Unlocking AI's Potential: Reid Hoffman Discusses 'Superagency'

**Kevin Rose** (0:03)
Reid, thank you for being on the show.

**Reid Hoffman** (0:05)
Always a pleasure. It's been way too long.

**Kevin Rose** (0:07)
Way too long.

**Reid Hoffman** (0:07)
Yeah.

**Kevin Rose** (0:08)
I am so, so stoked to dive into all things AI. The first thing that came to mind for me this morning, because I was up early and I was playing around with like all the things, is I was curious, like, what is, before we get into the book, what is your personal stack look like these days? Like, what do you do? Because you're seeing so much. Like, what's your go-to tool set?

**Reid Hoffman** (0:29)
So, well, not surprising, I do a lot of stuff with AI. And primary tools I use in AI are various, the ChatGVT models and Claude, because those tend to be the most generalist tools for doing a lot of different things. But it kind of ranges from some kind of interesting, and this is partially because we have kind of technological accretion. It's like we have our own little personal tech debt. So, you know, like, I have my agendas for all of the things, because I talk to lots of people, so I remember all the notes, like in Evernote. Remember Evernote?

**Kevin Rose** (1:04)
Yes, yes. So you're old school like that.

**Reid Hoffman** (1:07)
Old school. And then I have all of my, like when I'm working on ideas on projects, it's all in Microsoft OneNote, right? Because it's kind of like these different modalities of association, and it works. And now, because I have my home set up with kind of Mac studios and screens. Yes. I now travel with multiple laptops.

**Kevin Rose** (1:34)
Yes, same.

**Reid Hoffman** (1:34)
So it's like, no, no, no, I need more than one screen.

**Kevin Rose** (1:39)
Yeah.

**Reid Hoffman** (1:39)
So it's a weird, like when people have my laptop, what are you carrying?

**Kevin Rose** (1:44)
Well, it's funny is when the air came out, the new Mac Airs, I was like, oh, I'm going to get lighter. And now I realize I have a stack of things. Like there's a stack of different devices. Nothing got lighter.

**Reid Hoffman** (1:54)
I just had more devices. Exactly.

**Kevin Rose** (1:57)
Are you using any of the crazy like pro stuff, like the ChatGPT Pro now?

**Reid Hoffman** (2:01)
Yeah.

**Kevin Rose** (2:01)
I mean, that is just insane.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:03)
Yeah. Well, and actually specifically on my computer, I actually have it so that it will naturally, like when I'm doing creation and prompt queries, it'll take it out to multiple models and then reintegrate it.

**Kevin Rose** (2:16)
Oh, amazing.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:17)
Yeah. So it's kind of like we started doing the swarm stuff before OpenAI did.

**Kevin Rose** (2:21)
Yes.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:22)
Right. Because it's kind of like the, like one of the things that people don't really, you do, but like many people don't appreciate is that one of the things that these models are really spectacular is role-taking. So the simple role is argue against me or argue for me. Right. But then it's also like, okay, what I'd like to know is what would a historical cultural anthropologist think about what I'm saying?

**Kevin Rose** (2:44)
Oh, wow. Crazy.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:45)
And so what you do is you do these prompts with these, take this role in the query that I want, in the interaction I want to have.

**Kevin Rose** (2:54)
Right.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:54)
And then that helps inform me and get me better.

**Kevin Rose** (2:57)
Right.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:57)
And so I've automated all that.

**Kevin Rose** (2:59)
Right. Yeah. So that's amazing. So you have your own script that splits it out and brings it all back together.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:05)
And integrates.

**Kevin Rose** (3:05)
That's awesome. So one of the things I do is I take the books that I love that can help me. So for example, Crucial Conversations is a fantastic book.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:14)
Yep.

**Kevin Rose** (3:15)
And there's a few times a year where I'll forget. Like I paid for something. You get this credit card charge. You're like, I've been paying for this for like four years, for $20 a month that I've never used it. And so I go in there. And because it has that corpus of data around that book, I'm like, help me craft this email in a way that will deliver this message. That will help me get the refund. And it's amazing because it uses the knowledge from that expert in that subject.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:39)
Yes.

**Kevin Rose** (3:40)
And then gives me back and prompts it and structures it in a way that gets the best results.