Reid Hoffman: Unlocking Limitless Human Possibilities With AI | Artificial Intelligence | E333

154.115 - 155.417 Will Salatin

What consolation is there in that?

155.477 - 171.765 Tim Miller

I don't know. Personal validation. Yeah. All that matters is solipsism. All that matters is having my own brain. Okay, I knew that you'd be on the other side of that, but I figured some of the listeners would be on my side. I'm enjoying it. There's another thing. It was related. I don't know. Ezra Klein, you might have heard of him.

156.588 - 177.667 Hala Taha

Welcome back to the show. Today we are playing part two of my episode with Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman is an incredible entrepreneur. He's the co-founder of LinkedIn and Inflection AI. And in part one of this conversation, we focused on entrepreneurship. So if you haven't heard that yet, make sure you subscribe. Stop and go back and listen to that one first, especially for an entrepreneur.

171.805 - 187.592 Tim Miller

He's kind of a minor columnist, and we might have him on the pod again soon. He had a piece over the weekend that said this. Trump is acting like a king because he's too weak to govern like a president. He's trying to substitute perception for reality. He's hoping that perception then becomes reality.

178.027 - 202.672 Hala Taha

We talk all about blitz scaling. We talk about his early failures as an entrepreneur, and he uncovered so many gems in this conversation. You don't want to miss it. If you've already heard that one, go enjoy part two of this episode on AI, where we're going to learn everything that he believes AI will bring to our future, including our own personal AI agents. It was an incredible conversation.

427.555 - 446.672 Tim Miller

And they are saying that this is an obvious disruption to FBI operations, the degree to which it can't be overstated. The forced retirement of director, deputy director, and now all five executive assistant directors. They say that this extreme disruption is occurring at a time when the terrorist threat around the world has never been greater. It's putting us at great risk.

441.153 - 459.207 Reid Hoffman

There's just a stack of things where you go, just creating it is better. Next thing is people say, well, what about jobs? And you say, well, okay, there's basically, I think always in the transition, there'll be difficulties and challenges and navigating that transition is one of the things I'm most focused on.

447.152 - 457.017 Tim Miller

And we have basically, you know, the weekend of the long knives at the FBI. And this is coming to a head with the Kash Patel vote coming up in the Senate.

457.457 - 478.973 Will Salatin

So the big picture on this to me is, you and I are like trying to have a friendly conversation about this, but this is extremely serious. And what's basically happened is that A crime boss has taken over law enforcement. He's president of the United States. He's taken over the Justice Department. And he's putting his accomplices in charge of the Justice Department, the FBI.

460.236 - 472.561 Reid Hoffman

But it's just like the industrial revolution with the loom and everything else and moving to the power loom. And we're going to have that. That's going to have a disruption in society. There's going to be challenges with that, guaranteed.

867.538 - 878.82 Reid Hoffman

if we go through it, if we do it in the right way, it'll be magical, I think, anyway, but it can be less suffering on the path to being magical and better navigated if we do it the right way.

875.123 - 887.367 Will Salatin

So undermining USAID in particular on Trump's part is part and parcel of his, you know, de facto alliance with the authoritarians of the world, right? Here's this annoying agency.

879.577 - 900.123 Hala Taha

So when you say super agency, basically what you're saying is we have human agency with AI. They'll be helping us become better humans. And that's why we have super agency. And then AI itself is going to be able to do things on its own, right? So can you talk to us about how AI will have agency? And then how do we imagine humans actually interacting with AI online?

887.387 - 889.008 Tim Miller

Yeah, throw China in there too, obviously.

889.028 - 910.594 Will Salatin

Yeah, right, right. There's an absolutely direct connection. I mean, USAID basically does, you know, good things liberals like. The whole idea of international development is like something. Trump's isolationism, America first, a lot of it is we're tired of being the good guys. We're tired of like giving things to other people. We're tired of helping other people.

1090.028 - 1116.406 Tim Miller

Any guess on the race of Kay Coles-James, Will? Uh, let me guess. Uh, it has to do with Ebony. Yeah. Yes. There you go. Black. Yeah. Uh, Tim Scott, Katie Coles, James conservatives. They need to take a knee. They need to learn their place, natural place and take a knee to MAGA. So this guy is really, uh, he was fired from the first Trump administration for his associations with white nationalists.

1108.312 - 1121.737 Reid Hoffman

Now, if you look at it today, like one of the things that I'm a little always bemused by is people say, I saw two articles in one day earlier this year, which was all that AI is good for is faking homework. AI is going to destroy all jobs. And you're like, what? Okay.

1116.446 - 1137.864 Tim Miller

He was one of the only people too racist to be fired from the first Trump administration. He's been brought back, uh, He's also pro-Uyghur genocide, essentially, or at least a big excuser of the Uyghur genocide. And talking about how he said that we treat American rural whites worse than China treats the Uyghur minority. And then this takes us to South Africa.

1122.438 - 1142.215 Reid Hoffman

Part of that's like right now, you're like, look, there's a very long way away from all this implication that everyone's talking about. I mean, there's some that's right here right now that's really spectacular, but there's a long journey, a long path, a long role for human beings to be participating in various ways and to be evolving and changing. And I, for one, look forward to that path.

1138.663 - 1157.11 Tim Miller

There's an interesting statement from Trump this morning, from Trump yesterday morning, rather. South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of people very badly. It is a bad situation that the radical left media doesn't want to so much as mention. The United States won't stand for it.

1555.188 - 1576.083 Hala Taha

So I know that you co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleiman. And one of your big missions there is to create companions that have high emotional intelligence for humans. It's not a workplace tool. You're really creating companions for people. Why do you think that's important? And what gap did you see in the AI world? Why did you get on board with that?

1558.819 - 1579.561 Tim Miller

I guess he's given Elon carte blanche to... interfere in the payment system. Among the things that he said that he wants to put a stop payment on is payment to Lutheran religious services because the Lutheran services, they're providing services for immigrants. Obviously, we wouldn't want to do that. So, you know, the

1576.67 - 1592.578 Reid Hoffman

So that's how we start with inflection. And part of that was because we said, well, what's the world that we see that necessarily people don't see that could be a very good product to create? Entrepreneur one, right? And we said, look, this agent, eugenic world coming, there's going to be more agents than people.

1580.482 - 1596.352 Tim Miller

The Christian, the presidency, the presidency brought in by Christians who, you know, great evangelical Christians like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. They're shutting down all payments to the Lutheran religious services. Anyway, JVL has kind of an even darker take on what's happening.

1593.198 - 1611.308 Reid Hoffman

Everyone's going to have an agent that's their own personal agent that they have trust with. with and is on their side. And what are the key attributes of that? Because if you look at even the very earliest of how other people were thinking about agents, they were thinking about as information processing and work. And we were thinking about this as a trusted companion for how you'd operate.