Yesterday, Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and Freeman Spogli Institute hosted a great discussion with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel on “Technology and Politics”. The LinkedIn and Paypal founders, respectively, spoke about the trends in technology transforming politics in a conversation moderated by British historian Niall Ferguson.

Hoffman and Thiel spoke about recent elections, inequality, dictatorships, AI, cryptocurrencies, monopolies and the need for deeper thinking on antitrust laws for the technology industry giants like Apple, Amazon and Google. An extensive write up of the event was posted at Stanford News including this highlight:

Peter Thiel said the forces of “centralization” and “decentralization” are clearly evident in technology and even politics. “Crypto is libertarian and AI is communist,” he said, describing cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, and artificial intelligence, which drives large data collection across societies.

On inequality, Ferguson said a “winner-takes-all” mentality in Silicon Valley may be good for a lucky few elites, but not for most people less fortunate. An “unintended consequence” of the last couple decades’ prolific innovations is greater inequality than is acceptable.

Here are the speaker bios from the event announcement page:

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking about the future. Peter is also the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

Reid Hoffman is the Co-Founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Partners. An accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and investor, Reid Hoffman has played an integral role in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses. In 2003 Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service. LinkedIn is thriving with more than 500 million members around the world. In 2009 Hoffman joined Greylock Partners. He focuses on building products that can reach hundreds of millions of participants and businesses that have network effects. He currently serves on the boards of Airbnb, Edmodo, Convoy, Blockstream and a few early stage companies still in stealth. In addition, he serves on a number of not-for-profit boards, including Kiva, Mozilla Corporation, Endeavor, and CZI Biohub. Prior to joining Greylock, he angel invested in many influential internet companies, including Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, and Zynga. Hoffman is the host of Masters of Scale, an original podcast series and the first American media program to commit to a 50-50 gender balance for featured guests. He is also the co-author of two New York Times best-selling books: The Start-Up of You and The Alliance. His next book is focused on “blitzscaling”, based on his Stanford course of the same name. Hoffman earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelor’s degree with distinction in symbolic systems from Stanford University.

The video is about 90 minutes long. Take a look: