Ashton Kutcher on AI and investing

This week, Reid and Aria are joined by Ashton Kutcher. While you might know him as the actor and producer who rose to fame on That ‘70s Show, Dude, Where’s My Car, and MTV’s Punk’d, Ashton is also an accomplished venture capitalist. He is co-founder of the VC firm Sound Ventures, and he has been investing in AI for more than a decade. Ashton, Reid, and Aria discuss the future of AI software and hardware, startups, and the AI revolution’s impact on society. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/ Topics: 3:00 - Hellos and intros 3:56 - Ashton and Reid’s trip to the South Pole 8:20 - What’s exciting about AI for investors 13:31 - How Ashton brings AI into his daily life 19:02 - Changes to the job market in an age of AI 22:01 - How people can maintain their agency and find more time in the age of AI 26:37 - AI and talent-sourcing 30:40 - How to be a “tryer” 35:14 - Rapid-fire questions Select mentions The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt Dædalus Possible is an award-winning podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Tune in for grounded and speculative takes on how technology—and, in particular, AI—is inspiring change and transforming the future. Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with an ambitious builder or deep thinker on a topic, from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education. These conversations also showcase another kind of guest: AI. Whether it's Inflection’s Pi, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or other AI tools, each episode will use AI to enhance and advance our discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  And what's happening with AI, I actually believe that this is one of the greatest advancements of humanity that we could possibly have. Whenever you have a subsystem that comes into place and says, "Hey, we need fewer people to have greater output," those are net-net generally good for humanity. Because people find things to do that are more productive. There are a lot of problems in the world that exist that maybe there's like one or two experts in the world on something. Now you can start to gain infinite expertise against any single vertical.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  That's really powerful.

• 0:57Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:59Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finkler.

• 1:00Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? What we can possibly get right if we leverage technology like AI and our collective effort effectively?

• 1:12Aria Finger?

  We're speaking with technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers across many fields: AI, geopolitics, media, healthcare, education, and more.

• 1:23Reid Hoffman?

  These conversations showcase another kind of guest, whether it's Inflection's Pi, OpenAI's GPT-4, or other AI tools. Each episode, we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.

• 1:35Aria Finger?

  In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it'll take to get there.

• 1:42Reid Hoffman?

  This is Possible.

• 1:50Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is about human progress, innovation, and the future. So we like to bring on guests who have a knack for reading technological tea leaves. These are the folks who seek out and want to usher in the next, next thing. That's why we're especially excited to talk with our guest today. In addition to being a famous actor and producer, he's an accomplished venture capitalist who has invested in AI for more than a decade.

• 2:18Aria Finger?

  In 2015, he founded the venture capital firm Sound Ventures, which manages more than $1 billion in assets. Sound's portfolio includes Airbnb, Duolingo, Nest, Robinhood, and Uber. He recently raised a $243 million AI fund in just five weeks. He has invested in OpenAI, Stability AI, and Anthropic, to name a few.

• 2:38Reid Hoffman?

  So how is a successful, multifaceted entrepreneur navigating tech, VC, and Hollywood amid the rise of what's arguably the most transformative technology of the last century? That's what we're talking about today.

• 2:52Aria Finger?

  Here's our conversation with Ashton Kutcher.

• 3:00Reid Hoffman?

  So I've been looking forward to this for months. Ashton, welcome to Possible. I want to open with a question which you are one of the very few people in the world that I can open with this question, which is, when we were together at the South Pole and I was learning from you about how to transmit the experience, one of the things you did is you held up your iPhone and you walked around the South Pole, like literally just like steps around it, like around the actual pole in the South, and said, there it is, I've gone through every time zone in the world. And I was like, well, that was a great way of encapsulating this experience. Now, you know, years on since we were at the South Pole together,

• 3:45Reid Hoffman?

  how has that experience resonated in your mind? And, you know, kind of, what would you say to other people to say why that maybe they should go to the South Pole?

• 3:56Speaker 00

  So, one, it starts kind of with the intent that you go to the South Pole with, right? And, and one, so we were also with our friend Eric, who always says, "Life is who you travel with," which I fully believe that. And so going to the South Pole with people you like, I think is an imperative, like number one point. We had the great fortune to do that. Two, part of the reason I really wanted to go to the South Pole was that the ice is melting. And sometimes having like a broad...

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Picture that is in your mind, that is an enduring mental visual photograph. Keeps something present for you for much, much longer. And when you have an experience in a place, it maintains the presence. And so I, I, I wanted to have a presence of be with the ice, so to speak, which is sounds kind of weird. But to, in doing that, like have a personal engagement with it. So is that as we face a lot of challenges in climate change, I can have this enduring notion about that. And then

• 5:14Speaker 00

  when we got there, it was so much more than the company that we kept. So much more than just developing this enduring picture. It was a stillness. And I remember our guide Hannah said to us, you know, when you're at the South Pole, when you're standing on the South Pole, you're, you're the most still person in the entire world. And so that, that stillness

• 5:47Speaker 00

  to me was profound. Having a sense of how much you need other people is profound because if you go even, you know, the shortest distance away from your group and something happens, you fall on a crevasse, whatever it is, you're, you're done. It's over. There's no, like, I, I always have a sense, because I was a Boy Scout, that of this sense of survival in, in any condition in the world. Because I can always find fuel, start a fire, hunt food, do what it like. Growing up like on a farm in a rural community, camping my entire childhood. I always had this sense of like, oh, I'm going to be okay. Whether I'm in an urban environment, whether I'm in a rural environment, whether I'm in the woods.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  In Antarctica, you're not okay. Like it's your only chance of survival. Is really other people. And so there's that connection to the group.

• 6:42Aria Finger?

  So I understand that one of the other people on the trip pulled out an LLM-generated answer to the prompt, "There is no Marx without Lenin. Discuss." And that was a turning point for you. Tell me more.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  He said, you know, and he read it and he's like, well, this isn't as good as like any of us could do, but like, it's pretty impressive as to where it is. And I remember thinking to myself, it would take me a month of research to write that article, like no less than a month to be able to write that. And that LLM did it in seconds. And so in my brain, I was like, no, it's better than what I could do. And, and I remember that switch flipping at that moment and saying, thinking to myself, oh, I really need to focus on what's happening here more than anything else that I'm focusing on, because this is changing fast. Because I'd remember seeing an output like two months earlier that was not even near

• 7:38Speaker 00

  that, where I, where I literally went, no, I could do better than that. And so it was really a switch flip for me on that trip about what the future was going to look like, about what the present was and about where focus should be, which I think is maybe the most important thing that we think about as people.

• 8:00Reid Hoffman?

  I totally agree. And by the way, I think that's an excellent framing of the South Pole as an experience. And then a great launch into AI. The actual question was from the All Souls Prize Fellowship Examination. And I think he published that in Daedalus, which was all about AI, edited by the estimable James Manika. So let's, let's dive in to AI. We obviously see this, you know, kind of future coming. And one of the things that I always kind of appreciated about you is, you know, while a lot of people know you as a amazing entertainer, actor and so forth, my experience with you

• 8:39Reid Hoffman?

  is almost entirely as a, you know, technology investor, starting way back to when we both invested in Airbnb. Where are you kind of looking at AI as an investor? How are you, how are you thinking about kind of what the future is that AI is bringing? What is the things that you as an investor are thinking about?

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Well.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  I've I've kind of built a mental model at this point for myself and and and working with my team. And I'm I'm really looking at what's happening as a wholesale platform shift for everything that we do.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  As an investor, I had the great opportunity to have a front row seat to the transition from web one to mobile. And in that transition, there were some things that that some patterns that I saw that I see at the very early stages of repeating themselves. And I and I have a lot of people ask me, well, is this a hype cycle? And I don't think it is. I don't think there's, I think there's very little chance that this is a hype cycle. I mean, there might, it might be a hype cycle from a, you know, valuation perspective on some companies that are claiming to be AI when they're not actually foundational AI.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  But when I think about it, I went, okay. When there was this shift into mobile, there was like Intel, what's inside? And I look at today and I go, it's Nvidia is what's inside.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  And then on top of that, you had the cloud companies.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  And then on top of that, you had these operating systems. And the operating systems of the past

• 10:41Speaker 00

  in mobile where it was iOS and Android. But a lot of people forget that it wasn't just iOS and Android. They're they're very reductive and they go, I don't know, it was, it's iOS and Android on mobile. And you go, no, no, no, BlackBerry was there. And in fact, everybody thought BlackBerry was going to be the most valuable thing because all the executives are using BlackBerry. And so how is that possibly going to get usurped? But there was also Motorola that was there with the Sidekick and in the Motorola two-way pager. And there was no Kia that was there. There were all these operating systems that existed for the mobile revolution. And then on top of that was this infrastructure layer of security and regulatory controls and then the applications that existed on top of it.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  And I look at it today and I actually think you have Nvidia where Intel was. The cloud companies I think are generally the same. But on top of that, the operating system layer, I think of these AIs as operating systems. And right now you have OpenAI, you have Microsoft, you have Anthropic, you have Google and Gemini, and I think of those as the operating systems of the future. And I think that there are going to be applications that exist on top of that. But whereas the mobile web and what happened before was this algorithmic compute that was very predictable, very consistent, the same thing every time,

• 12:09Speaker 00

  that looked a lot more like unskilled labor jobs that could do repeatedly the exact same thing every single time. This next shift is the skilled labor market because what we're doing is is taking the ability to know a lot about everything and distributing the capacity of that with variable outputs, which is a lot more like knowledge worker. And so I think whereas there was a great disruption of the unskilled labor market, data input, various things like that, in the last wave of shift, I think we're looking at the unseating of the skilled labor market in this wave.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  And never before in human history have doctors and lawyers and architects and had the ability to gain this type of leverage in their output. And I think that that's what we're going to see at the application layer on a go-forward basis. So I think we're at the very beginnings of a massive, massive, massive platform shift that is going to impact all of us more than we might even be able to guess.

• 13:32Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's a stunning and interesting new world. What are some of the ways that you're?

• 13:41Reid Hoffman?

  Thinking about kind of, you know, kind of like how you're bringing AI into how you're operating today, like what are some of your experiences with Anthropic's Claude, or GBD4, or other things? Like, what are some of the things that you, today? And what do you think that will be tomorrow?

• 14:03Speaker 00

  I, I probably most actively am using it to ingest information, where I'll take, you know, large quantities of information that I have and, and try to condense it down into something that's like very quickly consumable and understandable. It's probably the thing I do the most. And, and or taking very complex concepts and creating metaphors that, that help me understand it in a, in a more robust way. I'm using, my son plays flag football and I'm the coach of the flag football team. And so, and it's seven on seven, which is a little bit different.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  And I have different players that have different gifts and different skills. And so I've, I've actually used AI to come up with a defensive game plan, to game plan against another team, where I put in the skills of my players and what I perceive the skills of the other players to be, and then say, all right, what, what should be the game plan for that? I've taken all of our, the information that we have stored in, for, on behalf of our venture capital fund, and have tried to replicate some of the questions that I would ask about a deal.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  So instead of them having to come to me, so I, so I'm trying to outsource myself. To the AI as much as I can. I actually took a friend of mine who was a rabbi who passed away uh eight years ago. Um, I took all of his uh books and a bunch of videos that he had recorded of talking about various parsha of the Torah and um uh and holidays and things and uh put that into a database and created a GPT of uh my rabbi friend. So if I'm looking or thinking about a portion of the Torah, uh I can actually go to the GPT and get my rabbi's perspective

• 16:12Speaker 00

  on that portion of the Torah, even though he's passed away. Um, which is kind of fun. Um, so this is just like some of the things I do. I I also, we invested in a company called Rabbit. Um, that is a visual handheld AI device. So I'm a Cub Scout den leader for my kids Cub Scout uh pack uh pack. Um, and I took the kids, it's like seven and eight year olds on a hike. And they're always asking me like, what's this plant? What's that tree? What's this thing? What's it? I don't know. I'm not a botanist, but now I am because I carry this thing around with me and I just pointed at I'm like, what is this plant? What are the medicinal uses of this plant? Is

• 16:55Speaker 00

  this plant poisonous? And I can suddenly become uh an expert on their behalf and we and and use that to teach them about what all these various plants are out in the wild. Um, and assuming you had, you know, 5G connection, I actually think that like people might survive more in the wilderness uh because they wouldn't eat some poisonous berry or whatever it might be. Um, but by the way, in that case, you have to consider hallucination and not and hope like hell it's not hallucinating. Anyone that tells you that this berry is okay to eat. But the those are those are some of the things um that I'm doing. I'm I I also, I

• 17:38Speaker 00

  mean, there's also like all the mundane stuff of like creating like music playlists. Um, and having the AI like I give it like four songs and I'm like create a playlist for me that is um great, that's based on this and it creates a music playlist. I I'm uh I'm using it. To edit a um a video that uh we created. So I found myself, we were, we were doing some fundraising and I was like, you know, I have to, we tell the same story about our, where we come from, our past, our experience, our thesis around this, or whatever it is. And so we, we decided to shoot it and then now we're using AI to actually edit it.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Uh, our corporate video where we can uh take that and it will give us a great first rough cut. And then we can just give it language notes and then it re-edits it uh based on the like, so. And I, and I'm a big fan of using autopilot in my uh, in my, my truck, uh, which is also using it. I, I'm using it all day long. Let's be honest.

• 18:47Aria Finger?

  I love that. We always talk about you're not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by someone who's using AI in terms of jobs. I just didn't think it would extend to like Cub Scout leader, uh, defensive coordinator for a flag football team.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  It gives you leverage i- in your life. And, and I think like people that are worried about it, like taking jobs. I, I had this fear. So I, I, seven years ago, I invested in a company called Vicarious. This brilliant guy, Scott Phoenix was, and, and he was pursuing AGI. And we were talking about it. We were in, you know, cracking through what it was that he was trying to do. And I remember it, I was in Toronto, Mila was doing a movie. And I was in Toronto and I'm laying in bed in the middle of the night and I had this dream. And I woke up in a panic. I was like, oh, the jobs.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  And so it's two in the morning. I'm in Toronto. I call him. Luckily, he was on the West Coast.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  And, and I'm like, I have a real problem. I, I might have to sell my shares in the company. I don't know if I can support this. And he said, what? And I was like.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  You're gonna take every job. And he says to me, first of all, you're a good person for even thinking that. And so everybody who thinks that this AI is gonna take all the jobs is a good person. They're a good person because they care about other people and they care about purpose and human purpose.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  But he goes, here's the good news. The AI is gonna tell you what job you should be doing. That'll make you happier. That will give you more sustenance in your life. That will create resonance around whatever purpose that you have.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  And that is gonna be a net positive for society. And so that's my, I don't think we're taking the roles away from people. I think we're giving people time to be a really good Cub Scout leader or to be a really good flag football coach. And we're giving them their time back to do the things that they love and making them better at the things that they love.

• 21:14Reid Hoffman?

  Well, and I think it's part of that kind of human amplification, right? Because by the way, everyone could use their phone to be a better Cub Scout leader of the pack. And by the way, enable all the kids to do that too. And yes, you know, you know, part of the thing is we're improving hallucinations as we work through the technology and especially you're gonna have another, I think these agents, this new agent universe is gonna have multiple agents and you're gonna have another agent that's kind of cross checking going, whoa, if you're giving advice on eating berries, be 100% correct on this, right? This is one of the ones that doesn't, like hallucinating matters here, otherwise.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  We can't afford error.

• 21:57Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, exactly.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  So what do you think is, you know, some of the ways that people can best, you know, kind of try to re-grasp their agency? Cause I think the part of the thing that people worry about is, you know, I want to be making decisions, I want to be doing things, you know, and I don't want the AI telling me what job to do. I want to be figuring out, like, I want to have that kind of sense of, you know, I matter because I'm choosing and I have agency. Someone said to me,

• 22:36Speaker 00

  my friend Luke actually said to me like 10 years ago, he was like, "Life is just a game and you have to decide what game you're playing."

• 22:49Speaker 00

  And I think that AIs are now going to be players in the game. And we have to decide what game we're playing.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  And I have, I have friends in my life that are incredibly smart about a lot of things.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  But they don't know what I know.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  And they don't feel what I feel.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  And, and, and they can give me advice about things. Sometimes I just have to learn it by making a mistake and that's okay too.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  And sometimes the advice that they give me is dead wrong. And they're really smart people. Like, like some of the smartest people I know,

• 23:39Speaker 00

  I wouldn't take parenting advice from. Some of the smartest people I know, I wouldn't take investing advice from. Like I have, I have a friend who's probably like IQ dwarf me IQ level Einstein.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  But I would not take investing advice from that individual. And, and I think AIs are going to be good at some things. I think humans are going to be good at other things. But ultimately, we're just playing the game. And I kind of think about like the stock markets and I think about like investing. Sometimes when everybody else is playing this game, you're better off playing the other game. And the value will be found there. And so I think what we're going to find is that the value is going to be found in different places. And I, and I think that probably the place

• 24:39Speaker 00

  that the most value is going to be found is in emotional intelligence. And, and people who are playing the game with very high emotional intelligence

• 24:52Speaker 00

  are probably, we're probably going to pivot towards that being a

• 25:00Speaker 00

  more prevailing strategy for some time. And, and if we think about the course of humanity, there was a period of time in humanity where like brute force and power and strength as a human being was the greatest single thing. When the guy was out pushing the plow himself, the scale of that human really, really mattered, right? And we've moved now to a market where

• 25:35Speaker 00

  brute force intelligence has become highly valued in market. But I think that what we'll likely start to see is a emotional intelligence that starts to slide up that value scale over the next century.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  And maybe the one thing that we all are hoping for, which is the prevalence of human kindness becomes the most valued thing in the world. The only advice I give to my kids is like, learn anything you want.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Be willing to work hard, but have great manners and be kind. Because kindness is probably going to matter more than anything by the time they're looking for jobs.

• 26:28Aria Finger?

  I love that advice. As a parent of three kids, people are always like, what do you tell your kids to learn? Just work hard and be kind. That's awesome. Thinking about talent, I love that empathy is going to become more important. Brute force intelligence is still important. Like, what do you look for? How do you use AI in your talent sourcing? Like, what is the way that you do this? Because identifying talent, spotting talent is such a critical part of the VC lifecycle.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  The biggest thing I look for is people I want to work for.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  I kind of treat it like, not like I'm interviewing them, but almost like they're interviewing me. And I need to get to a point with a founder or someone that's going to join our team at Sound where I go, I'd work for that person.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Because it means that I trust their intelligence. It means I trust their morality. It means I trust that they're going to succeed. And I always kind of think about the companies we invest in. And I say it to founders a lot. I was like, you're going to be a successful company whether or not we invest. I wouldn't want to invest in you if like, your success is reliant on me being an investor. You're going to be successful whether or not we invest. I hope that we're going to lend our skills and effort to get you there faster.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  And with less pain. Because no matter what building a company is painful. But I hope that we can make it less painful. So that's what I look for. And the way I assess it usually starts with.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  Distance traveled. I had this really. I did a project and I about six years ago, where I asked an intern to go find me where the most intelligent people in the country want to work the most. And then I and I wasn't even looking to invest. I just wanted to know why they wanted to work where they wanted to work. And so I started interviewing founders and CEOs of those companies. And turns out

• 29:01Speaker 00

  six out of the eight companies that I interviewed are all had done very, very well. But one of the founders said to me, when he interviews talent, that he looks for distance traveled. And I was like, let's swing that. And he said, well, if you start in a position of advantage and you incrementally increase that position of advantage, that's fine. But if you start in a position of extraordinary disadvantage, and then even if you're not at the place where the person of advantage was at, but you've traveled from disadvantage to a lesser point of advantage,

• 29:46Speaker 00

  but the distance that that that work that it took to get to there is the metric that I'm looking for. And so, so that's one of the things that I'm constantly looking for is. And one of the questions I asked to get there is like, what's the hardest thing you've had to overcome in your life? And if that thing was really, really hard and they overcame it, I go. Okay, that's, that's pretty exceptional. If the hardest thing that someone's overcome in their life is their parents telling them they can't go to Coachella, that's probably not gonna be, you know, the probable. And so I'm always trying to tease out like where you came from,

• 30:30Speaker 00

  how you got to where you are, what's the most extraordinary thing that you've been able to achieve? And, and, and then, and then measure what that distance is.

• 30:40Reid Hoffman?

  One of the things I love about your answer, it's like learning speed. Because it's the learn together and so do you, did they learn to adjust? Cause entrepreneurship is always about, you know, jumping off a cliff, stumbling airplane the way down. You know, it's like, you know, all this unknown, you know, gale force winds and all the rest. And this, Ryan, brings me back to, I think, another great lens on you, which you described yourself as a trier, because I think that you go and try things. It's part of the, you know, whether it's, you know, South Pole, AI, you know, the, the most spectacular move in the technology investing that I've seen,

• 31:22Reid Hoffman?

  you know, from, you know, anyone in the, in the LA ecosystem. What's the kind of the mental approach of being that trier and learner? And what would you give as guideposts to other people who would say, I should become a trier too?

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for the compliment. That feels warm and fuzzy inside.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  This is gonna sound really weird, so bear with me.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  I was a model.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  It's a really weird job to have. And I never understood

• 32:01Speaker 00

  why

• 32:04Speaker 00

  some people would get this job and somebody else wouldn't get that job. But I would go to these casting calls and get, just get rejected for just being me. I wasn't doing anything. I had, they were, I would walk into a room, they would look at some pictures, I would walk from here to there, and I would just get rejected for just being me. And so

• 32:29Speaker 00

  that's some weird form of like ego punishment that's, that's outstanding.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Then I was an actor and

• 32:44Speaker 00

  the same thing would happen. I would go into one job I would get, I would go in and I would do what I think is an even better job on another audition. I wouldn't get the role and I got rejected and got rejected and got rejected and got rejected. And I think like that function of consistent rejection is a really healthy thing.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Because it forces you to start to constantly. It can be healthy, but it can also be unhealthy. You can, and there are moments where I've, where it's been very unhealthy for me, where I, where you're questioning everything you do. And you beat yourself up and you go, I'm not good enough and I'm not like, but there's also like a healthy function of, okay, I need to inspect what I did, analyze it and improve. Inspect what I did, analyze it and improve. Inspect what I did, analyze it and approve. And you're constantly trying to do it. And by the way, down to

• 33:52Speaker 00

  the handshake of the modeling casting person, down to whether or not you look them in the eye, down to whether or not you, what your posture looks like, like to that level. And then as an actor, like how you say that, how you inflect that, how you communicate that, what you dress like, what you look like, like all of those things, you're analyzing and constantly giving yourself notes and being open to improvement. And then I saw this video with Kobe Bryant like two weeks ago. And somebody asked him, are you driven because you hate losing?

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Or are you driven because you love winning? And he said, neither.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  He said, I'm driven by learning in the present moment. And that then led me to like John Wooden and his like, don't look at the scoreboard, look at this moment. Are you doing everything in this moment you can? To do your, and, and so I think that like being willing to fail.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  And being present to learn in the current moment will always allow you to try because all you can do is get better.

• 35:13Reid Hoffman?

  Amen.

• 35:22Reid Hoffman?

  So let's do rapid fire. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 35:30Speaker 00

  I would say

• 35:33Speaker 00

  The Anxious Generation, which is Jonathan Haidt's new book about Gen Z. That gives me optimism because we've identified a problem and now we can start solving it.

• 35:49Aria Finger?

  Love it, and I couldn't agree more. So what's a question you which people would ask you more often?

• 35:57Speaker 00

  I can tell you a question that I wish people would ask me less often.

• 36:00Aria Finger?

  Great.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Which is, can I take a picture? Question I wish people would ask me more often is, how are you?

• 36:11Aria Finger?

  Love it, but a real answer.

• 36:13Reid Hoffman?

  Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?

• 36:19Speaker 00

  I think I see extraordinary progress in personalized medicine

• 36:28Speaker 00

  that I get insanely excited about.

• 36:32Aria Finger?

  So for the final question, can you leave us with a final thought on what is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity's way in the next 15 years? And what's the first step to get there?

• 36:46Speaker 00

  I believe the medical field will only be challenged by new

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Discoveries of issues. Lifespan will expand past 110, 120 years. I believe that that's possible. And that's really exciting. I also believe that we'll solve for the energy crisis that we currently have. I believe there will be a breakthrough that allows for, or a bunch of micro breakthroughs that allow for us to continue to consume energy at the rate that we're consuming it. So I think that that will be good because I think that then that will allow for a lot more innovation.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  I believe this next generation is very focused on climate and I think a lot of the issues that we have with climate are solvable. We just haven't created efficient solutions to them yet, but I think that efficient solutions are inbound. I believe as a diehard American that we are going to bring industry back to the United States of America and we're going to do so through robotic innovation and build out of a brand new industrialization that is only possible in America for the time being.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  I believe that we're going to find more effective ways to use space and that being outer space to benefit humanity in the very short term.

• 38:34Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wondra Media Network. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schlead, Adrian Bain, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 38:53Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sepieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, Ben Relis, Mike Van Rikum, Kathleen Flaherty, and Little Monster Media Company.