Reed Hastings on Hollywood’s future, Netflix’s shakeup and knowing when to leave

This is the polite part? And then the impolite part. I will shame him in in private too. It's the polite part when you wear the Warner Brothers discovery shirt. I'm looking forward to the rest of it. Yeah. My guest today is Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. After nearly 30 years building it into a streaming giant, Hastings fully stepped away from Netflix in June when his term as board chairman ended. His impact on Hollywood is undeniable, but his departure comes at an interesting time, both for the entertainment industry with AI and the drama around the Paramount Warner Brothers discovery merger.

And for Netflix itself, which lost out on its bid to buy warners just this month and announced a big shakeup at the C suite level and cut around a thousand jobs. But Hastings is pretty busy in his post-Netflix life. He has a seat on the board of directors at Anthropic. He's still a big philanthropist, especially around education, and is the CEO again now at the Utah Ski Resort, Powder Mountain. I have known Reed since he started Netflix. I've known him a long time. I consider this kind of his exit interview. I wanna hear about what he thinks about where he began and where he has been and what he's gonna do going forward. He's still a a relatively young man and he's full of ideas. I have always found him to be one of the most intelligent and bracing CEOs. All right, let's get to my conversation with Reed Hastings. Our expert question comes from author and legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, another person I've known a very long time, Sir Michael Moritz. We recorded the interview at the Masters of Scale summit in San Francisco. A portion of it was taped in front of a live audience, so don't go anywhere.

Reed, thanks for coming on on. What a treat. I know. It's been twelve years since we last sat down together like this. It was my code conference in twenty fourteen. It was the second season of Orange is the New Black. It was just about to come out of a successful season two of House of Cards had dropped. You really helped us you didn't help, you did usher in major changes in the entertainment industry. If you had to pick one company that sort of shifted everything, it was you. Talk a little bit about That shift. And whether you saw it coming or or Hollywood didn't I know Hollywood didn't see it coming. Uh Well, we did um very traditional great shows, uh like Orange is the New Black, or I don't know if you've seen the season's diplomat. Yes, I did some of Jerry Ross. So uh so think of the product that we make. Basically the same thing, done extremely well. Um, but we make it so much easier to watch, you know, to click and view it at your own time.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (52 minutes, 9,751 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.