Transcript
Reed Hastings (0:00)
In the 1980s, I was in the AI wave that was expert systems and they were public companies and fifth generation. And the Japanese were going to be this big threat and, you know, and that AI didn't work, but this one is 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 not watch robots playing basketball. STEM practically took over Stanford University. Okay, and now maybe what we'll see is a rotation, you know, back to the humanities into understanding combination of history and literature. If I had a three year old today, I would be like doubling down on the emotional skills. In 20 years, robots will do maybe 1% of the plumbing at most.
Reid Hoffman (0:49)
Reed Hastings is the co founder and former CEO of Netflix, the company that helped define the streaming era. And in doing so, reed rewired how 2 billion people spend their evenings. Under his leadership, Netflix launched streaming, pioneered the original content model with House of Cards, went global in 190 countries, and produced some of the most watched programming in TV history. He ran it for 25 years.
Interviewer (1:18)
But Reid's ambitions have always extended well beyond entertainment. He served on the boards of Microsoft and Meta. He's currently on the boards of Bloomberg and Anthropic. He's given hundreds of millions of dollars to education reform. And he holds a master's degree in artificial intelligence from Stanford from 1988 before most of us had AI on our radar.
Reid Hoffman (1:37)
Today we're asking, what does someone with that vantage point across entertainment technology, AI safety, and the long arc of institutional change actually think is happening right now? Where is the leverage? What are we getting wrong? And what would it look like for this moment to go genuinely well for humanity?
Interviewer (2:01)
This is a conversation about technology as a civilizational lever, about whether the people building AI and the people governing it are asking the right questions about what entertainment can teach us about human nature and what human nature can teach us about AI and about what it means to have spent 35 years watching technology reshape the world and to still believe the best is ahead.
Reid Hoffman (2:25)
And now to our conversation with Reed Hastings. Reed, awesome as usual, to talk with you. I thought we'd start with something a little light for both of us. So I'll answer this too. But we'll start with you. In various weird ways, we get mistaken for each other. What was one of the funny ways that comes to mind for you about being mistaken for me? And then I will also answer that question.
