The Future You Avoid Is Riskier Than the One You Face with Reid Hoffman | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

Going down that rabbit hole. What science fiction do we need these days? Reid?

So the thing that was really magical for me, but Frost, you know, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, even to some degree the early 90s, was a notion that what we're creating with technology, what we're creating as the possible human future can be amazing. Like the sense of the world could be much better for all human beings, not to say without big challenges and navigations and issues, but it could be. And you don't have to be as simplistic as like the Jetsons, but it's just kind of a sense of what does the path ahead look like.

There are only a handful of entrepreneurs who, it's safe to say that their companies change the way we do things. Reid Hoffman is one of those entrepreneurs, and LinkedIn is one of those companies. There was a time when posting our resumes online would get us fired. Now being on LinkedIn is just how we work. His mentality of giving power back to the people has permeated every aspect of Reid's life, even his full embrace of AI and what it can do for humanity, which he writes about in his book Super Super Agency. But it was our conversation about idealism, the need for it and what happened to it that really inspired me. This is a bit of optimism.

What did you want to be when you were a kid?

Oh, that's interesting. There are different phases.

It was.

I'd say the first thought was probably a science fiction author because I was reading a lot of science fiction.

How, how old are you now, approximately?

I am like, My birthday was two days ago, so I'm 58 and two days. Oh, happy birthday. Thank you. And then I started realizing that you want to do kind of contribute to making the world better. So then I had this kind of plan, and I think it's a very science fiction enhanced plan that I and a group of friends would all get into positions by which we could influence the world to try to make it more peaceful, less warlike, more compassionate. You know, kind of key what we think of as.

Essential human virtues, right? And then realized that, oh, and this will be a very weird thing that I've never ever said before on a public camera. My theory, now this is again, a 12 year old's theory.

Was like, oh, and the right way to do that will be to become the director of the CIA. And then when I was talking about that with my dad, he bought a book for me called the Crimes of the US Intelligence Agencies. And I was reading through it. Oh, assassinations. Oh, like I was like, okay, scratch that plan. And then after that, I didn't have a plan for a long time.

I guess through universities, it was try to contribute to public intellectual discourse, which what I mean is, is who are we and who should we be as individuals and as groups? And, you know, I thought maybe being an academic would be a path to that. So there was a. There was a number of years where I thought I'd become a philosophy professor. And then I realized that the kind of the scholarship canon of the academic humanities was more about scholarship and less about the kind of the evolution of the human condition, about the participation and the improvement of society. I was like, okay, I don't want to do that. Fortunately, I'd gone through Stanford, so I unders. Was acquitted. What is this software entrepreneurship thing that could be interesting? And that's, you know, how I ended up on my modern path.

And the rest, as they say, is history. What I think is so interesting is I asked you, what did you want to be when you grew up? Like, when. What did you want to be when you were a little kid? And you said, my plan was.

Yes.

Those are not the same question.

Yes, like, I wanted to be an astronaut. There was no plan for that. It was just the idea of it was so magical and fantastical.

I don't think I have ever had a. A thing that it wasn't a plan, like all the way back to five. Like, so, like, that's the way I am. Like the, the way that Reid answers that question.

Yeah.

Is that way. Right. It's like you say, okay, what do you want to be? You want to be an astronaut? Okay, what do you need to do in order to become an astronaut?

Right.

Like, okay, I need to understand physics. I need to have a certain kind of physical capability. I need to be within certain kinds of. Of programs in order to do it, you know, etc. Etc. And then that would start being like, like, you know, like, like at least components of thinking. Right. So if not action, the, The.

But you. The one fantasy you had, I guess, was to be a science fiction author.

Yep.

What was the reason you wanted to be a science fiction author?

Well, it was participating in the dialogue. I mean, the thing that I loved about science fiction As a child, 5.

Year old or 12 year old says, I want to participate in the dialogue.

Oh, yeah, no, no, look, I was, I was. Well, look, I may not have said that sentence, but that was what the intent was.

Mom, Dad, I would like to contribute to the discussion of the betterment of humankind through my works of science fiction.

Yes. Look, to give you a sense here, I'll tell you a funny anecdote from 12. So I was actually intensely into fantasy role playing games. I started when I was 8 because my dad hired a babysitter who introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons and then was surprised by my. The next day when I was talking to him was like, could you go out on dates more often? Like, like, hire Michael the babysitter back, right? Like, every night's good, right? And. And so when I got to 12, I was talking to some of my friends at school, and one of them said, hey, there's this fantasy role playing game company called the Chaosium, which publishes a game called RuneQuest that is like the next block over from my house. And so I literally walked down there, walked into the office and started trying to, like, get in the action because it was kind of like, like, how do I participate in this? Making a fantasy role, playing games and doing stuff. And I remember the really irritated look that the editor in chief was like, who the. Like, it's our customers, so we kind of can't kick them out brutally. But like, how the fuck do we get rid of this kid? And so what he did, and it was only years later when I realized what that look meant, right? It was like, at the time, it was like, I'm here. And.

He handed me.

A scenario pack, which is kind of what they give to the person who's leading the game adventure, the game master, dungeon master. He said, we're working on this. Go look at this. And then come back. And I think he thought, okay, this kid will never come back because I've given the kid work. Being the obsessive kid that I was, this was, I think, Friday afternoon. I came back Monday afternoon with the entire thing, like, redlined. Like, I'd worked through it. I was like, this part doesn't work. You need a character here, you know, because I just worked the entire weekend on this thing, right? And I know I did know when I handed him, he's like, oh, God, that didn't work. And then I started looking at it, went, I need to pay you for this because, like, I want to use this, so I'm going to write you a check. And. And. And so it was my actually first ever job for payment, but it was that same kind of participate in the dialogue. Be. Yeah, be. Be kind of part of what is being created. And that was the, you know, that's. That. That's the reason why, like, that is a science fiction author. Which I may still, at some point try to get some science fiction created. I don't know if I will ever write any myself, but I may try to organize a project to create some of the kind of science fiction I think we need these days.

Oh, I was about to go to the next question. Some of the science fiction, dot, dot, dot, that we need these days.

Yes.

Okay, I'm going down that rabbit hole. What science fiction do we need these days? Read.

So the thing that was really magical for us, for me, but Frost, you know, in the, you know, the 60s, 70s, 80s, even to some degree, the early 90s, maybe even into the 90s, was a notion that what we're creating with technology, what we're creating as the possible human future.

Yep.

Can be amazing. Doesn't mean that there aren't real issues. You know, Terminator was made the 90s or then some things to kind of navigate. But, but like this, the sense of the world could be much better for all human beings, not to say without big challenges and navigations and issues, but it could be. And you don't have to be as simplistic as like, you know, the Jetsons, but it's just kind of a.

You know, kind of a sense of what are the. What does the path ahead look like? And right now, when you look at the majority of science fiction, especially of the. The video format, you know, movies and so forth, the vast majority of that is dystopic. Yes. And the problem is you don't get a future like, you don't get a future that you want by avoiding the futures you don't want. It's a little bit like if I was planning on driving from San Francisco down to see you in la, if I said, well, I first have to plan to avoid all possible traffic accidents, all possible potholes, all possible. I'll never get to la. I won't get there. I won't even get on the car to go. And so you have to have, like, this is the future that we're trying to get to. And of course you go, hey, it's raining a lot. I should drive a little slower. You know, just, you know, you adjust. But you have to have that, and we need that in science fiction. We need that, that kind of sense of imagination, of. Of goodness and matter of fact. In 2019, because I had been talking to the Creative Artists Agency about this, you know, some of my friends there, Richard Lovett and others had asked me to come and, and give a talk at the end of their talent summary, and I basically Was like, you know, it's up to you guys to start stop harming the imagination of our human futures. Yeah, and I get it that the most natural drama is man vs. Machine, where the evil machine is basically almost, you know, is beaten by the man. But like, you know, it's man versus machine. It's like, look how we get to this entire modern life of all of the things that we love about modern life is by the way, through the creation of machines. Right.

Okay, two, two thoughts come to mind. Two completely different paths. I'm going to go down one, I'll come back and go down to the other. Okay, two rabbit holes. One is the whole discussion about AI right now. The science fiction is the discussion of AI, the imagining the future. What could be the idealism, some of the scariness as well, because it's dominating every conversation, every conference, you know, for good, for good reasons and annoying reasons. But is that this, this the, the science fiction discourse of the day?

Most of it, most of it is because.

It'S much easier to imagine how things go wrong than how they go. Right.

And so, but those, those that are investing in, in AI, you know, have no dystopian anything. It's all utopian. And is it, can we trust that their science fiction views of the future are the ones that should inspire us or should, should we be cynical given their, their conflicts of interest?

Well, I would say call it 85 trust 15 cynicism. Okay, right. So is the fact that you know the facts. The people at OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Microsoft are all actually, in fact people like you and I care about what happens with, you know, the friends and family, their communities, all the rest that cares about like what happens in terms of the progress of the elevation of human welfare. Absolutely, yes. And so, you know, they kind of the simplistic, you know, what is kind of classic, mostly lefty populist story, which is, oh, because of profit, they're gonna like ruin the whole human race. It's literally deep misunderstandings in both human nature, in the nature of corporations and how people work together in the nature of like, for example, even when you're a completely full blooded capitalist, you're like, well actually, in fact, ruining humanity would be bad not just for me, but for my business. So it's kind of like, it's this question on like, the intents and so forth are good. Now the reason why the 15% hold back is blind spots and part of where it's useful for.

For people who have, you know, concerns Is say, well I think there's a blind spot here and there's something you we should do something about. Now the most often blind spot is well, we're driving to LA and we don't know what the danger is ahead so we should go five miles an hour. And you're like, well that's not going to work because other people are not going to go five miles an hour, not other companies, not other countries, not other industries, et cetera, et cetera. So you, you have to say no, no, we're going to go at the kind of speed of traffic. Right. But we're going to try to navigate it within going the speed of traffic.

Okay, I'm going to put on my cynical hat here. So you talk about the, the mi, the misunderstanding of capitalism, you know, that, you know, it's not good for business to destroy the planet or to destroy the, the market. Yeah, you're talking about Adam Smith capitalism, which is, you know, which is, which is more long term focused. It's what old fashioned Goldman Sachs used to call long term greed.

Right.

And a strong argument can be made because of the way that capitalism has become more and more short termist, more and more shareholder focused, not customer or employee focused, that we will do damage to the market because by the time it's damaged, I'm out of here.

Right.

And it just reminds me of, of Kodak, where kodak in the 1970s invented the digital camera, suppressed the technology because they didn't want to cannibalize film sales and paper sales and chemical sales. And the thought of having to reinvent their company was like ugh. And licensed their digital technology to Fuji and other Canon, other Japanese companies who sort of pioneered digital photography. And then eventually digital photography takes over and basically bankrupts Kodak. And the executives who made those decisions who had foresight, let's be honest, they knew the world was going to go digital. They weren't idiots. But at the end of the day they bankrupted the company. But they were long gone and retired with their big fat bonuses for driving the stock price up for the 10 years that, you know, they were making money making coin off of the license. So is it maybe 50, 50, not 85, 15.

Well, but it would be. Can we. Look, the worst part is actually the one that I most often use for where I think capitalism goes very wrong in human welfare is unfortunately the incentives in the medical industry. Which is the incentives in the medical industry are we are all in chronic desperate conditions and need to be paying for drugs and dialysis and Everything else every week in order to sustain. And I think that's the classic where the economic incentives kind of align to, you know, bad for society.

The wrong thing.

The wrong thing. Because by the way, the. The collapse of Kodak is exactly the kind of thing where bad board of directors, bad management causes a company to collapse. And by the way, that does create chaos for the workers of Kodak, for the company town and Kodak. And so it destroyed Rochester. Exactly. So real issues, but at the overall, the market actually still assumes and goes to places beyond those bad actors. And the impact on, call it society as a whole, humanity is not necessarily bad.

I see what you mean. So they made. They made bad decisions for the company.

Yes, they did.

Bad decisions for society writ large, you know, excluding the town in which they worked in.

Yes. So, but that's also the reason why I go 85, 15. Because even with this kind of market dynamic.

Oh, that's interesting.

There is still things go wrong. Medical is the one they most often use is the things that go wrong. There is others too. Yeah. The one that's kind of the cause celebrity for the last 10 years is the advertising model. And actually, I think the advertising model gets far too much grief.

Because when you go to. It's almost like a version of patronizing. You go to the vast majority of human beings and you say, would you rather pay for this thing or have it for free with someone else buying it for you so they can advertise to you. And most human beings go, yeah, I'd rather have it for free, please. And you go, well, you shouldn't want that.

You're like, well, I mean, I think Tim Cook summed it up right. If you don't pay for the product, you are the product.

Yeah. Look. And even if you do that, that most people go, yeah, that's what I want. Thank you very much. Don't be patronizing to me.

Allow me to express my own preferences.

Yeah. I was in Europe and they have different rules there. And I logged onto Instagram and it offered me to pay for it and have no ads or have the ads. And as much as I hate the ad model, I know the system is listening to me. I know it's tracking me. The thought of spending $79 a year to use Instagram, I was like, yeah.

No, yeah, See, look. And the most sympathetic I am to this point is to say look, because there's enough people who don't want it. You have to kind of nudge them to force them to offer that as an option.

Yeah.

Right, but by the way, of course it's going to be premiumly priced. Not because they just simply want to drag to drive you to advertising, it's that the. Well, look, actually, in fact, we're optimizing our entire business operations or hiring an ad for us and all the rest of the stuff. And if you're going to say we're going to cut off part of our product from all that, that's going to be an expensive subunit, so let's charge for the subunit. So anyway, this is all a digression into the patterns in capitalism. The thing that I think is important, look, if there was no. Earlier this year, as you know, I published a book, super agency, try to make the Optimistic case for AI. And obviously it's like the most optimistic book for AI that's out there, especially.

Written by, dare I say, dare I say science fiction.

Yeah, well, a lens, a more pragmatic science fiction. Yes. And now.

If there was no criticism, I would have put more criticism in it because it's not that I'm absent the criticism, it's just that the dialogue is so much like, AI is coming for your jobs and for your lives and for, you know, like, it's like, okay, like that's science fiction. Right. And it doesn't mean there aren't huge transformations. But the way that we're talking about AI, part of what I was trying to remind people is, is the same way people talked about the printing press. Right. They said, well, but this time's different. It's like, well, each time is indeed different and this time might be different. It has a lot of differences. Yeah, but don't take the trivial of I can think of something to go wrong. And therefore, because this is like, for example, a classic thing that is discussed in this. And I'll get back to the, to the. How much do we trust the companies? But classic thing is precautionary principle, which is, well, if something serious can go wrong, we should actually, in fact try to totally minimize it. And if you're like, well, okay, you could die driving to la. And if you say, well, I'm never going to get in the car until I know that I couldn't drive dying, you know, die driving to la, then you're never going to get in the car. Right. So you have to have precautionary principles.

But there's acceptable risks.

Yes.

You know, you're not going to get in a car without brakes.

Yes, 100%.

We have our cars inspected for a reason.

Yes.

And we want pilots to walk around the plane before we take off for a reason. You know, we understand that most accidents are pilot error, for example, but there's an acceptable level of risk.

Yes. And by the way, this is part of the reason why, you know, the earlier Biden executive order was something I supported and was doing, because it's kind of like, hey, have red teams be investigating the risk, doing stuff like, that's good stuff to do. The companies actually are still all doing that because they went, yes, this is a good idea to do. We will do that.

And so that's the reason why it's kind of like 85% positive. And.

Yeah.

And there's one of the things.

So here's. I have a question. I'd love to get your opinion about this, which is. And, you know, you talked about how technology throughout history is disruptive and scary, and it does absolutely change the way our lives work. And I think we have to accept that depending on the technology. But some of those technologies change our brain. They change how we work. The Iliad was handed down through oral history. It's like, son, it's time I tell you the story of the Iliad. I'm like, you memorized 800 pages? Like, no, no. My dad told me, and now I'm going to tell you. And, like, and then when the printing press came out, the brain literally was like, I don't need to remember stuff anymore. And it just stopped remembering stuff. I remember just in my lifetime, I used to have a mind like a steel trap for phone numbers. You told me your phone number. I knew everybody's phone number, lists of phone numbers. And then I was one of the first people to get a Casio digital diary with 2k of memory. And I put all the phone numbers out of my head into the technology, because I like technology. To this day, I know my phone number and my sister's phone number, and I can't remember anybody's phone number because my brain was like, you don't need it. I'm going to turn that function off. Or the calculator. We just stop being good at math. Right? Like, I think most of us are okay letting go of some of our talents and gifts and outsourcing it to technology. The question I'm asking is, what facilities, what faculties are we going to lose because we're outsourcing to the AI? And my fear is that it's not just our memories. Maybe that's acceptable, but rather, there's going to be a decline in. In. In human skills and other really important things, like Ability to cope with stress and other things because we outsourced it to the machine. That's what I'm asking, which is what faculties are we going to lose because of the technology?

Well, the faculties are definitely going to change. But let me give you an example that I've been telling a bunch of the, you know, educators, university people because it's a very common thing to say, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, we're at the day of the GPT5 launch. I'm not going to write an essay. I'm just going to have GPT5 write the essay and I'm going to submit it and I'm not going to have to think or suffer or stare at a blank page in order to do that. Actually. In fact, I actually think our capabilities for training human beings is going to go way up. Because what's going to happen is examination is all going to happen by AI and the examination will be like oral exams for PhDs. Right. Like we all learn going through college, you know, to say, hey, I can predict the three to five questions that are likely to be on the exam. I'll prepare for those. I prepare just enough to be able to answer those within a three hour period and get a good grade. And that's my competence level right now what we're going to have in small n years, this might be three. Right. Two could be five. Where literally the cost of examination is zero. And literally you can start taking the examination whenever you want. You could take it on day two of the class and take it on day 17 as well and 23. And however you learn. And part of the reason why we reserve oral exams for PhDs is because it's the one that you have to, if you're really going to do it, you have to prep the whole area. Yeah. Like you have to be A to Z on it. And so what I think is actually going to happen is we're going to be able to calibrate what we said as a human society for which skills do we want, how do we want those examined and how are people prepared? So I actually, I'm not a idiocracy believer here. I may, I may. No, no, this is our question of our choice about how we set this up. And actually, in fact, it's going to get a lot more rigorous.

I think you make, I think you make a very good point with regards to school.

Yeah.

But let's now leave school. And the AI is writing the press release for me. It's Writing the blog entry for me, it's writing my article for the newspaper, it's writing my book for me, you know, and very competently, I might add. When I was in school, I had to do the studying to demonstrate to the test that I knew it. But in the, in once I go get a job, I'm not getting tested anymore. They only want me to do a good thing like write, write a piece and that's it. That's my job to keep writing press releases or whatever.

So where is the learning? Where is the struggle? Where is the, the ability to, to hone your craft if you're actually never doing your craft?

Well, what I think, as opposed to the like, like if you, you compare person A and person B competing and today's environment is, you know, person A and person B sit down a blank page and have to craft what looks like a press release, right? You know, press statement, and you have from scratch. That's no longer the, that's no longer.

The, that's no longer a thing.

The thing. But then the question is, well, what does it look like? Because person A and person B are still going to be competing, you know, in our universe. And maybe it's the which way they prompt the AI better recognize the strategic game of the, of the, of the nature, do things that are better evocations for, you know, the competitive game of.

I don't know, the construction is a fair construction. Right, Because I school, it was me versus test.

Yes.

You're talking about not. We're not always in competition. You know, we're in competition sometimes for promotion. We're in competition sometimes for the job, but sometimes I'm the guy. I'm the guy doing the thing.

I'm the guy.

There's no competition. So what do you do when there's no. But actually the competition is in sense a test, a measurement.

Well, but our whole society is based on competition. There's competition for the job, there's competition for. Between companies, between products, there's competition for the promotion. That doesn't mean that necessarily each one is a directly, easily measured one. But like, for example, you know, you don't go out, walk down main street town and say, hey Sarah, Bob, you're my PR press release writer, you know, come on, come, come do this. Because there's competition for the job, right? And even though you say, well, but there's some jobs there's less competition for like maybe, you know, greeter at a restaurant, it still has to be on time, friendly, etc. Etc. As ways of Doing this. And by the way, of course, the whole landscape of jobs changes.

So what you're suggesting is the metrics will be different. So, so the quality of the press release is no longer the thing by which I'm judging you as a PR person. Now I'm judging. Are you showing up on time? Are you a good team player? Did you, did you get the data points from the client? Right.

Did you know what the strategy was?

You know, the strategy is. So you're, you're, you're, you're arguing that the. It's still there, but the, the, the standards are different.

Exactly. Just like, for example, to take your Iliad, the standards no longer. Do you remember the 800 pages?

But, though, but those, those things are still there. Even if I have to do the work myself, I still have to be on time. I still have to understand the strategy where I'm, where I'm struggling, where I'm trying to wrap my head around this. Right. And I swear I have an open mind to this. I'm not trying to force any. I don't know, I don't have a particular bias, which is. And I've talked about this publicly before, which is I know that I am smarter, a better problem solver.

A better critical thinker. Not because I have a book, but because I wrote a book. Right. The awful slog of writing a book made me better at the things that I like to be good at. You know, critical thinking and the like, pattern recognition. And I could have asked the machine to write the book for me, and it would have done a fairly decent job, but the outcome might have been excellent, but the process.

Was missing.

And you are as smart as you are not simply because you were born smart, but when you built your company, you built it and you went through the hell of building it, and the struggles and the setbacks and you stuck with it. And the grit, which contributed to all of your intelligence, wisdom, and perspective today. And you wouldn't be as smart as you are now or have the perspectives you have now had you not gone through the shit.

Yeah. And what I'm, what I'm saying is there will be similar kinds of struggle and evolution. Yeah, right. Because. Yeah, and the struggle changes. I mean, look at, like, accounting, you know, 60 years ago, 70 years ago, accounting was very heavily, like, I write down all the numbers in the books I do all the advertiser, you know, the, the addition and all the rest, measure all that. Then when, like, spreadsheets came along, people said, oh, my God, accountants, they're all going to be out to work. They're all going to like they're no longer able to do this. Well now accounting is strategic. It's like, no, no, I trust the computer system will, the math is fine. The math will do all that. And I'll, you know, if something doesn't look like I'll go, where does this, why does this look wrong? Like what, what is leading this? Usually it's a data error. Yeah. And what you're doing is you're applying a different kind of thinking to it. Right. And, and I don't think that new, different kind of thinking is necessarily bad. I also don't think it's necessarily always better. I think it's a transformation. I do think that, for example, you know, the fact that we now, you know, this is like again like the calculator example, very few are your phone number example, very few of us, like if you said we're going to compete in a speed long division competition, you'd be sitting there going, okay, fuck, remember how to do this. Can't bring out the, can't bring out my smartphone for this one.

And, and so, you know, there are some losses, but with those losses come other, other gains.

Yeah, yeah.

And the intensity of the competitive moment of how we, and the reason I started with school is because school is how we kind of do the basic provisioning for entering into the competitive moments. The way that we do that is I think kind of up to us. And by the way, I have confidence like the reason I don't like go and write a lot about that and do that. I have confidence that we will over time work that out. Like an over time is not like a long time net. Net.

What you're saying, and I think accurately so, is we don't know yet 100%. But what we do know is that nature pours imbalance in a vacuum and it'll find equilibrium. And just as you know, technologists love to say, you know, 20 years ago, 80, 80% of the jobs today didn't exist. Well, so too you know, all the people talking about all the job loss, yes, that will happen or at least some degree of it will. However, 80% of the jobs 20 years from now don't exist. Now that we can't even imagine. It was only a couple of years ago that people said the future is prompting and you're going to take, you're going to be a professional prompter. Well, that lasted like six months because it turned out, didn't matter how good your promise were, the machine got Smarter.

Yes.

So we're already getting the predictions wrong about what the future of employment looks like.

And this is the thing, this is part of the reason I wrote Super Agency. Most people go, you can't predict the future. Oh my God, terror, terror, terror. Because it's a little bit like, right? If you said, hey, you're going to get in the airplane and you're not going to predict if it can land, you don't know if you can land. Ah, I'm not going to get an airplane. Right, of course. But the thing is, is this is what our actual whole life is. We just blind ourselves to more most of it. That's the reason I use the drive to la. It's like, can you guarantee that I can get to la, you know, completely safely? Absolutely not Zero. Right. But it's like, okay, reasonable enough. And then the whole discussion becomes as, okay, well, what's the level of risk now? If I thought the level of risk was we're handing every five year old a trigger with an atom bomb, it'd be like, okay, that's a very bad idea.

Don't do that. And like, for example, if someone said, hey, I'm going to take the AI system today and I'm going to run the like the nuclear defense system with it, you're like, yeah, don't do that. There have been bad movies about that, you know, Terminator, War Games, don't do that. But that doesn't mean don't build AI. That doesn't mean like, for example, like Sudhartha Mukherjee and I are doing, how can we accelerate the cure of cancer. Oh, this reminded me of the note that I wanted to say earlier. Just so people hear it. My optimism is not just a blind faith or a reasoned faith in the future. We have a line of sight to creating a medical assistant that's as good or better than current GPS available to everyone who can access a smartphone on the planet that runs for less than $5 an hour. The quality of human life elevation for that is immeasurable. It is so large that it just, it's life changing. So there are other prizes that are worth paying playing for here that are actually really important and they're not just like abstractions about like, oh good, we'll, we'll be able to code a lot better.

Okay, this is the perfect segue to go back to the second rabbit hole that I was going to go down about the changing nature of science fiction as you, as you articulated, which it was very, very optimistic and it became dystopian. At some point.

Why was science fiction so optimistic for so many years? And where are we getting the optimistic views of the future now, if not from science fiction?

I think it was optimistic because.

People allowed themselves to simply be amazed by what technology can create. And I actually do think that some remembrance of that simple amazement is a very good thing. I mean, like, for example, one of the things that I say about, you know, ChatGPT and Copilot and Gemini and Claude is if you're encountering any serious decision in your life, you should always consult for a second opinion. It's a little different about a first opinion to be a little bit more careful, but I've literally had like, a friend of mine was at a hospital with his cousin where he was uncertain about what that hospital was telling. The cousin consulted GPT4 and GPT4 said, Go to another hospital, got to the other hospital, and the people that hospital said, it's a good thing you're here because two hours later you'd be dead. Right? And fixed it because the first hospital is like, ah, take some antibiotics, you're fine. And it's like. And that second opinion is a hugely valuable thing. And so I think that's where we kind of are already. And that, that's the simple amazement, the, oh my gosh, these really amazing things can happen. And by the way, how do we evolve as human beings? We're homo techne more than homo sapiens. We evolve through technology, not just things like this podcast or the glasses that you and I are wearing or, you know, these kind of things. But, you know, the books and all the rest is all kind of evolution through technology. So that's what I think is a thing that we kind of shifted off of now in terms of the optimism today.

I think that it's much harder because it's a little hard. Like, it's a little harder to state that simple optimism without getting a lot of critique. And people say, well, it's very nice and good for you to say as a technologist inventing this, that's going to change the world. What about all the people who aren't inventing the technology? You just have to kind of go along with it. And you go, well, whether or not I do it or not, the technology is going to change and it's going to go through it. So I'm in it because I'm trying to shape it in a way that would be best for them and best for kind of our children and grandchildren, future generations and future societies and all the rest. But I Do understand that kind of agency question. Part of the reason why I called it Super Agency. But so it means that like, for example, I get tons and tons of, of critique, but I'm not call it an intellectually honest optimist, which by the way, I am. But like I'm a commercial, I'm an investor, you know, I'm a technologist, et cetera, because that's the kind of critique you run into. And so I don't really know where the sources of optimism come. And that's part of the reason like, you know, in my normal life right now I would be more focused on like building the cancer drug cures than writing the book Super Agency. But I think that voice needs to be heard. I would be completely delighted when it's other people. And I do track the other, you know, the other, you know, kind of really great leading AI voices like Ethan Mullock and other people and try to support them and help them in terms of what they're doing because it's, it's, it's really important.

Can I share a theory as to why I think we had more optimism in our science fiction then and, and what happened to it? I think it's, I think it's the Cold War, I think because one of the, you know, great, great competitions exist on three tensions, I'll call them, I guess there's an existential tension, life or death. There's an economic tension. Are we going to make money and be able to provide for ourselves, our economy, our families? And the third one is the philosophical one that we have a philosophy, a, an ideology that we believe in and it, and we belong to this ideology and it gives us a sense of camaraderie and, and patriotism. But it also, it also connects us.

Right.

And I would argue that our, our science fiction in part was a reflection of our ideology that was competing against at the time, Soviet style communism. And so if you look at all our utopian versus dystopian science fiction, it was, we all get along, we live in peace, there's prosperity. Like we're accepting, we're including of people who, who are alien to us literally in, in many cases. And there are conflicts along the way, but we want to include everybody else. And this was an, it was an exaggerated and tangible depiction of our values to remind us what we stand for as we stand in great competition against the thing that would challenge that idealism. And, or that ideology. And idealism is the reflection of the ideology. And then with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we still had the economic competition versus everybody else. We still have the existential competition. We still would like to live in peace, and we still have enemies. But I would argue that the ideological a thing kind of just went away. And I think America in particular kind of forgot what it stood for because there was nothing challenging it. There was nothing standing in opposition. And so I think our science fiction became dystopian because now it was us versus ourselves. It was no longer us versus somebody else. And if you look at where we've ended up, it is largely us versus ourselves right now. The great competition in the United States against the United States is the United States. I think that an opposing ideology in the world, an ideology that is different to ours, would breed the need for people to tell stories of. If we follow our ideologies, this is what the world will look like to remind us that we stand for something great, something good, something worth fighting for, something worth dying for.

And I think that's the reason our science fiction became dark.

Yeah, because it was. It was less. It was more of a left to ourselves. The internal like we are the thing versus. No, no, our ideology is this is a golden future that we're fighting for.

Versus yours versus an external force that would stand in our way. And you know, from. From too many years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there was no balance of power. So there was nothing to tell us that we were wrong other than somebody like we fought up. We are. We now have factions inside our country telling ourselves that we are wrong. We're back in the day, we still fought like cats and dogs. We still had Republicans and Democrats, we had all of that nonsense. But at the end of the day, the external existential threat was worse than the internal one. Where today the external existential threat is either misunderstood, not perceived, not recognized, or seen as less threatening than whatever is inside the country. And.

That'S kind of how empires collapse, isn't it?

Yeah.

So I usually acts of suicide, not. Not homicide or.

Well, yes, the.

The side is of.

Long decay. Superpower side.

Yes. Well, and you know, we've seen it. Roman Empire. Seen it. The British Empire.

Yeah. They're all the kind of the same. So I guess the get. I guess what I'm positing, which is should folks like you and me not preach? Should we not be preaching? I mean, I guess you and I already do. I guess I already asked and answered, which is.

We are attempting to preach an idealistic vision of the future.

I work very hard to make my message available to anyone who wants to Believe in it, regardless of somebody's politics, because I believe it's available to anyone who is a human being to live in the vision of the world that I imagine. And my work, though maybe not science fiction, is definitely idealistic.

And so is it not the responsibility of, to your point to, to, to those movie, to those filmmakers. Should, should, should we not start preaching again, an idealized future that's worth striving for? I guess, again, it's a rhetorical question. Duh.

Well, I think that's a moral requirement of good leadership. It's part of the reason why I talked to the various, you know, very smart, very well meaning critics, everyone else to say, and here is the positive version, the elevation of humanity. And by the way, one of the subtle things of it is we would like to in human condition, I think, diminish how much as our condition is beating up the evil people. It's like, no, how do we, how do we elevate, like, if, like, to some degree, if you're a good person.

It'S how do we elevate people versus how to, like the ordering one or two. How do we elevate people? How do we prevent the bad people? If you're a good person, that's the order. If you're a bad person, in part, it's the other order.

Yeah, right. You still need to be able to know what I think idealism is ethereal. It's hard to see. It's hard to imagine an enemy is tangible. And it's much easier to know what you stand for if you can see what you stand against. And even, you know, Jobs back in the day, and I'm curious what you did at LinkedIn. But, you know, Jobs, he still had Big Blue and he still had, you know, Microsoft, and he, he still articulated an enemy that was standing in the way of, of, of his idealism. But the idealism came first.

Yes.

And so I'm curious, what was, you know, when, when, when as, as you were building LinkedIn, like, who, who was, who was standing in the way? What was the grand enemy standing in the way of the idealism that you promoted?

Well, it probably were two things. One was kind of a social norm that was bad for society and bad for individuals, which was no one should have a CV online, posted on, public, posted online. This is like, it was like, no, no, you're, you're disloyal to your organization, and so therefore, you know, you shouldn't do that. And I was like, no, actually, in fact, that's better for the Individuals opportunity that's better for society. Maximizing the opportunity of individuals and the creation of their best work. And it's a little bit more challenging for organizations because you can't just hold on to your people because no one knows who they are. That was part of the reason why they wanted that, that, that, that myth of if your CV is online, maybe you don't get the promotion or bonus or you know, maybe we fire you, et cetera. I mean, literally very early days of LinkedIn it was like, oh, I want to be on LinkedIn because maybe I'll get fired for being on LinkedIn. It's like. And you know, various, Some companies like tried to ban people from being on LinkedIn all. So there's that and then there's the old industry.

You know, the various, you know, like monster.com and everything else for kind of job listings versus the way the world should be, which is when you have an opportunity, you should be reaching out to people. Yeah, that, that you have. And people can reach out to you too. But it should be both directions for, for kind of figuring that out. And you know, it's funny, if, if with this conversation, if I were to phone my younger self and doing it, I probably would have, probably would have been better to phrase it more as a grand, as a grand enemy versus just an idealistic vision, which is more of what I was doing because it probably would have been what more motivating to the cohesive collection of the group in order to do a new.

This is the problem with, with enemies and negativity. Right. Which is, it's incredibly, it's incredibly powerful. You can rally people incredibly well. And I think that's part of the problem, which is you can rally people with negativity. But to what end? Yes, you know, and it's a short, I mean, short lived. It could be 20 years. But the point is that it's, it's got a, it's got a finite, it's got a finite end to it. Whereas having the idealism and viewing the enemy as simply the thing standing in the way of our ideals. Which is why to Jobs credit, it was IBM, then it wasn't IBM, then it was Microsoft and then it wasn't Microsoft. He kept replacing the thing that was standing in the way. But it was never about IBM or Microsoft to begin with. It was always about the vision.

Yes.

And so your idealism was ethereal, but if you were able to, because you're you, it's quite a populist message, which is power to the People, Right. Which is how dare the, how dare the corporation stand in the way of my. Of my opportunity, you know, and ironically, by allowing me opportunity and giving me some agency. There's that word again. The corporation will actually benefit. Because I'm sometimes proudly saying where I work or, or now business can be done. Because, you know, I know I wanted to just reach out to you to work with you, not because I'm trying to poach you.

Yes, exactly.

And it actually has benefited the corporation in. In a magical twist of irony, as it always turns out to be that way.

Exactly.

Can I ask you a question that I don't understand? I mean, I kind of have a theory, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Why is it. And maybe, maybe this is not true, but I think it's true.

When a male entrepreneur has some sort of liquidity event, company goes public, he sells the company, whatever, and comes into generational wealth. If you ask them what do you do now? They say, I'm an investor.

Right.

And so now I know they give to philanthropy, I know they do philanthropic works, but they define themselves as investors, which I find funny because you've just made more money than you'll need ever. And you now your goal is to make more money and like, oh, you've got a fund now. Oh, wonderful. Whereas when you talk to female females who have some sort of liquidity event where they have now generational wealth, and you ask them, what do you do? They say, I'm a philanthropist. And of course they do investing, but they define themselves first as philanthropists. Why can't all people who have. Who sell a company or go public and come into more money than they'll ever need? Why can't every single one of them define themselves as philanthropists first?

Well, they certainly can. It's probably.

Why don't they?

Yes, it's.

Why don't they?

Like. It's not a pattern that I've.

Observed perhaps as clearly as you.

I could be wrong.

Yeah, it's.

It's an initial. It's an initial observation.

Yeah. But you know what I. My hypothesis would be in that is that what's the fitness function by which you're awarded status. Yeah. By people around you, which is part of the kind of competitive game.

And men, it's money.

Yeah. And for women, it's more like, do you care about society and community?

You're a good person.

Yes, You're a good person. So that would be my hypothesis.

I think that's right.

And what I would hope.

Is that everybody.

Thinks of themselves as a philanthropy is becoming a philanthropist. Because I think that the. And it isn't just if you made a bunch of money and, and now have more money than, you know, what you can possibly do with in, in human life. And.

And by the way, the reason why people continue to make money is for all kinds of reasons. Some of it's, you know, know that's what they know how to do. Some of it's competitive, some of it's. That's what they think the meaning of their life is. Some of it's like, hey, I know how to, to behave philanthropically with that money.

But I think it goes back to our conversation about idealism and, and the future, which is, which is because I think it's, it's an articulation of values.

Right? Yeah. That the value that we, that we.

Are espousing or at least, you know, embrace by men more than women, which is, you know, money is the metric. And even if you have already quote, unquote, one, you want everybody to know that you're still trying to make more. I wonder if this was the 1950s, if, if that would be the same or is it this modern version of, of our values that's become a little bit distorted and a little bit more materialistic. I don't know the answer. I'm just curious.

Well, I don't know either. Although one of my, my high school history teachers favorite expressions, which, which I really have come to embrace is things aren't like they used to be and never were. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's. It's kind of a. Be a little cautious about the mythos. Right.

Because we like to, we like to idealize the past.

Yes.

Romanticize it.

Yes. Now. But my earlier question is like, for example, when I was, I was thinking about how your question applies to me, and I would say, like, I would say I probably would have started with the word investor, but the reason I would have started with the world investor is probably not because I'm looking to, you know, kind of occupy that social status niche. Right.

You're quite different.

Yeah. You as much as, like the philanthropy I do, I think of as investing, like investing in kind of humankind, investing in human potential and a lot of the same mechanisms. Like, does it have a scalable economic model? You know, that kind of stuff still.

Applies, but it's, it's. It's a giving mentality versus a taking mentality.

Yeah, but, but I, but even, like, for example, like part of having been successful as an Entrepreneur and successful as an investor. Yeah, I'm now no longer interested in investing and putting a lot of time into things that like, I put in a dollar and I make $10 and it's only the $10. I'll do it if it tripped across it because I know what to do with the $10 in terms of philanthropic investment. But I look at like, what kinds of things actually make the world the more, the more the way it should be. It's like, for example, the Airbnb was the first investment that I pitched to Greylock. And part of it was like, actually, in fact, this unlocks the world as it should be. Right. This is that, that, that's what's essential about this. And of course it's a great economic investment. Yeah, but that's part of it. And by the way, the, again, the. It's kind of a little de rigueur to kind of think about capitalism as bad amongst, you know, kind of call it liber educated, you know, you know, high, high highly educated liberal circles. And it's like. No, no, actually, in fact, you know, to your earlier thing about Adam Smith, it's not just Adam Smith as the wealth of nations, it's Adam Smith as the Theory of Moral Sentiments. And that's actually extremely important to understand about what's going on here. And if you don't, if you're not sophisticated about that, your critique is, you know, useless.

Yeah, you're, you're different than your peers. Like, you're different than a lot of other sort of founder, you know, unicorn founders. I don't think you're a part of the longevity obsession, are you?

No, of course we'd all like to.

Live a few years, happy lives, but, but like, you're not, you don't fit that same profile. It's one of the things I really like about you, which is you, you are much more yourself. You're very comfortable in who you are.

Look, it gets back to that science fiction, right? It's like, what are we trying to do? What is the path of humanity and how do we contribute?

Can you just share one specific story of something that you were involved in that at some point throughout your career, doesn't even matter if it was commercially successful or not. I'm just real curious. One thing that you were involved in that you absolutely loved being a part of this thing, this project, this event. And if everything in your life was like this one thing, you'd be the happiest person alive.

Oh, interesting. I like diversity, which is a problem with that the answering your question, because multiple different things is, is a, is a good thing. But so like just one thing again.

And again, one specific thing that you were part of, it doesn't matter about its commercial viability, but like when you look back and you think about that experience, you're like, oh, amazing.

You know, it's probably unlocking things where people have.

Tell me a specific one.

No, no, I'm just the pattern of it. It's like part of the reason I'm answering it, taking me a few, like, you know, some a minute or two to kind of is there's many of them and it's kind of like the one is kind of a challenging.

Pick one. Pick one of those.

Yeah, well, so.

You know, part of, like, part of the thing that I love about actually I'll use being an investor is that you are giving someone the shot to do that life's work that makes them.

That. That is something epic.

I get, I get it. But give me something specific. Like maybe it was something that happened during the early days of LinkedIn or, you know, just. It can be absolutely anything but like when you look back, something specific. I hear you about the investing, but something specific that I can relive with you.

Yeah. So.

Well, look, it's a little micro element, but it's a very micro on this. Go for it for that thing. It will start with the basis of one of my frustrations with LinkedIn.

Yeah.

So my base of frustration with LinkedIn is, is the vast majority of people approach being connected, other people on LinkedIn as.

Kind of, oh, this is how, this is how I navigate. This is for me.

Years back, I was having a conversation with a friend and serial entrepreneur, Paul English. And we were sitting around very early days in LinkedIn, six years in or seven years in. And he's the first person who on an unaided basis reflected to me what I think of LinkedIn and what I was trying, which is like when I connect with someone on LinkedIn, it's because I am giving them a gift of how can I potentially help you by connecting with you with other people in my network. Right. Like, it's making it easier for me to help you in our journey through life and work together. And Paul was the first person outside of LinkedIn who said, oh, I love LinkedIn because of this. Right. And I was like, yes. And you know, and since then there have been five more. But, you know, like, like that was a, that was the, you see the. What I'm trying to create for making us more collaborative Cooperative, you know, like life as a team sport. It's, it's how I help other people, how I give it as a gift. You see that? And that was, you know, maybe that was a version of feeling seen.

Yeah. Tell me an early specific, happy childhood memory. Something specific I can relive with you. Not like we went to my grandparents every weekend. Something, one specific event that I can relive with you.

Well, okay, this, this one seems a little, little funny, but as a seven year old beating my grandfather in chess. Right.

Say more.

Well, so like you think of one.

Particular, one particular instance.

Well, it was the first time.

Okay, so the first time you beat your grandfather in chess. Tell me about it.

Well, so he was playing chess with me and it was a, like, each time, you know, from like five to seven. Right. Like, you know, he'd win, he'd win, he'd win. I was trying to figure out how could he be doing this? Like, why can't I do this? And then it helped me start figuring out what, how the world worked and what was going on and what the pieces were and, and that kind of thing. And that was that. It was kind of the epiphany of suddenly seeing, ah, this is how this works. It wasn't so much like, ah, I beat grandpa, as much as it was like, ah, I can now see the world as it is. I can see more about what's going on and I can navigate it and participate in it.

There's entirely not the words I would have used as a 7 year old. This is.

No, no, no, of course, like as a seven year old, like, hi, beat your grandma.

Yes, exactly.

No, I, I get that.

The.

I mean this whole conversation, you're everything you talk about, it's about that undying that is striving to understand how it works for the benefit of others.

Yeah. And inclusive of myself. I don't think of others as not including myself.

100%. 100%. It's, it's, it's, it's a selfish selflessness all at once.

Yes. Yeah.

Total, totally. And you know, you talk about sort of the plan about adding to the discourse, which is, you know, I'm going to write this stuff so that people can understand how the world works, so that people can take it in for the benefit and even the LinkedIn realization, which is, here's how human beings should work and if you do it this way as an act of giving rather than act of taking, we all win. And the original philosophy of LinkedIn, which is if you allow people to Display where they work and put their CVs up on the world. No, no, no. This is how the world should work. And even your AI discussion, which is this unbelievable striving to understand how the world actually works for the benefit of everybody.

And even the way you describe your investing, you know, which is if I can figure out how something works, you said it's not how much can I get from it. That's, that's sometimes the, the sort of the, the lucky strike extra, but rather, if we get this right, how much will you get from this? And I don't mean financially.

Yeah, well, and also the person's life work is not just for them. That's one of the things that your life work is not just.

Life work is not just for them.

Yes, it's for, it's for us.

And that's my rub. The people who define themselves as, as investors versus philanthropists, which is whether, you know, just going on the definition of the words, which is my life's pursuit is now for accumulation for myself, you know, versus my life's pursuit is to figure out how to way to give it all away or at least make it so that others benefit more than me because I've, I've had my, I've had my luck. It's a mindset rather than an activity because all philanthropists invest and all investors give away, give away money, I hope.

Yes.

You know, but it's, it's the, it's the hierarchy. It's the order. And you talked about that hierarchy in that order. In other, in other circumstances, the order matters.

Yes.

And I think this is one of my favorite things about you, which is why I think you're so different from almost all the founder leaders who sort of occupy that unicorn space, which is. You are unabashedly in it for others.

Yeah. And there are, there's a few others, you know, Bill Gates, Reed Hastings. There's a few others, but. Yes.

Yeah.

I'm not saying you're unique, but you are. But it, but it's a small group where you were unabashedly.

Yeah, it's the.

Unabashed.

Yes. Well, it's the way we should be.

It's the way we should be. And that is, shouldn't be the work of science fiction. It should be real. Real. It should be science fact.

Just fact, fact, fact. Yes.

You know, but I am so glad you exist. I'm so glad you're putting your visions in the world. And I really hope that the world that you imagine is the world that we build.

Well, that's part of the reason why I do this work, you do that work, and what we're hoping for.

So good. Thanks for coming on. What a joy.

Always a joy. I look forward to the next one. I look forward to a meal in person, too.

I know we have to do that. I forgot where we like to ask every one of our guests, just curious, if you have some sort of life hack, some sort of shortcut, some sort of thing that you figured out that helps you be more effective, efficient or productive as a. As a. As a person.

Well, I mean, here's very apropos. Our current. Our current.

Our current conversation and current moment is anytime I'm saw, I'm working on a new problem or kind of a new thought.

Part of what I do is I think about what's the position of human expertise that would most inform what I'm doing, and then I prompt AI model of your choice with, with this position of human expertise, give me, you know, analyze this problem for me or give me a solution or something else. And it accelerates how you kind of go through this. And I do this just, you know, kind of constantly. And like, for example, you know, one of the ones I'm, I'm planning on doing recently is, you know, a friend of mine was kind of trying to say I should take Ianograms, you know, and personality types more seriously. And I'm going to go throw out a set of prompts and ideas into probably GPT5 now and say and say and learn this and see do I think this is a useful pattern for understanding how we, we.

You know, we kind of work together, we travel together, we live together, etc. And then, you know, and that's, that's, that's. That's the hack.

I mean, it's, it's a good use of the tech.

Yeah.

Reid, such a pleasure, Truly such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Likewise. I look forward to the next.

A bit of optimism is brought to you by the Optimism Company and is lovingly produced by our team, Lindsey Garbinius and Devon Johnson. If I was able to give you any kind of insight or some inspiration or made you smile, please subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts for more. And if you're trying to get answers to a problem at work or want to advance a dream, maybe I can help. Simply go to SimonSinek.com until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.