The Future You Avoid Is Riskier Than the One You Face with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman

A Bit of Optimism

The Optimism Company from Simon Sinek

Education, Business, Self-improvement, Careers

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The future is something we create, not just something that happens. To guide progress toward real good, we need bold, optimistic visions of what society can become. Reid Hoffman makes the case for better science fiction - stories that don’t just entertain, but illuminate the futures we can strive for. As a serial entrepreneur and cofounder of LinkedIn, Reid brings a unique perspective on how storytelling shapes technology, society, and innovation. He argues that imagining optimistic futures is essential if we want to create them. In this episode, we also explore how technology like AI is changing the way our brains work and how our faculties will evolve, why humanity has shifted from focusing on external threats to internal ones, and how optimism isn’t blind faith—it’s a clear-eyed strategy for shaping a better world. This is... A Bit of Optimism. Check out Reid’s new book here: https://www.superagency.ai/ SUPERAGENCY: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm going down that rabbit hole.
0:02.8	What science fiction do we need these days, Reed?
0:06.8	So the thing that was really magical for me, but for us, you know, in the 60s, 70s, 80s,
0:14.9	even to some degree the early 90s, was a notion that what we're creating with technology,
0:20.8	what we're creating as the possible
0:23.2	human future, can be amazing.
0:26.7	Like this sense of the world could be much better for all human beings, not to say without
0:34.6	big challenges and navigations and issues, but it could be.
0:38.1	And you don't have to be as simplistic as like the Jetsons, but it's just kind of a sense of what does the path ahead look like?
0:46.6	There are only a handful of entrepreneurs who it's safe to say that their companies change the way we do things.
0:55.0	Reid Hoffman is one of those entrepreneurs and LinkedIn is one of those companies.
1:00.0	There was a time when posting our resumes online would get us fired.
1:05.0	Now, being on LinkedIn is just how we work.
1:08.0	His mentality of giving power back to the people has permeated every aspect
1:13.5	of Reed's life, even his full embrace of AI and what it can do for humanity, which he writes
1:20.5	about in his book Super Agency. But it was our conversation about idealism, the need for it and what happened to it that really
1:29.6	inspired me.
1:31.3	This is a bit of optimism.
1:40.5	What did you want to be when you were a kid?
1:42.3	Oh, that's interesting.
1:45.6	The different phases.
1:57.3	It was, I'd say the first thought was probably a science fiction author because I was reading a lot of science fiction.
	...

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