On with Kara Swisher - Reid Hoffman on Trump, Elon, Peter Thiel and Lina Khan

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

Reid Hoffman isn’t just one of the most influential entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley — he’s also one of the most important mega-donors supporting the Democratic party. A member of the so-called PayPal Mafia, Hoffman is a VC partner at Greylock Ventures and Microsoft board member who co-founded LinkedIn and InflectionAI and was a founding investor in OpenAI. He is one of the leading voices in tech fighting against former President Donald Trump, and he puts his money where his mouth is — which doesn’t always sit well with progressives, and is even more upsetting to former friends, like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who have gone full MAGA.   In this live interview at the Masters of Scale Summit, hosted by Hoffman in San Francisco, Kara and Reid discuss everything from the upcoming election, and the business community’s response to Trump, to Elon, Peter Thiel, Lina Khan and artificial intelligence.   Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on Instagram as @onwithkaraswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Support for On with Cara Swisher comes from Anthropic. A lot of AI systems out there feel like they're designed for specific tasks that are only performed by a select few. So where do you start? Well, you could start with Claude by Anthropic. Claude is AI for everyone. The latest model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, offers groundbreaking intelligence at an everyday price. Claude's Sonnet can generate code, help with writing, and reason through hard problems better than any model before. You can discover how Claude can transform your business at anthropic.com slash Claude. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with

Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Today, I'm interviewing Reid Hoffman live at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. Reid's Twitter bio says he's an entrepreneur, investor, and strategist, which is both accurate and a massive understatement. In 1997, and I actually met him back then, Reid created SocialNet, an online dating site that was arguably the first online social network. He was one of PayPal's first employees, which makes him part of the so-called PayPal mafia. And that includes PayPal founders and early employees like Peter Cheal and Elon Musk. But Reid was one of the good ones. He really has been one of the most important

and influential investors and entrepreneurs around, and he's moved himself into the political space. After he co-founded LinkedIn, he was, again, a founding investor in OpenAI and a co-founder of Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleiman, whom I recently interviewed. Go back and listen if you haven't already. He sold LinkedIn to Microsoft for over $26 billion in cash. He sits on the board of

Microsoft and is still a VC partner at Greylock Ventures. In his spare time, he's an author and podcaster, and he runs the Masters of Scale events and podcasts. Of course, Hoffman is now one of the biggest and most influential Democratic mega donors. He's been contributing to Democratic candidates and causes before former President Trump ran for office, but he ramped that up significantly once Trump came on the scene. He even helped fund E. Jean Carroll's legal battle with Trump and has been noticeably outspoken about the threat posed by Trump, something many other business leaders have not had the courage to do. He's also got a very big influence among Silicon Valley,

especially young startup leaders. Everyone talks about Elon Musk, but I think Reid is one of these people that also has equal influence, just in a different, kinder, and more decent way. He is a decent man, and I really like talking to him. We disagree on a lot of things, including his continued support for Peter Thiel. Many, many years that has changed recently, but he's willing to take a debate, and I really appreciate that, and I hope today will not disappoint. Our expert question for Reid comes from Teddy Schleifer, a journalist who covers billionaires and their influence in American politics at the New York Times. And I should note, an excellent reporter I hired at Recode when he was just a young and upcoming reporter. Now he's in the big time. Let's get to it.

It is on. Sit down. Hi, everybody. Thank you. I'm so excited. We're going to put this on the on podcast just so. I've asked Reid to be super pithy because I've only got a short time. So let me start talking about, we have to talk about the election.

We're going to talk about AI and blah, blah, blah. But I think it's impossible not to talk to Reid. He's one of the most significant mega donors, I think that's what they call you people, for the Democrats. I call them backstage the anti-Elon. I think it's true, actually. Reid is sort of the very opposite of, couldn't be more opposite in many ways. But you penned... ways. But you penned... You know, I like him, but it is still a very low bar in any case.

So you... It's true. It's so subterranean. It's you and Satya Nadella down there with Tim Cook every now and then. So you penned an op-ed for Bloomberg where you said, American business and commerce rely on the rule of law. Companies can't thrive where erratic, vindictive, autocratic influences our courts and Justice Department. I'm assuming you're talking about Donald Trump, but he gets plenty of support among the business community. He recently spoke at the Economic Club of Chicago, got applause even though he spewed a lot of nonsense when he attacked the press and they said there was a peaceful transfer of power in 2020. Explain the appeal to business leaders despite chaotic autocratic tendencies. He's just

talking about getting rid of income tax. He's talking about tariffs. Every economist is like, this is a disaster waiting to happen. So I think there's a good and there's a bad. And I don't mean good that I think that zero of them should support Trump. Right. The reasonable is kind of the question of, look, I haven't really studied the history of fascists or the history of how these things break. And so I come up with self-justifications. Like one of the things I've heard from some of the people who are supporting Trump is like, oh yeah, he's talking about tariffs, but he won't do that. He's just talking about that as part of doing it. And that's the classic, like what Hindenburg said about Hitler. That's correct.

Which is like, oh no, this is just a populist. He's not going to do anything. And it's like, no, no, generally speaking, you should take someone seriously. So that's the good side. The bad side is, you know, grifter crony capitalism. It's I'm buying something for myself. Right. And he is the greatest coin op president in history.

Yes. And that he's viable. Yes. And they can do what they want. What do they want? Yeah. What they should do is now when they have a dictionary reference of bag man, it should see reference Donald J. Trump.

Right. So why does that get them something? What do they want precisely? And some of them have many, many billionaires in tech and finance spoke out against Trump after January 6th. They reversed themselves. Steve Schwartzman comes to mind. You've said that business leaders who spoke out against Trump but support him don't have integrity, but they need to address their flip-flopping.

How do you get them to do that? They just say, I need the money or more money. Well, in terms of getting them to say, well, why did you agree that January 6th was a kind of a, you know, a treasonous prompting and incitement of insurrection? And now you're like, blithely ignoring it. Address it. That's what truth and integrity is. You might say, I've now changed my mind for the following reason. I'm explaining why I've changed my mind versus I'm buying my way into a position of influence. They go quiet. The ones that don't agree go quiet. They tend to go quiet. And what do you say to them? Even if you know, I mean,

just recently, Bill Gates has apparently given $50 million to Kamala Harris. Jamie Dimon, somehow it leaked out that he's for Kamala Harris, somehow. The leak's name is Jamie Diamond, in case you're interested. I think by definition, that's not a leak, but yes. Private people say. I was like, give me a break. He called up the reporter. That was it. I'm just, I'm giving you the secrets of the trade here. So then we have people like Ben Horowitz, who made a big deal about donating to Trump, now is donating to Harris. What happened there? And do you think he's hedging his bets or he actually is trying to help Harris win or he's hoping that he'll be on both sides of the trade?

Well, I think there are people who are hedging their bets and are being very public about it. I don't actually think that's not Ben. I think Ben is being principled. I think he has a, because I've talked to him, he has a set of legitimate concerns about the application of rule of law and process to crypto, which he believes that the Biden administration has not done a particularly good job of. He was dismayed by Biden's performance in the first debate. But, you know, now that it's Harris, he's known Harris for a long time. And so he's following his, still his principles about what is good governance.

And so, and, you know, to his credit, it isn't, most people, once they kind of make a public declaration, they just kind of stay there. Right. Versus take the, I am switching. And I think, you know, that's to Ben's point of honor. I would say she has a lot of big tech leaders.

It's not just, I mean, I think when you think about it, Trump's got Elon and Peter Thiel, who are very arguably fantastic, entrepreneur, fantastic investor. And then the cliff falls off and you get to Winklevoss rather quickly, right? You do. Let's be clear.

With you guys, it's you, it's Gates, it's Melinda Gates. It's like, it's a lot of Reed Hastings. You know, it's all kind of Vinod Khosla, A players. But what does she need to do to shore up her support in the tech industry? I think she probably has a lot. I've told you backstage, I find her conservative, actually, compared to a lot of Democrats. Look, I think she has a lot of support. I think that articulating kind of, and by the way, she's the first presidential candidate in history who, in her acceptance speech, referenced the importance of entrepreneurs and founding.

Right? That is a great thing. That is very noteworthy. I think that's the first step on, well, look, I care about a broader society. I care about what happens with people across the entire country and all communities. But I also recognize that the creation of new businesses and new industries and new technologies

is part of how we improve it for everybody and what that engagement is. And, you know, look, she is on path to doing that already. She obviously hasn't had a tremendous amount of time during the campaign. Because what do I and everyone you just mentioned want? We want her to win the election. Right. And then?

Well, and then, look, for example, the process that she led with the executive order on artificial intelligence was a great example of intelligent governance. First, call on a set of the relevant companies and push them very hard to a set of voluntary commitments. It's not like, oh, what do you want to do? It's like, no, can you do more? Can you do more? Could you do something about this? Could you do something about this? Then, once you get those, you look at them and say, okay, now which of these can we then make the rule of the road for the industry and then make it very focused? Not an amorphous, you know, like, oh, here there'll be some penalties for if you do wrong, which is very innovation quelling. But instead, no, no, you must have red teaming. You must do

the following kind of monitoring. You must have some of this kind of reporting and you must be in dialogue with us so we can learn about what are the right things to do to prevent bad things. That would be what I would expect on the kind of regulation front. And then in the, okay, how do we help all American industries, you know, because the tech industry is one of our great global exporters. How do we have that industry help all of the American industries to help our country be more prosperous and have more jobs? We'll be back in a world. Find out when you listen to Pondering AI, a podcast featuring candid conversations

with experts from across the AI ecosystem. Pondering AI explores the impact and implications of AI for better and for worse with a diverse group of innovators, advocates, and data scientists. Check out Pondering AI wherever you get your podcasts. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle.

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ask for what you want, but it was sort of spun into you're demanding it as a condition. Well, so the reason I made a comment is I wanted to make sure that when I talk, as I always do, but in this case, talking to the business community about making the argument about why Harris is unequivocally the better president for business out of these two choices, that I wasn't just arguing a partisan playbook, that I actually recognize. Read the progressive. Yes. And so it was like, look, I think in one particular thing, in tech M&A and so forth, Lena Kahn is actually being pretty destructive to American industry. And, you know, because her actions quell venture investing, which then means there's less startups that are doing competition, et cetera. It was said from a viewpoint

of a Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur, not as, you know, progressives who wanted to say, oh, it's a person on the Microsoft board who's opposed to it. It's like, no, actually, in fact, I never speak for Microsoft on these things and it's Silicon Valley. So I made that comment once on one business television program, never to anyone in the White House, including Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or any of those,

to kind of say, look, I'm a truth teller. And when I'm telling you that actually, in fact, Harris is much better for business investment, it's because it's true. But then of course it got blown into a whole story because it's like, oh, it's making a condition for his support. And I'm like, well, since they don't know about it other than your news program, it's a pretty bad condition.

No, you should have done it quietly. Right, that's how you operate.. No, you should have done it quietly. That's right. That's how you operate. What if I was actually having a condition? Yeah, that's not your image from my perspective. But the idea of that's something you would push for, Lena being. Well, look, I actually rarely push for things. And I try to never push for anything that has anything to do with my own economic advantage,

because I think that's corrupt governance. I think that's grifter capitalism. I think that's crony capitalism. It's precisely the reason why I am resolutely opposed to a Trump administration. If you paid him enough, he'd probably do that for you. Well, I've literally never argued for anything because it has an economic advantage to me. Right. Now, if I'm asked about what one should be doing in an FTC position around antitrust, I would give very different advice than what Lena Kahn happens to be doing. Right.

Has she asked you? No. No, she hasn't asked you yet uh i would be surprised would you want to be in a kamala harris administration well i wouldn't want to be frankly in any administration just because i think i'm a better use to society as an investor and a creator and all the rest and And the government job has bureaucracy constraints that is a little bit more difficult for people. Right. So no postmaster general for you. Okay. Well, I think that would be the definition of going postal, but yes. Yeah, that's not you they're describing. It's someone else, an old friend of yours. Speaking of which, speaking of another old friend of yours, Peter Thiel, one of your fellow PayPal co-founders, you and I have long had arguments about him. I'm like, he's not your friend, Reid. And of course, you're like, oh, I'll be nice to him. I'm like, don't be nice to him. He'll knife you. It went on for years. Finally, he took my advice. You no longer talk to him because of his support for Trump, which you consider a moral issue. You actually said this in an Allen & Company conference in front of Thiel himself.

Elon attacked you and essentially said you were on Jeffrey Epstein's client list and insinuated the real reason you support Harris. Can I give you a quick line? Sure. Every accusation is a confession with these people. Okay. Just use it. Okay. It's true. It's so true. It works perfectly on many things. But David Sachs also implied that you're somehow to blame for the Trump assassination because you've made an unfortunate... I repeated Peter's word at a private conference. Yeah. And what's it like when they're resorting to personal attacks? What is going on with all of you?

Like, you didn't really... Wait, with all of you? I mean, not you. You didn't do it. But, you know, I'm rubber, you're glue kind of thing. But what is happening instead of arguing about you is why are they doing this to you and what impact does it have on your life? And I'm not even beginning to say,

you know, Elon's attacking you. Peter's. David, you know, the third banana, David Sachs, is attacking you that way. I'm being generous with third banana. Well, look, I think what makes American democracy special in history and special that we want to return to is essentially peaceful transitions of power. of power. It's, again, another reason why I'm completely opposed to Donald Trump, who, like, incites January 6th insurrection, who exhibits a denialism about 2020, which, according to any person with any honesty and integrity, was a fair election. And, you know, all of this as

kind of part of the problem. And part of what they, that folks don't realize is you want to be speaking against any violence in politics whatsoever, right? And so, and so, you know, one of the problems that you get when you become the target of a bunch of, you know, kind of MAGA crazies who are spreading you know basically um lies and defamation around Epstein or other things is you get a bunch of like crazy people sending sending you hate mail and threats and and other kinds of things and that that is the end result and the real question for the people who incite it whether it's you know Elon other people, is how much are they doing it knowingly and how much are they doing it kind of ignorantly? Oh, no, stop. They're so nice. They're not doing it

ignorantly. They know just what they're doing, just FYI. But come on, at some point you have to be like, maybe this person's just an asshole. So you did, but how much responsibility do those tech companies have when it comes to weaponized disinformation you're talking about including it yourself and whoever you recently called out elon overt on x this week on meta you had the word hitler you got thrown off the service for a second because they still haven't figured out content moderation yet particularly well well i mean this is one of the you use scale ai systems and so forth. I get it. They actually threw my wife off for saying Hitler's a bad guy. She's like, I stand by my feeling on this.

It's a controversial position. Yes, I know. Well, they got freaked out when they realized it was my wife they actually threw off because it became a thing. They're like, oh, no, the wrong wife. But what responsibility do tech companies have for for this so um one i you know i think we do a very good job at linkedin um just to be clear so i think it's possible to to do well um and then two i tend to think look what we need to do is we need to say that one of the key things especially in democracies is you want your media ecosystem

to be a learning ecosystem by which you learn things that are true. So if someone's, for example, spreading information willfully and badly about, like, vaccines are terrible and, you know, aren't effective and da-da-da-da, which, you know, we know that vaccines, flu, other things are actually extremely effective and are part of how we have instituted our longer lives now. You want to make that not endemic and easy to assault a civilian populace through information warfare. And so the question is, is how do you do that? Right.

And by the way, I think it's a problem we need to work on. You know, one of my... I mean, they've been working on it for years. They keep getting it wrong. Like, how did that become controversial, is the thing? Or that they want it, they seem to be backing away more than leaning forward in this. My point of view is that, and I think there's intelligent argument around this, but my point of view is that and and i think there's intelligent argument around this but my point of view is that any uh and i think the same thing applies to social media companies also should apply to like cable news absolutely shoes shows and so forth um is that to say look you should have a uh here is what our our principles of information and truth are.

Here is how you can hold us accountable to. And so if you're actually signing up for accountability and you violate what you say you're signing up for, then you're legally accountable. Well, Rupert Murdoch paid a billion dollars. Yes, exactly. But Facebook didn't. Well, but Facebook was not saying we're signing up for saying that we are a source of true information. But they are. They're a source of information.

Well, but there's a source of information. But like if they could say, look, as you know this as well as anyone on the planet, they say individuals are signing up for what they're saying themselves. We are simply the conveyors of that. I've heard that. I've heard that argument. Once or twice. Once or twice. But they're saying themselves. We are simply the conveyors of that. I know, I've heard that. I've heard that argument. Yes, once or twice. Once or twice, but they're more than that. Would you agree?

Well, my view is, in an information source, you don't want to say, look, if someone's out there spreading, let's take an easy one, like destructive anti-vax information, then you should, as a platform, it's not legally required to do this, but you should, as a platform, it's not legally required to do this, but you should, as a platform, try to essentially make that less of a meme across your platform because it's

destructive to the health of the group and it's wildly inaccurate. We'll be back in a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast about joy and justice produced with Vox Creative. Former President Donald Trump has made voter fraud a key talking point in his 2024 presidential campaign, despite having no evidence of widespread fraud. Historically, claims like this can have a tangible impact on ordinary voters. In a new three-part series, host Ashley C. Ford talks to Olivia Coley Pearson, a civil servant in Douglas, Georgia, who was approached by a first-time voter who had questions about how the voting machines worked. And so she showed them.

Because of this, she was arrested for voter fraud four years later. According to Coley Pearson, what happened to her was less about voter fraud and more about intimidating Black voters. I think people need to know that people are Black people, people of color. They are afraid to get out and vote because some of the things that have been going on. Hear her story and subscribe to Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees. And it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot.

It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you. Tells you which leads are worth knowing. And makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. One of the things that you're thinking about is Trump might win, in fact. And I'll ask you that and then I'm going to get to AI. But you, it may be the administration of J.D. Vance or as Rachel Maddow calls him, Peter Thiel's failed intern.

You donated money to help Vance's opponent. He may be the president, too. There's a lot of chance that that could happen. So what do you imagine would come from a Trump administration? Are you personally worried about your fate? Well, I think, I mean, look look you have a president who in his first term demonstrated a willingness to use um the instruments of state for his own political power whether it's anything from threatening to withhold aid from foreign countries unless they produced probably false information that would advantage him politically or retaliatory against companies that he felt weren't weren't sufficiently laudatory and and with his program which is a classic kind of fascist maneuver and now you'll have you know potentially a second administration

so you'd think that the abuses of the instrument of state, which we as Americans should be completely and morally, politically, Americanly opposed to, will get substantially worse. So are you worried personally? Yeah, I would say I have the unfortunate expectation of various of the MAGIS being abusing the instruments of state to be retaliatory. So it's you and Cuban, right? Yes. Yeah, you and Cuban. Mark Cuban. Every episode, we get an expert question to answer. Question, this is from Teddy Schlieffer, who covers billionaires like yourself and political influence like yourself. Hey, Reid. It's Teddy Schlieffer here from The New York Times. When you got really involved in politics after 2016, I had heard you really felt like the party was just too outdated, too slow, the tech stack was too weak. I wonder, you know, now eight years in, what kind of grade you would give the Democratic

Party's kind of technologist donors at fixing those problems? Do you think that you've done an A-plus job, a B-plus job, a C-plus job? Because, you know, some people today fear that the Democratic Party is backsliding and that Republicans in some way or another are at least leaping the Democrats with things like TikTok and influencer content. How is the party doing on tech and digital? Well, as one of those people, I'm giving myself a grade. I give myself a B. I'm still working towards the A. A.

I give myself a B. Right. I give us a B. Right. But we're working on it. What are they missing? Well, among other things, I mean, we do, we have some efforts going in, kind of how do you organize a coherent set of relationship campaigning and having accurate databases. If you send someone a knock on a door that they're actually somebody that, you know, wants to talk to you, et cetera.

You know, that kind of stuff. I think we're still working on it. is still working on it. And it's one of the places where if you're more top-down fascist control, it's easy to do it better. When you're more inclusive on the Democratic side, which is a good virtue, it's slower and harder to do. Slower and harder to do. Although, as you said, the Dave Bautista thing was fantastic. If you haven't seen the Dave Bautista ad on Trump, go look at it at YouTube. I laughed out loud. All right, two very quick questions on Anne, and then we'll finish up. The last time we did an interview, you were asking the questions.

Thank you. I said that AI companies are shoplifting, and they scrape copyrighted material to train their models without paying for it. And you said, basically, like someone reading a book. Please expand on that. Clearly, a lot of copywriters like myself disagree. And there's evidence to suggest if generated models are like people who read books when it comes to write or create they might also be poorly disguised plagiarists well if they are uh doing plagiarism that's a different issue okay on the training side because that's a question of what gets reproduced um and so if things get reproduced that say, hey, here is writing from Kara Swisher that you can have for free for me versus paying for, that would be a problem. If you said, and here's something Kara Swisher said when it's lying about what you said or hallucinating, then that can be a problem.

And those are problems that there should be accountability. That's a different issue than should computer processes that have a legitimate access to a digital copy of a particular piece of work and read it, should they be able to do that? I think the answer is yes, the same way that a human being can. But those are three separate issues. So two of them I have strong agreement on. The general reading of things, now, of course, if you say we have a new copyright law, and the new copyright law has a robots.txt file, and the robots.txt file says a robot can't look at this without approval of mine, then fine.

But the law needs to say that. So last question about AI. You recently wrote the Digitalist paper, and you used GPS systems as a metaphor. Two things. Give me a really contrarian view you have about AI right now. I'm neither an alarmist nor a cheerleader. I would say I'm kind of wait and see.

I'm expecting the worst and hoping for the best, I think, is the way I look at it. But let's end by explaining the metaphor and spell out your vision for AI as an informational GPS. So one, I think we're in a cognitive industrial revolution. I think the same way the industrial revolution gave us physical powers,

transport, motion, manufacturing, construction, et cetera, AI is giving us cognitive powers. And so the metaphor to try to make that is like a cognitive GPS, which is how do you navigate a landscape of learning or doing work or communicating and that kind of thing. And that becomes an aid, like a GPS is an aid, like the way that we, like literally everyone in this room

has used GPS on their phone with maps to figure out how to get somewhere, how to get back, et cetera. And it's that kind of thing, but in a broader mental space. And then what I would say for a contrarian view is maybe in this audience, because contrarian always is contrarian against what? Actually, in fact, I think human institutions change more slowly than technologists expect them to. So the, oh, my God, all these jobs are going to change in two or three years, I don't think it's going to be like that fast.

And the last question, obviously, how confident are you about the bet you've made versus the bet Elon Musk has made? With the presidency, I mean. Confident that I'm making the right bet for the country. A hundred percent. OK. And confident of the outcome of that? Well, reading all of the polls and everything else, it very much looks like a jump ball. So my my advocacy is everyone, you know, call whoever, you in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, etc., and

get them to vote. But you will not be behind Kamala Harris on a stage jumping up and down, is that correct? Like a dipshit, as Tim Watts says. I'm happy to provide entertainment, but differently. Okay, not a dipshit. Thank you so much. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yochum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's Executive Producer of Audio. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher and Claire Hyman. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda, Thank you. and get there. It's a privilege to vote. It is a privilege and an honor. And do it, or else I'll be very angry at you. Go wherever you listen to podcasts.

Search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more. Thank you. performed by a select few. Well, Clawed by Anthropic is AI for everyone. The latest model, Clawed 3.5 Sonnet, offers groundbreaking intelligence at an everyday price. Clawed Sonnet can generate code, help with writing, and reason through hard problems better than any model before.

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