Celebrating 500 Episodes with Reed Hastings of Netflix

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Right now, I would say state-of-the-art is building apps that are the front end. Bet that within two or three years, just as we three are having a conversation, there'll be an AI avatar on this podcast. [upbeat music]

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Hope you enjoy today's pod. [upbeat music] Welcome to a very, very special, truly special episode of EdTech Insiders. This is a milestone episode for us. This is EdTech Insider's 500th podcast episode. And we wanted to-

Woo!

Yeah. And we wanted to express our enormous gratitude to the EdTech Insiders community. We've been up five years at the EdTech Insiders helm, and it has been the most amazing journey. Uh, Ben, tell us about the s- the origin of EdTech Insiders.

Yeah. Well, first, I just wanna say thank you to you, Alex. It's been awesome co-hosting this with you, whether it's Week in EdTech, whether it's been our interviews, whether it's been our newsletter. And it's been so mind-blowing to see it grow from just a few listeners, maybe our mom and, and like a few friends, to now a community of hundreds of thousands of people, about 100,000 each week. And the origin story was actually just water cooler talk. You and I met through On Deck, which was like an online community. And I, I don't know, I was... Was I guest number three?

Yeah.

I was guest number three. And, you know, kudos to you. You had an idea around a podcast, around the storytelling, around capturing what was going on at the time, which was in the middle of COVID. And it really has, since that moment, just been an incredibly turbulent time in edtech, with so many great upsides and great stories to tell, but also some real tragic stories over our time. I don't know, as you look back over our five years, what sticks with you from the themes, to the people, to the topics? What resonates with you most?

I mean, so much. And, and, and we should mention that I was gonna do only interviews. My original idea for the EdTech Insider podcast was gonna be interviews with people in the space, giving sight lines so that everybody could make sense of this, this incredibly fast-changing space. And it was your idea, and I think it was an amazing one, to do current events, to actually do it as, "Hey, let's follow this space." And as we both mentioned, it feels like we've had this incredible time capsule over the