Reid Hoffman on Trump vs Musk, Zuckerberg’s “superintelligence,” and the next wave of AI
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Most American consumers don't realize how valuable the global market has been for them. I spent a number of weeks in Europe traveling around doing conferences and a number of people kind of talked to me saying, look, you know, we've really liked having U.S. as a stable trade partner, but maybe China is a more stable trade partner for us now. And I think that's fundamentally very bad for the U.S. economy.

That's Reid Hoffman, co-founder at LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and founding host of Masters of Scale. Today, Reid and I dig in about what's noise and what matters most in 2025's fast-changing environment, from Trump and Musk's public spat to the conflict between Israel and Iran to whether AI will really lead to a, quote, white-collar bloodbath and what Mark Zuckerberg means when he says Meta is pursuing, quote, superintelligence.

There's much to get to, so let's jump in. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, founding host of Massage of Scale, and co-host of Podcast Possible. Reid, great, as always, to chat with you. Bob, it's great to see you. There is so much going on in the economy and in tech right now. It's hard to know where to focus.

How would you describe this moment with so much change on so many fronts? Like, do you compartmentalize topics? Do you say like in this bucket is what's going on in AI and over here is what's going on with U.S. trade or or is it all interconnected for you? Well, it's probably broadly just for focus and being able to not just get lost in the entire soup of chaos.

is, you know, in topics and this connectivity is on, you know, key major themes. So like, obviously, you know,

you know, AI plays across everything, kind of like, what does it mean not just for obviously work and what does it mean for geopolitics and what does it mean for the invention of science and what does it mean for medicine, but also like even when you kind of see, you know, let's send in the National Guard and the Marines to LA, you know, that doesn't necessarily generate the question of AI, but it does generate the, you know, we live in chaotic times. So there's a couple questions that go across all of them. And when something happens like Israel, you know,

starts bombing Iran. Like, is that its own bucket or does it, does it get you to start rethinking other things that are, that are around it also? It's mostly its own bucket. Um, but it does, you know, kind of go into, there's this general, like the world is more, um, descending into chaos. Like, you know, we're, um,

You know, we've kind of self-ended the post-World War II American world order. And I think that, you know, there will be thousands of lives and lots of suffering that will come from that because I think the post-World War II American world order has been one of the, you know, most golden times in human history. And the fact that we have deliberately self-sacrificed

you know, destroyed that will have a bunch of different costs. And I think the costs include, you know, increasing conflict and chaos, you know, everywhere in the world. So that has its kind of macro theme, which the Israeli bombing of the Iranians is in. Now,

I also think, of course, the Iranian nuclear program is a problem. You know, in Trump 1, I actually thought his ending the treaty deal was a mistake. But, you know, the Iranians are a force for, you know, kind of engaging in kind of global terrorism and global conflict. So, you know, the fact that there's something being done to try to contain Iran

Yeah.

I have to ask you about the public split between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Maybe it's a truce now. It's hard to say. Regardless, Silicon Valley must be buzzing. I'm curious what the reactions are. Are there any lessons that leaders are drawing from it in dealing with the president, in dealing with Elon? Well, I think there's a whole stack of things. I think one is, you know, there was a bunch of Silicon Valley leaders who deluded themselves into

That, you know, Trump was the sensible business man and the Dems were anti-business. And that was that straightforward. And they went, look, you know, part of the reason why, you know, kind of entrepreneurial people like Elon were getting in the...

The business is because they felt that, you know, like, for example, you know, one of the biggest expense lines in the federal government is the deficit. It's just the interest payments. I'm like, it's like we as a country have over decades borrowed money on credit cards to kind of finance our operations. And just like anyone who knows when they borrow money on credit cards, it puts a huge burden

And they're operating income and what to do. And that's what we've been doing as a country. And they said, see, they're really sensible. You know, Elon's going to go in and cut a bunch of costs and we're going to have a budget that is not going to be as much of a deficit. And I think, you know, part of what, you know, Elon's learning from the big, beautiful bill that's being proposed is we're actually not being business sensible here. Yeah.

And so, you know, Elon sparked in the way he normally sparks, which is to make a whole bunch of, frankly, crazy.

massively inflammatory tweets. And that caused a kind of a general reaction on both sides, which kind of informed everyone. It was like, one, you know, this big, beautiful bill is not a pro-future of American business because it's going to increase our debt line a whole lot. That that issue got drowned in

various power politicking, Elon saying, the president's only going to be here three and a half years. I'm going to be here 40 years. You should listen to me, not him, et cetera, et cetera. I think that the question that this is not, call it business rational, not sensible on governance, not sensible on managing the debt, not sensible on kind of how do we actually, in fact, help the country get rid of its debt, get back to good business,

is I think the broad lesson that everyone's drawing from it. In terms of business sensible, do people look at the time and effort that Musk has put into politics and spending his time in Washington? Was that time well spent in a business sensible way? I think most people think it's probably been a pretty bad net negative. What are the actual

that Doge has really accomplished. It started with these big claims about shaving off fraudulent expense to help right-size the deficit, and there were a lot of claims about

reducing fraud and literally zero substantiation about the reductions being, you know, particularly fraud-oriented or anything else. So I think that's not been successful. And then obviously Elon's engagement with this has caused, you know, I mean, I now see, I see, call it

three times as many Teslas with anti-Elon bumper stickers in the neighborhoods I drive around in than there are Teslas without anti-Elon bumper stickers. Most purchasers of Teslas believe in such things as climate change and think that we have to be rational on these topics and the fact that

Elon is kind of like staying silent on an administration that's kind of claiming that climate change is a complete fiction. I think that's been – not just has Doge been a big problem, but I think like the Tesla customer base is in clear revolt now.

on this stuff. And so I think all of those things have been real challenges. Trump's economic policy, certainly the tariff policy has been wildly erratic. The deals he's talked about remain incomplete. Business rarely thrives in that sort of uncertainty, but so far, at least judging from the stock market, things seem to have stabilized. Right.

Has Trump already, like, fundamentally changed the U.S. economy? Or so far, has it been mostly noise? So I think it's been fundamentally changed, but the impact hasn't been fully felt. Like, I think that most American businesses and most American, you know, workers and most American consumers don't realize how valuable the impact

global market has been for them that even you know kind of some of our closest allies let's take Canada for example

You know, tourism from Canada is way down. Purchases of American products in Canada is way down. It's entirely based on, you know, kind of pronouncements from the White House and actions from the White House about all of this that have kind of led this to this happening. And that's just kind of a microcosm of things that will have, you know, bad impact on American society, American industry, American companies, American workers, American consumers, you know.

And I just think that it hasn't really fully hit the numbers in the market yet. I spent a number of

of weeks in Europe, traveling around, doing conferences as I do earlier this year. And the number of people kind of talked to me saying, look, you know, we've really liked having U.S. as a stable trade partner, but maybe China is a more stable trade partner for us now. And I think that's fundamentally very bad for the U.S. economy.

Who are you talking to these days when it comes to understanding government policy? I mean, you had a lot of access during the Biden administration. Where do you get your information today or where can you have impact? You know, my ethos has always been for decades

Any Western democracy leader who has been, you know, kind of duly elected, I try to help them as much as possible. I have zero connectivity with the current administration. The U.S. is not really looking for not just mine, but a lot of people like me's input on, you know, how to win an industry with AI, what kind of things should mean for policy and other kinds of things.

You know, more of my advice has been going to the other, you know, Western-style democracies. I continue to be willing to help any well-elected government official trying to solve a problem because it's part of being kind of pro-humanity, pro-society, pro-Western society evolutions.

You launched a new AI company in January, Manus AI, focused on drug development. The U.S. healthcare system has often resisted new approaches to improving health outcomes. I mean, lots of companies have become roadkill on that route. How much do the challenges in healthcare appeal to you? You know, seem like they're an opportunity versus sort of make you cautious?

It's both. You're not surprised by my answer, Bob. One of the things that I think we tend to do badly within regulatory state and everything else is by trying to make things very reliable, we enshrine the past against the future. And there's all kinds of ways in which the regulatory system within healthcare works.

makes the future slower, much more expensive, much less taking of risk in order to accomplish things that are really incredible. And that's my general play is what are smart risks you can take that have, you know, society transforming, industry transforming, you know, human health or, you know, kind of positive humanity outcomes transforming to have. And the fact that there is a

You know, the healthcare system is so challenging and difficult across all these different fronts. It's in innovation. It's in payment systems. It's in liability. It's in all of this stuff.

And so that all, like, you know, it makes me cautious when you're in a circumstance to say all of these barriers mean that it's impossible to win, it's impossible to succeed. On the other hand, obviously, it's extremely important. And if you can figure out ways to navigate the challenges in which other people don't, you can build stuff that's extraordinary. And that's part of the reason why when I was talking to Siddhartha Mukherjee about, you know, how AI can accelerate drug discovery, he said, look, can

cancer is the exact right thing. He is obviously the celebrated author, researcher, et cetera, on this. And he's brought drugs to market successfully, you know, approved by the FDA. He understands the whole ecosystem of that. And he said, okay, let's partner together, then do this. And perhaps, you know, what we anticipate very strongly is the acceleration that we get from AI in doing this kind of drug discovery work.

It's going to be so massive that that gives us enough energy and enough acceleration that even navigating all of the different challenges in the healthcare system, regulation, payments, et cetera, will be navigable because the benefits will be so huge.

the tenure of RFK Jr., does that add to the challenges? Does that, like, is he more open to the opportunities that you're putting in, or do you just can't even think about those things? I'm always hopeful when someone comes in a disruptor that they will do stuff that the disruption will be positive for society, positive for humanity, positive for industry. On the other hand, you know,

Everything I've seen, unfortunately, continues to echo, you know, my worries that I articulated during the confirmation process, which is the confirmation of RFK Jr. may be measured in thousands of American lives that are lost. And, you know, that kind of, call it non-intelligence around vaccines and other kinds of things, seems to be the top focus of his work so far versus the

How do we bring more technology to benefit more Americans to bear, which would obviously be the thing that I would prefer new disruptors focus on and think is the right thing to do. ♪

Whether it's RFK Jr. or Elon Musk, the move fast and break things ethos that underpins much of Silicon Valley's success hasn't translated smoothly to U.S. federal policy in 2025. How can we better navigate the line between good disruption and bad disruption, especially when it comes to the realm of AI? We'll talk about that after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, Reid Hoffman shared his insights on Trump, Musk, RFK and the U.S. economy. Now, Reid digs in on critical AI developments from claims that AI will spark a white collar bloodbath to Meta and Apple's efforts to catch up with OpenAI and Microsoft. Let's dive back in.

I saw that the AI firm Anthropic CEO Dario Amodi told Axios recently that there was a coming white-collar bloodbath, that people are dramatically underestimating AI's impact on jobs. Do you agree with that? Do we know what the impact will be? Well, frankly, no one knows. Anyone who claims they know exactly what the impact is, is either self-deluding or other-deluding.

Dario is right that there is a – that over, call it a decade or three, that we'll do a massive set of job transformation. And some of that job transformation will be replacement issues, just like, for example, when computer programs, Excel and other things started happening online.

the people whose jobs it was to write in the ledger, the accounting ledgers, that job went away. But on the other hand, the accountant job didn't go away. The accountant job, if anything, everyone was predicting that the accountant job would go away. And actually, in fact, the accountant job got broader, richer, et cetera. It's like scenario planning, financial analysis. Just because a function's coming in that has a

you know, kind of a replacement area on a certain set of tasks doesn't mean even all of this job is going to get replaced. It does mean there's going to be a lot of transformation and that some specific things that used to be described by job description will be completely gone. But that doesn't even necessarily mean that a function is going to go way down. So I think there is a massive, you know, tsunami of transformation coming and

And I called Dario to talk to him because, you know, deeply respect his point of view on lots and lots of topics about the bloodbath thing. And, you know, we see the world in kind of different variables here because bloodbath just implies everything going away versus where I tend to think all, you know, having published Super Agency is that we at least have many years, if not a long time, of

of, you know, kind of person plus AI doing things. Like, could I just replace, for example, my accountants with, you know, GPT-4? The answer is absolutely not. That would be a disastrous mistake. And it's just similarly like saying, also, let's replace my marketing department or my sales department with GPT-4. Absolutely not. Now, should each of these departments be

using GPT-4 and Copilot and Claude and everything else in order to operate? Yes, they should be starting to experiment with that. There's various ways in each of these departments you can be amplified with this work.

but that's nowhere close to a bloodbath. The bloodbath is a very good way to grab, you know, internet headlines, media headlines. But one, not soon, right? Two, even on the impact in terms of what's happening, I think transformation is the better thing. That does involve some replacement. We do have revolutions, but it tends to be when it's a—

large percentage of jobs in a very short timeframe. What jobs are most likely to be replaced? They're the ones where we're trying to program human beings to act like robots, like a customer service script, et cetera, in terms of the way you're operating. And that's the most natural replacement.

But even then, it's unclear that that will be a bloodbath because of the question of what the adoption of the companies look like, how it's refined in, even with massive transformation that will happen in relatively short timeframe. So, yes, yes.

I think people are underestimating AI's impact on jobs, but I think inducing panic as a response is serving kind of media announcement purposes and not actually, in fact, intelligent industry and economic and career path planning.

You know, we continue to see new advances in AI and new services and new uses, but there are also indications of, you know, what some people call AI fatigue. There's a study from S&P that says that some companies are scrapping AI initiatives at an accelerated pace. Why is it so hard for some companies to figure out how to get positive returns from AI at this stage?

It's partially because it requires, and this is what can happen with AI generally, but what it requires doing is kind of retooling how the job works, retooling how the teamwork play works, retooling what the expectations in the system are, because the

The thing they most naturally want to do, hence a little bit like Dario's white-collar bloodbath, is they want to say, okay, I unplug Bob or Reed from Job X and I plug in an AI agent in order to do it, and then it just all continues to work that way. And by the way, that's not what the end workflow is going to look like, period. Even when you've gotten these agents to quasi-autonomy in their being able to function within a workflow process, even as they get there,

that's not the way – like work is not going to stay in the same organization. And that's the most natural thing for companies to do. So then they go, okay, well, we don't really know what to do here. So what that gets back to is individuals going, well, actually, in fact –

I have a good sense. It's like I'm the early adopter of a computer. I'm an early adopter. I have a good sense of how to use this in order to do the things I'm doing. And I'm moderately changing my job. I'm using it to amplify myself, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so, you know, it gets back to the individuals doing this versus the AI initiative. And so that the workers will themselves in some ways define what the jobs are the future and the workflow is like from from experimenting.

Yeah. Well, certainly in the next few, to use the poker analogy, turns of the card, that's certainly what's going to be happening. And I've seen a whole bunch of that all over the place, including in my own work and in our work. This is one of the things that when you get to industrial age companies versus AI age companies, and what is the way that the kind of strategy and workflows are going to need to work?

And the thing that industrial age companies, for example, what is still generally taught at most business schools and all the rest, is you – and by the way, it's part of one of the miracles of modern management that, you know –

U.S. business schools led and other business schools also participated in was getting to professional management, industrial management, was how do we build this industrial efficiency process of evaluating risk, understanding customer engagement, understanding workflow development, understanding efficiencies of supply chain and work and all the rest, created a massive amount of productivity. And that was a really, really good thing. But that was industrial age management.

And what happens in AI management as you begin to get to the AI agent, how would, you know, what would be the dynamic process of how companies should work? Because this industrialized process is almost certainly incorrect. Within a small number of years, you won't have, as it were, any fully individual knowledge workers or information workers anymore.

Any so-called individual contributor will be deploying with multiple AI agents on their team, and they will be managing these AI agents on their team generating stuff. So the notion of managing work becomes much more of the individual contributor work. That's a clear lens in terms of how the world of work will be evolving. Now you get back to what should companies doing now? Well, the answer is,

The whole thing is going to be much more dynamic, experimental, and evolutionary. It's going to look more like, you know, like if we want to shift to a military metaphor, commando teams, you know, Delta Force teams, and less like supply chain logistics teams.

And so you need to be building in that kind of experimental learning, evolving, even when the initial experiments aren't really working for you because you haven't figured out how to put them into your industrialized process. But you want to keep with that experimental process because what the future will look like will be much more dynamic and fluid in terms of how work works. And so I would be...

I'd be, I think it's a mistake to be scrapping. It may very well be, well, that one didn't work. Reset. Just try it again completely. That's totally fine. But saying, oh, we tried that AI thing. It didn't work for us. You're like, oh boy, that's not going to work out. Mark Zuckerberg has made headlines in recent days pushing for what he calls AI super intelligence. And then many folks have sort of said that artificial general intelligence, AGI, was still far off.

Are Mark's plans for real? Well, Mark's plans are for real. I mean, I think he's trying to get meta because Mark is a very good strategist and thinkers. Like, you know, by them having focused on

all of the AR and Oculus and glasses, they didn't focus as much on the AI. And part of what he's trying to do is get them to intensely focus on AI and what they should be doing because, you know, while, you know, they've released some good open source models and so forth, you know, there's a reason why when people are talking about, you know, kind of

making a difference. They talk about open AI and they talk about, you know, Copilot. They talk about Anthropic Cloud and they talk about Google Gemini. And then after that, they start talking about things like DeepSeek from China and so forth. You know, Meta hasn't even gotten into that list as as not Amazon and, you know, and even though, you know, Apple treads the market itself with Apple intelligence and

You know, we have yet to see the intelligent part of the Apple intelligence. I'm sure it's coming, but, you know, it's still TBD.

And so, you know, Mark being meta-strategic is diving into this with intensity. Here's the complexity and nuance of it, which is, look, we already have superintelligence in some ways. You know, GBD-4 is already superintelligent in ways that, you know, outperforms human beings on like breadth and synthesis of tasks. Like if you use deep research, the speed at which you can generate a deep research report is

is, frankly, superhuman. Doesn't mean that there aren't errors, doesn't mean it should be off doing it by itself, but that superhuman capability exists. Now, it doesn't make me anxious or

Because I actually think the natural impulse will be it will be very positive for humanity, for society, for industry. It doesn't mean that there won't be super difficult transitions, transformations and jobs and so forth. But the highest probability is that it will be good.

Now, that being said, can it be bad? And the answer is yes. It could be bad by mistakes itself. It could be bad by its hand in human being. It could be bad by carelessness and a set of other things. And so trying to increase the probabilities of great outcomes for society, industries, humanity, et cetera, is great. And try to decrease the bad ones is great and what we should be doing. Now, Mark –

announcing super intelligence as a goal, e.g., please include me on the map with everyone else. You know, I think that's a good thing to happen. There's a lot of work between here and there in order to make that happen.

Some of the anxiety about AI, I feel like there's this term new to me, interpretability. It's a sort of a euphemism for the fact that we don't really know how generative AI systems arrive at their outputs. Is that something that needs to be solved for people to trust AI in a different way? Or are you not particularly worried that interpretability remains a mystery?

It's critical that it's solved for certain kinds of tasks. Should we put AI in charge of our nuclear defense grid? Absolutely not, right? Like, no way. Bad idea. But interpretability is a scale, and there's a bunch of stuff where the current level of interpretability is totally fine for how we operate. We were earlier talking about customer service, and you said, well, we don't have really good interpretability. Do we mind—

putting autonomous agents out there at the front end of customer service calls? The answer is no, because look, how bad could it ultimately be? But you wouldn't necessarily make that your air traffic controller at this point. No, exactly. Now, that being said, we do want to solve this problem as much as we can, but

And so there's both efforts within the major AI labs, open AI and anthropic and everything else, trying to increase interpretability, trying to have better governance of these systems, better absolute reliability of systems. And then I also – here's a prediction. I think over the next –

two to 10 years, we'll be also building new technological systems that are integrated in with the current LLMs and generative AI that will massively increase the reliability of these things, possibly through some interpretability, but is blended into the systems. Essentially, the reliability goes way up

And even if the interpretability only goes somewhat up. And I think that is something that we are intelligently working on.

Well, as always, Reid, I appreciate your candor in taking my questions on all these wide-ranging things. I really do appreciate it. Well, likewise. And Bob, it's always fun to talk with you. And, you know, I think it may be my, almost like my Vulcan sign-off of the live long and prosper as I look forward to the next conversation too. Thank you.

Reid's grasp of AI and his penchant for nuance always leaves me feeling smarter. One of the key things I take away is that amid the frenzy around AI and the accelerated pace of change, it's worthwhile to remind ourselves that it's a marathon and not a sprint. While some tools may seem like plug-and-play solutions, we need to be strategic in how we incorporate AI into our workflow today and how we think about that workflow evolving in the future.

We don't know what tomorrow will bring in tech, in the marketplace, in politics and geopolitics. What we do know, it'll be the choices of human leaders and each of us individually that will determine how AI and other disruptions define our world. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening. ♪

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Rapid Response is a Wait What original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Troh. Our producer is Alex Morris. Associate producer is Mashimaku Tonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Lital Malad. For more, visit rapidresponseshow.com.