Possible

Episodes

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  AI’s midterm coalitions, Anthropic’s safety bill, and VC conflicts 28.10.2026 29m

  Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger weigh in on AI policy heading into the midterms, from Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar’s proposal to ban superintelligence to Anthropic’s own frontier AI safety bill. They map the political coalitions forming around AI regulation, including a bipartisan push from Chris Murphy and Josh Hawley to hold developers liable when AI agents hack. Reid explains why pausing AI for a congressional process would be a mistake. He argues AI companies should work with any administration but stay transparent about political spending, and that government can borrow expertise through councils and working groups. He also makes the case for his dual mandate: keep America in the lead on AI while making sure it helps people now. They also examine Satya Nadella’s call to treat AI models as potential insider risks, the public feud between Factory and Cognition, and whether VCs can still back competing AI startups. Along the way, Reid uses water-cooler conversations to explore where company IP ends and human nature begins. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/
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  Karpathy’s AI gap, free Adobe clones, and AI’s effect on persistence 21.10.2026 27m

  What happens to software businesses when AI makes their products easier to recreate? Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger explore what a developer’s effort to rebuild seven Adobe apps with Claude means for software pricing, competitive moats, and intellectual property. They also unpack Andrej Karpathy’s AI capability gap: why everyday users and researchers inside frontier labs have very different views of what AI can do. Then, they examine a randomized study showing that brief AI assistance caused—not just correlated with—reduced persistence after that help was removed. Reid makes the case for AI as a cognitive exoskeleton—and for designing tools that build grit alongside capability. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/
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  Why Americans are so worried about AI 14.10.2026 28m

  Only 36% of AI-aware Americans expect AI to mostly help their country, according to a Gallup and Microsoft survey. Reid traces that unease to three forces: fear that the future will be worse than the present (which AI amplifies when prosperity has not reached much of the country), an instinct to protect what Americans have, and doubts about who will share in AI’s gains. With Aria Finger, he makes the case for winning at AI while spreading its prosperity, including through AI and robotics in manufacturing. They also examine HackerRank’s Chakra AI interviewer and why hiring should remain a team decision. Finally, OpenAI’s plan to test visual ads in ChatGPT raises another question: can a free AI assistant earn trust while carrying advertising? Reid calls for a clear separation between ads and answers, enforceable commitments, and third-party audits. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/
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  Building safety tools no one can take away with ROOST’s Camille François 07.10.2026 1h 24m

  Protecting people online shouldn’t depend on whether a company keeps its safety tools effective, affordable, and available. ROOST founding president Camille François joins Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger to explain how a nonprofit is turning trust and safety into shared infrastructure. She digs into why social media was a blip in how we build tech, what Discord did after Twitter bought Smyte and shut it down, and how two people running a fandom app caught 19 cases of child exploitation in two weeks. A daycare switching its Alexa wake word to "computer" becomes a lesson in how the next generation should relate to machines. They also examine why policy without tools is ineffective, how a shared safety commons helps startups compete, and what it will take to make safety as invisible as encryption.
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  Who gets to pull the plug on AI? 30.09.2026 15m

  Reid Hoffman sees promise in an AI buildout and wants its financial risks in the open. He and Aria Finger unpack a Financial Times report on up to $300 billion in AI infrastructure guarantees largely absent from the balance sheets of technology companies. They explore California Governor Gavin Newsom’s push for independent lab auditors and an AI kill switch, and discuss what effective federal oversight could look like. Reid explains how these proposals differ from the 2024 bill he opposed and makes the case for an international cyber treaty. A Truth Social poll to rename AI also prompts a debate about why “artificial” sells the technology short.
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  When AI's builders sound the alarm 23.09.2026 40m

  Can America lead in AI while making life better for everyday Americans? Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger weigh in on Dario Amodei’s call to pace the frontier, and Reid makes the case for America’s dual mandate: leading in AI while delivering prosperity for the many. Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger puts his personal estimate of AI-driven extinction risk above 10%. They unpack that warning alongside Sam Altman’s support for slower development and David Sacks calling Anthropic and OpenAI a cartel. Reid identifies biological threats, cyberattacks, and job disruption as the real risks, makes the case for steering over pausing, and explains why kill switches matter. From data centers that don’t raise local electricity bills to a free AI medical assistant for every American, they explore what rebuilding public trust could require. Read “AI for All Americans” on Substack: https://reidhoffman.substack.com/p/ai-dual-mandate
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  Seven creators, $1,000 a week in AI tokens, one summer 16.09.2026 44m

  Reid Hoffman and Parth Patil argue that if your AI experiments always work, you’re not pushing hard enough. Wrapping up the Tokens to the Future series, they revisit seven grantees’ experiments with $1,000 a week each in tokens. Their conversations span Dungeons & Dragons worldbuilding, an iOS game built in a weekend, and personal agents whose usefulness compounds over years. They explore how AI can shift more people from execution-focused “cog jobs” to creative “spark jobs,” and why expertise can sometimes make new possibilities harder to see. Throughout, they ask what to delegate and where story, pacing, and judgment still demand human direction. Plus, Parth’s example of ChatGPT picking seven for a “random” number raises a bigger question: how do you get surprise from a system built to predict?
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  Can we defend against AI hacks? | Dozie Anazia 09.09.2026 40m

  When AI can fake your CFO’s face and voice, what still counts as proof of identity? Infosec Analyst Dozie Anazia joins Reid Hoffman and Parth Patil to explain how AI is transforming cyberattacks, penetration testing, and autonomous defense. Drawing on projects including the Breakfast news app and Aegis URL scanner, he shows how Claude and Codex can build software, uncover an XSS flaw, and run a pen test—while still falling short of unsupervised network defense and elite human hackers. They explore purple teaming, agent-versus-agent review, and the advantage defenders retain over attackers. Plus, one low-tech defense against a stolen voice: a family safe word.
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  Training robots for a world they’ve never seen 02.09.2026 59m

  Useful robots won’t be programmed one task at a time; they’ll need to adapt to unfamiliar objects, environments, and robot bodies. Physical Intelligence cofounder Chelsea Finn (named last month to the TIME100 AI list for 2026) joins Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger to explain how general-purpose robot models learn to act in the messy physical world. She explores why lower-quality training data can strengthen a model, what months of failed laundry-folding attempts revealed, and how the same system can work across different robot platforms. A robot mistaking an oven for a drawer becomes a lesson in the strange line between useful generalization and obvious error. They also examine why robot demos can mislead, how hardware reliability can stall progress, and what it will take to move AI off the screen and into the world. Congratulations to Chelsea, recently named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in AI: https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/chelsea-finn/
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  Inside an AI-powered personal dashboard | Matthew Tiemann 26.08.2026 31m

  AI strategist Matthew Tiemann is building toward a world where AI agents work around the clock—and humans step in for the decisions that matter. Across his work at energy services company Foundry-Logic and his personal projects, he uses Claude Code, Codex, and Fable to automate knowledge work and accelerate software development. Those projects range from an AI-assisted iOS game to a personal dashboard informed by his goals, to-do list, and Oura Ring sleep data. Drawing on experience across data analytics, supply chain, robotics, logistics, and energy, Matthew joins Reid Hoffman and Parth Patil to explore proactive “heartbeat” agents and shared context. They also discuss adversarial review, 12-hour human check-ins, and AI’s limits in subjective judgment—revealing why human vision and alignment remain essential.
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  The whole studio is one guy | Jonathan Brazeau 19.08.2026 31m

  Jonathan Brazeau joins Reid Hoffman and Parth Patil to explain how AI animation and filmmaking are making the one-person studio possible—letting small teams create films that once required 100 people. From Dungeons & Dragons world-building and an RPG art book illustrated with Stable Diffusion, to a fantasy-western short film made with Midjourney, Luma AI, and Suno, Jonathan breaks down his workflow: character design, storyboarding, mocap, rotoscoping, music, and human curation. The conversation explores the “cogs and sparks” framework, what a lean AI-native studio can realistically accomplish, how taste separates art from AI slop, and why technology still can’t provide the essential creative spark. Read Questmaxxing on Substack: https://reidhoffman.substack.com/p/questmaxxing
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  Making taxes fun with Pikachu and AI | Cadi Zhang 12.08.2026 34m

  Cadi Zhang joins Reid Hoffman and Parth Patil to explore how generative AI is changing game development, world models, and robotics. Drawing on her work across Unity games, VR teleoperation, AI accounting, and robotics product operations, Cadi explains what virtual worlds can teach embodied intelligence—and why physical robots still lack the tactile, real-world data that can’t be scraped from the internet. She shares how she uses GPT, Blender, PixelLab, and Aseprite to prototype games faster, including a duck-themed imposter game and PokéTax, her Pokémon-inspired tax-filing game. AI can rapidly generate code, gameplay mechanics, and 3D assets, she says, but it still can’t judge whether a game feels fun, maintain a consistent art style, or model the precise force needed to fold a sheet of paper. Reid, Parth, and Cadi discuss simulation-to-reality gaps, the limits of current world models, robot safety, humanoid versus task-specific form factors, and why human taste remains the decisive creative skill.
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  How Sougwen Chung teaches robots to pause 05.08.2026 56m

  Sougwen Chung has spent more than a decade drawing alongside robots—not to automate their art, but to discover what changes when a machine becomes a creative partner. They join Reid to trace the evolution of D.O.U.G., a series of robotic collaborators that learns from Sougwen’s gestures, including a neural network trained on two decades of their drawings. Sougwen explains why unexpected machine marks became errors to “poeticize,” what becoming machine-readable taught them about remaining human, and why they call their practice “operational art” rather than “AI art.” They also explore a new system guided by brainwaves and an ancient calligraphic pause—and ask whether the intelligent systems we build need more than speed and capability. Maybe they also need silence, restraint, and the wisdom to wait. Credits: A big thanks to Natalie Stone, Tessa Nijdam, Arina Ermakova , the Scilicet team, Fellowship, Reece Straw, Sam Osborn, Nick Capezzera, Maximilian Andereya, Peter Butterworth, Haruka Wang and the team at Mosaic Ventures for hosting the conversation. Additional Credits: MIMICRY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_1), 2015. Footage: Sam Osborn and Nick Capezzera. MEMORY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_2), 2017. Footage: NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo. COLLECTIVITY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_3), 2018. Footage: New INC & Nokia Bell Labs. SPECTRALITY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_4), 2020. Footage: Maximilian Andereya. ASSEMBLY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_5), 2022. Footage: Peter Butterworth. GENESIS Process Film, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Studio SCILICET.
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  The artist using AI to sell brands | Joe Salvatore 29.07.2026 36m

  Visual artist and brand content creator Joe Salvatore joins Reid Hoffman and Parth Patil to explain how AI is turning creative professionals into orchestrators of systems rather than makers of one piece at a time. Joe spent four years chasing every new image and video model out of pure creative curiosity before Parth pushed him to take a step back and become a director of these tools. He traces that shift, from generating a single image, to making 200, to running fully automated ad campaigns through Codex, and explains why the critical skill turned out not to be technical at all. As he puts it, he can outsource production, but he can't outsource his taste. He walks through a live campaign for Ketone-IQ, using a Hermes agent to research decades of proven advertising styles, then chaining models together to generate and grade hundreds of on-brand variations overnight. He and Parth get into how a shared creative agent learns from everyone it works with, why articulating an idea clearly has become the differentiator, and how AI made the gap between a sloppy brief and a tight one impossible to hide. Reid, Parth and Joe close on Wittgenstein, and why language no longer just describes the world but summons it. Referenced in episode: the Lord of the Rings x Wes Anderson AI trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrjL_TSOFrI
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  The creator using AI to go viral | Will Weinbach 22.07.2026 36m

  Social media strategist Will Weinbach joins Reid Hoffman and Parth Patil to explain how AI agents are reshaping content, distribution, and what a single creator can build. Will had never written a line of code before Parth handed him the tools to start. He traces his path from using ChatGPT to write essays, to vibe coding his own software, to running autonomous remote agents like OpenClaw and Hermes—systems that accumulate skills and memory and improve themselves on the fly. Not knowing how anything works under the hood, he argues, is exactly what lets him experiment without fear of what he might break. He walks through the fully autonomous social workflow he built, an agent that pulls, edits, captions, schedules, and posts content across every platform, then reads the analytics and A/B tests itself toward a goal. He also recounts the night his agent went rogue and posted four times at 4 a.m., and the experiment where he put an agent inside his TV just to see if it would work. Along the way, Will and Reid dig into what younger creators understand about attention that older marketing teams miss, and what happens to the resume when the real skill becomes knowing how to use AI. For Will, the edge isn't expertise. It's a willingness to try.
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  The film director winning awards with AI | Ben Hansford 15.07.2026 34m

  Commercial director, AI filmmaker, and USC professor Ben Hansford joins Reid Hoffman and Parth Patil to explain how AI is reshaping Hollywood, film production, VFX, and comics. Ben has been experimenting with generative AI since before DALL-E and Midjourney went mainstream, using the earliest tools to sharpen commercial treatments, win jobs, and teach one of the country's first AI film courses. He traces Hollywood's arc from student protests and industry resistance to a scramble for answers, as shrinking budgets and shifting audiences push creators toward new workflows. He also recounts how a 30-minute AI VFX test reset his sense of what a director can prototype, and why he's building BloqBloq around a stark creative bottleneck: as he puts it, there are more NBA players than professional comic book illustrators. He maps the "iceberg" of creation, from databases and security to publishing and iteration, and explains why turning an idea into a finished product takes more than a prompt. For Ben, AI isn't just a tool. It's a crew. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/
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  Introducing Tokens to the Future: free tokens for builders 08.07.2026 32m

  Tokens to the Future is a new limited series from Possible about how AI is expanding what people can build—with more tokens, custom agents, and a community behind them. In this first episode, Reid sits down with Parth Patil, co-creator of Reid AI and co-architect of the Token Grantee program, to lay out the thesis behind it. Through the program, a small inaugural group of creators and builders—working across film, gaming, comics, print, digital art and more—each receive a recurring grant of $1,000 a week in tokens, access to a custom fleet of AI agents, and an ongoing collaboration with Parth. There are no restrictions on which tools they use; the freedom to choose is the point. Grantees will join the series over the next few months. Each episode features one of them showcasing how they're using these tools to build products that could reshape their work, role and industries. Along the way, Reid and Parth discuss how AI agents are becoming persistent collaborators, why the biggest opportunities may lie in creative rather than technical domains, and how closing the gap between an idea and a finished product is changing entrepreneurship. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/
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  America's aerospace rebirth 01.07.2026 1h 16m

  Blake Scholl joins Reid and Aria to explain why the future of aviation won't be built by reviving the past, but by reinventing it. They explore how Boom Supersonic rebuilt an entire aerospace supply chain, why small AI-powered engineering teams are outperforming legacy organizations, and how software is transforming the way physical products are designed, tested, and manufactured. Blake explains why building their own engine changed everything, how AI is accelerating hardware innovation far beyond coding, and why America's biggest bottleneck isn't technology but its ability to build. Together, they unpack what it takes to solve seemingly impossible problems—and why the next generation of industrial innovation may come from startups willing to rethink entire systems.  For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/
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  Who's got the ball on carbon removal? 24.06.2026 1h 11m

  Carbon removal has gone from a niche climate concept to one of the world's most important challenges. Reid and Aria sit down with Nan Ransohoff, Head of Public Goods at Stripe and a leader behind Frontier, the advanced market commitment helping build the market place for carbon removal. Nan explains why cutting emissions alone won't be enough to meet climate goals, what it will take to scale carbon removal from thousands to trillions of tons, and why governments—not just companies—will ultimately need to create and fund the markets that make it possible. They discuss the most promising carbon removal technologies, the role AI could play in accelerating climate solutions, and what it means to be a "general manager" for challenges that affect all of humanity. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/
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  AI’s next big test: the public market 17.06.2026 29m

  Reid and Aria explore what the coming wave of AI IPOs could mean for the future of technology, investing, and the broader economy. They discuss why public ownership may become an important way for society to participate in AI’s upside, where Reid sees the strongest long-term opportunities across the AI landscape, and why the next generation of software engineers will be defined by managing AI agents. They end the episode examining the rise of AI-generated music, what it means for creativity and copyright, and why AI should be viewed as a tool that expands human expression rather than replaces it.  To watch Reid’s Pi Day music video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DV3-Pw8EZ7x/?hl=en