For The Kingdom

Pipsy podcast on suoron suoraan. Tapahtuipa kerranettää pessimisti, optimisti ja saletisti suunnittelivat tapasiltaa. Ja niin hän sillä kävi, että saletisti onnistoli. Hello Radical listeners, it's Ollie Dougmore here. I'm the executive digital editor of the New Statesman. And I'm pleased to tell you that I'll be standing in for a mole while he's away. I'm even more pleased to tell you about the amazing Radical guest that I'll be speaking to. His name's Andy Kato, and in a former life he was one half of the spectacularly popular music duo Gruevarmada. But he gave it up to become a leader in something that I'm very interested in. Regenerative farming and food security. And he sold the rights to his Gruevarmada songs to buy a farm, where he began experimenting with regenerative no-till methods. And now he's calling on others to do the same. As always, we'll be putting your Radical questions to our guest. So please send us a message or voice note on WhatsApp to 03301239480 or email [email protected]. Now on with the episode. Hello, it's a mole here. Welcome to Radical. Conversations about the big global trends changing our world, the big forces, the big ideas that are really transforming our world and also offering you some radical ideas for the future. Look, I love doing this show and I get very excited before every single episode. I'm not going to lie. I am particularly excited about this one because we have got a monumental guest because it's someone who has completely transformed the world, indeed the world work, especially. And he is a radical. Look, we have two kinds of guests on this show. We have those who are really smart and influential and effective at identifying radical changes, whether those are happening or those that are needed. And then you've got those who are incredibly smart, effective and influential and actually making those changes happen. And this week's guest has straddled both camps. I have been speaking to the Titan of Tech that is Reed Hoffman. Get ready because his biography is rather long but you deserve to hear the highlights. He is the co-founder of LinkedIn, which is the largest professional network in the world with 1.3 billion users, maybe including you. And that has completely transformed the nature of networking and work today. He was part of the so called PayPal Mafia on the founding team of PayPal alongside the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Teel. He's been a huge backer and champion of dozens of AI companies. He's given large sums of money to the US Democratic Party. And unlike many of his contemporaries, he is a vocal critic of Donald Trump. Yes, he's a tech billionaire, not the first tech billionaire that we've had on this show. And yes, we're going to talk to him about his wealth and about taxing that wealth too. Conversely, he's worth saying that like other tech billionaires, he has come under scrutiny for his association with Jeffrey Epstein. He's expressed regret for it. He's argued their relationship was one about fundraising. You're going to hear us talk about that in the show as well. Look, Reed Hoffman has transformed the world of work in a profound way and he wants to do it again. He is a proper radical because he is advocating for the rapid adoption of AI in a way that is smooth, empathetic, humane and involves effective regulation. And it's worth saying before we get going, a huge thank you to all of you who have listened to recent episodes, particularly in my last week, with Matt Clifford, a very influential, powerful man in the UK. Someone who's also a very big believer in artificial intelligence and someone who, like Reed Hoffman, is a venture capitalist and investor. And look, I know it might seem a little bit like we're doing a lot on AI at the moment. And particularly might seem like that to those of you who enjoyed our episodes on the future of food and farming with Jamie Oliver and James Rebanks or, you know, education and discipline with Katherine Birbelsi, or that great episode we did on fostering with Louise Allen. I know we're doing a lot on AI, but here is two reasons why we should. A lot of people, not just in the field, but beyond do think that artificial intelligence could be the most profound technological revolution in our species history. The second thing is when the opportunity arises to interview Reed Hoffman, you say yes. And we thought we should get him in. What would you guys? What would you, our beloved listeners to Radical Want? You would want us to invite in a tech billionaire, ask him some fair but tough questions about where technology is going, about his own wealth, about the future of capitalism and indeed democracy, and encourage him to be really honest about the way in which he is radically transforming your world. Reed Hoffman, welcome to Radical. I'm amazed. I mean, this is very flattig. I'm amazed you have time. You must be busy when you come to London. Usually every 10 minutes is booked. You must build in buffers in your day, right? Buffers and things. I do it when I can. And when it's important, like for example, things like, who knows when you're on a media program, maybe something just was breaking in the last hour. And so you build in a little bit of buffers, but most of the time it's, like, even the, oh, it takes X time to get from X to Y, that's it. Do you have downtime, though? Do you relax? Usually weekends, weekend evenings. But other than that, you're trying to transform the world. Something you've done quite a lot. So you've changed the world and you've done it a few times. You've changed the world of work specifically and massively through LinkedIn. You know that the world of work is going through another revolution because of AI. Revolutions can be very bloody, but they also create winners. What is your priority for making sure that this revolution creates more winners than bloody losers? The change that we're going to happen with AI does mean that there is going to be some really difficult challenges and times ahead. Why I'm optimistic about this isn't because there isn't that difficulty about what we're navigating. Of course, by the way, we're going into a compressed speed cycle of the industrial revolution. Like that'll be challenging. But the question is, is how do we get to both navigating those challenges as humanly and as gracefully as possible? And how do we get to the same kind of benefits of the amplification we got with the industrial revolution? Because nothing in our current society would be like it is without the industrial revolution. We wouldn't have a middle class. We wouldn't have public education. We wouldn't have, you know, most people's ability to take a cab or to transit somewhere. All of these things are the positive benefit of the industrial revolution. We're now doing that again. Now I call it the cognitive industrial revolution. And so the reason why I put my time into this writing books, super agency, et cetera, doing podcasts, possible master's scale. And investing, I should say, you invest in, I think, over 35 companies, mostly within AI focus. A lot of them do with incredibly exciting things that we don't talk about enough like drug discovery and fixing cancer. Exactly. So the point is you only get to the positive universe by trying to steer towards it. You don't get to the great universe by steering away from the bad universes. It's a little bit like you said, hey, I'm going to drive from London to Cambridge. What I'll first do is map out every pothole. I will make sure that, oh, well, where might there be traffic slowdowns? Where might there be an accident? Plan for that in advance. You're never going to end up getting in the car and going. And you're going to forget that you wanted to get the Cambridge. Yes. So what you do is you drive there. Right. And you get it. You go, okay, the car looks like it's working. You get in the car, start driving. You drive as fast as you reasonably can. You don't go five miles an hour. The whole way to Cambridge. You go as fast as you reason again. Now, reasonable. There's some discussion and you know, argument with that is that's what you do. And that's how you get to a positive universe. So people frequently listen and be being optimistic and they say, was that just because you're a technologist? Is that just because you're investing these things? Is that just because you're blindly optimistic? And the answer is no. It's because I'm strategic about how do we get to the really good place to be? Both of course me, but us. How do we get there? And the media is the us part. Before we talk about the future, which is going to be very much the focus of our conversation, can we talk a little bit about your beginnings? I've had the enormous privilege of speaking to a lot of people who've done very well in the world of technology. And I'm strapped by three things that I just wanted to touch on with you briefly if I could. The first is timing. A huge amount of life, of success, of achievement, of wealth, of fame is luck. Done luck. Been born into the right family. Choose your womb carefully as Warren Buffett says. To be born in 1967 in Palo Alto, California, it was just the most tremendous stroke of luck, wasn't it? I mean people will, you know, you didn't inherit wealth. You've done this yourself, but your parents got divorced. I think when you were very, very young. But if you think about some of the things that drive success, network effects, what some economists call capitalization, which is making the most of human talent in human capital. You did have the good fortune didn't you to grow up in the sunshine in a place that had some of the smartest people in the world all in a concentrated place in flux of capital. You chose your time and place well. A thousand percent, but even here is how even it's more lucky, which is I got the independence bug earlier. So I applied to a boarding school and got in without my parents knowing and then persuaded my parents to send me there. So I went to boarding school at the Putney School in Vermont. If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have gone back to Stanford because I would have said I have to get out of California. I need the independence to get out and was only because I had done this quirky, weird thing of applying to boarding school without my parents knowing, then persuading them that it was okay for them to send me there that allowed me to go, well, actually for university, I think I'll go back to Stanford. And by the way, if I didn't go back to Stanford, I wouldn't have been part of the whole Stanford Silicon Valley community. I wouldn't have understood technology as a fundamental part. Like everything downstream wouldn't have happened. You displayed my unusual talents even before that. I mean, I think when you were 12 when you wrote, or you got a credit, a copyright credit on a board game, which you'd been involved in helping to design or rewrite. And there's two things about, I think it's very important not to generalize about people in Silicon Valley. There are lots of different personalities to types, lots of different motivations. But it's interesting how many people who've been successful in technology share two particular aspects quite often. One is that they were often very interested in games and gaming. Lots and lots of other people in your field played other games, including board games when they were young. Obviously, you're super bright. That's one thing, analytical. But what is it about gaming that prepares people well for a world of technology? It's a great question. And by the way, I think it's more than just technology, but technology especially. And the reason is, is if you think about how to be strategic in anything in life, like strategic and starting a company, strategic and building a piece of technology, strategic and writing a book, any of those things, strategy is you frame your game. Like what does a win condition look like? What are the moves? What are the competition to what's going on? Because games are inherently competitive and life in many ways, starting companies, writing books, etc. inherently has competition in it. And if you can frame the game the right way and have this understanding of what possible success conditions look like, together with what are my assets? What are my abilities to do that? That gives you strategic framework. So the reason why, like I love the fact you've started with this question is because the advice I give entrepreneurs when I invest the advice that I, like how I craft my own companies, people say, well, how did you learn this? Well, it all came from gaming. And when you play multiple different games and you kind of think about like what is strategy? What is tactics? What is competitive play? What is winning conditions? What do I find an edge? Yes. And how do I change the game to a game that is a much better game, a game that not only do I win, but I can win in massive ways that have a, you know, kind of hopefully amazingly positive impact on society. All of that comes back from theory of the game. And that speaks also to a propensity for imagination. And one of the other things I'm very struck by is how many people, like Elon Musk, like Peter Till, Reid Hoffman, have been influenced by science fiction. And I think about science fiction, I mean, you're born in 1967, 60s was a zero kind of moon landings and literally moon shots, I'm speaking, which is a few days after the amazing recent efforts of the Artemis astronauts. But think about science fiction is it's more fiction than science. It tends not to be that you can find a wormhole or go at warp speed through, through folding sort of supernovas or whatever it might be. But I'm really struck by the kind of glorious irony that lots of people who have actually changed the real world. People who have imagined and engineered real things were sparked by a love of fiction and fantasy when they were growing up. Palantir is a company that Peter Till named. Palantir comes from Lord of the Rings. He was hugely influenced by Tolkien. Elon Musk was an obsessive reader of science fiction. And science fiction is a big part of Reid Hoffman as well, isn't it? Yes. And the reason is, and by the way, I put a big difference between fantasy and science fiction, fantasy, they share a characteristic here. But it's like, how could you imagine what's possible? And obviously, like what's possible, like our wormholes possible, we think unlikely, given our current understanding of physics, but becomes a vehicle of we can imagine it, we can imagine it's possible. And by the way, part of how you get new physics is reimagining the world. But what Einstein said is, what if there is no ether? What if it actually, in fact, is these kind of the way that gravity and other kinds of things influence the space of things, there isn't a medium in which we're actually moving through in this case. It's kind of gravitational fields. And so the same kind of imagination about what is possible is always part of creation. And so it's part of creation of technology, because like, how is a new technology like possible? And how does it operate? Same thing in businesses. How is there a new service or product that's possible? Now you have to learn, it isn't just that you have to learn all kinds of detail underneath it. Like, for example, well, I could imagine a eyes like, yeah, okay, lots of AI imagination. It's one of the reasons why when I was a student here at Oxford, I wrote my thesis on thought experiments, because like, well, what can we, where is thinking about possibility, good reasoning, and where is it bad reasoning? Yeah, right? Because it's not always just good. I think about thinking. Where does your ambition come from? So I think it is a science fiction answer, which is when you, when you read things, Lord of the Rings, Enders, Game, Dune, et cetera, like, you know, like a bunch of these grades, and you're thinking on the scope of humanity, you're thinking on a heroic scope, you're thinking about like, you read the foundation series with Asimov, and you're thinking, like, where is humanity going? And how am I part of that journey? And that kind of just naturally kind of leads you to a certain set of, well, where can I participate in this massive journey on a humanity level journey? It lets you also to serve an extraordinary places and extraordinary people in 1994 you worked for Apple computers. And in three years later, 1997, you set up something called socialnet.com. What was your ambition for socialnet.com? When I realized, and this was my very first startup of my own, so 30 years ago, coming up next year. So lots of mistakes. Like, literally, we could spend hours just going on all the things that I had this expression at the back of the time, which was, things I realized on Friday, I wish I had known on Monday. But that was the intensity of the learning curve. Now, but the central picture was most people back then we talked about the internet as cyberspace. And as part of it being cyberspace, it was like this alien thing that's different from us, and sure you go on and you have a user handle and you talk in chat rooms where you don't know the expression back then is on the internet. No one knows if you're a dog, right? Because it's like, who the heck knows what the alien thing is? So this alien thing called cyberspace. And I said, yeah, and everyone's talking about it is the only thing that matters is the internet. But actually, in fact, what's going to happen is it's going to completely change our physical lives. Like, basically, how we live this life that you and I do here standing. It isn't meeting new people. It's how do we live with the people we currently have. But how do we meet new people that are part of our actual physical lives? And that was the social net idea. So obviously it was dating services, but also like roommates and golf partners and obviously working relationships, which is part of what led to the, as I learned what worked and didn't work in the social idea, which led to LinkedIn. But it was like, oh, no, the internet is going to transform the life we lead here physically, the people that we meet, the people that we go through life with. And that's what's really important. You, for people who don't know, you've written a lot of books. I think we mentioned a couple like Blitzcaling about life as an entrepreneur and investor. You also host podcasts where you speak to other leaders in this field. And one of the big things that you keep coming back to is the importance of being able to pivot. So for instance, people may not know there's a lot of mythology around this. They call PayPal Mafia. These remarkable individuals. You're one of them who were at PayPal at the beginning. As far as I can remember, PayPal was about encryption on cell phones or mobiles as we announced them. PayPal wasn't about payments, financial payments online. It's pivoted in a very, very big way. If you're really honest and maybe the honest answer is the good one, or maybe it's the humble one or somewhere in between, what was the founding ambition for LinkedIn? Well, so the founding ambition for LinkedIn was after social night and after I'd been part of the founding team of PayPal. So a lot of experience already with startups. And so LinkedIn is an unusual one for its ambition. Actually, in fact, as we're it more or less got to. So it was, I was going to say because my next question was to me, what did LinkedIn get right? Did LinkedIn get right? Because your whole ethos is an entrepreneur is that you've got to know from your failures. Did LinkedIn get very right? 1.3 billion people later, get very right? The thing you intended for it to. Yes, which is in work, the thing that's most helpful to you is life is a team sport, not an individual sport. So how do you collaborate easily with other people that you know and like and trust? Some of them are colleagues from current or former jobs, but some of them are also mates from university. Some of them are family members. Some of them are just friends and friends of friends. How you help each other navigate the world to work, especially job opportunities, but also like expertise and like, I want to learn about this AI thing. Who can I talk to to learn about this AI thing? That was essentially the idea behind LinkedIn. And it was like, everyone's going to have a public professional identity. Everyone's going to have a set of people that they ally with that they connect with in terms of navigating it and their help is anything from the very big things, which of course is what LinkedIn is heavily used for. because that really matters. Like, what's my next job opportunity? How do I proceed in my economic life and career? How do I raise money? How do I raise money, etc.? But it's also like, huh. For example, when I talk to students, I say, well, like I get it that I should use LinkedIn for finding an internship or finding my first job. It's like, but you should also use it as for finding information interviewing. 'Cause maybe like, for example, you're a college student, maybe your college student friend's uncle, if they're connected to or aren't, they're connected to on LinkedIn. Like, oh, that's a really good person for me to talk to, given what I'm thinking about. Why is it called LinkedIn? Um, fairly straightforward, actually. But this is more entertaining. When I started LinkedIn, basically, I was probably a little foolish on, I didn't want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars buying a URL. Not yet knowing, 'cause, you know, the first seed money was like a million dollars and I want to spend that kind of money buying a name URL. It's probably a mistake, but that's fine. Um, so what I did is I sat down with a glass of wine in front of an internet register. - You know, it's dangerous. - Yes. And I just started testing names that I thought might work. And LinkedIn was like, oh, hey, it's available. I can buy it for $10. Let's use that one. - Really? - Yes. And the idea was linking into a network. 'Cause I had a set of ideas about what LinkedIn was gonna be, right? And I just sat down and did it. And, you know, it's funny because, um, it violates certain rules of naming, namely like some-- - Tell me, tell me drunk. - Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. - Well, it wasn't drunk. - Good, you know, I'm like, it's, yeah. - Right, it might have been two glasses of red wine, during the entire naming exercise. By the way, it's very entrepreneurial thing is, okay, we've been talking about this for a couple days. We had all of these like network, like network idea, like, like, but the problem is most network stuff's called computer networking, so network work, and so forth, this is not gonna work. At LinkedIn, we called the service working network, which is like a mouthful, and sort of, you know, kind of social net, and so it's like, okay, fine. I'm just gonna solve this problem. I'm gonna sit down for an evening. I'm gonna figure out a name, that's our name, we're gonna go, and that's how LinkedIn came about. - And it worked. - Yeah. - The pro, I mean, LinkedIn's a very particular network, 'cause it's professional. The promise of social media, if you think about those, it's a very heavy day, when Twitter was Twitter, when Facebook was Facebook. Was of giving everyone a voice, generating economic value, helping you forge these connections that increase, not just in your professional life, but your social life, joy and productivity. And social media more broadly these days, particularly I think because of Twitter X, and when it's become, gets a bit more of a bad rap, it's this idea that it amplifies extreme voices, it feels polarization, and it makes smart people do dumb stuff. What's your score card for social media, 15, 16 years on? I mean, what's your feeling about whether or not it's delivered on the original promise, albeit very different platforms, is doing very different things? - Yeah. Well, first of the outset, the obvious thing is, LinkedIn almost never gets any of that criticism, 'cause it's designed in a much more civil way. What are the design features of LinkedIn that try to be against polarization? Oh, it's his work, and people show their best self. - Essentially, we're very anti-animity, right? It's like, you must be yourself. We can sometimes get it wrong, but that's what we design the whole system to really push towards. Two is, you're being yourself is tied to something that matters to you, namely your economic identity, right? So here is where people who are looking me up in a professional context look at me. So for example, if I'm gonna go spew a whole bunch of hate or be a Nazi or something online, it's like, well, okay, that's gonna really affect your economic things. Are you sure that you want to do that in this space that is tied to your economic identity? Third is, we're not wed to everyone being on LinkedIn, from very early days, we kind of have a, you know, it's a baseball metaphor, kind of a three strike system. Sometimes you can do something so bad that you get all three strikes in one strike, but like we will go, we don't want you on this service, right? And if you get banned from the service, it's actually pretty hard to get back on. 'Cause we're like, if we ban you, we ban you for a reason. By default, if we don't have the time to consider you to getting back on, then we just won't consider you getting back on. And obviously, as we've gotten bigger, we try to be a little bit more fair about that, especially if maybe something misfired in a banning and so forth. But like, it's like, no, we're about a civil space. - Yeah, but how do you make sure it's democratic? I mean, what are the criticisms that you feel have been made of LinkedIn that stick and hurt, including people saying that benefit some people more than others? How have you tried to change LinkedIn to accommodate the criticisms that can be sometimes made for it? - So I think the principal criticism we got for the first 10 years was we're boring. And to some degree, we're like, yep. (laughing) We're about trying to save people time in their world of work. We're not trying to get people to spend time. Like that's, again, our economic incentive is not, spend a lot more time on LinkedIn. Our economic incentive is aligned with yours and how do we help make you effective? The notion of some people get more out of LinkedIn than others, that's by the way the nature of life. Like some people have more lucky to have been born in Palo Alto and be part of Silicon Valley. And so that happens. But what we try to do is give you your best possible foot forward given the circumstances you have and to be able to engage more in use the tool. Like we become an influencer and build a better network and so forth. So it's not that we try to equalize as we try to amplify everybody. I'd say the principal thing that I, that is true for all internet properties that's still a work in progress for LinkedIn is to make sure that it's as safe for women as it is for men. And what I mean by this is a woman goes on, puts her professional profile on, puts a nice looking headshot and starts getting marriage proposals from random people on the internet. 'Cause it's a global service, that like some country in Continent X, I'm not gonna pick on any particular ones, I'll leave this exercise to the reader, says, "Hey, if you're a woman with your headshot on a profile, you must be available for marriage proposals." And we try to contain that as much as possible 'cause that's not an environment that women feel is safe. And so that kind of thing, I think is still a work in progress, but it's a work in progress. We do it much better than most places on the internet. Right. And I've heard from a number of my women leader friends that like LinkedIn is the only place they feel they can post on social media without being attacked. So we do a reasonable job, but there is a lot more to still do. - Let's talk about jobs. You've transformed the world of work over the past 25 years and you're arguing that it's gonna transform very rapidly the next five years. One of the questions which everyone, including on your own, podcast asks you to ruminate on is which jobs are most vulnerable to AI? I think it's better to approach this question by seeing jobs as bundles of tasks. And therefore, the question to you is which tasks are most vulnerable to AI? - So I'll actually answer both questions. I think the task analysis is great. McKenzie, by the way, has done a whole bunch of detailed analysis on tasks and line them up with jobs and what percentages of jobs will actually go away completely automation, which ones are little transformed, et cetera. - And which ones which we can't know might be invented? - Yes, exactly. So the simplest one is all of the jobs whose composition of task is a human following a script, right, like trying to get the human knack like a robot, customer service jobs. As a kind of a classic one, those are largely completely going away the way they are because they're mostly composed of the, you've called me, I pull up the little script, I say, what's your problem? I've navigated the menu, trying to do it. I'm told what to answer. The AI already does that a lot better. - Toll booth operator. As Richard Thay, there's no bell prize when I came on this show and he said, "Yeah, it would be such a bad thing if Toll booth operator is no longer did that job." And by the way, they won't soon yet. - Yes, exactly. By the way, AI's are smart, so it's very broad on the scripts. And so you got companies like Sierra and Parlo and others kind of already doing customer service as a, you know, AI's a front end. And by the way, one of the predictions I would make just on this is, I think within a small number of months you'll have a customer is calling in going, "Please put the AI on." 'Cause the AI gives me better, quicker responses to navigating the issue that I'm on versus the human who's trying to go, "Oh, wait, what does this menu say? Do I have to call my supervisor now?" You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is ways of doing it. And all the way, it's also more human because in a customer service thing, most times when customers call their irate, some people in their irate are very abusive. And so some of the poor customer service operators have to deal with people who are yelling at them, calling them names, "Hey, I doesn't care." Now in tasks, what I think will happen here is, and this is the nuance on tasks. I think there's a bunch of tasks that will simply be taken by, "Let's use coding as an example." One of the popular discussions in the last couple of years has been, "Will software engineers be gone?" All automated. I am a strong disagree on that thesis. But the reason why the smart people are saying this is that they said, "Well, but a lot of the coding tasks are like, "how do I write a connector between computer system one "and computer system two through an API?" Oh yeah, AI's gonna do all that stuff. And it's like, "Well, but a software engineer does that mostly today." So they're gonna stop knowing how to use C++ or C# or Pascal, Rost or Pearl or whatever, and they're gonna do that. 'Cause by the way, most of that specific code will be written by AI's. So software engineer's gone. You're like, "Well, no, software engineer." is completely transformed, right? Because what'll happen now is the software engineering job is not like I'm sitting there and I know the syntax of how to write and purl and tada tada and my big just reading is I know how to write and purl and you don't and tada tada that goes away. You today can write things in purl, you today, you can write an app for the iPhone today. - You can code. - You just use cloud code or codex and away you go, right? So you can do that today. Now, the challenges you still have to think that way, you still have to have the thinking problems and now what software engineering becomes is software engineering orchestration. And here what I actually think is there's a thing called Jevons Paradox, which is at a certain price point there's infinite demand. I think there's infinite demand for software at a certain price point. Now that you have software like orchestration, you're going to have software engineering doing everything. You're going to have software engineering like kind of going, hey, how do we automate our process for our particular cafe to make this work for our unique experience? Hey, can you go do something in codex or cloud code and make that happen? Or hey, I want to change like we have music for an environment. And we're in, I have a unique idea for how to do use music and environment and some of that's going to be AI creation music. I'd like an app to do that. Okay, you can do that. It's essentially now infinitely available. And so in this transformation, sure, the task of, I'm specifically writing code goes away. But the other task of how do I conceptualize it? What do I think about how to make it? How is it maintainable? How does it have cybersecurity? How does it grow and match to the things I'm doing? Those challenges within software engineering, the software engineers will still participate in for a number of years, maybe a large number of years. What then is the purpose of education in the age of AI? So I think one, which is critically important, is how to use AI tools, right? And one of the things I love that a professor at Wharton says, Ethan Mollick, is the worst AI you're going to use is the AI you're using today. So you have to expect that the tools are getting better and better and better. It's not like I learned how to use the computer. And now I know how to use the computer. So this is guys along with science, something that Rishi Sunak, the former and the US saying him, true known well, he's saying quite a lot that, you know, everyone's obsessed with you're going to lose your job to an AI. You're actually more likely to lose your job to someone who's better using AI than you. Exactly. 100% Rishi is not surprising, smart guy. 100% on target on this. So one thing as education is learning to use AI. And a lot of academics kind of go, oh, this could be used for cheating. They're not learning the thing, etc. So their instinct is ban it. It doesn't fit with their work process, etc, etc. It's the exact wrong preparation for young people coming in the future. Adjust your own processes, get them as heavily engaging in using AI as possible, because that really matters. The other thing is, I don't think there will be many jobs that will be so-called individual contributors. All of our jobs will be, we are orchestrating sets of agents. Like almost everything we're doing, we're actually orchestrating agents as we're doing it. So we're actually all mini managers of a bunch of agents. What that means now is you have to be strategic. Right? So it's kind of like thinking about like, well, how do I, how would I solve this problem with a set of different agents? And oh, actually, I think I need eight different ones here. But it doesn't, the fact that AI, so that's what you're describing, strategy is cognitive. And some people look at the fact that we're living through it or in the foothills of a cognitive industrial revolution. And they say that kind of AI will do the thinking. And therefore we need to shift the emphasis in education away from cognitive endeavor and tasks. And I just wonder what you think about that. Say, recurring theme on this show, where people say we need to reform education. Does the advent of the cognitive industrial revolution mean that education should shift away from a focus on cognitive excellence? Short answer, no. Long answer, it's a transformation of what kind of cognitive excellence. So let's use a parallel. So pre-printing press memory really mattered. And your ability to remember things mattered actually almost more than your ability to reason. Because if you couldn't remember that stuff, then you couldn't have anything to reason over. Once you have printing press, all of a sudden memory matters a lot less. Which of your cognitive capabilities really mattered? And then similarly the internet comes along, you don't need to go to library, figure out how to use library, it's how you search, how you pull up information that way. So now we have the next amplification, which is the cognitive things are, how are we interfacing with agents? How do we use the agents to go retrieve information? When we see the information, do we trust it? Do we trust what the agent's done? How do we cross check it? And actually, in fact, the cognitive level, like for example, one of the little hacks that I suggest people use AI for, what I've done in writing my books and all the rest, is use it as a counter agent, like EG, what's wrong with my idea? Like one of the basic things to use AI is, I think X are you against it? - Haven't you also created an AI read, which attends meetings for you? - I would say it has done press interviews, it's done keynote conferences, you know, keynotes. - But actually delivered it. - Yes. - So you've, okay. - Yes. And we have a thing called a proto-box, where we have a hologram of read AI that's been there in the lobby to meet with entrepreneurs and other people attending conferences. So we've done all that. So it's not really, it is a tend for me, but it's a tend in specific context. - It's a lot of substitution. - Yes. - This would be, yeah, okay. I wonder where this leaves the old idea of meritocracy and how people from humble beginnings can get on, because your parents were lawyers, you've been very honest about the fact that you grew up in a wonderful place, but you know, you've through a kind of, what I would call a classic 20th century meritocratic story, by the way, it's something that's in my story and that of my parents, you've gone to a great university, you've joined the cognitive credential elite. So you've gone to a great university, you've got qualifications, you've got an entry-level white collar job, you've met the right people and then you've kind of risen up. How does that story hold up in an age where a entry-level white collar jobs might be the ones that come under pressure. Dario Amade was on this show and he's very outspoken in his belief that entry-level white collar jobs, he's a boss of anthropic, are the ones to go. But how do people from humble beginnings get on when that old 20th century model is under such pressure? - So I think we will be refactoring what those original paths look like. Now one part, which we were chatting about a little bit prior to the show, which is startup of you, which is be the entrepreneur of your own life and being a entrepreneur. - Is it book you read? I threw your first book. - I very first book. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And the thing is is what I was writing, this is like, you know, more than 10 years ago, the thing I was right about in this book was to say, you don't have to start companies, that's a different question, maybe you do, maybe you don't, there's your choice, but you need to approach your career the way an entrepreneur approaches theirs. - Which is a red jubber, I really strongly recommend it. It basically says, if you took an entrepreneurial mindset to your own life, then you would start thinking about yourself in terms of capabilities, assessing risk, and thinking you would apply a kind of startup mindset to your life. - Exactly. And that's now 10x more true than it was, you know, over a decade ago when I first wrote that. - Why? - The world of work is being disrupted. So for example, people overly project right now that the lack of entry-level jobs has to do with AI. As far as I can tell whenever I've scratched it, it's not yet. The lack of entry-level jobs is over hiring from the pandemic and re-correction, global turbulence and uncertainty about investing in the business. And when a business is uncertain about investing, it basically stops hiring new people, it stops doing internships. It's like, I don't know what I'm gonna look like next year, let's not take on forward-looking obligations as we're doing. And that's one of the problems with turbulence and everything else as part of it. And why do we want stability within an economic environment? Now, it isn't saying that it hasn't happened, I think it will happen, but you say, well, what's gonna happen with entry-level jobs because they're not gonna look like the entry-level jobs that you and I went through because the entire world has changed. Now, some of it is, I think that you will get entry-level jobs in companies because they do need to hire people and they will need to hire people who replace the current people and they won't just be able to hire senior people. And by the way, part of how companies can be with you, I was like, oh, you're only trying to hire from Stanford, I'm gonna go hire from MIT. And I'm gonna go get those really good people from MIT. So there will be entry-level patterns for young people, though just be different. So let's use law as a thing. As opposed to like, I hire a legal clerk where your job is to go pull the books and like, show me all the case files. It's now your job is to go preliminary, do the chat GBT report on all this stuff, have cross-checked it and bring it to me. Right? And that's what the entry-level job now looks like. - There are some people who are gonna hear this and say, here's a guy who's done really well, made a bit of money who's needlessly optimistic and sunny about this. And they say, actually, read what's gonna happen is, AI is gonna create a new aristocracy. It's gonna exacerbate existing inequalities and injustices and it's gonna do it in several ways. First of all, it is gonna create wealth without work. Secondly, that wealth is gonna go to very, very few people, particularly if the company is a private rather than public. And the third thing is, what about the tax revenues? What about what happens if you do lose some employment? What if you don't replace them straight away and you don't know the jobs that create the taxes on which poorer people are disproportionately dependent because public services are used by poor people? Isn't there a danger that AI not only causes disruption, but actually makes some of the bad things about current world significantly worse? - So, So first, you'd say plan for it. Well, in part, and look, and adjust to the turbulent waves and weather as you sail. Will a bunch of people, including current companies, make a bunch of money with new technology answers? Yes. They will make a bunch of money. That's not the case. And part of what I said earlier is, I'm not articulating a point of optimism to try to, like, as it were, sing my own book on this. I think I will do very well with AI, but I think there's a bunch of other people who are going to even do better. That's fine. It doesn't matter. And I think there's a whole range. But like, for example, let's take us to focus on entrepreneurship. Now, with AI, many, many more people can be entrepreneurs. It is a great enabler, right? And so part of what I think we want badly is society. Part of the reason why I created LinkedIn, part of the reason why I do media and everything else is how do we unlock as much of the talent in the world and the billions of people as we can to enable them to do their best work. Because when they're economically elevated, it doesn't just benefit them. It also benefits their communities, our society, et cetera. That's a, that's a case for mass participation. And that's about spreading ownership. And I'm sure you would say spreading ability to use it to create value. And is there any evidence that that's really happening now? The evidence of last 15 years is that we've created one of the biggest asymmetries of wealth and knowledge and power in human history. They would somebody would argue. And secondly, that we've just given far too much power to far too few people. The dissension, there's a few people. And you happen to know these people individually, I don't. But there's a few people, it doesn't mean mostly American or the west coast of America that have completely disproportionate control really over the future of humanity. We've always had pillars of power and asymmetry in that power. So we said we didn't have the tech leaders, we had banking leaders or energy company leaders or politicians and presidents. Isn't this something worse this time? I don't think so. Like for example, if you said, would I rather have Wall Street bankers or technologists as kind of elite power, rather have technologists, they're creating things that actually can make a difference for everyone. They're creating health apps, they're creating Wikipedia, they're creating, you know, search. There's a whole bunch of things that actually flows down to the average person. Like one of the things you look at technology, you go, you know, your Uber driver and Tim Cook have the same iPhone, right? So it's like that kind of flow down as one of the things that comes out of technology, even though obviously Apple, Tim, etc. make a whole bunch of money, right? But it has a flow down to a massive benefit overalls. Because I think what happens is people tend to really rotate on the, I want to have an inequality discussion. Maybe a maximum ratio between, you know, like lowest paid person, a corporation and the CEO. And I think it should be 20 times. And you're like, okay, well, I should be 20 versus 10 versus 100. Like, well, that just feels right to me. It's like, well, that's the reason we'll use markets for this. We don't, we don't try to calibrate that to a fix. What we do try to do is say, how do we get 80 plus percent of people, and I agree that we've had some problems in the last 10 plus years, 20 years. How do we get 80 percent of people to benefit? Now one of the things I think about the technology world, including AI, is it's there right now for just about everybody. So for example, something like 90 percent of the chat GBD users are using it for free. It's there. It can benefit you right now. You just need to do it. That's part of the reason I wrote super agency as part of like take agency, do something. It doesn't mean that whether it's open AI and Thropic, Microsoft, Google, more economics will accrue to successful businesses. But part of the reason why I joined the technology industry and love the technology industry as relative industries is it's more about billions of people participating and using it. Like for example, when you get to the energy, when you look at where a lot of energy wealth goes to, it tends to go to extraction regimes in a number of countries, take Iran for example, where it's supporting a regime with an extraction resource. It has more of an anti-democratic nature to how economics is arranged and created there. Whereas technology tends to be more like we need lots of talent. We need lots of customers using it. That is, I'm not saying it's perfect, not saying it can't be improved a lot, but it's better in then it's a little bit like the Churchill line. Democracy is the worst of all governments, except when you consider all the other ones. Except for all the other stuff we've tried from time to time. But on your specific idea that technology has a kind of galvanizing, energizing force, which is that you try to shoot for the moon. On that specific point, is it creating a potential vulnerability for us all at the moment based on what's happening in the American stock market? There are some people investors who say, if you look at the price to earnings ratio of some of these enormous companies and talk about comes like OpenAI, you were there at the start of OpenAI, they say, this is mad. This capex, they call it capital expenditure. This is spending on data centers, which is a lot of it's funded by borrowing because they're spending money which they don't have the revenues for, even these extraordinary rich companies. And also, there are all these extraordinarily bizarre circular deals. Do you, as an investor, put aside the sunny optimistic champion of technology that read Hoffman is, as an investor looking at core business numbers, do you look at what's going on in the American stock market and think, holy smoke, guys, if this goes, as we call it in the UK, tits up, then a lot of people are going to be paying the price and it won't be Sam Altman. If it does go, then Sam will be paying the price too. So when you get to like a bubble where the bubble explodes and takes a bunch of the financial system with it, everyone suffers. So you want to avoid bubbles. So there are different types of bubbles. There are financial bubbles and then there are industrial bubbles. Yes. And industrial bubbles sometimes when they go pop, they leave society having moved forward. Yes. And we'll sometimes, some parts of financial, like for example, the internet bubble, had we had several years of winter, of economic winter following it. But by the way, we still got to a revolution of society through the internet. PayPal survived that, Google survived that, et cetera. As Yahoo is still offering, it still has a service that hundreds of millions of people use. The question is, will a bunch of dumb investments be made in AI that people will lose money on and will go to zero? Yes. I guarantee that will happen. Will those cause us to have a financial constriction that's like a bubble? That's where I think the substantive question is. And the reason I'm inherently bullish as an investor, I'm not just being sunny optimist here, is if you say what we're doing is we're making intelligence available at the scale and price of electricity everywhere, there's a huge demand for that. Didn't you say what is intelligence worth? Yes. Because it's like, it's worth all of it. So for example, might someone have said, oh, I built a data center for 60 billion, it's actually worth 40 billion. So I lost 20 billion in doing it, but I could still run the data center. I still will be profitable in running the data center. It may be the original investors got washed out in their investment and a new person buys it and runs it. But the need and demand of the compute and the intelligence will still be there. So what I think that the investors who tend to go, this is nuts, tend to get right is some investments. There's a number of investments I pass on because I look at their evaluation relative to their likely economic outcome and I go, nope, I'm very positive on AI, but I go and I'm more or less only look at AI investments right now. And so like I pass on them because of that. But I will invest in other things that look crazy in terms of valuation because I'll go, no, no, this is going to get a lot, a lot bigger than people think. I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Reid Hoffman, the co founder of LinkedIn, huge AI investor and democratic party donor. Now, as you remember at the beginning of this episode, I said that I would be speaking to him about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and just to give you a little bit of context before you hear that exchange before 2025, he was acknowledging limited philanthropic contact. So he says that he knew Epstein primarily through fundraising for the MIT. He said, Master Schusser's Institute of Technology Media Lab, he said contact ended around 2015. He acknowledged meetings, he expressed regret and he said the relationship was transactional and brief. But then towards the end of last year, his name surfaced in US investigations and hearings into Jeffrey Epstein's networks and Reid Hoffman began publicly calling for full disclosure of the Epstein files. Hoffman then acknowledged in a post on X that he did have more meetings than previously stated, including contact between 2016 and 2018 both in person and remote. And of course, that was after Jeffrey Epstein's conviction for soliciting sex with a minor. So early this year, a Bloomberg investigation outlined some of this chronology. And I think it's important that you have the context again. So in 2014, a Florida court filing accused Epstein of trafficking an underage girl to Andrew Matt Battern-Winzer alleging that she was forced to engage in sexual acts. The late Virginia D'Refreis said that that girl was "she." Matt Battern-Winzer has repeatedly denied the accusations calling them false. And according to Department of Justice emails, that Bloomberg reported Reid Hoffman offered to help Epstein with damage control. So he said in an email and I quote, "being given a bit of thought to how I can help with recent press," he wrote that in January 2015 and he went on mostly looking for help on the online front. Epstein responded, "Nothing to do during a storm, but hunker down and wait until it blows over." Separately, I should just add finally that other emails indicate Reid Hoffman's stator Epstein's New York apartment, that he stated is Caribbean home, and also that the pair exchanged gifts. Right, with all of that in mind, back to Reid Hoffman. I want to come back to capitalism and inequality. You're going to kindly stick around for our listeners' questions because we've got lots of those. And I should say that when I solicited questions from our listeners for you, 90% of them were about AI, we did get lots of questions also about Jeffrey Epstein, including some from women. The tenor of the questions that I got was, "At core, why did you keep a relationship with him years after his known conviction for offenses related to sex with the miners?" So I actually met him only after those convictions. They were part of his past. They were in the public domain then. They were in the public domain. Look, I asked the then director of the media lab, "Look, I never engaged in something like this to your trying to have a fundraiser. Does MIT headquarters like, is this fine? Someone's done their time, has just been served?" And I got a yes. And I was like, "Okay, my ignorance was I should have done my own work there." So you sort of as a way to try to vet him and get a kind of clearance from someone else that he was someone that you could do business with. Yeah, because look, we believe in the fact that people can serve time, have been served justice, and then have rehabilitation. Right? That is a possibility that we want from members of society. So that was the question. I was like, "I hadn't paid that much attention. I hadn't gone and gone, done Google. I hadn't realized that most of that there were so many victims who were justice hadn't been served." Like, none of that was apparent to me. And it is possible with retrospect and hindsight to say, "This is all true." But is it also true to say that your relationship was mostly about fundraising? Because you know, you stayed at his New York apartment, you stayed with him in the Caribbean. Was it about that? Or was it also about things that advised for dignitaries who he should meet and him getting to know other people in the world of technology that you knew? What did he want from you? Well, so there's what I wanted from him and there's what he wanted from me. What I wanted from him was fundraising for MIT. And by the way, fundraising is a friendly activity. You don't go, "Hey, asshole, give us money." And that's the only thing like, you know, that's not what you do. So you caught him. So the turn of the emails, which I'm sure embarrassed now, the turn of the emails is come on in with some of this. Be friendly, yes, exactly. And he was always dangling me. "Oh, I might be willing to give some money to this the scientist who's having difficulty raising money because the work could be important." You know, maybe I would do that if you introduced me to some people and it only took retrospect to realize what he was doing that it was essentially like I was being an idiot in a fool and he was playing me. And he's fundraising a reasonable defense when he had a conviction that was known in public. Well, that was, I thought I already talked about, which was the fact that someone has a conviction, does, we believe in rehabilitation and re-agreement in society. It's one of the things we want for everybody as a possibility. So I'd asked, got an appositive answer, hadn't done my own work, big mistake. And once I started paying attention going, "Wait a minute, maybe this wasn't like a tone, maybe this wasn't actually just a serve." That's when I essentially went to the sure share, and he kept trying to build a relationship with me, introduce me to someone, so like there's an email saying, "Well, I'll come to this conference if you have the courage to meet with me because I'd stopped responding to anything years earlier." And I'll just say one thing about this discussion that I think is really important in the public discourse. So much of this is a discussion about person acts who had a relationship with Epstein. I had a fundraising relationship with them. I regret it. I obviously apologize a lot. The important thing is justice for the victims. The important thing is doing the right things for the victims. And as I kind of realize that, what I've been doing is trying to help them. So I help them fund an advertisement, to pressure Congress, to release all the files, all the rest. That's where I actually think the discourse should really be. And so just because we're on this topic, I want to make sure that I've emphasized that. I totally hear that. I've got one final question of the emails which you mentioned. There's one where you say that you might want to help them with the press. Is that the one which is most mortifying or you look back on you think, what was I doing? I mean, hindsight's an easy thing maybe. But can you look back on anything? Actually, this is one person who didn't need help with the press. Well, yes, mortifying. It's actually much simpler. Everyone takes this one sentence and then when they want to experience it. What is the context? So the context is Joey called me and said, you know, Epstein is like has all these really bad Google search results. Do you think you could help them that Joey's Joey, Joey, Joey, Joey, Joey, you know, former director of the MIT Media Lab. And then I said, sure, but my idea was a very simple one which is go find a credible journalist. Tell your side of the story to credible journals like how you rehabilitate it, etc, etc. And then that goes to the top of the thing. It's the same. Do I say give anyone who had any kind of negative thing? It was like sure. Like, this is what you need to do, which is the thing I said, right, in a fundraising conversation room. That's it. I wasn't aware of any other context. Like, people say, well, but you knew that, you know, one of the victims had come forward then. I was like, no, I wasn't aware of that. And by the way, it isn't anywhere in any of the, like, all of the emails have been made public. It's not in any of those things. I wasn't told that. It was just like, oh, he has this problem with his Google search results. What is the normal answer? Go find a very credible journalist and do a long story. I think the reason the Epstein's got to be on, as you rightly say, the justice for the survivors and victims. The reason people are interested in it is partly because it speaks to a broader issue about the state of capitalism today. And it's really interesting because you're here, someone who's spent, what, 40 or more years in capitalism. And I think I can describe you as a, as a proponent of capitalism. Someone who believes it's better than the alternatives as Churchill said of democracy. I think one of the undisputed stories or the elements of the Epstein scandal and horror is a feeling that basic rich people and the super rich live according to different rules that the system is rigged in their favor. To what extent based on what you have seen of the lives of the very rich, is that actually true? Well, at least partially true, although it's not necessarily new. Well, if you go back to human history, kings live by very different rules than peasants or, you know, townspeople. You know, and it's kind of the whole history of powerful people, usual history as powerful men have different things. Part of, I think, our invention of modern societies to have a rule of law that applies equally to everyone. And that's part of the reason why this feels, you know, more offensive when it's places of, oh, you're doing crimes and you're getting away from it. And obviously we should do our absolute best to have rule of law apply equally across all people. Now, a wealthy person can afford a better lawyer, you know, et cetera, et cetera. There's still you, you, you, you can't eradicate it completely, but you put in a lot of energy. And this is one of things I love about like this country, magnet, Carter, all the rest like, no, no, the basic rights and dignity of every person. Now, of course, when that started, it was every man, we've since made progress and now it's every person, not just every man. Right. But that kind of thing, I think, is very important. But what's so interesting about this is I think that very unusually, and you must be highly conscious of this, a lot of other people associated with technology and Silicon Valley have come into line with Donald Trump, should we say, to put it mildly, you have not a new pay to price for that. You've also been very outspoken about, for instance, the proposals to reform taxation in California. And what's really interesting is if you look at Zora and Mum Darni in New York, or if you look at the UK where the green party is rising up the polls and there's a big challenge to the Labour left. There's a legal Zack Polanski who's cutting through on social media. It's a very simple message, which is tax the billionaires. And you've really intellectually engaged with that. And I think I'm right in characterizing your position as do what would be most effective. So it's an unusual thing to ask you, but what does an effective tax policy look like? And what should we be mindful of in your view, that makes a kind of populist message of the left that says just tax them into oblivion? Are the kind that Mum Darni is perhaps almost saying, what makes that wrong? Well, so the tax of an oblivion is an anti-capitalist position that misunderstands how we fundamentally design our society, which is economic incentives to create value for society. And so we don't have anything, this is one of the problem that all of my very lefty progressive friends have, which is like everything is paid for by the success of business. Part of how we have new successful businesses, because businesses die is entrepreneurship. And part of what we need in order to do that is to have economic incentives for the founders, the employees, the investors, etc., etc. And then this gets back to our earlier conversation of, well, but it shouldn't be that much. You're like, well, we have markets to determine that. That's it. Yes, we do, because a lot of questions that we got in for you, some of which might be, is people saying, should there be billionaires at all? Well, I think it's we should design a system that creates the most economic value that rises all boats. And then whatever the outcomes of that system are, and if that is billionaires, fine. If that's not billionaires, fine. It's the system for that economic generation, generation that you really need to have. Now, that being said, I'm a strong believer in progressive taxation. So the percentage of each new dollar that you get, should go up the wealthier, the more income you generate. And we have some breakages on that. Like Warren Buffett has really pointed this out some, which is like, well, wait a minute. Like as a wealthy person, I can hire all these tax people and I can pay a lower percentage of my income than the middle class person who's working at X. That's not okay. We should fix the, call it anti-progressive taxation things. And then what are the ways to do that? Now, the crazy thing about the California wealth tax is that it's like, okay, well, we have a budget shortfall because Donald Trump has done a anti-blue state thing including California. So what we're gonna do is go-- - Should you say for our listeners that in America, blue state means the Democrats as opposed to red state is Republicans who have it's the other way around here. - Yeah, oh, great. Didn't know that. He learned something new. And so, a medical worker's union said, well, let's just impose a tax on the wealthiest, small number of people because it's politically advantageous to us and let's do that in order to do this budget shortfall. Well, this is the, we're coming for you specifically for this shortfall, which by the way, probably there'd be a shortfall next year and the year after and so on. And so what happens is all these people start moving. And even just proposing the tax in the way they've done it, they've already reduced the amount of tax that California's gonna get, right? Because the people who are otherwise were already paying the highest state income tax of anywhere in the US other than Manhattan, New York, already the highest tax regime, they're like going, those people are already paying that and now a bunch of them are moving, right? - So people will move according to tax changes. - Yes, you think that's how I'm wondering. - Because some people say it's not true at all. Why would they move? And also if they do move, so'd them let them go. And you would say on both sides that gets the wrong. First of all, people do move. And if you let them go, they'll take their revenues elsewhere. - Exactly. - What you want is you want a policy, by the way, to maximize your tax revenue, to benefit the bulk of people, but maximizing the tax revenue is keeping the people who make a bunch of money, engaged in local in various ways. - Right, I should say for people, I mean, people who have heard it in the introduction, you've given millions, tens of millions to, not just democratic courses, but something like, I'm very interesting. And this is where we should end. To a particular agenda, which I would call the abundance agenda. There's a very brilliant set of writers in America as recline at The New York Times and Derek Thompson, who's a brilliant sub-stacker and used to work at the Atlantic. wrote a quote with a book called Abundance, which suggested that abundance, the idea we should build more of the things that make life worth living, was a good rallying cry for, if you like, centre left politics. The thought of which I wanted to conclude, if I made this podcast, then you're going to answer some of our listeners' questions, which were very grateful. I don't know if you feel this in London at the moment, and we're sat in London together now. When you come to Britain, what's your assessment of where we're at? The are people who are being ambitious, who are trying to do things. I do think as a society, it would be much better, not just for Britain, but for the world, for more of the UK, to be ambitious that way, to be saying, what's the way that I can go try to make something much more myself? I realize, I was a student here for a few years. I realize I'm speaking as an American, in a kind of a British context, and that sounds very American. This is one of the good things about there's many bad things. This is one of the good things about Americanism. When you were open, that was what mid-80s. Early '90s. Early '90s, okay. Yes, early '90s, before we went to Apple Computers. And so it must make you fond for this country. Very much. And I think that there's many great things about this country. And I think that not only for this country, but for the world, to contribute those. And I think that there is a lot of interesting opportunity here, because there's a lot of smart talent. And the same kind of things that benefit the US, which is a global focus, like a lot of people come here for university, for economic opportunities, or with harness that to the benefit of Britain. I think it's doable. And part of what I try to encourage, my British friends to do, some of them already, intensely, they're already, but it's to be more ambitious, because it's possible. Final question. On the day that Steve Jobs died, got an New Zealand, and Steve Jobs has died, it's about 15 years ago now. And then you click on the link, and you go through to the Apple website. The Apple website was just a video of one clip from Steve Jobs. And it was clearly one that he'd chosen, it's how he wanted to be remembered. And he said, "My favourite quote is from Wayne Gretzky. "For those of you who don't know, " Wayne Gretzky was a very famous Canadian ice hockey player. "And Steve Jobs said, "My favourite quote is, "I go to where the puck is going, "not where it has been." I took from that, that Steve Jobs wanted to be remembered by the idea that he looked around corners, he looked ahead, he tried to see where the world is going, and tried to meet it sort of over there, over and over here. What's the big thing that our listeners need to understand, particularly about AI, about where the puck is going, and what they need to do to get ready? So what I will say to listeners, the same thing I say to my portfolio companies, and entrepreneurs, which is, don't build for how AI is today. Build for how you expect AI to be six to 12 months from now, because that's part of where the puck is going. Now, by the way, can anyone know with any degree of certainty where it is? No, there'll be some things that'll be better, and some things that'll be not as good as you think. So you have to have a certain amount of flexibility in that same thing as individuals. Start using it intensely now. Use it for things that matter to you. Not just like, oh, rather than looking up on Wikipedia, I'll ask Chad CBT. Do that too, that's fine. Or take a picture with some of my fridge, what could I make for dinner tonight? Fine, do that too. Make a sonnet for your kids birthday. Great, do that too. (laughs) But do it for things that matter to your work, that matter to how you operate, and you'll start learning, oh, it's really good for this, maybe in six months, it'll be better. But to have some sense and be engaged in that learning loop and what you're doing. And by the way, that's what I recommend to everyone. I recommend it to my parents. I recommend it to companies I work with. I do it myself. I cannot be more unequivocal on that recommendation. Sounds pretty radical to me. Reid Hoffman, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much. - Hi Pleasure. (upbeat music) - It's a big deal that Reid Hoffman, who's a very wealthy person who knows he's gonna get questions about his wealth, about taxation, about his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, should come on this show and give us so much time. And just addressing those things in reverse order, on the Epstein stuff, we asked him, as I think you heard there, a lot of firm, but I hope fair questions and you can make up your own mind about his answers and whether or not you're satisfied by them. And on AI, I think his message is quite clearly a version of the old. If you can't beat them, join them. In other words, there's no avoiding this coming revolution. It is gonna change everything everywhere, just not all at once. And your best hope of not just surviving, but thriving in the future is to use AI prolifically in your life, make it useful. Not just as an alternative to Google search, but it's something that helps you increase your own productivity. And what was interesting about capitalism and taxes, he was willing to engage on that stuff. He thinks capitalism is better than the alternatives. He's at the progressive end of politics. He gives a lot of money to democratic causes. He wants wealth to grow, and then he wants the proceeds to be shared in lots of different ways. And he has a warning about taxation, which is that if you do too much taxation in the wrong places, you're gonna send people away. What I feel like we've just got over a chunky period of time was an insight into how people who are leading this revolution are thinking about it. And their feeling, their message, their message very clearly is that there is no stopping this revolution. It will change absolutely everything. And if you want to be someone who wins, you need to get on board with it. And I think that's a valuable insight, because there are some people who kind of want to step off, who kind of want this not to happen, and who are understandably absolutely terrified about the impact AI will have on their lives, about exacerbating existing inequalities. I think his message is a pragmatic one, which says, "Plan for it, get ready, integrate it into your life, and realize that you have to try to master AI in order to not be mastered by it." And that is it for this episode. It's also it for me for a little while. I promise I'll be back in about four weeks or so. The next three episodes of Radical are gonna be presented by a selection of brilliant, brilliant young minds, including people that we've had on as guests on this podcast. I'm leaving you in their very, very capable hands. Don't miss me too much. I promise I'll be back in the summer with plenty more of your favorite podcasts.