Coleman Hughes (2:38)

Okay, Reid Hoffman, thanks so much for coming on my show.

Reid Hoffman (2:41)

My pleasure and honor. I've been looking forward to this for a month or two.

Coleman Hughes (2:46)

So we met at a conference years ago.

Coleman Hughes (2:49)

And I don't know if we've ever crossed paths outside of that, but obviously you will be known to pretty much my entire audience as the co founder of LinkedIn as a major donor to Democrats, as a billionaire tech guy.

Coleman Hughes (3:13)

And there's a lot to talk about. First I want to just get for, you know, assume there's a slice of my audience that doesn't know who you are, however small, and give them one or two minute version of who you are, how you came to be in the position you, you're in and what you care about most right now.

Reid Hoffman (3:35)

So originally I was thinking about.

Reid Hoffman (3:40)

Being an academic philosopher in fact, because I'm most interested in how we as human beings kind of understand each other and understand the world. It's kind of thought and language. So I did artificial intelligence at Stanford and philosophy at Oxford. And then I realized that I was kind of interested in this in a kind of non, call it scholarly, scholastic way, but in a. How do we influence the, the path of the kind of evolution of humanities societies, et cetera. Maybe he was reading too much science fiction as a child.

Reid Hoffman (4:11)

And had the benefit of going to Stanford, so realized about kind of software entrepreneurship as a way of shaping that and creating that and so went back to the valley, did a bunch of jobs, helped create a bunch of different companies. LinkedIn being obviously one of the more notable one. And part of the way that I kind of look at this is how do we have technology help us towards kind of how we evolve as human beings. And so, you know, in a couple of my books, super agency, impromptu, etc. I've kind of described us more as Homo techne than homo sapiens. Because the way that we evolve is through technology. The way we become our more human selves is through technology. Even though when we first invented technology it tends to be something we kind of go, oh, that's kind of alien. But then we integrate it, you know, whether it's, you know, printing press or cars or planes or electricity or any of these things. And part of how we.

Reid Hoffman (5:14)

Part of how we evolve and that's, that's the kind of the journey I've been on as an entrepreneur, as an investor, you know, as a kind of a technology co creator.

Coleman Hughes (5:25)

Yeah, so I, that's, that's interesting because I think, you know, I'm, I'm very much pro technological progress. I'm someone that follows Steven Pinker in believing that science and reason and enlightenment values are the reason why you and I can expect to live to 80 or 90 years old. You, you, we can expect our children to live past the age, to live full lives, which has been an expectation most human beings have not been able to have throughout history. We can be pretty sure there's not going to be a famine in the country that we live in. And that would hold even if we didn't live in America. There's so many things that we take for granted because they're right in front of our noses. And.

Coleman Hughes (6:15)

It'S the human way to take things for granted. At the same time, I think some of the problems you've devoted yourself to, like political trust in institutions, is a big one from what I've seen of your public worrying out loud, you know, that those problems seem to be, in my view, side effects of technology. Right. Like you, you mentioned the, the printing press, obviously a fantastic step forward for humanity in the near term. It created, you know, it created the Protestant Catholic split which killed countless, you know, hundreds of thousands or more in Europe and certainly reduced. One way of looking at it is that it reduced trust in the Catholic Church. Right. Which was a high trust institution before that. So one way of looking at what's going on right now is, is technology, whether that's even, you know, something as simple as the TV which we now take for granted. And then of course, social media, is that reducing trust.

Coleman Hughes (7:23)

In our institutions in the same way that the printing press reduced trust in the Catholic Church. And if so, how do you square that with a general pro technology bent that seems like is the core of your motivation?

Reid Hoffman (7:40)

Well, the simple high line answer is I completely agree that the.

Reid Hoffman (7:47)

Transition times.

Reid Hoffman (7:50)

Actually cause.

Reid Hoffman (7:54)

You know, kind of challenge and problems and suffering and so forth. And you know, printing press, which I also covered in super Agency, you know, did create nearly a century or facilitated a, the creation of nearly a century of religious war. And so.

Reid Hoffman (8:12)

What we should learn from that, I don't think is not stop technology, but try to make these transitions less painful, less suffering, you know, kind of more. I agree with you, but the, the, the technology. Correct. So reshuffle, the reshuffle, you know, facilitates in human nature kind of a degradation of trust. It's one of the reasons why I think part of our, you know, kind of moral requirement and our intellectual requirement is to, to focus on renovating institutions versus, you know, tearing them down as a kind of a general principle for these things. And I do think that, you know, for example, you know, like one of, you know, two of the areas where I tend to think, for example, social networks are very legitimately criticized. One is children and then the other one is things that facilitate anti vax conspiracies and misunderstandings as part of it. And those are instances of erosion of trust and kind of creation of it. And so actually, in fact what we need to do as a society is to say, hey, we need to get through these transitions to rebuilding to a newer, you know, hopefully truth seeking, you know, kind of more accurate set of trusts on the other side. But I, it's, I, I don't mean to underplay at all whether it's artificial intelligence, social networks, the Internet, mobile phones, the fact that transitions create.

Reid Hoffman (9:48)

Real.

Reid Hoffman (9:52)

You know, challenges for people, for societies and so forth. And you know, part of what we need to be doing is figuring out how to navigate those challenges. And we can go in any of the challenges that you know, you would like or your, you think your audience is most attuned to. But I, you know, it's like long term optimistic, short term challenge navigation. That's the, that's the, the high line of it.

Coleman Hughes (10:17)

Yeah. So the anti vax one is it, that's an interesting case study because, you know, in the, in the 1970s, I think it was, I forget if it was bird flu or a different, oh, swine flu. I don't know if you remember this. There was an actual genuine.

Coleman Hughes (10:37)

Vaccination crisis where there was a bad vaccine that was created. 60 Minutes covered it. Thousands of people took unnecessary vaccines and many of them are believed to have gotten.

Coleman Hughes (10:49)

Was it.

Coleman Hughes (10:52)

What, what's it called? Guillain Barr syndrome? Oh yeah, something like that.

Reid Hoffman (10:56)

Yep.

Coleman Hughes (10:57)

It was a really nasty situation and it's something that someone like RFK Jr. Points to and he says, look at what the medical industrial complex is capable of. Look, look at how vaccines can harm us. And he has a point in that instance. Obviously this is, you know, now 50 years old, but I don't recall there being a sort of a generation of anti vaxxers created as a result of that genuine.

Coleman Hughes (11:25)

Scandal. Yet during COVID there was to my knowledge, no scandal with the vaccines similar to that in scale. Right. Obviously there were vaccines that were recalled because they cause blood clots. But the system by and large.

Coleman Hughes (11:48)

Caught issues and responded to those issues. And the vaccines saved far more lives than, than, than they, than they injured. And by the way, I have a lot, many criticisms of how Covid vaccines were rolled out and how the booster was.

Coleman Hughes (12:11)

The booster. You know, people were pressured to get the booster even though later CDC data came out saying that people didn't need it, at least people of a certain age.

Coleman Hughes (12:21)

But.

Coleman Hughes (12:24)

Those relatively minor problems compared to for instance what happened in the 70s, cause such an enormous level of mistrust in vaccines that now you have people Just like going back to basics and saying, does any back, does any vaccine work? Like this is like fairly just to be, to be skeptical of vaccines in general, including, you know, like smallpox and like, just these fundamental vaccines that nobody really disagreed about for, you know, 70 years has now become popular. And so this is an interesting case study in what is actually causing the mistrust. Is it that the mistrust is well calibrated to the scandals that the government is imposing on us, or is it that we are now living in a media landscape where, unlike in 1970, you know, 60 Minutes did a really good expose on what happened with that vaccine. What goes on now is that anyone with a YouTube channel and some charisma can spend every single day exposing both good faith and bad faith criticisms of the system building audiences specifically built around skepticism on these particular topics and, and feeding them one side of the issue and never the other side of the issue. And that just wasn't possible in the 1970s. If you were a consumer that wanted that, there would be nowhere you could go to get it. And at the same time, what is my podcast other than something that's enabled by this very same ecosystem? Right. People are a fan of me. I get the guests that I want to get. I give them my perspective on things and, and they could legitimately worry that I'm not giving them the other side of an issue. Right. I tend to be better than average at that, and I think I cultivate an audience that actually wants that from me. But nevertheless, I'm part of an ecosystem and I love having that, having access to these influencers and information and something more than just 13 channels on TV. And yet I can see how it's contributing maybe the main contributor to the lack of trust, which is not just an American phenomenon, but has also happened to varying extents in the uk, in Canada, in France, in Japan. I mean, you know, so, so I mean, not. I don't know where the question is in there, but if anything I said provoked a, a thought, go ahead.

Reid Hoffman (14:52)

Well, absolutely. Look, I think you said it very well. I think you're substantially above average. One of the reasons I'm, you know, honored and delighted to be on the podcast for it, and I do think that it's important to be considered and thoughtful. I mean, the thing that I've.

Reid Hoffman (15:09)

I mean, a general principle that I tend to think about is wherever technology is a problem, how do we shape it to being the solution? Because it does create a shift, as your earlier comment, printing press, others, and then the question is how do we then make it into something that, that, that kind of creates a much better elevated human condition? You know, truth in media, society, institutions, other things. And here, you know, my tendency is to think that we should enable as much freedom of voice as possible. For example, you know, even if you want to say the moon landing was faked and you know, other kinds of weird conspiracy theories that, that come up or you know, the fact that you know, a vaccine can have a side effect for an individual means that it's, it's doesn't understand the statistics of actually if 70% of us take it, then thousands of lives are saved even with a weird side effect or two. And you kind of run through these things and you say well what's the way we could use technology to help solve this? And so like one of the micro things that I tend to think that would be a good thing within call it the freedom of voice for all individuals is to say, hey, if you're publishing through platforms that are trying to maintain trust, if for example you and I were to say, oh, you know, you know, I've seen medical evidence that it's proven that these Covid, those COVID vaccine vaccines actually caused more, much more autism, you know, or autism in equal quantities with the, the lives they saved or autism at all, it would say, oh actually in fact we have to add a note to this to say medical experts disagree with this. This is why here's where you get the information and if you're going to publish this, we have to add this note to what you're publishing. Because you know, it's, it's, it's trying to orient people towards a truth oriented discussion. It's not saying, you can't say, you know, autism and vaccination, you can't say the moon landing never happened. But you have to say it with a reference to where there's a canon of truth discourse that disagrees with what you're saying and that that might be a good way to kind of blend the, the virtues of every voice is enabled together with platforms that enable truth seeking about. Well, you know, when we do have something that's kind of through call it a scientific process of truth. Which I think, you know, generally speaking the way that we do that in all kinds of society is, is groups of human beings in considered format studying something. It's everything from scientific method to you know, juries in court systems to try to get to be orienting us towards truth in that. And you use that as a way to reflect with technology.

Reid Hoffman (18:16)

Back into A general discourse that, you know, someone can claim whatever they want to claim for whatever particular reason they are claiming it, but still have that. That would be my orientation on this kind of topic within obviously a lot of discourse for how to make sure that works, doesn't get overly abused by political interests and other kinds of things. But that would be the, that would be a, that's been a reflex that I think would be a good evolution.

Coleman Hughes (18:45)

Yeah, I think that too. And what that is an alternative to is the ever present human instinct towards censorship.

Coleman Hughes (18:56)

And I think we've seen over the past 10 years all the people that have been censored, whether it's from YouTube or Twitter before Elon Musk took it over or you know, kicked off of payment service services like, like PayPal and Venmo, people like, I'm thinking of people like Nick Fuentes and, and Alex Jones. They've all come back with a roaring fury and the halo of martyrdom, at least to their fans. And, and most of the misinformation and lies and in, in Fuentes's case, outright bigotry that he's pushing have become more influential, it seems to me, as a result of the censorship in the long run. And I think we constantly relearn and forget the lesson that when you censor somebody, you do make them a martyr and when they come back, people just listen to them regardless of what they have to say.

Coleman Hughes (19:58)

And so what has worked, it seems to me, is the community notes and sort of Grok checking tweets model. Right. And this, this almost goes. I mean, I remember every teacher I had in school would say, don't use Wikipedia as a source. Which is, yeah, it's not a primary source obviously, but it is actually fairly good on most things because it goes through a process of competitive editing by partisans on both sides and what emerges is actually fairly decent.

Coleman Hughes (20:32)

And so the community notes, I think has worked on Twitter. It doesn't make the person who gets community noted into a martyr, which is key. It just, if they get something provably wrong, it just makes them look like an idiot. And what's more, the ability to use GROK to check every tweet which reply guys are using on, on, you know, every controversial tweet now you could just look into the replies and see what Grok has to say about it is really important and adds context and checks people who are pushing, you know, BS in a way. Again, that doesn't make them into a martyr, that just makes them look like a fool if indeed they're Wrong. So I'm very happy with the way community notes and AI have influenced this. On the other hand, you have people who sincerely believe, and you know, I'm not one of them, but I want to put the question to you. You have people who believe that AI has enabled and or is going to enable misinformation at scale. Right. If we thought misinformation was a problem now wait till AI fully gets going on it. Maybe it's already happened and they have certain valid points. The, the fact that you can now make. I think we can say this with confidence now. You can now make deep fakes that are indistinguishable from reality to the typical human eye. And I've fallen victim to some of them on Twitter. And I usually rely on the GROK replies to tell me if this thing I saw is real or fake. So what do you make of the threat from AI to the trust problem that we're talking about and how do we preempt it or fix it?

Reid Hoffman (22:16)

So it's obvious that there is a.

Reid Hoffman (22:22)

There is a deep fake problem. And again, kind of the general principle is less. Let's stop technology, let's stop the ability to make deep fakes. You know, Coleman, I don't know if you've seen that. You know, one of the ways I've kind of played around is I made my own digital twin read AI and did various things with it just for entertainment purposes and also to kind of show that it deepfake is not even in the case of a deep fake technology, there's good uses of it other than just kind of call it Hollywood, you know, kind of character illusion and movie creation.

Coleman Hughes (22:57)

I think you are the real you right now. Right?

Reid Hoffman (22:59)

I am the real me. Yes. Although, by the way, what you would.

Coleman Hughes (23:02)

Say if you were a digital twin.

Reid Hoffman (23:04)

Yes, although if, if, if you asked me a question in Chinese and I replied in Chinese, then you would know it was read AI because, you know, one of the superpowers that read AI has is being able to, to, to speak a number of different languages.

Coleman Hughes (23:17)

So when I. Ni hao ma.

Reid Hoffman (23:19)

Yeah, exactly. I'm fine, thank you. That, that is actually how happens to be a piece of Chinese that I, that I, that I know. But the.

Reid Hoffman (23:30)

But like as an instance of it, I gave a speech in Perugia about the importance of humanism in the age of technology and then had read AI give it in Italian and Hindu and Japanese and Chinese and you know, everything else is a demonstration of the kind of pro Human characteristics for this. Now that being said the deepfakes is a real issue and we need to then say, what's the way that we, we navigate that? And the answer is, you know, as part of, as opposed to slowing down technology and trying to stop deepfakes from happening. Because I think that'll be actually very difficult to do. You have open source models, you have a whole bunch of things. Open source models also coming from China and other places makes it very difficult to say. We will simply make it, you know, the technology unavailable to create a deep fake of Coleman, of Reed, of, you know, someone else. Actually, in fact, I think the deep fakes will be constructed and what we need to do is say, okay, well, how do we, you know, and grok and Community Notes can be a, can be a useful tool in this.

Reid Hoffman (24:33)

But like, actually, in fact, I think part of what we'll need to be able to do more of is to create some kind of, as it were, network of certification. It's almost like the crypto.

Reid Hoffman (24:47)

Kind of like part of what I like about, you know, Bitcoin and the crypto stuff is there's actually certain kinds of distributed protocols that need to be added to the foundation of the Internet, which include identity and certification in various ways. And so you can begin to say, hey.

Reid Hoffman (25:06)

This is the certificate that Coleman and Reed used to sign. The things that they, that they said I actually did, you know, like this podcast and so forth. And then that certificate could then be used as a. Which of these videos, which of these audios, which of these, you know, kind of things are actually in fact legitimate as a instance for how they roll. But I think we need to go technology forward to solve the deepfake problems. Now there's hacks in between it. Even if you don't say, we don't have to reinvent the firmament of the Internet for making this happen. You know, the hacks are, you know, you know, one of the things you already see happening with deepfakes is the use of phishing. You know, on, you get a, your, your, your grandma gets a call saying, oh, Coleman needs money desperately, please send it. And you know, and it's sounds like it's Coleman's voice and so forth. If you have a AI agent on your side that says, oh, wait a minute, this sounds like something that's potentially of risk. Why don't we cross check this? Like you're in this, this, this phone call. What's something that only, you know, you and your grandmother know? Ask that before you, you, you, you proceed in this conversation. And so I think there's various ways to also set up AI. Is the defense like it says. You see a video of Coleman saying, you know, I've come to believe that vaccinations are the work of the devil, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, well, that doesn't sound very believable. And the AI agent says, yep, that's not very believable. That that doesn't like we should really look at that to see if that was actually the case. And so anyway, so those I think are the gestures towards the solution. But it isn't trying to say that the problem doesn't exist and it isn't. I think it's always a mistake in technology to say the way that you try to prevent the challenge of a technology is to simply raw forbid the technology versus shape it.

Coleman Hughes (27:11)

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Coleman Hughes (28:28)

Let's move on to some other topics. I think every, every time I have a billionaire on the podcast, I have to ask them the billionaire question, which is should billionaires exist? And you know, there are many ways to object to the framing of the question, but this is how the question generally gets asked, especially on the progress progressive left. So I just put it to you. Should billionaires exist?

Reid Hoffman (28:52)

Well, given we're on a philosophical podcast, I will start in a kind of A first principles basis which is, I don't think anyone knows how human society works without inequality, right? That, that we have inequality and access to certain kinds of educational opportunity. We have inequality in terms of, you know, you prove yourself as an athlete and you're, you know, you, you're LeBron James or you're, you know, what else. So like, like the whole thing is a combination. Now we want as much opportunity spread across the hundreds of millions and billions of people as possible. But like the end results have in unequal results. You know, person one has paid more than person two. You know, the, the kind of the Harrison Bergeron or the, or the dumbass, you know, kind of sometimes communist thing and say, well, everyone should be paid exactly the same. It's like, no, that's not. Actually we have inequality. So then the question is, is how much inequality is too much? Because it's not the thesis that there is no level of inequality too much, but what are your principled bases for doing so? And, and then what kinds of inequality and how it gets there? And, and I think that the question, and like you can put this is like, well, should there be a hard number between, in a corporation between the, the least paid person and the CEO or the most paid person and that that ratio should be 100 times. And like, well, how do you get to that magic number? Is it because of your grumbling of your stomach and your intuition versus someone else's? It's like, well actually, in fact you should, you should allow kind of market mechanisms and other kinds of things, you know, be the determinant of that there might be biases in markets that we need to fix. Markets are not perfect. They, they do need some, you know, systemic kind of things, again, not with magic numbers, but kind of ways they operate. And you could imagine that you say, well, individuals get so powerful like the age of the robber barons where you know, JP Morgan and Rockefeller and everyone else were, were running the society and it took a Teddy Roosevelt to try to rec. Correct it to being where the instruments of democracy were more important than that. And that could be something now by the way people start, yeah, that's what's happening now. And it's like, well, you know, other than maybe in particular Elon's interventions, it's not clear that that's what's happening right now at all.

Reid Hoffman (31:26)

And, and so I don't tend to think I have, I think that the argument about whether or not millionaires, billionaires, you know, multi billionaires should exist, we shouldn't do it. On a magic number basis, we should do it on a first principles functioning of the system basis. And in particular, you know, I tend to be, maybe because this is, you know, self describes, I tend to be more sympathetic to, you know, kind of billionaires who made it through creating things that were very useful for society than like inheriting it. And by the way, that's also of course sympathy for Elon and other folks because it's like, you know, Space X and Starlink and Tesla, you know, massive contributions to society.

Reid Hoffman (32:14)

And so.

Reid Hoffman (32:17)

You know, so I tend to think on a first principles basis. It seems that they should in the current configuration. But, but I'm, I'm willing to engage in the discourse on a first principles, not on a political rhetoric, you know, the grumbling of stomach one versus stomach two, you know, kind of basis. Because I think that's just, you know, kind of the equivalent of ad hominem name calling.

Coleman Hughes (32:42)

Yeah, so I also think about this on a first principles basis primarily, but a different principle namely.

Coleman Hughes (32:51)

You know, the, the real question is do we care about inequality per se or do we care about poverty and what the floor of a society is? So for example, if I was like, like in the movie Soul, I'm like, I'm a soul, I haven't gone into the human world, right? I'm choosing what society to live in. Society A is a society where the, the lowest people are earning $20,000 a year. That's like bare minimum entry level. You're working a janitor job, whatever it is, you can afford three meals a day, let's say because the price of food is cheap. There's no famines, you can afford basic entertainment, you can afford education for your family. Like that's, that's the floor of one society. But the ceiling is extremely high. There are Reid Hoffman's that have a billion dollars and fathomless wealth that I'm unlikely ever to attain. But then there's another society that doesn't have any billionaires, but does the floor is even lower. The floor is say 10,000 half of what I would be. So there's far less inequality in society B. But the poorest members of society are doing significantly better in society A. To me it seems obvious that society A is a better society even though it has more inequality. Not only that, I would say 99% of migrants given a full information choice between society A and B would choose society A. So I'm making a deeper claim than that it's my value system. I actually think it's everybody's value system when they think about it deeply. And so to me, looking at a society and asking how much income, say, or wealth inequality.

Coleman Hughes (34:48)

There is, is actually asking the wrong question vis a vis human flourishing and what we should actually care about. And then when you actually look at that question, and I put this, I had a socialist on my podcast recently and you know, I made the point which is, you know, even at the height of you mentioned, you know, the Gilded Age, when you had Rockefeller and all these people making all this money, well, at that very time, what was the number one destination for the poor migrants of the world? America. That very same Gilded society that the rich were supposedly running into the ground. That was the society that Italians and Irish and Jews from Russia were pouring into by the millions with nothing through Ellis island because it offered them the very best opportunity in the world at the time to live a middle class life, a better life. And so if you look around the world, it looks like, it quite often looks like the societies with the billionaires, like America also are usually the societies with the kind of structures that help the working poor succeed as well. So that's how I view the whole issue. I think people look at it backwards.

Reid Hoffman (36:06)

By the way, I completely agree with the principles you just mentioned because I do think that the.

Reid Hoffman (36:13)

The question is how do we create both.

Reid Hoffman (36:17)

The best rising of that floor plus the opportunity to make as much wealth, make as much progress, do as do great work as possible, which can go as high as possible. The one place I would kind of, as it were, steel person, the, the one place is if you say. Well actually in fact, and this is one of the reasons why I think kind of questions around monopoly power and so forth are good ones for society to address is if you, if you get somebody who is so powerful that they're corrupting the system to lock themselves in the position of power, either individually or collectively, that's get. Gets be a place where you should examine that some. And it's part of the reason why I think, you know, like for example, the antitrust stuff from the Gilded Age and you know, Teddy Roosevelt and so forth was actually, in fact.

Reid Hoffman (37:10)

You know, actually in fact good for society.

Coleman Hughes (37:13)

Yeah, I agree.

Reid Hoffman (37:14)

Right. So anyway, so that, but that, yeah. So where I think we're in, we're in, we're, we're, we're coloring in an area of very, very broad agreements within the philosophy of create human prosperity and human opportunity. And that's the most important thing. And you're going to have societies with a lot of inequality as Part of that, but that's actually, in fact the functioning of a society that creates a lot more, you know, kind of humanist, you know, like medical systems and, and, you know, elevating poverty and, you know, to elevating people out of poverty and so forth, which is, which is the most important thing, right?

Coleman Hughes (37:52)

I mean, medical research is one of the prime examples of this. Like any given year, if you look at where all of the new medical breakthroughs are invented, it just so happens to be America. Why? Because this is the uncomfortable truth, I guess, is that in America there is an opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to make oodles of money by inventing things that people will want to buy in order to cure or mitigate disease. That opportunity to make that much money is restricted in Europe for various reasons. And so only in America is it worthwhile for pharmaceutical companies to put up the billions of dollars required for the uncertain result of making that huge bag of cash at the end of the rainbow. And it might seem unseemly to someone without that bag of cash that people are making that absurd level of money, but not only do we benefit from the medical innovations, eventually the whole world benefits from those medical innovations as they condemn the system that allows people to get wealthy creating them. And so there is something very dark in human nature, in my opinion. And you know, I've been seeing it just more and more on both sides of the political spectrum lately. I've been noticing it more, which is the reality of envy. Like, like envy is, is the emotion, I think perhaps more than any other, that has led to the destruction of otherwise good societies, right? If you look at every time the Jews have been expelled or pogrommed in a country, or not just the Jews, you know, the Pakistanis and Indians in East Africa or the Chinese, the overseas Chinese in Malaysia and other places in Southeast Asia, they get expelled from these societies because they're doing too well, because they have too much money. They control, quote, unquote, too many of the businesses, right? And then like clockwork, when you expel them, the country does much worse off. It's just cutting off the nose to spite the face. And that's, you know, that's just one example of envy. But obviously every country that has willingly elected communists, like true capital C, Communists, such as we rarely see anymore, was a case of, you know, of basically of envy. And you know, in those cases, the electorate gets what they want and they get it good and hard, as the quote, as the quote goes. But so there's a left wing version of envy. There's a right wing version of envy. And.

Coleman Hughes (40:43)

In my view, that's what motivates a lot of the anti billionaire rhetoric, rather than a deep concern for the country per se.

Reid Hoffman (40:51)

By the way, the other thing, just as a general principle, that I think is worth saying, because I agree with that, as a instance of where people say it's better to tear the whole system down, is that the, the impulse to kind of tear the system down versus renovate the system is a extremely expensive, very difficult thing. It's the kind of thing that leads to, like the French Terror, it leads to the Cultural Revolution, it leads to the year zero. And it isn't to say that, you know, sometimes that may be the only path out, although frequently it's not. And it's.

Reid Hoffman (41:29)

And the cost and human suffering and the collapse of society is huge. But I agree with your end viewpoint, and I think that it's also a, you know, kind of think about how do we renovate our institutions versus how do we tear them down as a good general principle.

Coleman Hughes (41:47)

Yeah. So right now, a lot of people feel that the, the threat to institutions is coming from, first and foremost, from the Trump administration. And I'm of two minds about that, because.

Coleman Hughes (42:03)

In the first instance, I do believe Trump's personality tends towards authoritarianism. He is exactly the kind of president that the founding Fathers were worried about and designed the system in order to contain. There's just no doubt about that, that if it were up to him, he would grab as much power as he possibly could. He would run roughshod over every rule that constrained his power. That seems obvious to me. On the other hand, it seems equally clear to me that the institutions are successfully holding him to account. And I, and so I see some of the rhetoric which suggests that he is already sort of taken over democracy or already turned the American to an authoritarian state to be alarmist.

Coleman Hughes (43:00)

And I also think that there is a disturbing phenomena where the media actually stands to gain by convincing Americans that basically we've already lost our democracy, or we're at the five yard line with our democracy and we're about to lose it. And so there's a systematic. Especially, you know, I live in New York City, most people I encounter are liberal. There's a systematic underreporting of the instances that happen almost every day. You know, recently in the news of Trump's ambitions, you know, being thwarted, whether it is, you know, the Supreme Courts look like they're about to rule against him on his signature tariff proposal, which I've been against since the Beginning, the National Guard have been removed from two of the cities they were deployed to. And in general, the hyperventilation about the national guard going into D.C. hasn't really borne very much by way of imposition on the citizens of that city. You've got federal court challenges to, you know, all kinds of things. His lawsuit against CNN and appeals court ruled, ruled, ruled against it. And the attempted GOP redistricting of Texas, judge ruled against that. And so the judges are doing their job not only at the Federal Circuit level, but also at the Supreme Court level. And to me, it seems like a case where you have, like I said, a classic authoritarian wannabe that is successfully being held by the institutions. And that should make us feel, if not good, then at a minimum, we should not feel like we're losing our democracy. And I hear that tone quite a bit. So where do you feel we are right now? And where, if at all, do you disagree with the picture I just sketched?

Reid Hoffman (44:53)

So probably not surprising to you, I have broad brush agreements with the picture you just sketched, but perhaps a little bit more.

Reid Hoffman (45:04)

You know, critical of the Trump foundation, the Trump administration, than you, than you just sketched. Look, I do think that a number of Democrats get a little histrionic like, oh, we're not going to have elections next year. And it's like, that's like, I think, frankly, misleading. And, and then when people say, well, look, there were elections and you were just, you know, everything that you said was just a bunch of histrionics and we shouldn't pay attention to, I think is a.

Reid Hoffman (45:32)

Destructive thing. And what's more, you know, when this kind of lefty progressive goes this histrionic, it covers the actual more relevant issues. And I do think that there is a certain amount of, of, of, of the, the, you know, the, the of the tripartite, the judiciary kind of holding the ground, which I think is important. Although, you know, the fact is it's kind of like in a number of the instances, it's like, stop breaking the law. Like, stop, you know, invading blue cities with National Guard as a kind of way of doing it. You know, the kinds of things you didn't cover that were also very alarming to me was the politicization of the military, know, kind of firing 31 generals as a function of it. I think it's important that the military, like, I think one of the subtle genius things that.

Reid Hoffman (46:28)

That of the American system was that the military.

Reid Hoffman (46:32)

Doesn'T do its oath to the president, it does its oath to the Constitution is kind of the way that it operates. And I think it's one of the things that we have, you know, our, our, our foref for fathers and other folks have made a great system. And so the firing of those generals, I think was a problem. The fact that, yes, and I understand that this was speeches and so forth, but kind of the environment of risk where you got everything from Trump kind of advocating for the execution of a chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff on truth social to kind of doing the Democrats should be executed for making a statement about don't follow illegal orders. It's kind of like, you know, like, you know, apple pie and vanilla ice cream. Don't follow illegal orders. Like, great, yeah, don't follow illegal orders, you know, as kind of a way of doing it. And so I think that the.

Reid Hoffman (47:35)

That the, that the attempts to erode our system are, you know, serious. I think words are actually, in fact serious. I think they create a whole environment.

Reid Hoffman (47:50)

That, that, you know, kind of part of how society works is by belief in the, in the fact that laws work and the fact that elections work, etc, and I think doing a variety of things to keep those reinforced, it's, I think, important. And so I'd say that the, that the critique of the Trump administration as being very corrosive to our democracy is accurate. I also agree with you about the Trump, you know, tariff policies and so forth. And I hope that the judiciary keeps that because that is a power of Congress, not a power of the executive. And the attempt to erode the powers of Congress, I think are, is bad for the American system.

Reid Hoffman (48:35)

But anyway, so I, I, I'm more critical than your, your, your, your, your, your picture of the Trump administration just outlined. But I do think the judiciary has, you know, elements of showing the.

Reid Hoffman (48:54)

The kind of resolution despite, you know, Trump's, you know, best efforts to, you know, contramund what the founding fathers were trying to limit the powers of the executive for, you know, domestically. For very good reasons.

Coleman Hughes (49:09)

Yeah. Do you think that Trump is a.

Coleman Hughes (49:12)

Singular threat as a result of his personality, a, and also his cult of personality, that is to say, the level of loyalty that he commands among his followers. That is unlike anything we see from anyone else in the Republican Party, but also anyone at all in the Democrat Party? Do you think that his, because I agree with you when he, you know, all of this, all of this normalization of, of the language, whether it was from lock her up to I'm going to, you know, you know, everything you mentioned, the just the loose way he is with language, with threatening Political opponents with threatening violence, all that stuff, it all bothers me. But at the same time, I am sympathetic to the argument that if that stuff doesn't happen, we should judge people more by their actions than by, than by their, than by their rhetoric.

Coleman Hughes (50:10)

And, and so it does bother me. And.

Coleman Hughes (50:16)

Do you think that he is a singular threat or do you think that because of his success, the success he's had with the Trumpian style, let's call it that, we will be seeing politicians try to emulate that freewheeling, say whatever the first thing that comes to your head, even if it's violent, even if it's nasty, push as hard as you can on the system.

Coleman Hughes (50:45)

Challenge every norm, don't respect, you know, do, do whatever you can get away with. Do you think we'll be seeing politicians emulate that style for the rest of our lifetime?

Reid Hoffman (50:58)

Well, it's certainly possible.

Reid Hoffman (51:01)

And you know, it should concern.

Reid Hoffman (51:04)

The.

Reid Hoffman (51:06)

Various magists.

Reid Hoffman (51:09)

That, you know, by the way, you know, we don't want the left to be emulating that style too. You know, the far left.

Reid Hoffman (51:18)

I think what we want as much heads towards centrism as we can, whether it's kind of pro business or whether it's pro institution or anything else. And we don't want that. I think that's one of the concerns that it will create that I think also that.

Reid Hoffman (51:36)

The kind of the questions around, you know, even as the judge appropriately throws out the, the.

Reid Hoffman (51:48)

Inappropriate indictment of Comey.

Reid Hoffman (51:54)

You know, the question is, is even like bringing that case as a form of, you know, kind of autocratic persecution of an individual to create fear in other individuals, to not counter the executive authority because even, you know, it's, it's extremely costly for a, for everyday citizen to try to defend against that kind of stuff. And so that kind of fear of, of political abuse and persecution is the kind of thing we don't want either legally or normatively to things. And I think that the use of those kinds of things, not just words, are.

Reid Hoffman (52:36)

You know, kind of extremely, you know, dangerous and then, you know.

Reid Hoffman (52:44)

You know, pardoning people who assaulted police officers in an effort at an insurrection where the, you know, a bunch of the people were trying to see if they could kill Vice President Pence or Speaker Pelosi or so forth. I think those are all instances of, you know, actual, in fact.

Reid Hoffman (53:07)

Corruptions of the system that are beyond just words. So I think we're actually already. It's not just the emulation of the word side, but the emulation of the activities and the furthering of the activities for political power. You know, I think the genius of the American system, the, the wondrous.

Reid Hoffman (53:27)

Of our kind of earliest democracy was the peaceful transition of power and the acknowledgment that the election.

Reid Hoffman (53:39)

Is what works. I mean, for example, one of the things I find completely nutty about how the administration works is you can only serve in the administration if you make some public statement to the fact that the 2020 election was stolen, which if you look at it at its outset is when Trump was president and there was a Republican Senate and there was Republican state of electors. Sleepy Joe Biden stole the election, but when Biden was president in 24, he didn't. That's the thing you need to publicly testify to, to be part of this. And that, that is a huge, I mean it's just, it's, it's like, it's bonkers and it's a huge erosion of kind of trust and media ecosystems. And anyway, that's, that's, that, that kind of thing. I think where that goes is nowhere good.

Coleman Hughes (54:27)

Yeah, I think one of the best criticisms of Republicans that I've heard in the past year is when Trump won in 2024. There were actually Democratic Party insiders that asked a few questions a how did we mess this up? What did we do wrong? Was it simply not having a primary or does it have something to do with the way we talk about political issues? Do we have a problem with wokeness? There was obviously there was a wing of the party that didn't want to do any self examination, but there was a wing of the party that was trying to do self examination, error correction and look inward and saying what did we do wrong? When Republicans lost in 2020, there was like zero self examination. There was like literally the very few people that tried to self examine were effectively ejected from the party and they all got around a total lie that somehow as you said, the election was stolen when Trump was sitting, but then they weren't able to steal it when Biden was like, it makes no sense at all from a basic perspective. Trump constantly says, oh, I've got the evidence, but I'm just, I left it in my other pants. I'm not going to show it to you right now, but I've got a whole bunch of evidence.

Coleman Hughes (55:55)

And yeah, there is a, there is an asymmetry there with respect to which party is actually willing to look into its, its faults. Even if I think Democrats don't do as good a job as they could have even on that score.

Reid Hoffman (56:11)

But.

Coleman Hughes (56:14)

Yeah, and, you know, when it comes to the political prosecutions, this is, this is the, the point that I always raise to Trump supporters I have on the podcast, is how bothered I am by Trump's retributive instinct. I mean, this is a man who will literally file a lawsuit against a.

Coleman Hughes (56:34)

Pollster who.

Coleman Hughes (56:37)

Came out with a poll.

Coleman Hughes (56:38)

Saying he was going to lose an election that he then won. Right. So he was not in any way damaged. If anything, the pollster's reputation was damaged by her failed prediction already. He was not at all damaged because he won the election. And yet after winning, he's still upset enough to file a lawsuit against anyone who had the idea that he might lose.

Coleman Hughes (57:02)

Right, like that.

Coleman Hughes (57:02)

That's a level of pathology, psychologically, that's actually difficult for me to understand.

Coleman Hughes (57:10)

And at the same time, I think it's always important, especially if I have a Democrat.

Coleman Hughes (57:19)

On the podcast, to express that I thought the political prosecutions of Trump went overboard at the same time, and I think there was a lack of reflection on that within the Democratic party. Like, the January 6th prosecution seemed to me totally appropriate.

Coleman Hughes (57:35)

But the prosecutions.

Coleman Hughes (57:38)

By Alvin Bragg and Letitia James seemed to me frivolous, and that they wouldn't have been done for anyone besides Trump. And then when it came to the classified documents case, this is an, this is a gray area for me because.

Coleman Hughes (57:55)

You know.

Coleman Hughes (57:57)

There'S a very good case to be made that the Espionage act is just overly broad, and that's why it so rarely gets actually prosecuted. It seems like every president and vice president is taking documents home after their presidential term. And, you know, Hillary Clinton, you know, those emails disappeared after they were under FBI subpoena, which is not that different than Trump evading, you know, moving boxes that were under subpoena at the same time, and yet she didn't get prosecuted for it. And that kind of made sense to me because there seemed to be a certain wisdom about amnesty for political officials not wanting to go down the banana republic route of putting people in prison, even if you technically can, even if they did, in fact, break the law. And I thought that Democrats and, and media outlets that were partial to Democrats didn't do a good job of. Of being critical of those prosecutions at the time. That does not justify, to be clear, what Trump is now trying to do to all of his political opponents.

Coleman Hughes (59:07)

But it is something that I think should be part of the conversation.

Reid Hoffman (59:11)

Yeah, no, I agree with that. And actually, I think kind of political retribution.

Reid Hoffman (59:18)

Generally speaking. I mean, that's. This is one of the Things that I was kind of concerned with myself on the confidential documents case, which is, is this like the mobs, like, only thing we can get you for is tax stuff? We know there's a whole bunch of other stuff, but the only thing we can get you for is tax. Or is this just a, you know, only the confidential document side? And at least the, the, the thing was being done very carefully.

Reid Hoffman (59:49)

But like, I think the notion of, of, you know, kind of what is it should, like, when it's involving political figures, it should be something that is, you know, kind of fundamental to the corruption of the state versus anything else. You know, it's part of the reason why Klepta was, you know, like the, oh, look, I'm gonna take a plane from Qatar is like, we should be much more careful about this kind of thing anyway. So. But it's a corruption of the state more than anything else. Right?

Coleman Hughes (60:26)

And, and on that topic, it's been reported that Trump's DOJ is looking at you as a billionaire Democrat donor who has spent a lot of resources opposing Trump through the normal Democratic allowable means.

Coleman Hughes (60:47)

And that you're on Trump's hit list. How afraid are you that Trump's DOJ is going to try to find something to indict you over? And what are you. What is it like to be in that psychological state of anticipation?

Reid Hoffman (61:06)

So I think it's kind of the incense of what's terrible and kind of.

Reid Hoffman (61:12)

Anti American on this. So I've been called out twice by Trump in front of the White House press corps once to. Because I think he's angry at the fact that I called for the release of the Epstein files. And, and so it was like, we're going to investigate Democrats and Reid Hoffman for the relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and calling out the DOJ to do this. And you're like, well, okay, so I've already kind of publicly said that I regretted following MIT's lead and fundraising for Jeffrey Epstein, which is my.

Reid Hoffman (61:51)

Interaction with him. And I wasn't partying with him back in his criminal days, unlike there's photographic evidence of a certain president doing that. President Trump. And then the other one, which is an executive order against Antifa, which as follows, I know is a fictional organization. There is no such organization. And saying, you know, I'm going to investigate.

Reid Hoffman (62:15)

Alex Soros and Reid Hoffman on this. And so I think both of those cases, like, you know, are kind of called out from the White House in an official capacity with directing investigations with, as far as I can tell, because from my Perspective, zero evidence of anything, because I don't have any, you know, any actual truth in any of those cases. And my guess is, is the DOJ is spinning up stuff because they tend to do, you know, like a little bit like the Comey thing, like, okay, no legitimate prosecutor will file an indictment against Comey, so we'll, we'll fire them, demand their resignation, and put in a lawyer who has zero prosecutor experience to, to, to ram one through. That doesn't work.

Reid Hoffman (63:11)

Everything that I've seen is the DOJ will jump anytime that Trump will do something on true social. So I anticipate something is coming from a complete political persecution point of view. And what I think, you know, obviously that's concerning and, you know, kind of, you know, has a personal story. But I actually think the more bad thing is the corruption of state, the corruption of American values and virtues. And I think that's the thing that we, we as a society most don't want.

Coleman Hughes (63:46)

Right. Yeah, I agree with that. And I hope that, I hope that people see that these, these prosecutions for what they are, even if they are Trump supporters. And I hope that they realize this is, this is the worst part about Trump. Right. The best part about Trump is that he can go to the Middle east and get these peace deals and genuinely do get some foreign policy achievements that I doubt a Democrat would have been able to do. For me, the worst part of Trump is he sees a Democrat billionaire donor and says, how can we, how can we make this guy's life living hell just because he opposes me in the way you're allowed to as an American citizen in a democracy? I mean, that's, that's really disturbing to me. You mentioned that, you said antifa is not a real organization. When you, when you say that, you mean they're not an organized group that has, that goes under one umbrella because, because obviously there are black clad people in Portland, you know, attacking journalists like Andy. No. And you know, surrounding federal.

Coleman Hughes (64:58)

Or state courthouses during COVID or whatever it was. So when you say that, explain what you meant by that.

Reid Hoffman (65:04)

Yeah, just. Well, the principal place that I've, I've seen any references to indiffer is, is, you know, right wing or, you know, red media organizations. I've never seen any organization like that was described as organization. I think there's individuals who might, you know.

Reid Hoffman (65:28)

Might, you know, kind of describe themselves in tiva and obviously all political violence, you know, is bad. We should be discouraging it in word, indeed in, you know, in any.

Reid Hoffman (65:42)

You know, in any Mechanism. And so you know, part of like, you know, I'm just kind of expressing my shock when it was like I'm gonna like we have an executive order against Antifa and I'm going to investigate. You know, Reid Hoffman is like, well like not only do have I never funded anything that ever was anywhere even in the same planetary atmosphere as, as Antifa, I was like, I'm not even aware there's such a thing as an organization like this. Like, like the only place I've ever heard it described is in the red ecosystem and it's never crossed my path otherwise. So. Right, right.

Coleman Hughes (66:23)

So yeah, I think the, the confusion there is. My assumption is that it is a network rather than an explicit organization. A network of individuals that meet up and discuss tactics and view themselves as anti fascists as a, not as a proper noun but as a normal noun. And they go out and do stuff like this and they don't have a 501, 2, 3 obviously or they don't.

Reid Hoffman (66:47)

Have.

Coleman Hughes (66:50)

I'm not even sure if they have an, a national official body or a spokesman or anything like that. It's really a loose network. And so how do you combat a loose network? Essentially what you're talking about is they're criminals. Right? They're criminals and they, you know, cities like Seattle and Portland have done a pretty bad job of just simply applying the criminal law to those people and those networks. But there's, there's nothing to gain by say declaring them a terrorist organization. Right. Or, or looking for Antifa in other countries and deeming them to be terror organizations. As if that's like a real problem for Americans. What really actually has to happen is the police departments of Seattle and Portland need to prosecute those individuals that are committing these crimes. Right. I mean, I think, you know, we don't really need, we don't really need to seize emergency powers in order to, to do that. But at the same time I think those cities have done a very poor job of actually clamping down on that issue.

Reid Hoffman (67:55)

I agree with everything you just said and I think part of it is to not try to use the very legitimate case of when we do need to act on kind of terrorist groups to try to seize more executive power to kind of persecute your political enemies in an anti American and undemocratic way.

Coleman Hughes (68:18)

Yeah. Okay. Reid Hoffman, we've reached the end of my questions for the time being. Maybe I'll invite you on another time. Obviously best of luck and knocking on wood that your legal troubles don't actually arise and that if they do, they end up just being an embarrassment to the Trump administration rather than a serious headache for you. Is there anything that you can point my listeners to? If they share your general concerns, want to support the work that you're doing, can you direct them to any of your organizations that you're excited about right now?

Reid Hoffman (68:51)

Well, I think, generally speaking, I think one of the things that's actually most important is something you were saying earlier, which is we should be raising the.

Reid Hoffman (69:06)

Kind of the capabilities and the livelihoods of Americans across the country. So whether it's the various things I'm doing with opportunity at work, which is how do you get people of talent all across the country able to participate in the tech industry or the center for Rural Innovation to create economic opportunity rurally, those would be the kinds of things, because I think that's, that's what we should really be focused on most, primarily as a society.

Coleman Hughes (69:34)

So thank you very much for coming on my show. Reid Hoffman, thank you.

Reid Hoffman (69:40)

I look forward to the next conversation, whatever context it is.