Reid Hoffman on AI’s new tune, Davos, and the need for CEO courage

0:01 People like to have a cause celeb and kind of virtue signaling of I'm really good and that that AI thing is bad. It's the greatest human amplifier for quality of life that's been built. You're saying go somewhere else. It's like it's like the Bernie Sanders does no data centers here, build them all in Canada. Have Canada get all the economic benefit. Let's make sure we Americans don't. It's crazy thinking, it's stupid thinking. You have responsibilities that are commensurate with your power, and so you need to speak up. I myself get uh regularly called out by the White House. We need to be speaking up and we need to be figuring out how to solve our problems together. That's Reed Hoffman, of course, founding host of Masters of Scale, co-founder of LinkedIn and tech investor. I've had Reed as a guest on the show many times. Rarely has he been this animated. With the World Economic Forum in Davos as a backdrop, Reed and I talk about the latest in AI, as well as the leadership challenges and opportunities facing the business community. We talk about music and medical care, how the prospect of a tech bubble is and isn't impacting his own investing right now, and we dip into the roadblocks.

1:21 Posed by political headwinds from Ice activities to Denmark. It's been a busy start to 2026, so let's get to it. I'm Bob Saphian, and this is Rapid Response. I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Reed Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Graylock, founding host of Master Scale, co-host of uh podcast possible, read, great as always to uh to chat with you. It is always great to see you, Bob.

1:53 I have to start by thanking you. You sent me a holiday gift of Christmas music, an album of all AI generated songs. Here it is. You're on you're Your own creations. What sparked that project? We're actually gonna put it up on Spotify because we got such positive responses to it. It was a couple things. So one is when you look at AI and the kind of superagency of ex of increasing human expression, whether it's text

2:20 Picture, video. Music. is another really central thing. And you know, me as a start up guy was thinking, is there startup opportunities here? Is there something can be done? And I haven't yet figured any of that out. I've talked to a number of different interesting people. But I did realize is I could just use the tools to start showing that expression, that that expansion

2:40 Of The scope of possibility. amongst our imagination. That's now with AI massively Excended. I was like, Oh, I could use music, even though I um

2:50 Not a composer of music. I am not a player of music. And I could use it. To create something that's human expressive. And I said, Oh, that's a good idea. What should I do with that? Most Christmas music, there's maybe like five Christmas songs I would want to live listen to once or twice the season, and that's it. And most of it, small tea, happy, happy Christmas. Best time of the year. And you're like, Oh my God, it's mall music, it's musac, et cetera, especially as it's massively overplayed. How could I use being affectionate to the holiday, but creating the kind of music That we would want as part of kind of human gesture, you know, days from now, maybe even before this.

3:27 Podcast airs. We will have it up on Spotify. We recently had uh Harve Mason Junior, the head of the recording academy on the show to talk about the Grammys. And he he was surprisingly open to AI generated music. Are are you hoping for a Grammy in your future? I'm not sure that I would ever ever even potentially be within like, you know, the same planet as a Grammy uh Harvey I've had an email exchange with. I actually sent them uh the the record so that they they'd get they'd get a little exposure to it. But I do think that one of the things that people have to get through is like look, not like try to retroactively try to hold on to the past.

4:04 Part of art and everything else is how do we create The future, if you have ideas and imagination, the tool set for creating stuff completely changes. So example, lots of people can code who didn't know how to code before because of coding tools. Do engineers go, oh, down with these evil tools, because we should be have a monopoly on our own coding. It's like, No, right? It changes the landscape. If you can't afford a lawyer and you're looking at a lease, you can use the AI tools. All of these things are part of the the human world.

4:35 that is open us to it and music And creativity is some of it. One of the things I told actually a a multi-grammary winner, I said, look, let me tell you two things. The first thing's gonna terrify you, and the second thing I hope will make you insanely optimistic and curious. The first thing is I can create a knockoff of your music and song today in fairly simple prompting. and go, here it goes and here it is. And you go shit, that's That that's kind of my like voice and that's my kind of song. And and I'm known for that.

5:03 And you go right. What makes the AR tool interesting is there is a uh a award winning global architect in Japan The way This architect creates his initial thing. When someone says, Hey, I've I've got an I I want I might want to hire you for a building.

5:19 Please come give me some ideas. Literally will go in a chat G B T. And you know Actually I think Dolly and Midjourney and I think probably is using Nano Banana now. And say, create me twenty things in my style. Right, with different kind of prompts. Then it goes, Okay.

5:35 Three. Seven and fifteen are really good. Let's iterate those um. Let's package up, let's bring them. Right. And that's kinda like it's the my style. It's actually Massively helpful. And the same thing is true for music. So when I was talking, it's like look. You can now create.

5:50 stuff in your style and you can create Hours. Of interesting music. In minutes. Right. And

5:58 Then you can go, Well, okay, that song's not so good. Hey, actually this bit seconds 32 throft seven are really good. We're gonna pull that out and we'll use that as an anchor for the next genius thing that we're doing. And that's part of the creativity that this increases. And so you know part of super agency, the book, as you know, Is I'm trying to not just tell But show. I'm gonna do another s minimum six records this year.

6:25 And maybe a lot more, because it's given me all kinds of different ideas about what kinds of things could create delight and sharing and community within the human experience and Yeah. That's a Great use of music.

6:40 You know, I started with the music'cause I I I I wanted to h hear your spirit and have some have some good news to start'cause the the early part of twenty twenty six Like has been Quite a hit. Vaccines in Venezuela and Minneapolis and Greenland, like H how are you feeling these days?

7:01 Well it's roughly Can we hold our shit together to get the amazing thing that's coming with AI? Because obviously the political world's going to hell in a handbasket. All these kind of really terrible, terrible things happening. But like

7:15 AI's capabilities for human empowerment. I mean, imagine the world has changed that your smartphone Is a is essentially a good doctor Doesn't that be perfect?

7:25 Doesn't have to be in the L. But it's there always. Like if you're not doing a second opinion today, whenever you have a major medical issue. First opinion if you have access to doctors, still the right thing to do, but if you're not doing a second opinion, you're making a huge mistake. That's Like

7:39 Amazingly good. The World Economic Forum is going on in Davos right now. And and along with the geopolitical issues, AI has been a a central topic. But it feels like the conversation has been around things like AI security and the impact on jobs and economies and sort like i is the state of the conversation there

7:59 Kind of what you expected? Well it's what I expected But it's also one of the reasons why do You know, books like Super Agency, podcasts like Masters of Scale, Impossible, and other things in order to try to say, look, you can't avoid the bad futures by just trying to avoid the bad futures. You have to steer towards the good futures. Doesn't mean you ignore bad. It doesn't mean you don't you ignore cyber risk or you ignore Issues of digital sovereignty, or you ignore issues of geopolitance.

8:31 But you try to say, Hey, how do we get to a really good future? I constantly talk to people who are like Well I'd really like just like us to pause. Like until we sort out this particular problem, we should all pause. And you think eight billion people are gonna pause. So it's like, No, no, we're going in that direction. And it's a question of like, you know, you're kinda going with the rapids and it's and it's a question of how you row your boat, where you're going to, what you're trying to do, and It is shapeable. You just kinda have to grow take agency in doing it. And so the Davos conversation, I think Eighty percent of it.

9:03 is a non-productive conversation or even a counterproductive conversation. We're squandering this huge opportunity to say, hey, AI is American intelligence, and this is just like the Americ, this is something we want to build collaboratively and to be helpful to All of No. Every society that we're not enemies with. And it means it's not necessarily Denmark. Is what you're saying. Well, Denmark should be at the at the top of the friends list. I mean, you know, you and I have have talked about some of these issues now for so long that I I sometimes forget

9:38 Like you have been at the center of so many key AI developments. You're co-founder and early board member at OpenAI, played a role in bringing Microsoft and OpenAI together. You helped launch Inflection AI and Manus AI in your investments, in your books, and your podcasts. And all of it is like helping to usher this new era into being. And you've sort of You've taken on that role. How conscious was that choice and like Why? And do do you feel the weight of it?

10:09 Well I definitely feel the weight of it. Um And You know, part of the thing that I think is a mistake about how some people think about this is We are better as a society when it's when you have a

10:20 Broad conception of self interest. It's like the way that I think of things is I think humanity society And then me.

10:29 And doesn't mean me not present. Right. It means me as part of Industry, part of society, part of humanity. And some of it is obviously to your own benefit, too. And then when it's aligned, this is part of what makes the genius of capitalism, what makes certain societies so much more productive, because they go, Hey, let's align the areas where there is a me that also goes to a very broad us. And so when I approach kind of AI and technology I think of it on that level. Like, for example, I would trade off my own economic interest in a heartbeat against

11:03 You know, society And humanity. And that's the journey we are on with AI. Human amplifier. Mm.

11:14 It's like the same reason why we have cars and not horses and buggies. Hey, I make my living, you know, kind of grooming horses. It's like well You know? course's role in society has changed. It's no longer primary transport. You have to go through the change. So well I would like the change to happen after my generation. It's like, well, that's never the way it works. Those folks who adopt these technologies and shape them to how you live good human lives is part of how you enable the next generation and the next generation I obviously deploy commercially when it makes sense because commercial models are part of what you know get you to scale. But what matters first? Humanity.

11:50 What matter second? is societies. What matters third is functional industries, which matter for economic and all And as part of that Gets down to matters for me.

12:01 Your optimism, what you call reasoned optimism a about AI, there's also at the same time this constant talk about an AI bubble, valuations and hype about some use cases. Is an AI bubble or some bubbly parts of AI sort of inevitable. I mean, in any tech cycle there's over investment and some big bets that don't pay off. Or is bubble like a word that's too loaded and you would describe it a different way. Good use of the term bubble. is when you think

12:32 The economic frenzy has got to a point That when it breaks, it will take the economic system down with it. It's horrific. you know, suffering across the, you know. frankly the globe. So

12:46 A bubble is is a substantive risk of that. It is not. Hey, valuations are higher this month than they should be, and they'll be corrected in four months or twelve months. So the question is is Bubble is this is this

13:02 Catastrophic unwind. Whereas It might be in various ways. We have speculative investment. Like, for example, you'd say, Hey, if you're managing a pension fund, Should you be buying the stock market at the top of the stock market? Probably not. Even though by the way buying the stock market over 10, 20 years is exactly what you should be doing. So there's the there's some timing issues. I've passed on a number of investments because of valuations, because I've gone look

13:26 The risk reward on that valuation is not right. I'm still making other investments. Some people go, Well, the AI revolution, you should buy at any price. Once a lot of people start thinking buy at any price, you know that you're You're at risk of a bubble. Whereas when people are going, Oh no, this one's a good but, that one's not a good bet, and some some of these will be wrong. And by the way, some of them like

13:47 Like say we built data centers two or three years earlier in the full capacity of what we needed. By the way, no nothing suggests that there's huge demand for training, there's huge demand for product development, and there's huge demand for inference, right? The expectation is that data centers that we're gonna be multi-years of Can we have Five X the number of data centers? Can we have 10X the number? And by the way, you know, there's this US political thing, oh, is this data center bad for communities? Like, look, I would allow any community to build data centers they want. It's it's like having industry. It's like it's useful to have local power plants.

14:23 individual citizens electricity price going up. Yeah, sure. You need to add as much power as you're gonna use or more on a green effective basis. Great. Right, because then you get m you know, m generally more power on the grid. And having compute available, this is precisely what's going on in Davos is going, Oh my God, it looks like the the the two countries that are taking the lead at having a lot of compute available are the US and China, we all need to be included too. And yet you've got idiots. um like Senator Sanders in this country who are like, oh no, no, we'd rather have horses and carts. Please not not don't have data centers here. Reed's passion about AI is so compelling, and he's an equal opportunity critic of what he sees as drags on US competitiveness, whether it's coming from the Trump White House or from Bernie Sanders. So where does Reed see the most risk and the most opportunity in technology right now? And how is right now a moment for courage from business leaders?

15:21 We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us. Before the break, Reed Hoffman explained why he sees AI as the greatest tool to improve human quality of life. Now he talks about what it'll take to make the journey from here to there as investors, business leaders, and society. And he details his own personal tactics as an investor, plus a rapid fire round on AI talent, what it takes to be an AI first organization, and the case for CEO courage. Let's jump back in.

16:01 When you look at at AI startups Today. Two years ago. Like it is what defines a a defensible, attractive AI startup today. Has that parameter changed for you, whether it's valuation or whether it's sort of what a moat is?

16:22 So moat's more important. Valuation is a is a risk reward thing. You can take a big risk. When you get to something that's a really good moat. When you don't are uncertain about motes. Um then you wanna take

16:36 less risk. The mistake people frequently make is that like say for example They go, Well, coding says it's gonna be really valuable. My first round will be raising at a ten billion dollar valuation, you know, and I wanna raise two billion dollars. And you're like Well okay. There aren't that many companies that are worth more than ten billion dollars. Right. So you're saying that you are On a risk adjusted basis, you're gonna be so high on that list that you're gonna get a multiple from where you are now, even though you haven't built any product.

17:06 Part of the being smart about investing is, and this gets to your Motes question, is like, well, what is everyone else doing in coding? And by the way, what is Microsoft doing coding? What is OpenAI doing coding? What is Anthropic doing coding? What is Google doing in coding? And you have to kind of analyze that risk return. Now, sometimes You know, part of how some growth investors You know. uh epic careers are make is they say, well, everyone else thinks that this is this you know, investing at this thing at ten million dollars is nutty. But I know this is gonna be, uh has a actually pretty good shot at a multi hundred billion dollar valuation without tons of additional capital. If you have a reasonably high probability of that, because then you're gonna be going if it's a one percent probability, you've got a problem. If you got a 50% probability, woo, that's probably a really damn good investment. And I know something that other people don't know.

17:53 Part of being a good investor, it's not just do you identify technology trend, do you identify good founders, but also valuation is one of the things that makes good investors. Now part of the reason why we have a lot of people talking about bubble is to go, Oh my God, there's these new valuations that we've never seen before ever in the history of of technology investments. And the answer is Yes, And by the way, some of those will be absolutely right. Right. Like, you know, people who have invested in open Aon Anthropic.

18:24 earlier where people say, Oh, that's totally crazy. Have made historic returns already today. You can't presume that you pick a hundred percent. That's part of investors having a portfolio. It's like I go, Okay, I try to pick Twenty things.

18:37 And I try to make Four plus of them epic. And I try to make as many of them money making as possible. But by the way probably in my twenty, I probably have five to ten that are like oops.

18:49 Right. But that's because I'm being bold enough in in my investments. For a public markets investor and I I've I've uh I've I've tried to explain this sometimes to my kids. Like sometimes you can lose money on a good company and make money on a crappy company because of when you get in and when you get out. W but when you're talking about for for for venture investing It has to be a good company, right? I mean you can lose good money on a good company, but you're never gonna make money on a bad company. Actually

19:18 Occasionally it does happen. 'Cause occasionally you're lucky. Right. Random company. is bought.

19:24 strategically for a ton of money. That you're like Oh good. You take it. Got that in that one. It does happen. But the key thing and this is the thing is I try not to I try to be a A long term builder, not a market timer.

19:39 When I invest in a company it's'cause I think Ten years from now, it'll be industry transforming. It'll be a LinkedIn, it'll be an Airbnb, be an open AI. Those are the kinds of things that I'm That I'm essentially trying to do. And so you have to be the kind of compounding value to society and the market. In order to do that. And that's you know, that's what I put

20:02 All of my thinking into. If you're game, I'd love to do like a a rapid fire round with you, give you some AI topics. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. From an investor perspective. Are we at a sort of consolidation phase when it comes to AI? Things are sort of coming together, or is it still kind of unbridled innovation? much closer to unbridled innovation. There's a number of things that people haven't seen yet, that it isn't just, oh, a small number of the big frontier models are all the winners. I think there's gonna be a bunch of other stuff.

20:34 You said that you want your doctors to use AI to double check their work. So are you saying that I should trust AI to know better than my doctor? Yeah. Um well sometimes it will. Um, but that's the reason I was very precise. The second opinion with AI is totally cheap. It's easy.

20:52 And the second opinion contr contradicts the first opinion. Get a third. Right. Go talk to another doctor. Sometimes your doctor is wrong, by the way. Sometimes Chat GBT is wrong too. But that's the reason why we consult multiple opinions, because if you go, Well, now I've got to two doctors and a frontier model or two.

21:10 At this point you should have a pretty good sense of what you need to dig into, if not the answer. And the doctor themselves should be using the models to to double check themselves. I actually think it's literally almost malpractice. not to be doing that today.

21:27 All right. Energy and AI. We talked about this a little bit, this political pressure on tech firms to absorb grid costs and our communities pushing back. Do you see the energy economics of AI playing out in a particular way in the year ahead? Well, this is one of the areas where people like to have a cause celeb and kind of virtue signaling of I'm really good and that that AI thing is bad because it's bad on energy, it's bad on climate, it's bad on local electricity costs. And by the way, it doesn't mean that there won't be something there, but like Like for example, when people say, Oh, AI is already raising electric costs and they give you their data analysis, it's like well, you've got a whole bunch of raising electric costs that have nothing to do with AI. There's no data centers there. And they got some other areas where there's data centers or the electric costs the same. You haven't actually

22:17 you know, even yet made the case. Now I'm not saying it's impossible to happen, but part of the responsibility of building that is we should be building out Like uh you know, clean power. You know, Microsoft and Google and so forth are taking are taking huge risks on Buy stuff from geothermal plants and other kinds of things to prototype green power, which then can be spread through the use in your HVAC system or your washing machine, your microwave.

22:41 And by the way, then you begin to apply AI itself. I could easily imagine you can train AI models today. to save twenty to thirty percent of a power of your average, you know, middle class household. with no impact on quality of life. So the demand is not like stop this AI because it's bad for climate. It's like, hey, make sure you're doing all of these things in your data center development and your power development and your use of AI that makes us net better. On electricity. And make this net better on our environment.

23:11 AI and regulations. Last time we talked, you used an example of cars not being invented at the same time as seat belts. Are are we any closer to fastening ourselves in when it comes to AI? Not really. Maybe we're closer on hey We should have more protection of children in part because we have

23:33 you know, bad actors like X AI and Grok that are kinda saying, Hey, we don't mind if we create sexualized images of children so maybe we have to lean in more on those things. But Like broadly For example. If you say, Well, what should regulation do? It's like well create Clear safe harbor.

23:49 For how all tech companies can create medical assistance to be more of assistance to the millions and billions of people. Simple safe harbor might be is remember I'm not a doctor, and remember you should talk to a doctor if you have access to one. Maybe a part of it is that when I can go see a doctor, I can say hey

24:09 uh you know AI of my choice. Please give me a Like produce a summary. for a doctor about the whole conversation we had about this, right? And please talk to my doctor to help My doctor, she or he understand right what it is I've been trying to navigate.

24:25 If you have those things, it's it's it's it's a safe harbor for experimentation, even when it gets it wrong sometimes. No. Should we be figuring out what the benchmark is to say, well, what's the number of errors acceptable? Yes, but we can only begin to understand that once we begin to deploy it and see what the data is. AI and talent. W one of the biggest drivers of US tech leadership has been attracting talent from outside the US. Immigration policies tightened up. The outside pipeline has

24:55 Basically been cut off. Are we gonna start to see any implications from that this year? Well, I think we already are. a huge amount of the technology advantages the US have has because of of Indian and Chinese talent that's come over.

25:11 Well now the Indian Down's gonna stay there. It's gonna go to Canada, it's gonna go to Europe. When someone comes and builds a huge company here. It it it creates lots of jobs for, you know, restaurants and accountants and you know all kinds of services and them buying stuff from American manufacturing and staying in American hotels and all the rest of the stuff. You wiping out all of that and you're saying, Go somewhere else. It's like It's like the Bernie Sanders stupid no data centers here. Build them all in Canada. Have Canada built get all the economic benefit. Let's make sure we Americans don't.

25:43 Right. And it's like it it just literally it's like, you know. Up is down, it's crazy thinking, it's stupid thinking. And so you want that immigration. That's how we built the prosperity of this country in 250 years comes entirely from a generation of us going, here is the way that we will take immigration and be a competitive advantage to every other country in the world. It's like, oh Well, let's take our competitive advantage and let's sabotage it. Now, none of this says that we haven't gotten to a place where we have problems with the borders, we have problems with asylum, we have a set of other things that of course need to get fixed. People are saying, Hey, I'm feeling pain in my job. And my my community, my environment, what's going wrong. And help fix it.

26:24 Right. And we should be doing that. But by the way Completely closing the border is not the right idea, right? I mean, you could do that as a start, just as kind of saying, hey, let's re-normalize. But then you have to understand, like, For example, like they earlier like well, we're gonna send ICE after all of the Agricultural work.

26:43 And then I was like, Oh shit, our farm's gonna stop working. Oh, don't do that. No, no, send them into the the center streets of Minnesota so they can beat up people and shoot people. Do that instead. You're like, okay, that's not good either, right? It's frankly catastrophic and terrorizing. So like if you want to see domestic terrorism, see how ICE is operating in some cities and some environments. And so it's like okay. What are the like the things to do to actually really solve Americans' problems? That's what we need. And Some of

27:15 rationality immigration is absolutely essential. How do we have prosperity? For our society, for our children, for our grandchildren, and And including a bunch of communities that right now feel a lot of pain. How do we solve all those problems? That's the thing we need to be doing.

27:31 The political climate has made business leaders more cautious about commenting on societal issues. What do you say to people when like w when it's worth weighing in or even necessary to weigh in, or whether now Just isn't the moment. Look the theory that if you just keep your mouth shut, the storm will blow over

27:52 And it won't be a problem. You should be disabused of that theory now. Right. That's that is not what's happening. Lots of people say, Oh no no this tariffs thing, this is just a early negotiation tactic and it's like look

28:06 The volatility is a massive sabotage to business. Our young people aren't being hired. It's like well, yeah. businesses are in a highly volatile situation. I was like, Well, we're trying to do no hiring until we understand what's going on. That's the message that's being sent from the White House out to the whole business community. And so you need to speak up. And you go, Well, but what if I speak up? Then they're gonna penalize me. Like, Well, by the way, precisely when you feel fear is you should you should think about is this a time for courage? Because by the way, of course it shouldn't be. punitive for you speaking up about what your knowledge and expertise and experience and and and what's going on is. You know, I you know, I myself get

28:44 uh regularly called out by the White House. Um and particularly Basically only for political persecution purposes. Right. If they would say, Hey, you know, uh uh, unlike Trump who has all these pictures of Epstein, you know, at parties, like I was like I did a little bit of fundraising for MIT. Well, I'm a close associate. Like well You guys have all the all the documents.

29:07 Release all of them. Let's let people decide the truth of this themselves. So stop lying about me. So Speaking up is actually, I think, really important.

29:18 And um in part of the reason why I um You know kind of. uh do so is not just because of me and because my sense of of moral right, like first amendment, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, but it's also to try to give other people a sense of look, you should speak up about the things that you think are real. And if you feel fear Get some other people to speak up along with you and put the energy into it.

29:44 Right. Don't just kinda go, Oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna create a rationalization. I'm gonna say, hey, I don't need like I'm not being you know, fearful. I'm not being a coward. I'm just, you know, it's the right thing. It's the right thing for my business. It's the right thing, you know, it's like Look. Human beings first. Right.

30:04 Society. Right. And You are members of both of those. Like

30:11 Like speak up. Be present. On those things. And by the way. When you're

30:17 Um Uh powerful. one form of power is wealthy. Anyone who's wealthy in the society should be extremely grateful for being part of the society. You have responsibilities, they're commensurate with your power. And so you need to speak up. And by the way, not only does you know the current uh current administration want to silence all of this as speech and say, No, no, you're not allowed to, you know, you must take pledges of loyalty. But you know, like I also get You know, arguments from the lefties who go, Oh, well, you as a wealthy person, you have no moral right to speak. I'm like, Yes, I do.

30:48 Like we all have a right to speak. Right. Some people might value My speaking by knowledge of how uh companies are created, how prosperity is created, how you have a vibrant economy, and that's part of what creates jobs. I mean, I'm a guy who's created a a site that has many hundreds of millions of people. participating in it in order to find work. Right. You know, should people weigh my opinion on some things more than others? Absolutely. Should they weigh them less than certain things than others? Absolutely. But like it's like We need to be speaking up and we need to be figuring out how to solve our problems together.

31:22 I have two more rapid fire questions. AI role prompting. You you recently talked about this on possible. Don't ask AI for the answer, but for different answers in different styles. Are there role styles that you rely on when you're doing role prompting? Yes, there's maybe call it a minimum three levels. First one, first simple role prompting is Be my critic. Like I think X

31:49 How would you how would you argue against it? It doesn't have to only be the contrarian, the so called devil's advocate. It can also be the elaborate more, what arguments did I miss, or you know, where is it complicated, et cetera. The next level down is Which Expert points of view.

32:06 might bear well on this question. Are there really good perspectives that I should consider on this part of my book, Super Agency was kind of this question of human technological development. Well, as a historian of technology. How would you critique this? Like and so y you have this kind of

32:23 Uh uh expert Role of scription. Now the final thing is To think about these as teams.

32:31 Of roles. You should be thinking about roles in a team. And how you're bringing that team together in terms of and this is actually what I think the future of work looks like, because I think what we happen is we don't really have individual contributors. Maybe we have individual contributors like you and I talking to each other right now, Bob. But I think Within a year, we're gonna have little AI agents that can have this window that says, Oh, Bob, Reed forgot to mention this. Ask him about that, or this parallel to what Reed's doing, or this parallel to this piece of news from Davos. That'd be a great thing to bring up. And you go, great. And so it's managing teams of agents, even in our roles as quote unquote individual individual contributors. And

33:07 That's part of how we we're gonna create a more human You know, more productive, more more amplified, more superagency future. As you're talking about the workplace, it kind of leads me to my my last question here, which is uh about this this term AI first and the AI first organization. And I'm curious what you think the biggest

33:29 bottlenecks are for organizations that are trying to become AI first or talking about becoming AI first. Massive reinventions are very difficult. Um, so the easiest ones that become AI first are like individuals or very small organizations. Um, and that's I think you see the most of that happening. Now, because society also runs through a lot of large institutions, we need the the the renovation of these as well. Now part of that is to start saying Hey, are we on a

34:01 Call it a weekly basis. playing with understanding the trajectory of AI and thinking about the ways that we should change. And that's as you know, like almost the kind of it comes the full record circle. Like part of the reason why I'm trying to to to use AI in many variables, in many vr variations as I can, including making records, is because Um, that is what gives me a lens into what not just how I What

34:28 can operate, but how my team can operate and how the portfolio companies I work with can operate. And that evolution, you have to presume its dynamic. Like a lot of people say, well, I'm gonna wait till it's all sets out and then I'll evaluate it and I'll adopt it. It's like Uh yeah, you're gonna wait forever. Right. You need to be adopting now. Every week, what is something I tried that worked? That maybe we should build more around?

34:53 Or and tr you know, anticipate its trajectory and what's something I tried that didn't work and what do we learn from it? And do we think it won't work Forever, we don't think it won't work. We should try it again in six months, you know, et cetera. And that's that's the kind of thing you should be doing, not just as individuals. But as teams and as companies. And that means, by the way, you'll have some points of failure, you'll have some breakages, you'll have some mistakes, you have to understand what the parameters are of that, how to correct it, et cetera. But that is central. For The journey.

35:20 to becoming AI native. Well, Great as always to chat. I look forward to the next time. Awesome to talk with you, Bob. Happy New Year. I so enjoy talking with Reed in part because he's such an eclectic thinker. He's one of the central figures in AI expansion as an investor and a founder, but also by modeling what's possible more broadly as his AI Christmas album shows.

35:46 In a similar way, Reed is modeling a kind of courage for others in the business community by challenging political figures from the White House to Bernie Sanders. Whatever you think of Reed's specific policy positions, it's instructive to call out assumptions and to champion the open, respectful sharing of ideas. I don't agree with everything Reed believes, whether about AI or about Trump, but I fully endorse his spirit of courageous engagement, active experimentation, and steadfast optimism. Pushing for a better tomorrow and believing that we have the agency to create it. That's the American way. I'm Bob Sathien.

36:27 Thanks for listening. Rapid response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Alex Morris. Associate producer is Mashimaku Tonina. Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastonelli.

36:53 Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Le Tal Malad. For more, visit rapidresponsshow.com. Yeah.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 10 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.