Reid Hoffman | The Philosopher Entrepreneur

Well, there are frankly a substantial number because I actually, in fact, think that philosophy is something that's very important for understanding humanity, understanding kind of what are the big ideas, how do we kind of evolve as individuals in a society. And when you look back, you say most people tend to be very blinded by the now. They tend to think everything has always been like the now, or maybe it was a little bit more barbaric, but they don't kind of really realize the evolution back when kings were thought to be gods, and the evolution of religious systems, the whole notion of human rights, and kind of you weren't most focused on being part of a tribe. You know, but even the evolution of nation states, and so all of this stuff, the evolution of that thinking, including things like the birth of science, all come and start in philosophy. You know, I think we're going to talk about a few of these, but perhaps the very first one is Aristotle for me. And not that he isn't actually, in fact, the first philosopher, but Aristotle was perhaps for me the first who really opened my eyes to how important philosophy is to thinking about human beings.

There were multiple important students of Plato, who himself was a student of Socrates. And part of the classic ways that traditionalist philosophy was understood was this kind of contrast between Plato and Aristotle. Because Plato was very much classically the ideas and the pure mental landscape depicted in kind of the metaphor of the cave, and thinking about what are the pure forms, the essence of things, that actually, in fact, the world around you is kind of the projection from these pure essences. Whereas Aristotle, and this is part of the reason why, especially for entrepreneurship, but also for me personally, was actually, no, philosophy starts by study of the world, by the fact that we're embedded in the world. So that's part of the reason why, you know, he came out with the natural sciences like taxonomy and kind of trying to understand like what's the world we find ourselves in, but also the similar approach to human beings. The classic transliteration into modern American English is that Aristotle said human beings are political animals. Now we tend to think about politics and the action of people within the political sphere, but what he actually meant was that human beings were citizens of the polis, right? Polis being a Greek word for city. And so that's kind of the tribal, because they were city-states, tribal in this kind of political unit of the city. And that's kind of the Athens versus Sparta, because the city-state was so integral to the intensity of the kind of the Greek political and society and philosophical action. One of the things I've said about entrepreneurship is it embeds a theory of human nature. What's your theory about how human beings identify themselves, connect with others, view themselves to be part of a group, are motivated by ideologies, by emotions, by desires, by appetites? How are those things, you know, kind of put together? What are the questions when they're kind of pursuing a theory of the good, because everyone's a hero of their own story? And you know, one of the other areas is that kind of I think owes its origins to Aristotle in my thinking is I have this favorite quotation that in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but of course in practice there is. Well, that's also very, you know, when you kind of look back to the earliest records we have of philosophy, you know, Aristotelian, because that notion of revise your theory by engagement with the world, engage the world to generate the theory, have the theory, apply it, and that loop between theory and practice. Because you know, actually, in fact, where I ultimately get to is it's the combination of theory and practice that is so impactful and important, and is also of course part of the reason that theory generation, that generation of human nature, that having an investment thesis, a theory of the game in your entrepreneurship, all comes back to this very philosophy as a practice in the world, which is very Aristotelian, and part of what makes Aristotle so central to, you know, how I think about philosophy's importance to entrepreneurship.

Exactly. And by the way, a lot of things that the general business world should learn from entrepreneurship, you know, a theory of experimentation, you know, like our friend Eric Ries and The Lean Startup. Also, you know, of course, what we did with the episode with him on Masters of Scale. But that say, look, it doesn't mean don't have a theory, doesn't mean don't have something that may take you through some negative data. You may say, well, I hear that negative data, but I still have a theory that I think is potentially right and let me try to get there. But always be refining it with engagement. And part of the engagement, everyone always thinks experimentation is only like I run the experiment like an A/B test on a consumer and a website. Actually, in fact, part of getting data is go talk to your smart friends and say, what do you think is wrong with this? And try to distill it because they may have some things that are wrong. Like, you know, for example, in the early days of LinkedIn, a bunch of my smart friends all thought LinkedIn wouldn't go anywhere because they said, well, your whole value proposition is a network, the value proposition doesn't kick in until you get to a million people, you're never going to get to a million people because you have a chicken and egg problem. And it's like, ah, but actually, in fact, enough people believing it, enough people seeing it, plus the techniques of growth hacking, all lead to I think I can get to a million people and then the value proposition can kick in and actually be mainstream and be very valuable. And that kind of, you know, being in the world is part of what I think starts with the Aristotelian. The reason why I've always been more Aristotle than Plato, although obviously I have great respect for Plato. Although let me make one more just so people understand that I actually, in fact, I really am ensconced in philosophy. Here's something that will probably for most people go, what the heck is that? I actually think Xenophon was a more accurate student of Socrates than Plato. And then everyone's go, okay, we have no idea what you're talking about. But Xenophon was someone who was out in the world and was actually leading an army and applying these principles. And so, but the notion of the intellectual curiosity and that learning starts with questions, which is kind of to some degree the central Socratic method, and it's part of the reason why, you know, when you teach entrepreneurship or how to be an entrepreneur, it's always be asking the questions as a way of motivating that. And so Plato is not the only student of Socrates.

Yes. And the other thing that I think is really interesting and important to underline, we talked before briefly about how influential Aristotle was. The funny thing about being an influencer is you don't always control how your influence works. So Aristotle very much took the point of view of the world is something that we're going to inquire and we're going to learn from and we're going to experiment, we're going to do all these things. And Aristotle did them so well that for centuries afterwards people just said, well, Aristotle said this, therefore it must be correct. So they learned exactly the wrong lesson from Aristotle.

And you know, because Aristotle was like many of these thinkers, was always, look, I think I've discovered some truths, but it's a dynamic process, just like entrepreneurship is. That I cross, say, it's okay, this having gotten a partial answer to this question now allows me to ask a much better question.

Well, it actually wasn't a book on philosophy. Our friend David Jok and Brad Feld were writing a book, The Daily Practice for Entrepreneurs, and Nietzsche. And I've known Brad for a long time, and so they reached out and said, hey, we're doing this thing. I think it's an excellent thing. Actually, in fact, I coined a phrase that I'd never used before, which is patron philosopher for entrepreneurs, which I thought Nietzsche was an extremely good candidate for, which we'll go into in a minute. Like I think a number of first-year college students, especially in the US, Nietzsche was a revelation when I read him. And there's so many people who claim Nietzsche as a patron philosopher that are highly questionable. People always go, oh, Nietzsche, isn't he the Nazi philosopher? Because the Nazis claimed him as a patron philosopher. I'll say a little bit about that. That was all wrong, although oriented by his sister, who was trying to get, you know, economic and political and social position within Nazi Germany. For example, one Nietzsche aphorism is, an anti-Semite is the worst of all people. Right? Well, given that Nazis were anti-Semites, that is not compatible. So just to give you a sense that Nietzsche, you know, basically would have despised the Nazis who were holding up his philosophy as an ideal. Similarly, there's various white supremacists who, because of the Nazi thing, claim Nietzsche. Again, wrong. Now, the reason why it's easy, there's an attraction in Nietzsche and easy to misinterpret. So the attraction in Nietzsche is that Nietzsche was one of the youngest ever professors at his time. And so as a classicist, his intense study was all the past. But the organization then of academia was we are just mere shadows of these great philosophers of the past, Aristotle being one of the frequently referred to as the philosopher, but you know, like the Greeks. And so we're just trying to sing their praises. And what Nietzsche was saying, actually, in fact, look, that's great, and Aristotle was great, and Plato was great, and so, but it's the creation of the new, it's the creation of the future human being, you know, frequently described as the Übermensch, which is the Overman. But what he was really oriented was the who we're becoming, that act of creation of we are making better human beings, we are being the better versions of ourselves, we're going there as opposed to trying to become like machines or simply the ritualistic copies of earlier human beings. We should be creating ourselves. And so there was a huge focus on individuals. That was also part of the reason why Nietzsche was so opposed to religion. He was very pro-Jesus and anti-Christianity, because like Jesus was defining a, hey, I've got a new idea of who we could be and how we could be amazingly creative as a human being, and yet like, oh, now we're going to all try to be stamped into a mold and to follow a system of rules only because it's a system of rules, not because it's innating this creativity. And so that's the thing that he wanted to do. And now the parallels obviously between this and entrepreneurship was that emphasis, the importance of the individual, the individual being creative, engaging in creative destruction, which is how do I invent something which is attacking the current idols, perhaps the current industry, perhaps current market condition, perhaps the current leading products or services, by creating something new, by being disruptive. And to do that, and in this, you know, the kind of King Lear and Shakespeare is creating something from nothing. And that was something that is actually, in fact, what is part of the difficulties and the heroism and the fear of the entrepreneurial journey. And so that Nietzsche is a very good patron philosopher. And part of it is Nietzsche, you know, said, hey, I despise systematizers, and the will to a system is a lack of integrity. Because part of it is that creation of the new is the not the old system, but the new system or the new build towards the thing that isn't yet invented. And so that's why I think it's very important, and that's why I thought Brad and Dave's book was a good practice for entrepreneurs, and why Nietzsche is actually, in fact, a good philosopher. Now that doesn't mean I, by the way, agree with everything Nietzsche said. Nietzsche generally speaking was a destroyer of idols, is a tear down the old system, and you know, occasionally would say dumbass things about women or other things. You know, because by the way, all philosophers have said dumbass things too. This is the canonization of any of these individuals as heroes is always fools, but also by the way, attacking them because they said one dumbass thing is equally dumbass. My favorite of all things was actually Freud in his book Civilization and Its Discontents, where he has a footnote where he describes men as more adept at technology than women because men had better control of fires in the early days because they could use their penis to pee on fire and control it. And you're like, oh my God, what degree of dumbness do you have to say? Like, I get it that you're trying to kind of grapple with technology and all the rest, and the social pattern might be that at the moment men seem to be grappling with technology more, but would you think it have anything to do with the fact that your society was organized that all the men were in charge and all the men were going to university and all the rest of the stuff would have anything to do with that? You know, dumbass as a comment. And yet Freud, super important for understanding that there are hidden forces of psychology at work and understanding that we aren't just all rational beings and there's subconscious things that you have to work through and open the doors to all of that to thinking about how we evolve as human beings. All that stuff, super important that Freud opened, but yet dumb comments. So did Nietzsche make dumb comments? Yes, Nietzsche made dumb comments. That still doesn't mean when the interesting things, the things that they contributed that we should build on and learn from are still very key. And a lot of the Nietzschean, you know, kind of philosophizing with a hammer and aphorisms as a way to kind of generate catalysts for thinking is a great patron philosopher for entrepreneurship.