Possible: Satya Nadella on making human and token capital compound

**Satya Nadella** (0:00)
So, what I think we have not yet conceptually gotten right in the shared understanding is, what is this future of work going to look like? If you're a tech CEO, you have to be deep inside of what's the tech stack. AI is not a technology, it's the future of the firm. One of the dictums I have is, don't use frontier models for non-frontier problems. I think in the AI age, that is going to be everything, right? I think I would be very surprised Reid, if he was sitting here a year from now, if the world is not completely turned on, what is my AI supply chain look like?

**Reid Hoffman** (0:37)
I couldn't be more delighted to introduce a special episode of Possible with Satya Nadella, the Chairman and CEO of Microsoft. Satya and I have known each other a long time, and part of in this is AI revolution for humanity.
I thought this would be a great episode to get out. I mean, we covered all kinds of important topics. Satya as always is elegant, is cohesive, is smart, is comprehensive, and above all, humanist in what is our AI future. This will be an amazing episode. Actually, one of the things that's great, Satya, about filming this here, is that it reminds me of the earliest days when we were talking about Microsoft and LinkedIn. That's right, because we did one of our very, very good conversations here in the Greylock office. So it's like just awesome to be back. I want to start with something that I don't know as many people realize and appreciate about you, which is with how many books of poetry you have in your house. Can you say a little bit about your attraction to poetry, favorite poets, what the engagement is there?

**Satya Nadella** (1:41)
Yeah, I actually got into it in different times of my life. I remember as a middle schooler, we had this standard issue English poetry book, which I've been trying to reclaim and get all my life and unfortunately is out of print. But it sort of had even getting introduced to Shelley or Wordsworth and it had even sort of Indian authors like Surajini and I do writing in English. And it is, I don't know, I felt maybe it was my attention span or what have you. I was naturally drawn to poetry as a thing to enjoy and love. And I've always compared it even to code, which is it's sort of compression in its best form.
And so whenever I'm bored, I get to go read. I'm not great actually at understanding deeply. I've never studied it. I'm not like, so that's why my reputation of knowing about poetry is far exceeds my knowledge of poetry. But I still continue to use poetry as perhaps the best expression of the human experience. I mean, if you sort of broadly think about literature as sort of what captures more than even history, the human experience, I think poetry is the compressed form of it.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:05)
I completely agree. So a particular poet that you go back to?

**Satya Nadella** (3:08)
Yeah. So the thing that I really, I would say the poetry that probably speaks to me most deeply is the Urdu poetry. That is sort of because I grew up in Hyderabad in India and Urdu is sort of the in the air. And some of the Urdu poets, both modern and sort of people in the 17th, 18th century were just extraordinary. And in particular, there's this poet whose name goes by Ghalib as his name and he's just extraordinary. Or even a modern poet like Faiz. I was also very, having grown up in Hyderabad, I was very influenced by Rumi.
In fact, the high school I went to was fascinating. In fact, we had the number of languages which were all thought was obviously it was English.
There was Hindi, which was the national language. And then we had Sanskrit, like basically, like Latin here, I guess. And then we had the local language, Telugu, which is my mother tongue. But we also had Urdu and Persian. And so all of them, like in fact, when we would break for what was called second language, my second language was Sanskrit. But I had classmates who would go to Persian, Urdu, Telugu, Hindi, and it was fascinating.

**Reid Hoffman** (4:30)
Well, among the experiences, I'm experiencing a little bit of language envy because a joke that I like is what do you call a person who speaks three languages, trilingual, two languages, bilingual, one language, American. And unfortunately, I resemble this joke. All right. So we're just coming out of Build, which was amazing. Let's actually start with going back in history. So Microsoft's first product was a basic interpreter.