Reid Hoffman, tech billionaire: AI job revolution

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0:29Amol Rajan:podcasts.

0:35Amol Rajan:Hello, I'm Amol Rajan and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world. I want to get freedom. I like that freedom. A gender equal world would be a better world for men too. We need this is fire. We need healing. We need trust. These companies don't really, they don't care what governments do. This is a war. The first thing that we want is the war to end. For this interview, I met tech billionaire Reid Hoffman. He's co-founder of the largest professional network in the world, LinkedIn. He's also a huge investor in AI and a Democratic Party donor.

1:17Amol Rajan:You're going to hear about how he transformed the world of work through his social network, LinkedIn, but also how he thinks the use of AI can transform the world of work again and lead to a new industrial revolution, akin to the industrial revolution of the 19th century. The change that we're going to happen with AI does mean that there's going to be some really difficult challenges and times ahead. Why I'm optimist 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. That'll be challenging.

1:53But 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?

2:06Amol Rajan:You'll also hear his thoughts on billionaires and tech bros. And you're going to hear me ask him about his relationship with the late sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.

2:19Amol Rajan:Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Reid Hoffman in a conversation I recorded last month. 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. And revolutions can be very bloody, but they also create winners. What is your priority for making sure that this revolution creates more winners than bloodied losers? The change that we're going to happen with AI does mean that there's going to be some really difficult challenges and times ahead.

2:56Why I'm optimist 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. 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.

3:30We wouldn't have 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.

3:47Amol Rajan:One of the big things 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 the so-called 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 now call them. PayPal wasn't about payments, financial payments online. It sort of 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?

4:18Well, so the founding ambition for LinkedIn was after social and after I'd been part of the kind of founding team of PayPal. So I had a lot of experience already with startups. And so LinkedIn is an unusual one for its ambition, actually, in fact, is where it more or less got to.

4:34Amol Rajan:So it was, I was going to say, because my next question is going to be, what did LinkedIn get right? Did LinkedIn get right? Because your whole ethos as an entrepreneur is that you've got to learn 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.

5:03Some of them are family members. Some of them are just friends and friends of friends. how you help each other navigate the world of work, especially job opportunities, but also like expertise and like, hey, 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 it because that really matters.

5:34Like, what's my next job opportunity?

5:36Amol Rajan:I mean, LinkedIn is a very particular network because it's professional. The promise of social media, if you think about those heady days 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 what it's become, gets a bit more of a bad rap. It's this idea that it It amplifies extreme voices. It fuels polarization. And it makes smart people do dumb stuff.

6:05Amol Rajan:What's your sort of scorecard 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 doing very different things? Yeah. Well, first at the outset, the obvious thing is LinkedIn almost never gets any of that criticism because it's designed in a much more civil way. 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 it benefits some people more than others? How have you tried to change LinkedIn to accommodate the criticisms that can be sometimes made of it?

6:35I'd say the principal thing 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 because it's a global service. Like some country in, you know, Continent X – I'm not going to 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.

7:13And we try to contain that as much as possible because 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. I have heard from a number of my women leader friends that LinkedIn is the only place they can post on social media without being attacked. So we do a reasonable job, but there is a lot more to still do.

7:42Amol Rajan:So let's talk about jobs. You've transformed the world of work over the past 25 years, and you're arguing that it's going to 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. McKinsey, by the way, has done a whole bunch of detailed analysis on tasks and line them up jobs and what percentages of jobs will actually go away completely on automation, which ones will be transformed, et cetera.

8:20And which ones, which we can't know, might be invented. Yes, exactly. So the simplest one is all of the jobs whose composition of tasks is a human following a script, right, like trying to get the human to act like a robot, customer service jobs as a kind of a classic one. And 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 navigate the menu trying to do it. I'm told what to answer. The AI already does that a lot better.

8:53Amol Rajan:Toll booth operator. Richard Thaler, the Nobel Prize winner, came on this show and he said, it wouldn't be such a bad thing if toll booth operators no longer did that job. And by the way, they won't soon yet. Yes, exactly. By the way, AIs are smart, so it's very broad on the scripts. And so you've got companies like Sierra and Parloa and others kind of already doing customer service as a – AI is 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 customers calling and going, please put the AI on. Because the AI gives me better, quicker responses to navigating the issue that I'm on versus a human who's trying to go, wait, wait, what does this menu say?

9:32hey, do I have to call my supervisor now? You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, as ways of doing it. And all the way, it's also more human because in a customer service thing, most times when customers call, they're irate. Some people when they're 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. AI doesn't care.

9:52Amol Rajan:There are some people who are going to hear this and say, here's a guy who's done really well, has made a bit of money, who's needlessly optimistic and sunny about this. and they say actually Reid what's going to happen is AI is going to create a new aristocracy. It's going to exacerbate existing inequalities and injustices and it's going to do it in several ways. First of all it is going to create wealth without work. Secondly that wealth is going to go to very very few people particularly if the companies are private rather than public. And the third thing is what about the tax revenues? What about what happens if you do lose some employment?

10:22Amol Rajan:What if you don't replace them straight away and you don't have 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 first you 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 ai companies make a bunch of money with new technology answers yes they will make a bunch of money i'm not saying that's not the case and part of what i said earlier is i'm not articulating a point of optimism to try to, as it were, sing my own book on this.

11:03I 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 for example, let's take as a 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 as a 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?

11:38Because when they're economically elevated, it doesn't just benefit them. It also benefits their communities, our society, et cetera.

11:45Amol Rajan: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 the last 15 years is that we've created one of the biggest asymmetries of wealth and knowledge and power in human history. Some people would argue. And secondly, that we've just given far too much power to far too few people. That essentially, there's a few people, and you happen to know these people individually, I don't, but there's a few people, a dozen men, mostly American, on the west coast of America, that have completely disproportionate control really over the future of humanity?

12:24We'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 there 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? I'd 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.

12:56Like one of the things when 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 is one of the things that comes out of technology, even though obviously Apple, Tim, et cetera, make a whole bunch of money.

13:16Amol Rajan:You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service.

13:25Amol Rajan:Every story is a technology story in one way or another. And on the Interface podcast, we decode the tech that's rewiring your week and your world. On this week's episode, we'll look at whether or not Google is about to destroy the Internet. Can the Pope save us from AI? And is Roblox finally facing a reckoning? Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

13:54Amol Rajan:I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, a huge AI investor and a donor to the Democrat Party in the United States. 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, the convicted sex offender. And just to give you a little bit of context before you hear that exchange. It's worth your knowing that before 2025, he, Reid Hoffman, acknowledged that he had limited philanthropic contact with the financier. He said that he knew Epstein primarily through fundraising for the MIT, that's the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

14:31Amol Rajan:He said that contact ended around 2015 and he acknowledged meetings. He expressed regret and he said the relationship was transactional and brief. But then towards the end of last year, Hoffman's name surfaced in the US investigations and hearings into Epstein's vast 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 remotely. And of course, that was after Jeffrey Epstein's conviction for soliciting sex with a minor.

15:10Amol Rajan:Now, with all that in mind, let's return to my conversation with Reid Hoffman. 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 offences related to sex with minors? 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've never engaged in something like this. You're trying to have a fundraise.

15:42Does MIT headquarters, like, is this fine? Someone's done their time. Has justice been served? And I got a yes. And I was like, okay. My ignorance was I should have done my own work there.

15:54Amol Rajan:So you sort of, as it were, tried to vet him and get a kind of clearance from someone else that he was someone that you could do business with. 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 for members of society. So that was the question. I was like, I hadn't paid that much attention. I hadn't gone and gone Google. I hadn't realized that that most of that there were so many victims who were just as hadn't been served. Like like none of that was apparent to me. And it is possible with retrospect and hindsight to say this is all true.

16:32Amol Rajan: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 like advice 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.

17:02So you caught him.

17:03Amol Rajan:So the tone of the emails, which I'm sure I'm embarrassed now, the tone of the emails is, come on in, give us some of this money. Be friendly. Yes, exactly. And he was always dangling the, oh, I might be willing to give some money to this 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. It only took retrospect to realize what he was doing, that it was essentially like I was being an idiot and a fool and he was playing me. And is fundraising a reasonable defense when he had a conviction that was known in public?

17:33Well, that was – I thought I already talked about, which was the fact that someone has a conviction. We believe in rehabilitation and agreement in society. It's one of the things we want for everybody as a possibility. So I'd asked, gotten a positive answer, hadn't done my own work, big mistake. And once I started paying attention going, wait a minute, maybe this wasn't like atonement. Maybe this wasn't actually justice served. That's when I essentially went to the, sure, sure. And he kept trying to build a relationship with me, introduced me to so-and-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 like responding to anything, you know, like years earlier.