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**Ben Hansford** (0:00)
AI is a crew, AI is a team, AI is the Navy SEALs. You can give it a mission, and whether or not you love the results, it is going to accomplish it. I always think about, like, you know, Jack Nicholson technically is a tool of Stanley Kubrick. Jack's gonna do what Jack's gonna do.

**Reid Hoffman** (0:14)
Yes.

**Ben Hansford** (0:14)
Right? And Stanley can nudge it, and he can say some things, but when he calls action, Jack's gonna Jack. I've never seen anything shift as quick as people's opinions on AI. There was a phase about a year ago where I felt like everyone needed help, and now they don't need help anymore, they need answers. We are actively watching budgets decline and distribution become more complicated, and Gen Z and Gen Alpha are just, you know, they're floating away from sort of modern studios. AI is their answer, and they know it. They just, they now have to kind of bring it all together. The shift has gone from like, we hate you to please help us.

**Parth Patil** (0:47)
The Token Grantee Program gives $1,000 a week in tokens to high potential creators already deep in AI across film, gaming, comics, print, and digital art. There are no tool restrictions. The freedom to choose is the point. Grantees also get access to my own custom fleet of agents and an ongoing collaboration with me.
The goal? To close the gap between an idea and the world.

**Reid Hoffman** (1:13)
Ben, welcome, and Parth, why don't you introduce Ben? Selecting him, how do you met, that kind of thing.

**Parth Patil** (1:20)
Ben and I met I think three years ago now, maybe four, but Ben and I met in LA. He hit me up through a shared Slack channel. We're in with a bunch of guys from, actually, traditional Hollywood, more traditional Hollywood guys. Ben was the first person I met in traditional film and entertainment that was experimenting with AI. At a time when almost no one was experimenting with AI in Los Angeles, I was like, oh my God, I can have a conversation with one person, I don't have to go to San Francisco for this.
Ben would come over to my place and just hang out in the lounge and we would just hack. I would show him the latest agents and then he was playing with image and video models back then when they barely worked.
This is Ben, he's a professor at USC and teaches film, and also just very deep in the latest in AI, from coding agents to image and video and what it means for entertainment pipelines.

**Ben Hansford** (2:19)
Yeah, and full disclosure, Reid, I owe this to Parth. Like I owe literally, because he's right, like at this time, we're pre-Dall-E, we're pre-Midjourney. Like all you're doing is, you know, you're on GitHub, I burned one GPU, I got, you know, I killed one computer with the virus, like it was the wild, wild west. And I started reaching out to some friends because I was like, this is the future, this is absolutely the future. Most of them disagreed. I was even at FMX in Germany and they told me I was crazy. And then a mutual friend of mine in Parth was like, you've got to meet Parth.
He is the holder of the Keys. And then I went and met with Parth. And I think my joke is that, you know, when Neo meets Morpheus and he gets red-pilled, I met Parth and I was red-pilled from there on.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:04)
It could be red-pilled or given you were going, Keymaster, we could even go back to Ghostbusters.

**Ben Hansford** (3:08)
Oh, let's go Ghostbusters.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:12)
For those people who've seen the original.
That might be dating myself. So say a little bit about, in addition to meeting Parth, how did your early AI experiments start? Like what was the, like this is the future. I got to start even though everything's broken right now.

**Ben Hansford** (3:32)
So I actually, I get a really lucky break, which is I'm a commercial director.
So I make my bread and butter directing commercials, and so my world has always been very visual. In fact, I can date it all the way back to like, I was the neighborhood dungeon master.
So I start telling stories as a kid, and everything is visual for me, and then I become a commercial director. But probably about four and a half years ago, I start playing with generative AI, and I get this immediate bump. I get this immediate superpower, which is I start winning more and more commercial jobs with it. So I'm starting to do treatments, you know, and even just like being able to do better image manipulation, being able to do like really like gorgeous style frames that no one knows where they came from. I start winning more and more commercial jobs. And at the time, I'm teaching directing at USC.