Possible: Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings: stories, schools, superpowers

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Startups, Business, Mindset, Management, Bob Safian, Entrepreneurship, Diversity & Inclusion, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Berman

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2026

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Reed Hastings has announced he'll leave the board at Netflix, the company he co-founded. Before that news broke, Reid and Aria sat down with Hastings on "Possible" to talk about how technology has rewritten the rules of entertainment before, but AI takes him back to his beginnings. He studied AI at Stanford in the late '80s, decades before it became the only conversation in tech. Few people have watched this moment build from as many vantage points: he's served on the boards of Microsoft, Meta, Bloomberg, and, now, Anthropic. In this episode, they talk about what AI changes in entertainment in the stories themselves, and who gets to tell them. They ask what AI can deliver for education, an area Reed has poured hundreds of millions to reform. They dig into whether the disruption coming for workers is a wages problem, a jobs problem, or something else entirely. And they ask what a two-superpower AI race means for everyone else.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In the 1980s, I was in the AI wave that was expert systems, and they were public companies,
0:05.2	and the fifth generation, and the Japanese were going to be this big threat, and, you know,
0:10.1	and that AI didn't work.
0:11.4	But this one is.
0:12.3	Anything that lives in the emotional realm will be impacted not as much by AI because we humans react to these things emotionally. And so again, I think we'll
0:23.2	not watch robots playing basketball. STEM practically took over Stanford University.
0:28.7	Okay? And now maybe what we'll see is a rotation, you know, back to the humanities
0:34.4	into understanding combination of history and literature. If I had a three-year-old
0:40.9	today, I would be like doubling down on the emotional skills. In 20 years, robots will do maybe
0:47.2	1% in the plumbing. At most. Reed Hastings is the co-founder and former CEO of Netflix, the company
0:53.9	that helped define the
0:55.3	streaming error, and in doing so, rewired how two billion people spend their evenings. Under his
1:02.3	leadership, Netflix launched streaming, pioneered the original content model with House of Cards,
1:09.3	went global in 190 countries, and produced some of the
1:13.4	most watched programming in TV history. He ran it for 25 years. But Reed's ambitions have always
1:19.9	extended well beyond entertainment. He's served on the boards of Microsoft and meta. He's currently
1:24.9	on the boards of Bloomberg and Anthropic. He's given hundreds of
1:28.2	millions of dollars to education reform, and he holds a master's degree in artificial intelligence
1:32.6	from Stanford from 1988 before most of us had AI on our radar. Today we're asking,
1:38.4	what does someone with that vantage point across entertainment, technology, AI safety, and the long arc of institutional
1:48.5	change actually think is happening right now. Where is the leverage? What are we getting wrong?
1:55.4	And what would it look like for this moment to go genuinely well for humanity.
	...

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