ChatGPT and Google: The Tech Billionaire Taking On AI Companies (Matthew Prince)

25:32But they know they don't have that much. They know that they've effectively found one of the holes in the cheese. And so what they do is they actually take that query and they publish it back to music creators. and there are several, like many music creators that are making millions of dollars a year that you told me about one guy is making 40 million euros a year, just writing songs for unfulfilled Spotify queries. And I think that's beautiful because when you search for a song, what you're searching for is an emotion. And if you can't find it, then there's sort of a hole that's left. And these people are actually writing content to fill those holes.

26:15And I think that that provides the beginnings of the ingredients for how we can remake the media industry in an age of AI to say what's really valuable is filling in the holes in the cheese. And that's, I think, the beginning of how we figure this out is, and what I'm encouraged by is, if you talk to the founders of Anthropic, if you talk to the founders of OpenAI, if you talk to Google, if you talk to Microsoft, what they want is very reputable, very unique. Trustworthy. But it's not just trust, it's also uniqueness. It takes us to a quite remarkable decision that you've made as the co-founder and boss of Cloudflare to restrict the access of AI bots to websites that you are a critical part of the infrastructure of.

27:08Before we get to that decision, how you came to that decision and the consequences of it, I think it's just worth going back and briefly telling the story of your company. It's been 15 years, multi-billion dollar revenue. You're the critical infrastructure for between 20 % and 25 % of the internet. I don't know why I'm quoting these numbers back at you. 3 ,500 employees, roughly? 4 ,500. 4 ,500. It's a lot since you did that last podcast I listened to. I operate in much of the world, and every single day there are more people. I mean, if all the Cloudflare users daily in the world got together, it would be a very big country, right?

27:42We see about 6 billion people pass through a network every month, which is essentially the entire online population. What do you do? What do Cloudflare do? We make the internet faster and protect it from bad guys. And so when we're doing our job right, your internet just seems a little bit faster. You're less likely to get scammed online. and we protect most of our customers are either content creators or companies that are putting something, making it accessible online. And then their customers are the ones that flow through our network to be able to access whatever they're on. And you as a company, 15 years ago, you were above a nail salon in Palo Alto, which is just near San Francisco, it's part of Silicon Valley.

28:30There were eight of you back then. You've grown extraordinarily big. And you are, in ways that I was checking out in advance of our conversation, deeply mission driven. Part of what you do actually came about from a meeting that you had with three journalists, I think. Was it the Committee to Protect Journalists? And one was from Angola, one was from Ethiopia, and one couldn't say where they're from because they're getting followed by death squads. The first meeting I'd ever been in, the term death squad had been used, unfortunately not the last. And I think you said goodbye to these journalists in a sort of cab outside New York, and you kind of turned around maybe to your co-founder, because I think the meeting with them had been slightly longer than you'd anticipated.

29:06And you sort of thought, this is what we're about. We're about getting the internet to people who are going to otherwise be. I mean, it was, being a journalist in a lot of parts of the world is a really dangerous profession. It's very easy, sat in the West to pretend, you know, to moan about it, but at least we're free to report what we want. That's right. And these journalists were covering government corruption in their home countries. And there were a lot of people that wanted to silence them. And they all came to us and I – I mean they had tears in their eyes and said we can't do what we do without Cloudflare.

29:38And we didn't start the company to protect journalists. We started the company because we thought let's do something that takes advantage of this opportunity in the market and hopefully we'll make some money and impress our parents. Why most people start things. And yet here we were where, you know, these people couldn't be doing the important work they were doing without us. And at that moment, it really just sort of changed kind of our focus where we realized that this was bigger. You know, and then I think the Internet is bigger than any of us totally appreciate. And as one of the real guardians of the Internet, you know, I think that that's what drives everyone who works at Cloudflare.

30:16But when you set up Cloudflare, you say it was about impressing your parents. I hope they were impressed, by the way. as they ought to have been. But what was the opportunity that you saw? The funny thing is that what my alternative was, was my dad owned a bunch of restaurants and he was getting older and wanted to retire. And so he called me up and said, son, it's time for you to take over the family restaurants. And they just, not only were they not very good restaurants, he owned, for example, the only Hooters in Utah. And I couldn't imagine anything worse than running my dad's Hooters. It just wasn't my passion.

30:55I'm afraid you're going to have to explain Hooters to a British man. Oh, it's a place that sells chicken wings and has women that don't wear much money clothes. Oh, right. So I think there's got to be a Hooters in London. It's probably, they're thinking about it now. It all comes flooding back. And so not, again, what I wanted to do. But again, my dad had provided for our family and so felt some obligation. So whether proud or not, I think he's still a little angry that I didn't take over the family business, but it all worked out. So I think we were really said that, and again, this is a little bit wonky, but you could see that software was moving from something that you bought and got a physical copy of to moving to the cloud.

31:45Companies like Salesforce doing that. You could see that hardware, like the servers that you used to have to buy, that those were moving to the cloud as well. And so what we just thought was inevitable was that the networking gear, the firewalls and all those things would also have to move to the cloud as well. And so the original idea of Cloudflare was how do you take a firewall and put it in the cloud? And you've evolved because of your scale. You're now between 20 and 25 percent of the Internet depends on you. You're a huge company. And you've evolved, if I may say, into a phrase you used a moment ago, which is something of guardians of a particular vision of the Internet.

32:18And you made in that context, and in the context of all we're discussing about the development of AI, a quite remarkable decision, which is that you said AI bots will not be allowed to scrape the data from websites that are protected by Cloudflare technology. Can you just explain precisely what was the decision you made and why did you make it? So it comes back to where we started with the conversations with media companies where they said, our businesses are getting killed because people are taking our data. They're using it to give answers in their answer engines, but they're not sending us anything back.

32:55They're not paying us. They're not sending us traffic that we can monetize in one way or another. And so we started to think about, you know, what could happen? And again, we walked through and we said, you know, done right, we could create an actually a new market and a new business model, which might not only be better for media companies, but might be better for society as a whole, where we get away from kind of the rage baiting, dividing media that we have today back to rewarding real content creation. And the question is, how do you get there? And you need a market. And the challenge is that no markets can exist without scarcity.

33:32There's not a market for air unless you're scuba diving, right? Because there's no air underwater, so you have to pay someone to put air in a tank and then you breathe that air and they make money for the scarcity of air, right? If every media company is just giving their content away for free and they're letting anyone take it and they're not getting anything back, then there will never be a market. And so in order for us to get to that better media place, in order for us to understand that, we said we have to restrict this. And the media companies, you know, again, because they don't have the same technical sophistication often as someone like Kloffler does, they didn't have the tools to be able to do that.

34:13And we really do believe that, again, coming back to those journalists who are covering government corruption, coming back to the small local newspaper that we own, we think that media is such a critical part of society and it deserves to be protected. And so we said, we need to engage in this and we need to take all we've learned from stopping hackers around the world and apply that to help media companies have the ability to stop these AI bots, create scarcity. And then hopefully what emerges is not a world where all the media – all the journalists starve to death, not a world where all the media gets locked up behind five different AI companies, but one where there's a fair exchange of value, where if you're creating original content, you're paid for it.

35:00And again, I think the first step in doing that is you've got to actually restrict the crawlers. All such decisions, particularly one of such immense scale and consequence, are trade-offs. They involve, frankly, pissing a lot of people off. When you were considering those trade-offs, what did you anticipate as the potential downsides which you've had to deal with? You know, I think the first is, I think there's a little bit of a misperception that we just blocked AI crawlers generally. What we actually did was, I think, a lot more thoughtful, which is we went and we looked at what pages behind us were either behind a subscription or had an advertisement on them.

35:36Because in those cases, that's an indication that the purpose of that page is to get a human to go to it to either see the advertisement, make money off that, or pay for the subscription. And in those cases, that should be blocked. On the other hand, the defaults really matter. And so what we said was, we're gonna default that if you're a media company making money through ads or subscriptions, we're gonna default to block. You can override that. You can say, no, no, I just wanna contribute to artificial general intelligence. And so that's why I do podcasts or that's why I write the stories that I do.

36:11But by default, we're gonna block those things. Things that aren't advertised-based, things that aren't subscriptions, we're gonna leave that open. But again, you can say, listen, I don't like this AI stuff. We're gonna shut my content off. And that's a decision up to you. We're providing the tools and setting the defaults that we think make sense to help build what is the future of an internet, which is more sustainable, you know, is better than the internet. How do you contend with the criticism or pushback that though that might produce a better internet in some ways, at this current moment in history, it's a sort of dangerous thing to put blocks on the innovation prompted by AI.

36:52That anything that sort of places a limit on where AI can scrape away and provide data is both against, There's a liberal argument against it, which is that people, as you say, want these services. Yeah. And they want the best possible, you know, chatbot to give them the best possible information to organize the best possible holiday as a gentile. But also that there's an economic danger, potentially, even though you've made your decision for principled reasons, you say, there's an economic hazard in putting a sort of blocker on AI in some way. Yeah. Well, there are lots of blockers on AI. You know, if you want to get chips from NVIDIA, Jensen makes you pay for them.

37:29Jensen Twang, the book. Jensen, who is the CEO and founder of NVIDIA. If you want to get the best researchers, they get salaries. We're not gonna say, oh, AI is so important that we're gonna bring back slavery, right? That doesn't make any sense. So I don't understand why if the content that someone like you is producing is the fuel that's running these things. Why is it they have to pay for the chips? They have to pay for the researchers, but they don't have to pay for the content. That doesn't make any sense to me. And so I think unless you're going to go to the extreme of saying let's nationalize this and basically conscript everyone to work on it because it's that important, which is absurd.

38:15Like then, of course, the people who are creating the content that fuels these answer engines should be getting compensated for it.

38:26I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Matthew Prince, the boss of Cloudflare, the company that runs infrastructure for around about a quarter of the entire internet. Listen, if you are enjoying this podcast, please do subscribe on BBC Sounds. That way you won't miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, just make sure you've got your push notifications turned on and that way you'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed.

39:04But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the Apartment Bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

39:35I think a lot of people, especially those listening to this, will be sympathetic to your arguments and say, this sounds like a principled decision. And it is, you know, the sort of impulse to make sure creators get a fair shake seems one that a lot of people would say is just common sense as well as the decent thing. It is quite extraordinary, isn't it, that Matthew Prince is making these decisions. I mean, not because you're not in any way morally qualified, but it's a huge responsibility for you to make. And one of the criticisms of the broader internet, which I think is more applied to people like the Jensen Twangs or the Zuckerbergs or the Elon Musks, is that we have created this world in which a few people with extraordinary wealth and power are making decisions that have enormous consequence for the whole globe.

40:19And even when those decisions are ones that people might approve of, as they might approve of what you're saying, who are you guys to make the decisions? Yeah. I think, first of all, we didn't make this decision on our own. We met with BBC, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, every possible journal, the Associated Press, and talked to them about what's the right thing to do here. And, again, I don't think of this as us sort of saying this is – you can't scrape the internet. There's lots of the internet that's not behind Cloudflare. But the reason so much of the internet is behind Cloudflare is because we're out there standing up for people like content creators.

41:01We're actually saying this is a problem, and if we don't do something about it, one of those bleak outcomes is pretty likely. And so I think we have a duty to be making these hard calls, even when they are hard calls. And this was, frankly, one of the easier calls that we made. And you also have to abide by the law in all the different countries where you operate. And I think that's something that I saw looking online at the decisions that you had to make around whether or not neo-Nazi websites such as the Daily Stormer were able to use your technology. And I think it's important to demarcate or distinguish between the kind of decisions you would make, which I imagine working out if a neo-Nazi website can have your technology.

41:39As you say, you mostly provide it for people like Transport for London. The neo-Nazi is probably one in a thousand decisions. Oh, it's even less than that. The funny thing about that is, you know, I never thought I'd know so much about neo-Nazis in my career and a bunch of other things. For the most part, our job around content moderation is pretty easy. Well, you're not really content moderators. I just wanted to, almost in your defense, say, if Mark Zuckerberg were here or if Elon Musk were here, those guys are actually facilitating mass production of content and they're kind of making editorial decisions.

42:11You know, should this be allowed? Is that free speech? Is that inciting hatred? You're not doing that. And yet with the neo-Nazi website, which, as you say, is a tiny fraction of the many decisions you've got to make on a daily basis, but you did have something close to an editorial judgment to make about who should speak. Yeah, and I think that that's – we've basically done that three times in the company's history. So sort of the mean time between these things once every five years. So we're probably due for some controversy around this any moment now. But what I think was different about what we did is it would have been very easy for us to fire the customer and then just if anyone called us about it, say no comment or it was a violation of our terms of service or hand it off to the lawyers.

42:57And I actually think that's really dangerous. That's what most technology companies do. And I think it's part of why there's actually so little trust in technology companies because even if they're being very thoughtful. And I think for the most part, they are. They're not transparent. They're not transparent. I think, again, we're not a government, but we touch billions of people's lives. And so I think we have to think about how you build trust in a very similar way. And so transparency has always been one of our core values. And so when we make decisions where it would be easier to just say no comment, I get to talk about neo-Nazis.

43:38And by the way, you do podcasts. I mean, Elon Musk's pretty available to speak, but one of the other things about some of these companies is that they have people that don't always talk openly about it. In the context of all that we've discussed and your desire for a better internet and for creators to get paid well, what have you made of the argument, if you've had a chance to follow it here in the UK, around AI and copyright laws? I don't know if you've seen it. There's a big old spat between creators and the government. And the government is approaching this, I think, as a trade-off. On the one hand, you want to be seen to be pro-innovation.

44:10You want to allow AI to do its business. And that's where some of the idea behind making technology firms exempt from copyright laws comes from. On the other hand, you've got really influential creators saying, you know what? We need to come together to make sure, almost like a union, that we get paid for our stuff. What do you make of the debate that we've had? Do you take a view on it? Yeah, I'm a recovering intellectual property professor. So I love a good copyright debate. But what I'll say is that typically – and I'm actually not an expert on UK copyright laws. But typically, copyright laws protect fair use if you transform a work.

44:53So if I read, you know, William, if I read Hamlet and then I retell it sort of in a modern kind of, you know, London sort of times way, like there's no copyright problem there. I've taken something and I've actually transformed it, which is kind of what the AI systems are doing. They're taking information, they're remixing it, and they're giving it back to you in a way that's there. And in that sense, I worry that copyright is the wrong tool to be able to get creators what they absolutely deserve. And if you look in the U.S. where a number of these cases have gone down, the best case that's out there, which was a case involving Anthropic, The most well-reasoned case so far has actually said if you take information, you consume it, and then you recreate it, that that's the same way that if I read a book and then write a story that was inspired by but isn't actually a direct copy of, that that's allowed.

46:01And so I worry that if creators lean too heavily on copyright, they might actually get a result, which is not what they want. That isn't to say that content creators shouldn't be compensated. Absolutely, content creators should be compensated. And the good news is the AI companies, again, 80 % of the AI companies are Cloudflare customers. So we know them really well as well. And we've talked to them. And what they have said over and over and over again is if there is a level playing field, then we're happy to pay content creators. But they're worried about one thing. And this is actually, I think, the most interesting thing that's going on in the UK right now.

46:39There's one company that all of the other AI companies worry about. It's the reason why OpenAI was founded in the first place. When Sam Altman and Elon Musk got together and put together OpenAI, what they were afraid of was Google, that Google was so far ahead of everybody else in the content space that they had this enormous advantage. And today, the company that is holding content creators back from being compensated more than anyone else is Google. And the reason why is that Google sort of struck the original deal with content creators, you know, 22, 25 years ago, 27 years ago, where they said, we get a copy of your content in exchange for running a search engine where we'll send you traffic.

47:23So Google feels like they have almost a God-given right to have a copy of everyone's traffic. And they're gathering it up and they're using it for their AI systems. That's giving them a really unfair advantage in the AI space. And every other AI company is like, listen, we can't pay for content if Google is getting it for free. And so I think actually the most interesting thing, which is going on in the UK right now, is that the competition authority is looking at Google and saying, are they using their dominance in search in order to give themselves an unfair advantage in AI? Presumably, among other things, I'd say we're still giving you unique visibility.

48:06Search is still dominant in the internet. Sure, AI and the answer engine as opposed to the search engine is coming. But if you're an artist, particularly a small artist, and you want some visibility, type in your name, the whole world can see it. And that's incredible value. Well, and I think that traditional search, where you type in a search and you get back a treasure map, that's one deal. And that should have one set of rules. And I think that that is a fair trade with content creators. Answer engines, where you type something in and you just get an answer, but you don't actually generate traffic, that's different.

48:39And Google is under an enormous amount of pressure and threat competitively from these new companies. And so they're sort of trying to run the past while also migrating to the future. And I think that what the UK may be in a unique position to do is to say, it's fine. You can do that, but you've got to split those things apart. If you take content for search, you can't use it for AI. And if you take content for AI, content creators have to be able to block that without blocking search. And if the UK does that, I think it actually might become the home to all content creators where they're going to say this is the place that is actually giving us protection, giving us a fair shake, creating that level playing field.

49:26And I think if we can get Google to split crawling for search from crawling for AI, that that will be the final step that we need to take in order to get every AI company to say, okay, now we're ready to start paying content creators for the content they have. And this is a debate that is happening right now in the UK, and it's why I'm here wearing a suit. Yes, fantastic to talk to you about it. We've taken up a huge amount of time. I've got two quick final questions. One is that we spoke to Dario Amadei on this podcast a few weeks ago, and one of the things that he's achieved a bit of notoriety that he didn't really want to achieve for is around his, not forecast or prediction, but his suggestion that AI was going to be a big, big, big threat to white-collar jobs.

50:13The worry that lots of people, including white-collar people who listen to this podcast, will have is that entry-level jobs, which require kind of systematic thought in the next few years, potentially going to get wiped out in finance, management, law, and so on, and that artificial intelligence is coming for those jobs. Does that seem to you inevitable, as it does to lots of other people? I actually don't think it is. So as an example, we are heavy users of AI internally. Of course. And I have been before a lot of other people. You used machine learning years ago. Yeah, yeah. And so one of the things, though, is how do we get people to really take advantage of it?

50:52And what we see is actually entry-level workers or interns who come in are often the best ambassadors to really bringing in the latest of AI. 50-year-old CEOs are stuck in our ways, whereas a brand-new 21-year-old intern has actually a sort of new way of looking at the world. And there are going to be massive productivity improvements that happen because of that. And for that reason, Cloudflare has massively expanded our internship program for this next coming year. So I actually think that you're going to see different ways of working. But I kind of think that whether we're all going to lose our jobs to AI or whether we're living in a James Cameron film and it's a Terminator, it's going to kill us all.

51:38I think those are distractions from the bigger point, which is this is a platform shift. and that platform, the same way that we went from, you know, your laptop and a browser to social, to mobile, now we're gonna go to AI. And that is going to fundamentally come after many business models that are out there. Those business models are gonna change. Media is the canary in the coal mine. But what happens to brands? What happens to aggregators? What happens to small businesses that are out there? How is a small business, if agents are shopping, are you ever going to beat massive corporations that can optimize for that?

52:15I think those are the really interesting questions. And AI is going to come for the business models long before they come for our jobs and long before they actually come for turning us into the matrix or whatever. On which point, final point, I know that we have lots of young listeners to this podcast, many of whom would love nothing more than to be a tech entrepreneur. And you've been on this extraordinary story from studying English to begin with to being a professor to sort of a couple of missteps, or not missteps, but honorable failures. Missteps. Missteps in the world of business. I mean, I was a crazy thing.

52:4918 years ago, I was a bartender.

52:54So don't follow my path. That's probably not the right thing to do. And I don't know if you feel you should, sure, should not have gone to business school, but I just wonder if we could end with your sort of what you've learned having grown a very successful company, advice to young entrepreneurs listening to this who want to win in this new world, who feel kind of both exhilarated and somewhat exhausted by all this chat about AI, but who are thinking about setting up their own company and being pretty radical with it. The big unlock for me was that the people who you want to have as your teammates aren't necessarily the people who are your friends.

53:29There's a temptation to like go and start a company with like your mates who, you know, cheer for the same team and are about the same age and went to the same schools. But it turns out that if you're all the same, then you end up just fighting all the time over who's in charge. The org chart might say whatever, but you're all the same. So, you know, roll of the dice, it could have been someone else is the CEO and someone, you know, and a different thing. What was really powerful about Cloudflare, and I think the secret to our success is that the three of us who started it, we had a ton of respect for each other, but we were radically different.

54:01Michelle, one of my co-founders, you know, she is, She's incredibly organized. She gets things done. She knows how to scale. Those are not my strengths. My strengths are, you know, I can tell a good story. I can sort of think about what the future is gonna look like. I'm always generating ideas. That's not her strength. And so we were different than that. She is just a, like, and to this day, we're obviously friends because we've gone through this. But back in the day, like, we wouldn't have hung out together. And so then the big question is, how do you find those people? Because it's not gonna be the people that you necessarily went to school with.

54:37And so my advice would be go places that are growing like crazy. And while you're there, don't look for the people who necessarily root for the same sports team as you do, but really internally recognize what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses and find those other puzzle pieces around you that complement, fill in kind of the holes in your own personal Gs and that can make you better. And again, that was the secret to Cloudflare's success. Are all the internships for this year already locked up? No, no. We just opened applications the end of September. Matthew, it's fantastic to speak to you.

55:16Thank you so much for coming in. Thank you so much for having me.

55:22Well, I hope that at the end of that conversation, you are persuaded, convinced, that Matthew Prince is genuinely one of the most influential people in the modern digital arena. His decisions, his principles, his values have a huge sway over what many people see. Not because he's a censor. That's not what he's aiming to do at all. In fact, he would cast himself as a pretty liberal kind of guy. But because he has had to make decisions about who Cloudflare supports and also about whether or not Cloudflare will allow AI bots or these crawlers, as he was describing them, to scrape information from all of Cloudflare's clients, which just happens to be around about a quarter of the entire internet.

56:02And it's very timely what he's talking about. It's very timely, not just because we're living through this revolution, a revolution that we try very hard on this podcast to help you make sense of, but because on a week-to-week basis, regulators all around the world are looking at these companies and working out whether or not they agree with Matthew Prince. So last week here in the UK, there's a very influential regulator here called the CMA, the Competition and Markets Authority. And last week, they designated Google with what's called strategic market status in general search. This is a happy reminder of my days as the BBC's media editor.

56:36Strategic market status in general search, which includes AI overview and AI mode. And what that basic means is that the CMA, they've now got a designation around Google, which allows them as the regulator, the CMA, to introduce targeted measures to address specific aspects of how Google operates search in the UK. In other words, to make really targeted, direct interventions saying what Google can and can't do. Google do dispute what Matthew Prince says, and they do have a response, which they put out there pretty publicly to the CMA's move. So on the CMA, Google says that many of the ideas for interventions that have been raised in the CMA's designation process would get in the way of UK innovation and growth.

57:17This is a very familiar argument. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it's one that they've often said. Internet companies always say that if you make regulation too excessive and interfering, it stops innovation. It stops the freedom which allows new products to arise in the market. But the other thing which they say specifically about Matthew Prince's claim is that they actually dispute the claim that he made about traffic to websites falling since the launch of AI Overview and AI Mode. In fact, Google says that, and I quote, the total organic click volume from Google search to websites has been relatively stable year over year.

57:52So you remember that Matthew Prince said actually for lots of the companies that were coming to him, they found that traffic had fallen very dramatically. Basically, Google says it's pretty much stable year to year. There was a lot in what Matthew Prince said, and I was really grateful for it because he's obviously a tremendously smart bloke, former law professor as well as one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, frankly. There was a lot of what he said, which was really quite optimistic. So that little story at the end, that little ditty about people getting paid a lot of money by Spotify to answer search queries and come up with their own music, that was a kind of cheering thought.

58:26Also the idea that in AI, we're not just going to get a sort of generic mush or slop of AI content, but actually there is going to be this flight to quality and uniqueness and niche interests. That was pretty cheering. And I was struck that in a way, what's happening now as this podcast grows and reaches more and more of you, and it's very exciting that we're doing that, is we're in a way getting a kind of conversation going on between episodes. So Dario Amadei, undoubtedly one of the most influential men in modern AI, the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, he was pretty clear that the impact AI could have on entry-level white-collar jobs would be potentially catastrophic.

59:05Up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs, graduate level if you like, white-collar jobs being wiped out maybe three to five years, potentially. Not a forecast or prediction, just a possibility he wanted to alert us to. Matthew Prince went in a different direction. His concern isn't so much about the impact on jobs, but more just the complete transformation of business models. And the thing is that will kill some old business models, but it will also create some new ones. And I guess the big challenge for those of us who aren't entrepreneurs who over 15 years have built multi-billion dollar revenue companies is how do you make sure that in this new world of new business models, you're part of a business or an institution that can still thrive.

59:49Okay, a couple of, well, several in fact, heartfelt thanks. First of all, and this is a reflection on last week, a huge thanks to Jacob Dunn. He is an extraordinary person, a very impressive person. He's also someone who's killed someone. This is a quite bonkers contradiction or paradox rather. It's not a contradiction, it's a paradox, which I've been kind of thinking a lot about over the past week and you guys have as well. I can say hand on heart that on social media, particularly Instagram, on email, in the street, random people bumping into me after, you know, I take my daughters to gymnastics on a Sunday morning.

1:00:25Hello to those of you who have kind enough to say hello last Sunday. I have had just the most extraordinary response to that episode last week with Jacob Dunn. And it's wonderful. OK, you know, I know it was a lot to ask of you guys to get through an hour and 45 minutes. So many of you did. And that's because the story is just incredible. And the heart of it is a radical idea, restorative justice, which I know many of you are interested in. Some of you are going to go off and see Punch, the play in central London, maybe even in Broadway for our American listeners off the back of it. And it makes me think that this is an idea, especially all the issues around criminal justice and prisons in particular, that we must, must come back to.

1:01:01But thank you as well to Jacob, who spoke very openly about some very, very difficult issues, to put it mildly, last week. I'll just give you a little flavour of a couple of the messages that have come in. There have been so many, but I just want to give you a sense of two, really. Jill says, thank you for this, Jill. Why should we, a supposedly civilised country, not do all we can to help offenders see that there is another way to be? Hard to dispute that, Jill. Thank you very much. Here's a message from Mel. I found listening to Jacob was so very interesting, especially hearing how he overcame his start in life and used his experiences to become such an inspirational young man.

1:01:40I have to say to you that there were moments in that podcast that moved me to tears. I can only imagine that you probably felt the same way whilst interviewing him. At the end of the podcast, I felt such a huge mixture of emotions. In a way, I felt as though I shouldn't like him. But by the end, I couldn't help feeling that he's such an extraordinary young man and many teenagers and young people would benefit from hearing his story. As a parent, it highlighted to me the power of forgiveness, especially towards someone that's hurt you beyond measure. Thank you so much to everyone who listened back.

1:02:16If you haven't heard that episode, just look it up in the Radical feed. Thank you so much to everyone who got in touch. Please do keep them coming. If you've got a Radical idea, if you've got a suggestion for a guest, just a response to what you've heard or a question, You can WhatsApp us 0-330-123-9480 or you can email us on radical at bbc.co.uk.

1:02:41Now, before I go, let me tell you that on political thinking this week, Nick is sitting down with the UN's aid chief, Tom Fletcher. He has been in the job for a year. You've often heard him on the Today programme. I've interviewed him there many times, an extraordinarily influential bloke. He's now the man responsible for getting food and tents and health care into the Gaza Strip. But he's also going to pull back the curtain on his life behind the scenes of British politics. He was a very influential advisor at the top of the UK government, advising Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the coalition government as led by David Cameron.

1:03:11You can listen on BBC Sounds from Friday morning, which is also where you can listen and subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajen. I've got to say that is an episode of political thinking that I'm particularly looking forward to. So do check out Nick's podcast there. And by the way, you can also watch episodes of Radical with Amol Rajan on the iPlayer. Speak to you next week. Thank you for listening and goodbye.

1:03:54did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.