Possible

Hosted by Reid Hoffman

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Episodes

157

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Aug 2026

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About the show

What if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Possible is an award-winning, weekly podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Hosts Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger explore what’s possible with forward-thinking leaders, deep thinkers, and ambitious builders across many fields, such as technology, art, education and healthcare. These conversations center on the ways technology—and, in particular, AI—is shaping the future. In episodes, AI tools such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Inflection’s Pi are at work, offering informational asides, prompting guests, or demoing what they can do. Lastly, between guest episodes, Aria interviews her co-host Reid on his latest takes on what’s possible if we use technology—and our collective effort—effectively.

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60 recent

August 19, 202631 min

The whole studio is one guy | Jonathan Brazeau

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

August 12, 202634 min

Making taxes fun with Pikachu and AI | Cadi Zhang

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.

August 5, 202656 min

How Sougwen Chung teaches robots to pause

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.

July 29, 202636 min

The artist using AI to sell brands | Joe Salvatore

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

July 22, 202636 min

The creator using AI to go viral | Will Weinbach

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.

July 15, 202634 min

The film director winning awards with AI | Ben Hansford

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/

July 8, 202632 min

Introducing Tokens to the Future: free tokens for builders

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/

July 1, 20261 hr 16 min

America's aerospace rebirth

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/

June 24, 20261 hr 11 min

Who's got the ball on carbon removal?

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/

June 17, 202629 min

AI’s next big test: the public market

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