Former President Bill Clinton in conversation with Reid Hoffman

0:01Hi, listeners. Tomorrow is Election Day. If you haven't already cast your ballot via early voting, please make sure to go to the polls on Tuesday. There's so much at stake. At the Masters of Scales Summit, I welcomed a very special guest to the stage to share the gravity of this year's election. The 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, offered his insights on how we came to this current moment of divisiveness in the U.S. and what could come next. The consequences couldn't be greater, and he landed on a message of hope. I hope you enjoy this special stage program from our summit, presented in full, unedited, here on Masters of Scale.

0:56You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I'm supposed to know what to do. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. working as a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it.

1:26This is Masters of Scale.

1:40Whoa. Mr. President, it is a great honor to host you here at this conference. Thank you. I'm honored to be here. I'm glad to be around people who are happy.

1:54I know that one of the things that everyone here wants to hear about is kind of how do you see the current state of what's going on in America? And what should we be thinking about? And how should we be? What should we be doing to try to help? Well, first of all, if you're confused about where we are and why we are here, I want to join your crowd. But here's how I think you should think about it. In the larger historical sweep, we are in a period that is somewhere between the run-up to the Civil War, but earlier like 10 years before in President Taylor's administration and the condition in the country after Rutherford Hayes became president and bought his way into the Electoral College by promising to withdraw all the Union forces from the South.

2:56So we exposed all these cultural and other differences and we became fodder for those who could profit immensely by exaggerating our differences and trying to rub salt in the wounds. And that's where we are in a modern sense. We also have been building toward this for a very long time. I mean, when President Eisenhower finally was able to dispatch Joe McCarthy and the whole everybody's a communist and all that stuff. He said presciently that we may be the longest lasting continuous democracy in human history, but he wasn't sure we could continue it because it required so much mental discipline and so much trust in our institutions and willingness to defend our Constitution and the way things are done, and the willingness to live under the same set of rules, even though the people who make the rules and enforce them, like all humans, are subject to error.

4:10But we had to believe it, and he wasn't sure we could make it forever. So we made it a very long time. But at least since the mid-'70s, there has been a fresh assault on the whole idea of government and an attempt to profit more from our differences than what we have in common. And then when Newt Gingrich took over the House of Representatives, he made a decision to basically try to make the white working class outside the South like the white working class in the South. And he was good at it. And we used to talk about it all the time. and one of his sometime allies, who was a senator from the southern state, said, I said, I knew the answer, but I said, why do you guys hate me so much?

5:05And I was out of office at the time. He said, oh, he said, those in any sense hated you way more than Obama. And I said, why? He said, because you betrayed the culture. You were a white, Christian, heterosexual southerner who was pro-gay rights, pro-civil rights, thought we could all live together in harmony. And like he said, it was really bad for our brand.

5:34And one Republican senator once said to me, I said, do you think Hillary or I did anything wrong in that Whitewater deal? Not illegal, even wrong. He said, oh, God, no. He said, anybody with a piece of her brain would know you didn't. And he said, that's not the point. The point is to make people think you did something wrong. And he said, you know, I hate the way we treat you. I really like you. But if we fought you fair, I'd lose every time. So, I mean, I've been living with this a lot longer than many of you have. And I think the consequences now will be grievous if we continue down this road.

6:14because, to use the term in common parlance now, there are no guardrails. If you watched the vice presidential debate the other night between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz, I almost had a coronary. You know, we weren't, there are no fact checkers now. God forbid we should have them. So I'm saying it's... But Vance actually said there was no big deal when Trump got elected on the Affordable Care Act, I mean, he actually helped to stabilize it. And I said, dear God, this was just a few years ago. When they tried to repeal it for the 60-something time with no consequences, you may think that's a great deal, but they did try.

7:06And it meant the end of protections for people with preexisting conditions from excessive rates and only John McCain stood up. And I think it's one reason his wife and a lot of other people in Arizona are supporting Kamala Harris now because President Trump said he was a loser because he got captured. But he stood up and the people noticed and as late as 2018, that gave the Republicans the worst beating in midterms they'd had in 100 years. Now, they didn't lose as many seats as we did, Obama and I, in 94 and 2010 because of the radical gerrymandering, which this Supreme Court has now said is just fine.

8:01The new gerrymandering rule, I don't know if you guys pay any attention to it, But basically, the judges said, yes, you have a right to vote. Yes, you have a right to vote. You have your vote counted. Yes, your vote should count about as much as everybody else's. But there's always been some gerrymandering, and it's just impossible to tell how much is too much. And after all, the Constitution gives that authority to draw this declines to the states. In other words, forget about the 15th Amendment or the 14th Amendment. I mean, it's unbelievable. And Elena Kagan, who once worked in my administration, wrote a brilliant and sending opinion and said, this is the first time in American history ever that the Supreme Court has found a right that has no remedy.

8:59and California had just finished with its computer bottles that gave the Republicans three more seats and New York had a court ordered the same thing. So it's okay if it goes one way but not the other. It bothers me. So that's where we are in history. Now in this campaign, we have a specific set of challenges is about 44 % or so of the people really want Trump to be elected. And they were for him all the time, all three times. And they believe, as he does, but there are about 5 % of the voters that are genuinely, genuinely undecided about, you know, the mega issues. And Trump's argument is pretty straightforward and slick.

9:53It's basically, I was president for four years. We had two really good years. I'm not responsible for anything to happen in a pandemic. And we didn't have this inflation. And we had planned new jobs. Then Biden gets in, and we have inflation. So you've got to vote against them and for me. And it's basically, and if you listen to people, and this especially affects millennials across racial lines, and especially people with families. They have a hard time buying groceries. They have a hard time maintaining their consumption habits, even if they've gotten pay raises. And there have been unusual increases in food, fuel, and housing.

10:45So what do we have to do? We have to, my side has to explain that without being defensive. Acknowledge, yes, prices have gone up. And, you know, over a year ago, we had 9 % inflation. Totally unsustainable. And then they have to say why it happened. It happened because we destroyed all the supply chains in the COVID epidemic. and we had inflation in every advanced economy on Earth. That's a reason, not an excuse. So then what happened? As we rebuilt the supply chains, inflation started to drop. Fuel prices went way up, aggravated by the Russia-Ukraine war. But we kept on with our all of the above strategy, which is not quite all of the above.

11:42is basically safer natural gas harvesting and all the green options than efficiencies. And a lot of people think that's a mistake, but we're in a period of transition, and we can't make it all up. In theory, we could without any natural gas, without any carbon-related energy, but in practice, we can't. And the third thing is housing. And that started with the crash in 2008. I just came from Nevada. They were the third hardest hit state then. People fled the state. And financial institutions came in and bought up all these empty units, and now they own them, and their rates are sky high, and there's a shortage of housing.

12:30So what I think we should do is admit the truth and say this happened, and this is what we want to do. What do they want to do? What we want to do is have a federal price gouging law, which we should have and should have had years ago, because we don't want to sit prices, but we don't want to be gouged either. And we know how to enforce them because lots of states have them. We should continue our energy policy and, if at all possible, accelerate it. We have unlimited potential to support solar and wind. We're trying to improve battery technology. We can do geothermal. We can do all this other stuff.

13:16We have now small-scale pellet nuclear technology where you can protect the fuel with ceramic balls, which will give it a much longer half-life before it will be dangerous. and we can dramatically improve the efficiency of fracking if the standards are high enough and regularly checked. And what's their policy? And on housing, she wants to build 3 million more units and give people help for their down payments. And they'll increase the supply and drop the price. So what's their policy? Their policy is they say nothing about the price-couching law. Donald Trump promised in a meeting with the oil companies, which was widely publicized, that he would repeal every single clean energy reform measure that had been adopted by President Biden.

14:18And the third thing is they said really nothing about housing. So I think Kamala Harris has got a more compelling case. And I think affirmatively they're better. You don't have to say anything bad about Trump. You just say this is what we're for. And they're not for that. And he's actually promised to repeal a lot of what has given us cheaper power every day. Elon Musk is so determined to do it that his greatest public service, I think, was the Tesla. It's a great car. And the people that have tried to copy it, my daughter and son-in-law are driving our grandkids to the house this weekend in a Rivian.

15:09And now Musk likes being on the power side so much that he's canceled all his recharging stations. And I have a friend who lives in Connecticut. He's a college classmate of mine, and he's from the Dominican Republic. He just won the contract to put up all the recharging stations in Queens that are going to regularly recharge the New York City taxi cabs because we have to be all green in just a few years. That's what I think. I think we should run on, yes, there's a problem. Everybody had it. We're doing better than most people, and you will feel it if you just hang around here. Because what happened, Trump thinks he's going to get a rerun of what happened in 2016, where he told us for a year, the economy, two years, the economy was terrible under Obama and we were producing 8 million jobs a year with no inflation.

16:07It was not terrible, but it often takes three years before people will admit that things are getting better and before they can feel it. And so in 2017, when actually the rate of new jobs started going down a little bit, people felt it. And, you know, Donald Trump is a genius at claiming credit. I mean, he is. He's good at it. I mean, we had a really sunny day today. I did that. It rained yesterday. If I had been president, it never would have happened. I mean, that's the world we're living in. So we're about to make a decision in an election that will have massive consequences for at least 30 years based on people's perception or lack thereof that they're getting better.

17:07There was a great article in one of the publications about five days ago, which measured Obama, I mean, measured Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on eight important economic questions, undecided voters. And hers positions were substantially more popular than his. But they don't know it yet, in spite of all the money it's been spent. So if you're interested in this election and you want to have any impact on it, I recommend we toot this horn as loud as we can for the 13 days that are left. And one final thing. There was a group of 170 economists from right to left that analyzed all of their proposals, including President Trump's proposal for 10 % across the board terrorists.

18:06And we know that if we buy things that we're not going to start producing here, that it's just being an add-on to the price. So it amounts to a$4 ,000 a year tax increase for most families. So I think it's a lay down who's got the better plan for the most people. His plan costs$7.5 trillion over a decade. Hers costs$3.5 trillion. So his is twice as expensive and helped less than half as many people. But it takes time to get that out and to get people to absorb it. and we're asking them for somewhat of a leap of faith because the only thing that I see people saying is they do notice when gas prices go down right away.

18:56So a lot of people are saying, yeah, gas prices are down. But they haven't felt the other stuff. So our job, those of us who support her, is to get out and make this argument. Then, on the terms of the threat to democracy and a woman's right to choose and all that. The real problem is that people have baked all that in, but they think, well, it wasn't so bad last time. McCain stopped it. But there are no guardrails now. The Supreme Court has literally said that the president can do anything to anybody at home in America if it's tied to his duty. Well, I've written his speech a lot in my mind. I swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

19:49I think Bill Clinton's a real threat to that. I mean, after all, he opposed me. And, you know, his wife ran against me. How dare her? And so I'm going to send him to the Colorado Supermax, where he can't do any harm. He's the enemy within. their idea of the enemy within is anybody who disagrees with them. Now you're laughing, but if you were me, it wouldn't be quite so funny. But I have done this little petition. I'm going to handwrite this petition and say, look, I'm almost as old as you are.

20:35And my blood's running thinner. and can you please at least send me to jail in the south somewhere? I'll even go to Guantanamo. I just want to be warm. Now, we're laughing, but you shouldn't be. So we'll just see what happens. My gut is I think we'll ink it out, but I have no idea. We could lose all these closed states. We could win them all. but the fundamental problem is she remains an unknown quantity to people and they don't know a lot of people who are still trying to make up their mind don't know what she has pledged to do and have been given a chance to compare it to what he has so in the last 13 days whatever I can do to stop that I'll close that gap, I'm going to do it

21:41We'll be right back after a break.

21:58use DEAL. DEAL is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert, plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one. So if you're scaling, make it simple with DEAL. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free. If you're in private capital, you understand that your next great deal starts with who you know. That's why over 3 ,000 firms trust Affinity, the CRM platform purpose-built for private capital. Affinity's relationship intelligence reveals your team's strongest paths to founders, investors, and decision makers using insights hidden in emails, calendars, and meetings.

22:48With powerful AI tools like Affinity NoteTaker and Deal Assist, you'll spend less time managing data and more time closing the right deals. Learn more at affinity.co.com. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find video of this talk from our Masters of Scale Summit and more at our YouTube channel.

23:15So, Mr. President, I think you made the most compelling case. And among other things, you've demonstrated that unlike former President Trump, you can conclude in cohesive argument, coherent sentences. Right. And do an in-depth analysis. Apparently it's a disadvantage. I thought about trying to dance around on stage for 30 minutes.

23:48I couldn't bring myself to do it. We appreciate the intelligence and the honesty. One other thing I think is the only point I'd add to your amazing descriptions. I'm going to ask it as a question is, you know, he keeps promising to do these tariffs. What do you think the impact on the American people would be of Trump's tariffs? it'll cost them about 4 000 bucks a year the average family yeah according to these studies that you know it could be off a little bit but if you ask them about it they dismiss it oh they said oh there were a lot of economists that weren't for us before look how great our economy was when he just rode on the back of obama's last two years and they think that you're going to give it to them again.

24:40This time, inflation's coming down. It's going to come down more. And we still got a lot of benefits to reap from the infrastructure bill. There are 60 ,000 projects more or less underway. There'll be 100 ,000 before you know it. They both promised an infrastructure bill, but only Biden delivered one. and they think they'll get credit for it. And they'll be out there claiming credit. It's only because I got elected that all these people decided to finish. Did I come up with the money? No. Did I come up with the money? No. I mean, it's crazy. And they think they'll get the benefit of the CHIPS bill.

25:22And that CHIPS bill is really important because I think it also, it'll not only make us more competitive, but I think it gives us a chance to stabilize our relationship with China and to minimize the incentive they have to take over Taiwan. But that also relates to what we do in Ukraine, so we'll see. Indeed. So because I think you so compellingly and decisively answered the election question, I'm going to move to a Silicon Valley favorite, which is how, and we mentioned chips, what's getting you curious around artificial intelligence? And how do you, from your position, how do you think we should think about it?

26:11Well, we talked about this a little before I came in, but I made three decisions when I was president that I thought worked out really well. And I made all of them in less than 10 minutes. Not all three at the same time, but when they came out. The first was I made a loan to Mexico when they were about to go broke, and 80 % of the public was against it. And we had just lost the Congress to the Republicans. And on the day I had to make the decision, to be fair, Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole were both for it. And they were both told when they read the paper that morning that 80 % of the public was against it, that they would be deposed unless they withdrew their support.

26:53So I had to do it alone. from a little-known fund available for currency stabilization. I did that, and it worked out great, and Mexico paid the loan back three years early, and we made$600 million more on the loan than we would have if the money just put in the government bonds. The second was when I decided we needed to accelerate the human genome project, and we finished the first map. And we got the best return on that investment that you can imagine. It was just about hundreds of multiples. And the third was deciding to put GPS into the public domain. And it's hard to imagine it not being in the public domain now.

27:40But at the time, I had to listen to a brisk argument about how the government had paid for all this research, and it was defense-related, and national security. I said, first of all, you cannot keep this genie in the bottle. So why don't we put it into places it'll do the most good and see what happens? And we all live with it without thinking about it now. So that's, I think that whatever happens, we need to think about AI in that way. For example, for me, you know, I'm from Arkansas. And I spent an enormous amount of time when I was president trying to close the gap between the economic opportunities available to rich and poor communities.

28:28So rural and urban ones. and you're in a position now where you can take everything that's been learned about this locally and nationally over the last 30 years and put it into a system that will give us feedback and figure out what we should be doing to harmonize the economic and social development of America. It's not so easy to do, but I mean, to whatever extent you do it, you will be cutting down on the intensity of all the social conflict we've got. So I wish I knew enough about it to know how to do that. Well, part of the thing that I can attest to personally is you have the depth of intellectual curiosity that continues for how to navigate these things.

29:18So we only have, you know, basically a couple minutes left. What would you say that people could do? you're spending time, you know, helping people understand, you know, Harris's package, the policies, why they're intelligent, why she's dedicated to all of the American people, why they have a long-term impact. What would you say to an audience of entrepreneurs and journalists and so forth about what they should be doing to try to get that message out? What's the thing that we can do to help row the boat? Well, I think, in all the swing states, I would make sure that all the major publications understand why you think it would be better for the economy if she won long term.

30:06Like I said, it's hard for you to imagine, but she just showed up in people's lives. I mean, I ran four times as long as I told you in the primary in 1992. And I was about to go to New York for the convention. and I got a survey that showed that a majority of the American people didn't know Hillary and I had a child. After I'd been out there and won the nomination and everything. And they also thought we were both from wealthy homes because we'd gone to Ivy League schools and spoken complete sentences. It's a feature. Yeah, so I think anything you can do to get people who are in business, particularly businesses they created themselves, to understand your perspective about who is better and why is good.

30:59But the other thing you can do is do what I'm trying to do on an individual scale. You can phone bank into Nevada and Arizona and the other closed states that are further east. We do have pretty good telecommunications. Indeed. Well, Mr. President, I speak for the entire audience. and thanking you for the presidency, for the Clinton Global Initiative, and for your work on this election. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.