Rahim Hirji — Super Skills: The 7 Human Skills for the Age of AI
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Who is Rahim Hirji and what is his new book about?
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Today's guest has spent twenty years inside the technology that's been quietly redrawing what learning looks like. He was at Harper Collins. He ran one of the first online tutoring businesses in the UK. He co-founded Eaton X, teaching soft skills out of Eton College. He led international growth at Quizlet across 60 countries. He's just written a brand new book, Super Skills, The Seven Humanities. Human skills for the age of AI. Publishing next month in July. It was the most requested title at the London Book Fair this year, endorsed by many brilliant authors, including Kareem Lakani at Harvard Business School. But one of the things that I loved about this book is that most books about AI start with the technology, but this one starts with a story of a boat.
It's a pleasure to welcome author of Super Skills, Raheem Herjee. Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, it is a pleasure to be here.
It's great to have you on the show, man. Let's tell the story of the boat because people are kind of gone, what the heck are these guys talking about?
The real icon of the book is the boat. And I start off with this journey that my forefathers took, leaving India a long time ago and and moving to East Africa. And the boat becomes this icon throughout the the whole of the book. It starts in the prologue at the beginning and goes right through to the end. And I really want people to think about um AI and the phase that we're in. It's a journey, right? So everyone goes on a boat and you go and you wanna end up somewhere. And that's really what the uh what this is about. The real thing about the boat is is uh I've been able to a align it with different phases in my own personal story. So the the dowel that my uh forefathers got onto w was really because of a time of survival.
They led led a very corpous type life in uh in India. And they wanted to step up a level. And I call this the skills that they had at that time were survival skills. Getting on the boats. They needed to eat. They needed to drink. And so they they aspired for a better life. Those are survival skills. And then my grandfather was uh in Tanzania, Darusalami, he had a shop. He needed a different set of skills.
What does the boat metaphor represent for the AI age?
Uh he also needed his survival skills, but he needed street skills. He in his shop he needed to communicate with s with people, with individuals. He needed to speak the language of the locals, which was uh Swahili. He needed some commerciality to be able to run his shop and sell at discounts and and make some money. Uh and then my my father and my mother came to the UK and they needed a different set of skills. They needed a vocation. I call them. They my brother called them um specialist skills. Uh and those specialist skills were to learn a job. So my dad was the countant, my mom was a midwife. And and in a similar way, people do that on a regular basis. They learn a vocation. And then many of us who've grown up
especially in the West, have realized over the last ten, fifteen, twenty years that you need these additional layers of skills. And I had this business at Eaton X and in that we taught soft skills. So things like communication, critical thinking. Be able to lead a team, be able to work within a team. And like ten years ago, I would think that's all you really needed, right? So you you'd need these four layers of skills. And they've been growing o over every generation. But as we know, the world has uh changed significantly over the last two, three, five years even. Um and because of AI, we need this new set of skills, which is what super skills are. And this is really what my ladder was, what is. So you've got the uh survival skills, you've got street skills, you've got specialist skills, soft skills, and then super skills.
And it starts off with our boat, but then it starts off with uh we're going on a new journey.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Rahim Hirji and what is his new book about?
0:00–2:35
2
What does the boat metaphor represent for the AI age?
2:35–5:44
3
How do the five generations of skills evolve into ‘super skills’?
5:44–8:42
4
Why does Rahim say we’re moving from algorithmic drift to intentional design?
8:42–11:19
5
What is the ‘Human at the Start’ (HATS) or centaur approach and why does it beat ‘human‑in‑the‑loop’?
11:19–14:28
6
Which super skill does Rahim believe AI will never be able to master?
14:28–17:00
7
How does eliminating busy work create opportunities for higher‑order thinking?
17:00–20:13
8
What are the seven super skills and how can listeners develop them?
20:13–23:24