Former President Bill Clinton in conversation with Reid Hoffman

REID HOFFMAN: Hi listeners. Tomorrow is Election Day, and if you haven’t already cast your ballot in early voting, please head to the polls on Tuesday. There’s so much at stake.

At the Masters of Scale Summit, I welcomed a very special guest to the stage to share the gravity of this year’s election.

The 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, offered his insights on how we came to this current moment of divisiveness in the U.S., and what could come next.

The consequences couldn’t be greater. And he landed on a message of hope. I hope you enjoy this special stage program from our Summit, presented in full, unedited, here on Masters of Scale.

[THEME MUSIC]

HOFFMAN: Mr. President, it is a great honor to host you here at this conference.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Thank you, I’m honored to be here. I’m glad to be around people who are happy.

Copy LinkOur place in history

HOFFMAN: I know that one of the things that everyone here wants to hear about is how you see the current state of what’s going on in America and what we should be thinking about and doing to try to help.

CLINTON: Well, first of all, if you’re confused about where we are and why we are here, I want to join your crowd. But here’s how I think you should think about it. In the larger historical suite, we are in a period that is somewhere between the run-up to the Civil War, but earlier, like 10 years before, in President Taylor’s administration. And the condition in the country after Rutherford Hayes became president and bought his way into the Electoral College by promising to withdraw all the Union forces from the South.

So we exposed all these cultural and other differences and became fodder for those who could profit immensely by exaggerating our differences and trying to rub salt in the wounds. And that’s where we are in a modern sense. We also have been building toward this for a very long time.

I mean, when President Eisenhower finally was able to dispatch Joe McCarthy and the whole “everybody’s a communist” stuff, he said presciently that we may be the longest-lasting continuous democracy in human history, but he wasn’t sure we could continue it because it required so much mental discipline. And so much trust in our institutions and willingness to defend our Constitution and the way things are done. And the willingness to live under the same set of rules, even though the people who make the rules and enforce them, like all humans, are subject to error. But we had to believe it, and he wasn’t sure we could make it. We made it a very long time. But at least, since the mid-seventies, there has been an assault on the whole idea of government and an attempt to profit more from our differences than from what we have in common. And then when Newt Gingrich took over the House of Representatives, he made a decision to make the white working class outside the South like the white working class in the South. And he was good at it. And we used to talk about it all the time. One of his sometime allies, who was a senator from a southern state, said to me once, “Why do you guys hate me so much?” I was out of office at the time. He said, “Oh, those in any sense hated you way more than Obama.” And I said, “Why?” He said, “Because you betrayed the culture. You were a white, Christian, heterosexual, Southerner, who was pro-gay rights, pro-civil rights, thought we could all live together in harmony,” and he said, “it was really bad for our brand.”

And one Republican Senator once said to me, “Do you think Hillary or I did anything wrong in that Whitewater deal? Not even wrong.” He said, “Oh, God, no. Anybody with a pea for a brain would know you didn’t. The point is to make people think you did something wrong.” And he said, “I hate the way we treat you. I really like you. But if we treated you fairly, I’d lose every time.” I mean, I’ve been living with this a lot longer than many of you have.

And I think the consequences will be grievous if we continue down this road. Because, to use the term in common parlance now, there are no guardrails.

If you watched the vice presidential debate the other night between JD Vance and Tim Walz, I almost had a coronary. There are no fact-checkers now. God forbid we should have them because I’m a saint. But, Vance actually said there was no big deal when Trump got elected on the Affordable Care Act.

He actually helped to stabilize it. And I said, “Dear God, this was just a few years ago.” When they tried to repeal it for the 60-something-th time with no consequences, you may think that’s a great deal, but they did try. And it meant the end of protections for people with pre-existing conditions from excessive rates. And only John McCain stood up. And I think it’s one reason his wife and a lot of other people in Arizona are supporting Kamala Harris now. Because President Trump said he was a loser because he got captured. But he stood up. And the people noticed, and as late as 2018, they gave the Republicans the worst beating in midterms they’d had in a hundred years. Now, they didn’t lose as many seats as we did, Obama and I, in 1994 and 2010, because of the radical gerrymandering, which this Supreme Court has now said is just fine. The new gerrymandering rule, I don’t know if you guys pay any attention to it, but it basically — the judges said, yes, you have a right to vote, yes, you have a right to have your vote counted. Yes, your vote should count about as much as everybody else’s. But there’s always been some gerrymandering. And it’s just impossible to tell how much is too much. And after all, the Constitution gives that authority to draw district lines to the states. In other words, forget about the 15th Amendment or the 14th Amendment. I mean, it’s unbelievable. And Elena Kagan, who once worked in my administration, wrote a brilliant dissenting opinion, said this is the first time in American history ever that the Supreme Court has found a right that has no remedy. And California – it just finished with its computer models that gave the Republicans three more seats. And New York had a court order the same thing.

So it’s okay if it goes one way but not the other. It bothers me. So that’s where we are in history.

Copy LinkBill Clinton on the 2024 Presidential Election

Now in this campaign, that’s where we have a specific set of challenges. About 44 percent or so of the people really want Trump to be elected. And they were for him all the time, all three times. And they believe as he does. But there are about five percent of the voters that are genuinely, genuinely undecided about the mega issues. And Trump’s argument’s pretty straightforward and slick. It’s basically I was president for four years. We had two really good years. I’m not responsible for anything that happened in the pandemic, and we didn’t have this inflation and we’re planning new jobs.

Then Biden gets in, and we have inflation. So you’ve got to vote against him and for me. And you listen to people, and this affects millennials across racial lines, and especially people with families. They have a hard time buying groceries. They have a hard time maintaining their consumption habits, even if they’ve gotten pay raises. And there have been unusual increases in food, fuel, and housing. So what do we have to do? Our side has to explain that without being defensive.

Acknowledge, yes, prices have gone up. And over a year ago we had 9 percent inflation. Totally unsustainable. And then they have to say why it happened. It happened because we destroyed all the supply chains in the COVID epidemic, and had inflation in every advanced economy on earth.

That’s a reason, not an excuse. So then what happened?

As we rebuilt the supply chains, inflation started to drop. Fuel prices went way up, aggravated by the Russia-Ukraine war. But we kept on with our all of the above strategy, which is not quite all of the above. It’s basically safer natural gas harvesting and all the green options and efficiencies. And a lot of people think that’s a mistake, but we’re in a period of transition and we can’t make it all up. In theory, we could without any natural gas, without any carbon-related energy, but in practice, we can’t.

So, and the third thing is housing. That started with the crash in 2008. I just came from Nevada. They were the third hardest-hit state then. People fled the state, and financial institutions came in and bought up all these. So, there’s a shortage of housing.

So, where should we make the decision? How do we make the decision? How do we decide how we decide? Well, we’ve got to have a budget. So, there’s a law in the United States that says we can’t change any amount of money that’s being paid.

And we know how to enforce them because lots of states have them. We should continue our energy policy and, if at all possible, accelerate it.

We have unlimited potential to support solar and wind. We’re trying to improve battery technology. We can do geothermal. We can do all this other stuff. We have now small-scale pellet nuclear technology where you can protect the fuel with ceramic balls, which will give it a much longer half-life before it’ll be dangerous.

And we can dramatically improve the efficiency of fracking if standards are high enough and regularly checked. And what’s their policy? And on housing, she wants to build three million more units and help people with their down payments. And it’ll increase the supply and drop the price. So, what’s their policy? Their policy is, they say nothing about the price-counting law.

They, as Donald Trump promised in a meeting with the oil companies, which was widely publicized, he would repeal every single clean energy reform measure. And the third thing is, they’ve said really nothing about housing.

So I think Kamala Harris has got a more compelling case. And, I think, affirmatively, they’re better. You don’t have to say anything bad about Trump; just say this is what we’re for. And they’re not for that. And. He’s actually promised to repeal a lot of what has given us cheaper power every day. Elon Musk is so determined to do it. That’s true. His greatest public service, I think, was the Tesla. It’s a great car, and the people that have tried to copy it. My daughter and son-in-law are driving our grandkids to the house this weekend in a Rivian. And now, Musk likes being on the power side so much that he’s canceled all his recharging stations. I have a friend who’s a lives in Connecticut, but he’s a neighbor, a college classmate of mine, and he’s from the Dominican Republic. He just won the contract to put up all the recharging stations in Queens that are going to regularly recharge the New York City taxicabs, because we’re going to have we have to be all the time. And he raised the red, the yellow, green in just a few years. So that’s what I think. I think we should run on, yes, there’s a problem. Everybody had it. We’re doing better than most people, and you will feel it if you just hang around here. Because what happened, Trump thinks he’s going to get a rerun of what happened in 2016. Where he told us, for a year, the economy was terrible under under Obama. And we were producing eight million jobs a year with no inflation. It was not terrible, but you know. It often takes three years before people will admit that things are getting better and before they can feel it. So, in 2017, when actually the rate of new jobs started going down a little bit, people felt it. And Donald Trump is a genius at claiming credit. I mean, he’s good at it. I mean, we had a really sunny day today. I did that. It rained yesterday. If I had been president, it never would have happened.

I mean, that’s the world we’re living in. So we’re about to make a decision in an election that will have massive consequences for at least 30 years based on people’s perception or lack thereof, that things are getting better. There was a great article in one of the publications about five days ago, which measured Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on eight important economic questions on this side of voters. And her positions were substantially more popular than his. But they don’t know it yet, in spite of all the money that’s been spent. So, if you’re interested in this election and you want to have any impact on it, I recommend we toot this horn as loud as we can for the 13 days that are left. One final thing was a group of 170 economists from right to left that analyzed all of their proposals, including Trump’s proposal for 10% across-the-board tariffs. And we know that if we buy things that we’re not going to start producing here, we’re not that it’s just an add-on to the price. So it amounts to a 4% a year tax increase for most families. And, so, I think it’s a lay-down who’s got the better plan for the most people. His plan costs $5 trillion over a decade. Hers costs $3.5 trillion. So his is twice as expensive and helps less than half as many people.

But it takes time to get that out. And to get people to absorb it. And we’re asking them for somewhat of a leap of faith. Because the only thing that I see people saying is they do notice when gas prices come, go down. Right away. So a lot of people are saying, yeah, gas prices are down. But they haven’t felt the other stuff. Right.

So our job, those of us who support her, is to get out and make this argument. Then, in terms of the threat to democracy and a woman’s right to choose and all that, the real problem is that people have baked all that in. But they think, well, it wasn’t so bad last time, McCain stopped it. But there are no guardrails now. The Supreme Court has literally said that the president can do anything to anybody at home in America. If it’s tied to his duty. Well, I’ve written this speech a lot in my mind. I swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. I think Bill Clinton’s a real threat to that. I mean, after all, he opposed me. And his wife ran against me. How dare her?

And so I’m gonna send him to the Colorado Supermax where he can’t do any harm. He’s the enemy within. Their idea of the enemy within is anybody that disagrees with them, me. Now, you’re laughing, but if you were me, it wouldn’t be quite so funny. But I have done this little petition. I’m gonna handwrite this petition and say, look, I’m almost as old as you are. My blood’s running thinner and you please at least send me to jail in the South somewhere? I’ll even go to Guantanamo. I just want to be born. Now we’re laughing, but you shouldn’t be. So we’ll just see what happens.

My gut is that we make it out, but I have no idea. We could lose all these close states. We could win them all. But the fundamental problem is she remains an unknown quantity to people, and a lot of people who are still trying to make up their mind don’t know what she has pledged to do and haven’t been given a chance to compare it to what he has. So in the last 30 days, whatever I can do to stop that, I’ll close that gap, I’m going to do it.

Copy LinkTrump’s tariffs & the CHIPS bill

HOFFMAN: So, Mr. President, I think you made the most compelling case. And among other things, you’ve demonstrated that, unlike former President Trump, you can conclude in cohesive argument, coherent sentences, and do an in-depth analysis.

CLINTON: Apparently it’s a disadvantage. I thought about dancing around on stage for 30 minutes. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

HOFFMAN: We appreciate the intelligence and the honesty. One other thing, I think, is the only point I’d add to your amazing description. I’m going to ask it as a question: he keeps promising to do these tariffs. What do you think the impact on the American people would be of Trump’s tariffs?

CLINTON: Yeah, it can be off a little bit, but if you ask them about it, they dismiss it. As long as I said. Oh, there were a lot of economists that weren’t for us before. Look how great our economy was. He When he just rode on the back of Obama’s last two years. And they think that you’re going to give it to them again. This time, inflation’s down. it’s going to come down more. And we’ve still got a lot of benefits to reap from the infrastructure bill. There are 60 projects more or less underway. There’ll be 100,000 before you know it. They both had an infrastructure bill, but only Biden delivered one.

And they think they’ll get credit for it. Yep. And they’ll be out there claiming credit. Yes. It’s only because I got elected that all these people decided to finish. Did I come up with the money? No. Did I come up with the out? No. I mean, it’s crazy and they think they’ll get the benefit of the CHIPS bill. Yeah, and that CHIPS bill is really important because it also, it’ll not only make us more competitive, but it I think it will allow, it gives us a chance to stabilize our relationship with China and to minimize incentives they have to take over Taiwan.

But that also relates to what we do in Ukraine, so we’ll see. We’ll see.

Copy LinkThe 3 decisions that Bill Clinton is most proud of

HOFFMAN: Indeed. So because I think you so compellingly and decisively answered the election question, I’m going to move to a Silicon Valley favorite, which is how, and we mentioned chips, what’s getting you curious around artificial intelligence? And from your position, how do you think we should think about it?

CLINTON: Well, we talked about this a little before I came in, but I made three decisions when I was president that I thought worked out really well. And I made all of them in less than ten minutes. Not all three at the same time, but when they came in, the first was I made a loan to Mexico when they were about to go broke and 80 percent of the public was against it, and we had just lost Congress to the Republicans. And on the day I had to make the decision, to be fair, Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole were both for it. And they were both told when they read the paper that morning that percent of the public was against it, that they would be deposed unless they withdrew their support.

So I had to do it alone, from a little-known fund available for currency stabilization. I did that, and it worked out great, and Mexico paid the loan back three years early, and we made 600 million more on the loan than we would have if the government money was just put into government bonds. The second was when I decided we needed to accelerate the Human Genome Project and we finished the first map.

And we got the best return on that investment that you can imagine, it was just about hundreds of multiples. And the third was deciding to put GPS into the public domain. And it’s hard to imagine it not being in the public domain now. But at the time, I had to listen to a brisk argument about how the government had paid for all this research and it was defense-related and national security. I said, first of all, you cannot keep this genie in the bottle. So why don’t we put it in the places it’ll do the most good and see what happens. And we all live with it without thinking about it now.

So that’s, I think that whatever happens, we need to think about AI in that way. For example, for me, I’m from Arkansas, and I spent an enormous amount of time when I was president trying to close the gap between the economic opportunities available in rich and poor communities, rural and urban ones. And you’re in a position now where you can take everything that’s learned about this locally and nationally over the last 30 years and put it into a system that will give us feedback and figure out what we should be doing to harmonize the economic and social development of America. It’s not so easy to do, but I mean, to whatever extent you do it, you will be cutting down on the intensity of all this social conflict we’ve got. So I wish I knew enough about it to know how to do that.

Copy LinkWhat Bill Clinton suggests Harris supporters should be doing

HOFFMAN: Well, part of the thing that I can attest to personally is you have the depth of intellectual curiosity that continues. For how to navigate these things. So we only have basically a couple minutes left. What would you say that people could do? You’re spending time helping people understand Harris’s package, the policies, why they’re intelligent, why she’s dedicated to all of the American people, why they have a long-term impact.

What would you say to an audience of entrepreneurs and journalists and so forth about what they should be doing to try to get that message out? What’s the thing that we can do to help row the boat?

CLINTON: Well, I think, in all the swing states, I would make sure that all the major publications understand why it would be better for the economy if she won long term. Like I said, it’s hard for you to imagine, but she just showed up in people’s lives. I mean, I ran four times as long as I told you in the primary in 1992. And I was about to go to New York, the convention, and I got a survey that showed that a majority of the American people didn’t know Hillary and I had a child. After I’d been out there and won the nomination and everything. And they also thought we were both from wealthy homes because we’d gone to Ivy League schools and spoken complete sentences.

HOFFMAN: It’s a feature.

CLINTON: Yeah, so, I think anything you can do get people who are in business, particularly businesses they created themselves, to understand your perspective about who is better and why is good. The thing you can do is do what I’m trying to do on an individual scale. You can phone bank into Nevada and Arizona and the other close states that are further east. We do have pretty good telecommunications.

HOFFMAN: Indeed. Well, Mr. President, I speak for the entire audience in thanking you for the presidency, for the Clinton Global Initiative, and for your work on this election. Thank you.

Copy Link“We cannot give up on our diversity”

CLINTON: OOne more thing. I just want to say one other thing before we leave. If you look at it, what are you uncertain about and what are you certain about the future? Forget about your policy. We don’t know how long we have before we reap an even bigger whirlwind because of climate change. Yes. Therefore, we should be less intolerant of ourselves for delaying what things we know we can do that will also diversify and strengthen the economy.

But we do know one thing. There is no country on Earth in better shape than we are for the 21st century. We have more people creating more things that are relevant to our future. A lot of it happening up here, right? We have, and contrary to the rhetoric, our diversity is an enormous advantage.

But most Americans in both parties are not anti-immigrant, they’re anti-chaos. And you can help people understand what happened. We reformed the immigration laws in 1983. We’ve had more people moving across national borders, not just to America, but all over Europe and the Middle East and Asia and Africa in the last few years than at any time since World War II. And that’s a lot for people to absorb. So you need to explain that to people. We cannot give up on our diversity. And we cannot forget an even more important thing about diversity. Diverse groups make better decisions than homogeneous ones do. One, I want to be optimistic, upbeat, and optimistic. But the next few years will be either quite challenging or a runaway success for America, depending on what we do in two weeks. Bless you.

HOFFMAN: Former President Clinton offers up his experiences as insight for the future of the presidency of the United States. He views his own party’s challenges as substantial, but surmountable. And sees the path forward as one that must include a hopeful future for younger people around shifting norms for climate, jobs, and technology. Thank you for listening. And vote this coming Election Day, Tuesday, November 5th.