Reid Hoffman

That's, for example, I think one of the reasons why this whole tariffs thing, which could be enormously destructive, is I think, is like, well, how do I apply tariffs idiosyncratically, like against my political opponents, but not for my political allies? Economic corruption. What if foreign actors are

Russia, others were transferring economics to people with political power in order to influence the U.S. and what they're doing. Easy ways to do that are like buy true social stock. Easy ways to do that are buy freedom coin or currency. Invest in businesses that, you know, people who are, you know, have a lot of political power are then essentially payoffs.

All of those things would be in the category of disastrous things.

Look, America benefits enormously from a global trade regime. The whole country gets a lot of economic prosperity. including things that support areas of the country that have more economic challenge. So you don't want to create trade wars. The trade wars will create a massive drop in prosperity in the US and in other places. Now, that being said, there are places that either have

Like, for example, take Iran, who are bad actors within the international context, or Russia, and that actually, in fact, are creating violence and war and chaos in various countries around the world. And you use tariffs and other kinds of sanctions as a way to rein in that behavior. That's one zone.

Another one is if you have countries that are behaving irresponsibly within the global economic system, And so, for example, with China, there's ways in which they slant the field so that they say, well, we can do economics in your country, but we can do business in your country, but you can't do business in our country. I think responding- Social media. Yes.

So it's like, okay, if you're going to disallow our businesses to operate in your country, we can disallow your businesses in parallel to operate in our country. Just as an economic thing, as kind of nothing else for how to operate. And those kinds of things I think are useful.

If, for example, people are using labor camps to produce products, adding tariffs as a way of saying, we're not going to allow that to happen, that's another good use. But those are like specific things, not general mercantile warfare.

You're actually, in fact, trying to destroy our industry in the short term so that you can then raise prices later and capture it. That is mercantile warfare. Responding to mercantile warfare is completely fine.

So I think a lot more of things as I actually think the US will be benefited by a substantial reduction in regulation. Okay. For every new regulation you want to add, remove two as a way of kind of modernizing and refactoring versus just accreting. Some of that will be AI, for example, an area that I'm committed to, passionate about, believe will be great for the world over time. We'll need power.

How do you get that power? What do you do with regulatory? A return to nuclear power fission and fusion I think will be really amazing. The question around being deeply committed to growing business across the entire country I think will be really good. One of the things that I actually think is not only a competence but a moral requirement for American presidents is to say business is good.

Now, you should invest in business across the entire industry, not just your own. So, it's not just improve real estate, right, or improve freedom coin, it's do the entire thing. And I think that's really important. So, I think all of those things are things that we could see as very good outcomes.

Well, it's a little unclear. It kind of depends on how he chooses to use his time and focus. So if his time and focus was, let's make sure that all of the kind of players in US industry are greatly amplified, like availability of power and the creation of new data centers and power for do that, and that's across the entire industry, that would be an enormous boon.

If the question around, okay, let's make sure that we are being rational about how we are willing to import talent, as we have done in the history of the US, to bring in talent that can work on this across the entire industry, that could be really good. If it was the, I want to make sure that we are inventing the future at the speed we need to be doing it, that's really good.

Now, the challenges would be is what if he goes, no, no, the most important issue facing AI is woke AI. Because we have this calling card, which means a whole bunch of different kind of, you know, these people are evil and terrible.

That's silly and not good, but easy to fix and not the most important issue when you consider what like AI means for American prosperity, well-being, a bunch of other things like that's an easy fix. Do you think Doge will be successful?

Well, in a sense, I would want it to be because I think the refactoring of bureaucracy, the refactoring of efficiency, those are things that I think accurately have gone wrong. There is next to zero chance that the missions that they have declared will be successful because the only way to get $2 trillion out of the budget... would be to massively reduce the deficit and reduce defense spending.

Those are the two areas, or for example, Medicare, Social Security. Those are the areas where the real money is. We want to posture that we just have too many federal employees. And by the way, maybe we do have too many federal employees, but it's not where the trillions of dollars in terms of what you can cut out of the budget, that's not actually where you can get it.

Well, that's generally true for very large financial institutions. And by the way, I think it's an important thing. That's the reason why, like you say, bull bear case on Doge as well. Look, I actually think kind of going through, balancing the books, figuring out the economics, applying kind of fiscal discipline in the way that we do in companies is a very good thing.

What I think is a false promise is to say, well, the really important thing is if we lay off