41. Reid Hoffman: Bankrolling Biden to beat Trump, the "PayPal Mafia", and Musk's messiah complex

27:00And also doesn't think law applies to him and is, you know, I believe deeply corrupt in a variety of ways. And it's part of, you know, the reason why I've kind of helped with a couple of lawsuits, including the E. Jean Carroll one and others. And, you know, that kind of like he doesn't care about anything other than himself is terrible for leading society. He says, oh, I feel your grievance and I will go clear out those, drain the swamp of the White House. And it's like, actually, in fact, I'm going to go make it much more swampy. And I'm going to go do this entirely for myself and don't care about you at all.

27:35You know, like, for example, if he were to become the Republican candidate and win, you know, he'll pull out of the Ukraine war the next day. He'll threaten to pull out of NATO. You know, he doesn't care about, you know, the children who are dying and suffering, plus all the other people in the Ukraine as part of doing this, you know, is a fan of dictators around the world. Like his comment when meeting Kim Jong-un is, I wish everyone had to stand up and salute me that way. Like, okay, maybe you should go move to Korea and be there. But what does it say that you, so you talk about something like Peter Thiel, you know, very, very successful entrepreneur, founded PayPal, associated with lots of the big successes in your world.

28:20And yet, as you say, regardless of what he might think now, knowing all that stuff, he not only supported it in terms of putting his vote for Trump, he supported him hugely financially as well in a system that you know as well as anybody, because you're a massive contributor to political campaigns on the Democrat side. I'm not sure I could sit down and have a civil conversation with him, knowing that he played such a prominent role in that. Look, I think it's, as I said, it was challenging and has been very challenging for, you know, kind of Peter's and my interactions because, you know, Peter's like, well, we've got to stop talking about Trump because it's interfering with how we interact.

28:59And I was like, look, I can't talk to you about anything but Trump until I, until I. Stop you supporting. Well, until, until at least I understand this. I mean, if I were to imagine, this is not what Peter said to me, but if I were to imagine a position like Peter's that I would try to argue if I was in his shoes and say, look, the American society is so sclerotic that we need a wrecking ball to kind of reset it. And it's unfortunate that wrecking ball has all of the grossness of Donald Trump in terms of corruption and narcissism and lack of care and regard for literally almost everybody else in terms of what's happening and no theory of governance.

29:39I have a great healthcare plan. I'm just never going to tell you ever as to what it is. And you say, okay, but that's a wrecking ball we need. I disagree with that, but at least I can argue with it. But everything else, I just don't know what the coherent moral and ethical justification is for supporting somebody who is erosive to democracy and the rule of law. And do you find, I mean, you've just been in Italy where I think you saw Giorgio Maloney, you know a lot of the European politicians. And Alistair and I talk about this a lot. I mean, we're in a very, very disturbing moment in European history where the far right parties are now up at 20, 25 % in Germany.

30:20They're doing very well in the Nordic countries. Marine Le Pen is in pole position potentially to take over as the next president of France. we're talking to you in the middle of a conservative conference where the British Conservative Party has gone full Trumpian. I mean, the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, is now talking about millions of immigrants swarming into the country, and they're getting into the classic culture wars around pretty much everything you can imagine. What on earth is going on? I mean, what's your sense of what's happening? And how do you see Boris Johnson compared to Trump?

30:51How do you view all this stuff from across the Atlantic? Well, you know, I thought there was a bunch of things where Boris was a version of Trump, you know, proroguing parliament, you know, kind of a similar like the rules don't apply to me. COVID lockdown for everyone else and I'm going to have a party in the backyard. You know, like, you know, all that kind of stuff struck me as at least birds of a feather. Obviously, living with the Trump stuff, I thought Trump was much worse. But, you know, when I talked to various British friends, no, no, Boris is just as bad. And it's like, well, okay, you know, I could believe it if I was, you know, more local and paying attention.

31:29That wasn't a dispute. And I do think that we are definitely in a crisis time for the world, a crisis time for democracy. Now, people frequently will then go, it's the worst ever. And you're like, well, I take the US as a concept. Like, we're not in the Civil War. There are definitely worse periods in kind of US history. Maybe we'll get there. It's definitely a down cycle. We hope we don't. That would be a really just massively terrible thing. And it's part of the reason why, for example, being so urgent on the rule of law, so urgent on democracy, so urgent on the stuff is really important. And that applies in the Europe context too, because part of the, obviously the echoes that thoughtful people worry about is they worry about the 30s.

32:14And they say, well, are we on another path of the 30s? Does it lead to a similarly bad thing. How do we make a better society without resorting to fascism as an angle for doing this? And, you know, I'm hopeful that we won't get anywhere close to any of the, you know, the bloody lines, but I think it requires work to do so. And I think everybody has to say, how do I help contribute to making society better? This is a little bit the public intellectual comment, because I think we are in troubled times. Do you think it's possible to make the case that without social media, and I think artificial intelligence, its impact upon democratic politics could be even more extreme and more difficult, that without that, Trump would never have been elected, Brexit would never have happened, some of these right-wing populist movements would never have got the traction that they've managed to get.

33:06You know, I definitely think that because the concept of social media is so broadly libertarian that it allows itself to be, or at least the leaders of Twitter and to a lesser extent, Facebook kind of allow that, that it can be hacked by crazy populist groups, it can be hacked by Russians, it can be hacked by, and I think that has a negative, a serious negative contributor. I don't think it's inherently bad. I think it's kind of a question of just as we figure out what is the balance of, like, you know, in the US, this kind of freedom of speech stuff, what is the balance from between the thing I can say the moon is made out of green cheese and I think aliens and Martians are running the White House and I'm not allowed to do that but I don't have the amplification of it I don't have the QAnon or the Pizzagate or other kinds of things and sorting through that is I think one of the things that's very important and broadly I think it can be shaped in a way that it's actually much more of a positive contributor than negative but that's not undercutting what the negative contributions have been but by the way you know people tend to want to hang that on just the social media.

34:10And like, when I look at this, I go, well, which of these two has a more negative impact, Fox News or, you know, kind of Twitter? And I tend to think like what gets amplified through Twitter is all of the essentially pure garbage on Fox News. And you can tell because like the Dominion lawsuit kind of - Tell us about the Dominion, remind us about the Dominion lawsuit because some listeners won't be familiar. So, Dominion is an electronic voting system. One of the things that, that to try to support the fraudulent criminal and narcissistic claim by Donald Trump that the 2020 election was stolen was making a whole bunch of like, and this electronic voting system by Dominion Systems was corrupt.

34:51And so they sued them. And they sued them because here's a place where it's not a political thing. It's an economic thing. And it's a basis on fact. And Fox had to pay a lot of money because it was all rampant lies that they knew were rampant lies, but also then revealed the text between these people like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity saying, yeah, the people who believe us on this stolen stuff are totally bonkers, but we have to say it because that's what they want to hear. And you have it as a part of a public record. And it's like, understand that these people are lying to you because they think it's the way that they get in front of you as exciting you as the mob.

35:24But they're still watching. But they're still watching. Why are they still watching? Why do people want to be lied to? Well, because, you know, kind of a classic human thing is they want to be validated in their emotional belief that the way the world is working that they don't like is because there's these evil liberals who are stealing it from them and corrupting their children. And being told that versus being told anything else helps them, you know, kind of validate their point of view. And so that's part of what goes on here. Well, thank you. And let's just take a quick break. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America, and Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small.

36:06From improving emergency response times to protecting against cyber attacks, local, state, and federal governments are innovating with Google AI. This is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at g.co slash American Innovation.

36:25One of the things I was talking to Yuval Noah Harari about last week is he's very interested in the way in which AI could make these kind of QAnon conspiracies in a much more powerful and convincing way. Just to remind us, the QAnon conspiracies are obviously these very, very powerful amongst certain factions of far-right voters, which make allegations about child sex rings in the Clinton White House, and goodness knows what else. I mean, this is sort of pseudo-religious conspiracy fantasies. Do you feel that that is something that we really need to concentrate on before the next election? And the reason I feel this is that when I was running to be mayor of London, I had a couple of companies come and pitch me who said that they were, you know, former Israeli intelligence and special forces people, and they offered to win elections for me using a whole series of different social media tools and said they'd done it in 52 countries and all this kind of stuff.

37:19And I imagine those same people will now be pitching their services on the basis of their ability to use AI. Could you talk to us a little bit about AI in the next election? So it's definitely a concern because it is an amazing human amplifier, you know, part of the book impromptu that you know that I wrote about how AI is amplification intelligence. Which incidentally for listeners, Reid actually wrote with ChatGBT4. It's a great book impromptu and it's definitely worth reading if you're interested in AI, but it's a book written actually as a dialogue between him and AI. First book on AI, co-written with AI is a kind of a slogan tagline.

37:53Is chat GBT for a public intellectual? It certainly can be. Go interact with it. You can have public intellectual conversations with it. It doesn't really have as much of a point of view, which you generally expect a public, like you can say broadly, argue for this, argue against this. But it's clever. but it is it can be very clever i highly recommend it i think i i think i threw rory into the deep end on it and he's now like oh this is more interesting than i thought it was he's morally obsessed i'd say yeah and and so there is a real issue there now but that issue obscures the thing that you know the q anon theory happened just fine with a whole bunch of human beings doing it you know you got um the russians and putin hiring nigerians to write a whole bunch of stuff and spread it within social media not just within the u.s but within europe as kind of ways of doing this.

38:39And so it's not necessarily totally new. And presumably, to push a little bit further, there could be a scale of amplification where the change in quantity is almost a change in quality. I mean, if the application becomes unbelievably powerful, sophisticated, and the QAnon conspiracy or the new conspiracy can almost be micro-adjusted to every different listener and evolve very, very quickly, you can imagine something having a very, very powerful cultural emotional effect before an election. Yeah. And that's exactly where I was going. So, you kind of elaborated the point that I was heading along.

39:12And I think there's ways to use AI to be on the other side of it. But, you know, it's one of the reasons why when the companies got together at the White House, one of the things they said, we will all kind of voluntarily commit to doing is essentially watermarking AI content to try to prevent, you know, some of this flood of misinformation. Now, the problem, of course, is there's open source models, and these open source models are provided by a variety of companies in the US, UK, and France. And those open source models can produce a whole bunch of this content in volume without watermarks. So, it's a legitimate attempt to be positive by Microsoft, Google, Inflection, Anthropic, and so forth.

39:51But we're going to have to go much further to try to allay the problems that will be front and center in 2024. for. Just back on the political front, we have, as you may know, we have limits on spending on our political campaigns. I just wondered, first of all, have you any idea how much money you have actually made in political donations during your life? And secondly, whether you think on balance, American politics would be better if it were possible to have the kind of spending limits that we have? So, yes, I am because I'm a business person. I keep accurate ledgers. I don't report the number because it's a very large number.

40:32And I do think that campaign financing limits are actually a very good thing. And the primary reason, of course, I do this is because you say, well, if there's going to be a whole bunch of money trying to turn the US into a theocracy or a divided kind of cultural war kind of place, I will try to put in some money to kind kind of to shift away from that, you know, kind of as a way of doing it. And it's part of what I think is my moral responsibility as a child of the country who's been fortunate enough to make a bunch of money, so to try to contribute positively. Does it make it very, very difficult?

41:05When we talk about billion dollar elections, that's kind of mind blowing for a British mindset. And yeah, it would seem to me that whether it's Trump against Biden, Trump against Hillary, when Obama first won, without that sort of level of funding, do you think it's literally impossible to win an election now without those sorts of sums of money flowing in? On the big national elections, fundamentally, it's almost impossible without it because it's the question of how do you pay for all this stuff like advertising and how do you even pay for it? Even if you have a total grassroots movement, how do you support and coordinate all of the grassroots?

41:41How do you use an understanding of where the electorate is to know which doors to knock on and all the rest, all of which is kind of an economic expense here. So, Reid, you've set up one of the biggest AI companies in the world with Mustafa Suleiman, who we interviewed a few weeks ago. And he often at the moment sounds more on the pessimistic, robot succumbing end of the AI debate. And you seem to be more on the optimistic side. I guess that's a very coarse characterization and you'd be more nuanced than that. But Give us the optimistic case. Give us reasons not to see AI purely in sort of negative, fearful terms.

42:18So the thing is, human beings always, when they encounter something broadly new in technology, always think that it's going to be there. When the printing press was created, it was going to be a corruption of human cognitive capabilities because you no longer need to remember and a spreader of misinformation. And so, you know, the fact that we author books and use the printing press show that there is a certain negative of that. AI is the exact same, and we can go through everything. We can go through phonographs, electricity, steam engine, a bunch of other things, those ways of doing it. And all of these technologies, I think we can shape them to be much, much better.

42:50And part of the reason, of course, I wrote impromptu and kind of twisted your arm to read it was to essentially kind of say, look, here is how it could be really amazing as human amplification. We can have a tutor on every smartphone that works from anything from a two-year-old to an 80-year-old on every subject that's infinitely patient to help you in anything in your life. Obviously, part of what Mustafa and I are trying to do with Pi, the personal intelligence. You could have a medical assistant available on every smartphone for everyone who has access to a smartphone, anyone in the world. Think about the alleviation of human suffering that you can do when you do that because of the 8 billion people in the world, substantially less than a billion have real access to doctors.

43:34And so, and by the way, even when you have access to a doctor, you know, say you had a medical assistant, you have access to doctors. Yes. Okay. Well, I'm not a doctor. You should see your doctor, but let's talk about it a little bit and say, oh, here's what you should tell your doctor when you're seeing them, right? You know, as a help and as an amplifier. And, you know, like for example, in Britain, you have rationing in the NHS. Well, think about if you could pre-do your visit each time before you go in to see a doctor with a medical assistant and be much more efficient than the doctors can actually help a bunch more people in good ways.

44:03That's all of the things that are line of sight today for this technology. And that's the reason why the go use it and understand how you can use it to be helpful to your humanity, to the society at large. And I am unresolvedly optimistic across all of them, democracy, jobs, quality of life, quality of work. I think all of this stuff is doable in a very positive way. Okay. And if you woke up and you weren't, didn't have your usual sort of positive Reid Hoffman outlook on life, and you were a bit more Mustafa in your thinking, what might you see as the potential downsides? And I guess what should we maybe worry about a little bit, even if the big picture can be positive?

44:46Well, part of my criticism of the critics, because most of the people who say, oh, oh, you know, like AI, the robots are coming for us, you know, science fiction, other kinds of stuff, is that the real issue is that AI is a human amplifier. And so, a human amplifier in bad human hands, whether it's terrorists, criminals, rogue states, et cetera, and you get distracted by and the robots will be a new level of sentience that will remake the world and we need to be obsessed by that. And it's like, well, I'm actually much more obsessed by AI in the hands of Putin, AI in the hands of Kim Jong-un, AI in the hands of a terrorist, a criminal, and how do we navigate that?

45:24And that's our first order. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't pay any attention whatsoever to what's happening as potential science fiction. And I pay attention to, could these machines be self-improving and so forth? And by the way, Mustafa and my positions are not so far apart other than he thinks that there will be big changes in society coming and we need to pay attention to them on a society basis. He's also actually a technological optimist relative to, he's building pie and he knows what he can make for humanity. And so, he's actually more in the, we can really steer to very positive things.

45:56He's just more highlighting. And by the way, we really need to make sure we avoid that landmine. So, we're primarily a politics podcast. And I guess the big question in this is regulation. What do you think smart politicians should be doing and thinking about AI? What should they be regulating and when? So, I don't know of any instances where you take a forming technology, but it's yet unformed, and you have pre-dictated it and regulated it in a good way that isn't just really slowing down innovation. So, I tend to think that a lot of the regulation stuff is to say, pay attention and then move rapidly to change the things that are potentially bad and focus on the really bad things, not the things that can be easily fixed in one, two, or three years.

46:40We'll say, well, you know, AI's hallucinate. You're like, well, we're fixing that every month in terms of bad outcomes. And it's just, by the way, Google search hallucinates too. It's just getting it down to a certain kind of area. And so that's, I think, one thing. And then the really extreme cases, like the use of terrorism, the use in criminality, like how can we restrict that in various ways? How do we be careful about the spread of AI within global conflict to bad state actors? You know, those kinds of things, I think, are the right things for government folks to focus on. of the things to do.

47:10And then you obviously iterate and you pay attention to, well, could this create a racial bias that could be a really problem? Yes, let's pay attention to that. And as it starts happening, let's fix it because we can fix it. But if you look at the way the social media has developed, is it not the case that by the time the politicians kind of caught up with the impact that it was having, or that they thought it might have in relation, say, to child abuse, some of the terrorism you mentioned some of the political implications that we've talked about, that it was too late. And is there not a danger of that with artificial intelligence?

47:46There's certainly a risk of it and a danger of it. And by the way, there will certainly be some bad things that happen that we wish we could have forestalled in advance. But this is part of like, you know, back to this kind of how is technology created and how do you learn is you create it, you deploy it, you learn from it, you iterate. The hope, let me call it the Brussels hope, that you can dictate kind of the pattern of innovation and do intense risk studies and that's actually not the way that these things work. And it's part of the reason why when you look at it, you say, well, it's the internet, it's cloud, it's mobile.

48:20All of that's created in the US where Europe hasn't done anything. AI could be another one of those or AI could be something that you potentially participate in. I'd love you to give a sense of what you feel your proudest achievement in your life so far has been. What are the things that you look back on And you think that was genuinely worthwhile. Well, you know, this may be the most American thing now that I said on the podcast, which is my family. No, no. I hope that it's still in front of me. Oh, there we are. We didn't even think of that. You're saying we hadn't even thought about the future.

48:51The best is yet to come. Yes. Right. So, you know, maybe it's inflection and pie. Maybe it's other things. You know, so far, I'd say, you know, obviously, LinkedIn has hundreds of millions of people. I think the public number is something north of 850 million people trying to create economic opportunity. It's most focused on every individual and as kind of a use of technology for doing that and for how, for example, social networks can elevate people as individuals and as groups and as companies and societies and kind of further make economic attention. That's obviously one, you know, kind of helping a number of entrepreneurs, you know, create stuff, whether it's Airbnb, you know, other kinds of projects for, you know, also helping elevate humanity.

49:32but like I said, the most American thing. I hope the best is still to come. Well, maybe my final question then is this. Perhaps the best that is yet to come is that you play a central role in stopping Donald Trump become president again. But I want to ask you a question that Rory and I asked a British business audience when we saw them recently. We asked them this question. Who do you think will be the president of America in 2025? A, A, Joe Biden, B, Donald Trump, or C, somebody else. So what's your answer to that? Joe Biden, who I think is a very decent centrist and exactly where we'd want to be.

50:10And, you know, I don't think it's a foregone conclusion. I think it's going to be a difficult race because making that case to the American people and having people hear it, I think is very important. But that we care about decency and we care about kind of like helping everyday people move forward. I think that's the Biden message. Love it. Now, Reid, you've been very generous with your time, but I wanted to get a couple of questions in. Tell us a little bit about how you became interested in friendship and what your fundamental theory of friendship is. And then two days later, they finished this conversation.

50:46And basically, perhaps like many folks, I kind of go through high school and I kind of was like, wow, this is a really strange thing. And I don't find many people that I really connect with. And the world is this kind of chaotic, strange place. And I got to Stanford and I started building some amazing, deep friendships where suddenly I felt more like on path to the person that I could be, that I wanted to be, that I should be. And, you know, like for example, the discovery on the public intellectual stuff was through discussions with friends, through discussions about like, you know, who are we and who should we be and how do we challenge each other and how do we grow to being the best possible versions of ourselves?

51:23Oh my God, this friendship thing, this is the really important thing in the meaning of life that is literally not talked about nearly enough. Like if you go into a bookstore, there's just oodles of books on like relationships and, you know, how do you like that? And very few on friendships is one kind of thing. And it's everything from philosophical depth. Like when you look at the history of it, you go, well, there's this little treatise from Cicero. There's this essay from Montaigne. There's this Nicomachean ethics thing, but there's very, very little. And yet it is so critical. And like from the historical and philosophical and deeply intellectual to the, what does it mean?

51:56Like, for example, there's a whole bunch of questions you can ask about friendship. What are the duties of friendship? What are the obligations? Where should friendship be challenging? When should friendships end? You know, all of these things, most people go, huh, hadn't really thought about that. And so, that was the, if you asked me when I was an undergraduate, what is the first book I was going to write? It was going to be on friendship. I still hope to do so, as you know, Rory. And I keep getting distracted by doing things like, oh gosh, if Trump gets elected, we're going to move to massive world disorder that's going to cause suffering all over the world, including in the US.

52:29Let's try to avoid that. How many close friends have you got then? I don't count. I do have a number. I don't think there's a rule that one can only have three or one can only have five. But it's that level of, is that kind of area? Close, close, close, close friends? You know, probably, although it's probably more like 10 or 15. And the thing about it is, like, again, a little bit the subtle corruption of friendship is you think, well, just one, and you're hung up on the number versus when you're interacting with your friends, whether it's a friend that you maybe have just made on a plane or has wandered up to you in a conference and started talking to you as a gesture in Rory's direction.

53:06We mess at a conference. Yes. And to be as genuine and present on that path as possible. And that's the focus point, not the, well, I already have enough close friends. I have three. It's the, how do you take all of your own actions and be as real and present on that path as possible? I don't think there's any magic numbers. And can I just come in on this? Because Alistair, you, I think, do have a sort of genius for friendships. And I noticed that when I see Dave Miliband pop around with a little present around the door, or I see the loyalty that you showed to the team that you worked with give us a little bit of a sense of friendship in your life you don't talk much about it but i i'm right i'll say that you do have actually quite deep loyal friendships yeah but i don't think i have that many i think we often say to people i often say to you rory we talk about somebody to get on the podcast i'll say yeah he's a really good friend of mine but then if i were to say if one of my kids was in real difficulty or if i would if i something was happening to me health-wise how many people would i really really really feel that i needed to tell to me that's a true friend and i would like them to think that i was the the same version for them i've had quite a few friends who've died some very close friends who've died but i i think friendship i wouldn't ever think that somebody i met on a plane was a friend until i got to know them for several years thereafter i'm a bit of a slow burner on the friendship front not that you and i aren't going to be really good friends read forever i mean you know this would be the great first meeting.

54:32Where I completely agree with you is I don't think we think about it and value it nearly as much as we should. So, in the first couple of months that I was in Oxford, as I'll put England versus Britain on this, I was talking about how much more approachable Americans were than English. And I was talking to a person who was like, oh, no, we're of course approachable. I said, okay. So, how long do you have to be seeing someone in the supermarket that you're to that you see them in the same supermarket before you introduce yourself and talk to them. And the answer then was three years. And I was like, okay, in the US, it's like second or third time.

55:11No, the other thing is, I disagree with that. I would say that in Britain, there comes a point where you've seen them so often, you feel it's no longer possible to ask them their name. Fair enough. And I actually think that part of the thing that is the mysterious delight around friendship is it's a state of becoming. It's a path that you're walking with someone. And that's part of the reason why it's not a category mistake, a mistake that you go, say you sat next to somebody on a plane flight and you had just this amazing conversation. You talked about, you know, your family and your friends and what you were doing.

55:50Maybe you revealed some points of vulnerability in each other and you talked about it and you go, well, are we friends now or not? It's like, well, we've started the path, right? Obviously, the depth of trust of who you might leave your children to if you were passing, you know, that kind of stuff, that's still to come. But you're on the friendship path. And I think that's the thing that is so often one of the mistakes that people think about this is they don't think about it as, look, it's a dynamic path. And there's different values. Like some people have told me there is, you know, kind of like, well, your friend is the person who you can call at 3 a.m.

56:25in the airport and will come pick you up. It's like, well, that's one kind of friendship. And it's a valuable thing. And there's these kind of multiple dimensions on friendship that are deeply valuable. And that's one, but it's kind of like, what are the things that are valuable to who you are and who you are in the process, the path of becoming? And those are, to some degree, your closer friends. I think one of the things, Reid, that I noticed with you is that you are very good at a combination of patience and nudging. So, the example that I had with him recently is that he was giving me advice on transitioning out of a job.

56:58And Reid spent a lot of time talking on the phone, talking me through it, talking through the options. and I failed to update him. And he sent me a very sweet, not a kind of chippy hurt message saying, what's going on? Where did you get with this conversation? Could you please update me? And I thought that was a really lovely thing because I think there are two things that people could have done there. They could have been really offended, understandably, wait a sec, I spent all this time giving this guy's advice and he's gone completely silent on me and not spoken to me at all. Or they could have been super polite about it.

57:27But I thought that was nice. Do you Do you think friendship benefits from nudging occasionally? Yes. And actually, one of the things you have to decide, like, for example, my fundamental failure of friendship is two people decide to try to help each other be the best possible versions of themselves. And if you agree with that as a theory, one of the things that needs to be is you should be thinking, what is the nudge or the thing this person needs to hear that maybe they haven't heard and haven't heard from another source? And how do I help provide that? And that doesn't necessarily mean sitting down saying, I think you're out of your mind because of topic X, or you're doing something categorically wrong because of activity Y.

58:07Like that may not be the friendship way of engaging in this particular thing. But you might say, well, actually, in fact, look, this person needs to think about this. This person needs to think about, like, is this really them? You know, it's kind of like, well, look, when you talk to so-and-so, you know, you kind of adopted the wrong pattern of doing it, right? And by the way, so I gave a commencement speech at Vanderbilt last year on friendship in part. And it was kind of three examples of how friends had kind of come and pushed me. A friend of mine, Kandaren, who had pushed me in understanding, you know, kind of how women talk to women in, you know, kind of my generation.

58:49And what are the things that are different than how men talk to women, men talk to men. And that was enormously illustrative. Another one was kind of showing vulnerability and being able to be open to being helped. And it was not just the fact that it was very honored to be that person, but also, oh, that's how one should be as friends. I should do that too. You know, those are all kinds of things where you should be intentional about how you're helping people, your friends, become the better version of themselves because that's the delight for them and the delight for you and the delight for the world.

59:19I think this is back to the difference between you and Mustafa and you, Oxford and Stanford. I think it's an American-British thing. Alex Ferguson, you may have heard of, is a very famous football manager. and I always say this is the best definition of friendship that I ever heard but you I think you might disagree he said the the friend is the person who walks through the door as everyone else is putting on their coats to leave now I guess you would say that's a very that's like my definition of friendship is about when you're in crisis it's about when things are going wrong who you're going to turn to but you're saying friendship is about who's making your life kind of better, more fulfilling, more enjoyable, not least by you helping them at any stage in your life is not about bad stuff.

1:00:06Look, I think it's fundamentally very important to also have, because like, how do you grow to being the person you have? You navigate crisis, you navigate the things that could crush you. So it's very important to have friends who help you with the, oh God, you know, my world is collapsing. And they come and say, well, we're going to help you survive your world collapsing and get to the next thing. It's a critical thing. I didn't mean to undercut that at all. Friends are the allies who, when the artillery starts running down, necessarily, the only friends are not the ones who just run and jump in the foxhole.

1:00:36They're the ones you might just go and have a nice time with. Well, but more than a nice time, who help you become you. Like if you said, the only skillset that I need in friends is when I'm in crisis, they're there for me. And you're like, it's a very, very valuable skillset. If you had to pick one, maybe that's the one you would pick, right? But it's not the only one. Right? That's the point. Now, I think we're coming towards the end, Reid, but I wanted to finish with a question that I asked your friend Mustafa, which is, what is the one question these interviews don't ask you, but should ask you?

1:01:06Well, there's probably a lot. You know, and we've covered a bunch of really good ones. I love the fact that we've covered friendship. I love the fact that we, you know, are kind of talking about human beings as, you know, embedded in social and political context and how do we navigate that? maybe it's per podcast. So like, for example, for this one, it might be with the insanity and craziness of US politics, what could British politics learn from US culture or something? Because by the way, I certainly think the opposite is true too. There's a whole bunch of stuff that I would wish the US would learn from the British.

1:01:43Give us a bit of a snap at that, because that's a hell of an interesting question, then I'll hand to Alistair to finish this off. I think a little bit of it is usually the easy British reaction to Americans is, oh, look at these simpletons who are kind of nuts and crazy, guns, uneducated, unsophisticated, crazy on religion. You know, there's a whole stack of things that are very legitimate criticisms. But then say, well, but what could we learn from the Americans? And that was part of what I kind of learned being a student at Oxford, which is actually, in fact, we want to encourage individuals of all places in the British class system and so forth to be able to accomplish things such that they could become leaders of society.

1:02:25We're going to allow boldness and risk on that. And we're going to celebrate it as it's happening. And that little bit of disruption in our social thing, which will come with some price and cost, some risks, some mistakes, is something that we could learn from and will help us make a much better society for ourselves. That would be at least one that I would start with. Okay. My final question, I guess, is this. On friendships, if you were to go to Peter Thiel, the major donor to Donald Trump, and said, are we still friends, what does he say? I don't know. We haven't talked in a few years. I don't know what he would say.

1:03:05I would hope that he would say is, I hope that we can be. Right?

1:03:12Okay. Well, listen, it's been great talking to you. I didn't think we'd end up talking about the philosophy of friendship. it but i think you should write the book maybe that's the great thing that you haven't done yet that's one of the ones that's in the possibility set okay well listen thank you for giving us so much of your time and thanks for talking to us thank you reed really really appreciate it speak soon my pleasure all right alice what did you think i thought he was great and um when i was just downstairs chatting to fiona i said oh god i've got to do this podcast and she said who you doing it with i said reed hoffman she said well who's here as well he's sort of big tech bro founded linkedin and she said why are you doing people on the podcast that your listeners won't have heard of i said i don't know but rory says he's amazing so that's why i'm doing it so and i think you know given that rory so rarely brings in guests i think you know i can't say that no i thought he was i i could have gone on talking to him all day i thought he was absolutely terrific oh thank you he is actually unbelievably famous um outside the circle of you because he's One of the reasons he's very famous is that he's one of the very wealthiest people in the world.

1:04:17So he set up LinkedIn. He's on the main board of Microsoft. He's now launched this massive AI company with Mr. Suleiman. He was one of the earliest investors in Facebook, one of the earliest investors in Airbnb. And he's very, I think, particularly famous in the United States because he's seen as somebody who Silicon Valley looks to. I mean, he's seen as an interesting person. He took a very, very strong line, as you were saying, on Trump and Biden. But a lot of the interviews, I was really pleased with that because a lot of the interviews you get with him are about entrepreneurship. I mean, obviously, there's a huge following for him from people who want to set up businesses and want to work out how to be a billionaire.

1:04:54And so I think a lot of what he does is he's asked about strategy, he's asked about hiring, he's asked about firing, he's asked about how to select CEOs. So I thought it was nice to take him in directions he doesn't usually go. Also, I asked him about the role of money in his life, And maybe this is what they all say. They're kind of not motivated by money. They just happen to end up very, very wealthy. But I didn't get the feeling of somebody who was at all ostentatious. I mean, what's your sense of his kind of how he lives? I mean, presumably he does sort of fly around in private jets and all that sort of stuff.

1:05:25But is he kind of – he didn't strike me as being sort of loudly, ostentatiously wealthy. That's based on, you know, 80-minute conversation. I have to be careful because I'm a friend of his and spend a lot of time with him. But no, he lives pretty modestly. I mean, he's not, I haven't really asked him too much about this, but he's not somebody who seems to be very interested in fancy cars or fancy houses. He's got a very strong relationship with his wife, who is incredibly down to earth. They live in Washington State in a pretty cold, rainy part of the United States. Very, very beautiful, but it's not a sort of lavish kind of Hollywood lifestyle.

1:06:00And I think he's genuinely honest about that. I don't think he feels he really needs money. What he's doing increasingly is earning money to put it into causes that he believes in. One of the things he said to me, he didn't say it on this podcast, but helped me understand him a bit, is he said that he realized quite early on in life that one of the things he was good at was making money. And that one of the ways he could probably make most of a change in the world is by making money and then giving it to lots of other people. So he once said to me that rather than him trying to be an academic and just another philosopher.

1:06:33He could make money and maybe support 100 philosophers who are smarter than him. Yeah. I mean, he didn't want to say how much he'd given to political campaigns, but we're talking sums of money that kind of dwarf anything that we hear about in the UK context. Yeah. I read that when he was fundraising for Obama, he got all his kind of mates together on a Zoom call with Obama and the entry price of the Zoom was$250 ,000. But he's kind of into the tens, hundreds of millions in terms of giving away wealth. I mean, again, I don't think it's sharing. He's close to Obama. They clearly like each other and respect each other.

1:07:14It's difficult actually interviewing somebody that you're close to. I don't know. How easy did you find it when you were interviewing Tony Blair to kind of reflect on his lifestyle and his friendships and things? You sort of stay off that? Yeah, maybe. I think there are some things probably that you know about people that you don't necessarily want to get into so for example you know i will have i will have talked to tony or to david milliband uh you know if there were stuff going on at home that they were worried about and so forth and i think it's unfair to kind of sort of bring that up as an interview but in an interview but no i i thought you did well there i thought that you know it was um it was just very interesting it's like i mean i obviously know his name but i know nothing about him and it's just very it's quite interesting to to speak to somebody that you don't know much about but you know that they're quite influential in their own way so how did you how did you first get to know him so we first met this grisly thing called the Bilderberg conference oh my god here we go let's get the conspiracy theorists all fired up that's right that's it that's it was it were you talking about 15 minute cities and uh exactly exactly all that kind of stuff.

1:08:22I don't know what I told you. One of the things that I discovered coming out of that conference, it was meant to be sort of secret that I'd attended. And then someone called a parliamentary debate, which I had to attend on why Rory Stewart attended the Bilderberg conference, which poor Ken Clark at the dispatch box had to go, and try to defend me. Anyway, one of the things I discovered from the whole thing is, you know, there's a big theory that the thing is run by lizard kings, alien lizard kings, where alien lizard kings. What I couldn't quite work out was whether I - Who is it run by? Who is Mr.

1:08:48Bilderberg? well i actually i i embarrassingly i don't know very much about it is like the freemasons how did you how did you get invited you get you get you get tapped on the shoulder and invited to go along and of course in my case what you end up with is a very grumpy bitter government whip who's really angry that they didn't get invited saying no you can't possibly go you've got to vote on the you know sunday trading bill on and are you are you told when you arrive that you can't possibly talk about who else is there. You can't divulge any of the details. Details to the conference, yeah. But anyway, what I still haven't worked out, though, is whether I was an alien lizard king before I went, or whether by going I've now kind of grown a tail and become an alien lizard king.

1:09:27I think probably I was one before I went. Did you go to Bilderberg? Wait a second, you're very quiet about this. Not on liberty to say. I mean, I can't know. I find that I don't get tapped on the shoulder for these kinds of things. I think despite my now being officially a pensioner, I think I still am seen by some of these things as a bit of a sort of rogue possibility. I think people know that I don't like being a member of sort of exclusive clubs. Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine that you might cause a bit of trouble. Yeah. Bit of trouble. Is there anything you wish you'd asked him that we didn't ask him if you want to do this again?

1:10:05No, there isn't. Because I think as a kind of, as a pairing with Mustafa Suleiman, I think I learned quite a lot from Mustafa Solomon about that world and how it works and who's in it and what sort of people they are. But I actually found with Reid Hoffman, I just found kind of from the off almost, a very interesting character and personality that there was lots to explore in, which is why it went off in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions like the philosophy of friendship. I'm very interested in friendship. I think it's a really interesting area of life. Yeah. We talk about friends without really thinking what we mean most of the time.

1:10:42And as I say, I think it's something you're probably quite good at. I'm very good. I'm good at everything, Roy. No, you're not good at everything. Not good at everything. Don't you think so? No, not good at everything. Don't you think I'd be very good as a Bilderberg? You'd definitely be rubbish at that. I wasn't much good at that either. I generally remember. Did you hear any really interesting ideas? At Bilderberg? No, I'm not a liberty. No, I didn't. I don't want to say what they are, but did you hear anything? No, no, I didn't. I didn't, no. Nothing at all? No, it was pretty dull. Really dull.

1:11:08No, no, it's dull. Is the food nice? Food's nice, but the conversation's pretty dull. Are there any women there? Yes. I'm sorry, Kevin. We're not going to keep getting dragged down this path. Do you have to wear a tie? I'm wearing one now. You're impressed. Do you have to wear a tie at Bilderberg? Yeah, I think I did. Yeah, I did. Jolly good. All right. Well, thank you very much for doing that. And let's talk soon. Yeah. See you soon.