what I would pick.
0:30:06 Yes.
0:30:10 I wouldn’t pick ChatGPT yet, but eventually, yes.
0:30:12 Well, I have this experiment.
0:30:21 I tell people, “Go to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT if we should teach American students the history
0:30:22 of slavery in America.”
0:30:25 And if you ask it, it gives very good answers.
0:30:26 Yes.
0:30:31 And this is actually one of the things that’s amazing about elevating human potential, human
0:30:36 capabilities is it is already an infinitely patient tutor.
0:30:38 For example, you say, “You have a subject you’re curious about.
0:30:41 Say you’re curious about something difficult, like quantum mechanics.
0:30:46 You can go to ChatGPT and say, “Explain quantum mechanics to a 12-year-old, and it will start
0:30:47 giving you a very good explanation.”
0:30:48 Okay.
0:30:49 I think I can understand more on that.
0:30:50 Okay.
0:30:54 Explain quantum mechanics to a college student, and we’ll start doing that.
0:30:57 This is already a way that you could start learning and understanding things.
0:31:03 You could go to Duran DeSantis and say, “Should we teach the history of slavery to students?”
0:31:04 I would pick ChatGPT.
0:31:07 I would pick ChatGPT 11 out of 10 times.
0:31:08 Okay.
0:31:11 My last question for you.
0:31:13 I don’t want to end on a downer, but I kind of have to.
0:31:16 Let’s say this worst case happens and Trump wins.
0:31:17 Seriously.
0:31:18 What are you going to do?
0:31:23 I’m going to hope that a lot of the people who are defending him who say that he actually
0:31:29 does care about the rule of law, that he does care about governing the country well, turn
0:31:33 out to be right even though I deeply fear that they are wrong.
0:31:38 I will continue to try to help build technology companies that are part of the future, but
0:31:41 where I’ll be doing that and what I’ll be doing, that’s a TBD.
0:31:47 What if it’s you and me and Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiffer all in the same man’s in our
0:31:48 camp?
0:31:50 What are we going to do?
0:31:57 I think the effort goes on to try to be our better selves.
0:31:58 We have had setbacks.
0:31:59 We had to fix the slavery problem.
0:32:03 We do have major problems.
0:32:04 People say, “This is the worst time ever.”
0:32:07 It’s like, “Well, Civil War was really, really bad.”
0:32:11 It’s bad now, but it doesn’t mean that’s the worst ever.
0:32:16 You continue to fight for what’s good about the human spirit and about America.
0:32:20 That’s how we should end this.
0:32:27 On a hopeful note, because let me tell you, I’m very worried and it’s going to be … We’re
0:32:32 about two weeks from the election and it’s going to be a very interesting play.
0:32:33 Yes.
0:32:37 Look, I think one of the things, so probably a lot of business people listening to this,
0:32:42 most people normally presume that Republicans are better for business because they tend
0:32:44 to be lower regulation, which is generally good.
0:32:47 Lower corporate taxes, which is helpful for business.
0:32:53 What they’re not tracking is stability, unity, an ability to say a very good position in
0:32:56 the world, a place where we are respected.
0:32:58 All of those things really matter.
0:33:05 And Kamala is the very first presidential candidate in US history who were in acceptance
0:33:08 speech talked about the importance of founders.
0:33:13 She is actually, in fact, having grown up in California, pro-business, and that stability
0:33:14 is the most important.
0:33:19 If you want to vote for the business candidate, you’re going to vote for Harris.
0:33:23 And the story, this has been remarkable people and, of course, this is the remarkable Reid
0:33:24 Hoffman.
0:33:26 Thank you very much for being here.
0:33:27 Thank you, guys.
0:33:34 This is Remarkable People.