This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
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 that 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. That’s really powerful.
REID:
Hi, I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
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.
ARIA:
We’re speaking with technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers across many fields—AI, geopolitics, media, healthcare, education, and more.
REID:
These conversations showcase another kind of guest. Whether it’s Inflection’s Pi or OpenAI’s GPT-4 or other AI tools, each episode we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.
ARIA:
In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it’ll take to get there.
REID:
This is Possible.
REID:
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 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.
ARIA:
In 2015, he founded the venture capital firm Sound Ventures, which manages more than a billion dollars 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.
REID:
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.
ARIA:
Here’s our conversation with Ashton Kutcher.
REID:
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—literally just steps 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, how has that experience resonated in your mind? And, you know, what would you say to other people to say why they should go to the South Pole?
ASHTON KUTCHER:
So one, it starts, kind of, with the intent that you go to the South Pole with, right? And one, so we were also with our friend Eric, who always says, “Life is who you travel with,” which I fully believe. And so going to the South Pole with people you like, I think, is an imperative 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 it—sometimes having like a broad 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 wanted to have a presence of being with the ice, so to speak, which sounds kind of weird. But, in doing that, have a personal engagement with it.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
So is that—as we face a lot of challenges in climate change, I can have this enduring notion about that. And then 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 the most still person in the entire world.” And so that stillness 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 in a crevasse, whatever it is, you’re done. It’s over. There’s no, like—I always have a sense, because I was a Boy Scout, that, of this sense of survival in any condition in the world, because I can always find fuel, start a fire, hunt food, do whatever. Like growing up 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.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
Whether I’m in an urban environment, whether I’m in a rural environment, whether I’m in the woods. In Antarctica, you’re not okay, [laugh]. Like, your only chance of survival is really other people. And so there’s that connection to the group.
ARIA:
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.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
He said, you know, and he read it, and he was like, “Well, this isn’t as good as 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 I, so in my brain I was like, no, it’s better than what I could do. 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.” And because I remember seeing an output like two months earlier that was not even near that, 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.
REID:
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 Dædalus, which was all about AI, edited by the estimable James Manyika. So let’s dive into AI. We obviously see this, you know, kind of future coming. And one of the things that I’ve always kind of appreciated about you is, you know, while a lot of people know you as an amazing entertainer, actor and so forth, my experience with you is almost entirely as a 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 thinking about what the future is that AI is bringing? What are the things that you as an investor are thinking about?
ASHTON KUTCHER:
Well, I’ve kind of built a mental model at this point for myself and working with my team, and I’m really looking at what’s happening as a wholesale platform shift for everything that we do. 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—some patterns that I saw that I see at the very early stages of repeating themselves. And I have a lot of people ask me, “Well, is this a hype cycle? Is this?” 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 be a hype cycle from a valuation perspective on some companies that are claiming to be AI when they’re not actually foundational AI.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
But when I think about it, I went, “Okay, when there was this shift into mobile that was like, Intel, what’s inside? And I look at today and I go, it’s Nvidia [laugh] is what’s inside.” And then, on top of that, you had the cloud companies. And then on top of that, you had these operating systems. And the operating systems of the past in mobile were iOS and Android. But a lot of people forget that it wasn’t just iOS and Android. They’re very reductive. And they go, “Oh, no, no, 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 were using Blackberry. And so how is that possibly going to get a usurp? But there was also Motorola that was there with the Sidekick—and the Motorola two-way pager.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
And there was no Kia that was there, and 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 things, and then the applications that existed on top of it. 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, at 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 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.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
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 taking the ability to know a lot about everything and distributing the capacity of that with variable outputs, which is a lot more like a 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 the shift, I think we’re looking at the unseating of the skilled labor market in this wave. And never before in human history have doctors and lawyers and architects 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.
REID:
[Laugh] Yeah. It’s a stunning and interesting new world. What are some of the ways that you’re thinking about how you’re bringing AI into how you’re operating today? Like what are some of your experiences with Anthropic’s Claude or GPT-4 or other things? What are some of the things that you, you today—and what do you think that will be tomorrow?
ASHTON KUTCHER:
I probably most actively am using it to ingest information, where I’ll take large quantities of information that I have and try to condense it down into something that’s very quickly consumable and understandable. It’s probably the thing I do the most. Or taking very complex concepts and creating metaphors that help me understand it 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. And I have different players that have different gifts and different skills. And so I’ve actually used AI to come up with a defensive game plan. It’s a 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.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
And then say, “Alright, what, what should be the game plan for that?” I’ve taken all of 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. So instead of them having to come to me—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 eight years ago—I took all of his books and a bunch of videos that he had recorded talking about various parshah of the Torah and holidays and things—and put that into a database and created a GPT of my rabbi friend. So if I’m looking or thinking about a portion of the Torah, I can actually go to the GPT and get my rabbi’s perspective on that portion of the Torah, even though he’s passed away, which is kind of fun.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
So this is just like some of the things I’m doing. I also—we invested in a company called Rabbit that is a visual handheld AI device. So I’m a Cub Scout den leader for my kids’ Cub Scout pack. 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 point at it, I’m like, “What is this plant? What are the medicinal uses of this plant? Is this plant poisonous?” And I can suddenly become an expert on their behalf and use that to teach them about what all these various plants are out in the wild.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
And assuming you had, you know, 5G connection, I actually think that people might survive more in the wilderness [laugh] because they wouldn’t eat some poisonous berry or whatever it might be. But by the way, in that case, you have to consider hallucination and hope like hell it’s not hallucination—anyone that tells you that this berry is okay to eat. But that, those are some of the things that I’m doing. There’s also all the mundane stuff of creating music playlists and having the AI—like I give it like four songs and I’m like, “Create a playlist for me that is great, that’s based on this.” And it creates some music playlist. I’m using it to edit a video that we created.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
So I found myself—we were doing some fundraising, and I was like, you know, I have to—we tell the same story about where we come from, our past, our experience, our thesis around this, or whatever it is. And so we decided to shoot it, and then, now we’re using AI to actually edit it—our corporate video—where we can 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 based on the language. And I’m a big fan of using autopilot in my truck, which is also using it. I’m using it all day long. Let’s be honest.
ARIA:
I love how 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, [laugh] defensive coordinator for a flag football team.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
It gives you leverage in your life. And I think like, people that are worried about it, like taking jobs. I had this fear. So I—seven years ago, I invested in a company called Vicarious, and this brilliant guy, Scott Phoenix, he was pursuing AGI. And we were talking about it, we were, you know, cranking through what it was that he was trying to do. And I remember it—I was in Toronto. Mila was shooting 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, “Uh! The jobs.” And so it’s two in the morning. I’m in Toronto. I call him. Luckily he was on the West Coast. And I’m like, “I have a real problem. I might have to sell my shares in the company. I don’t know if I can support this.”
ASHTON KUTCHER:
And he’s like, “What?” And I was like, “You’re going to take every job.” And he—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 going to take all the jobs is a good person. They’re a good person because they care about other people, and they—and they care about purpose and human purpose. But he goes, “Here’s the good news. The AI is going to 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.” And that is going to 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.
REID:
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, part of the thing is we’re improving hallucinations as we work through the technology. And especially, you’re going to have another—I think these agents, this new agent universe, is going to have multiple agents, and you’re going to have another agent that’s kind of cross-checking going, “Whoa, if you’re giving advice on eating berries, be a hundred percent correct on this.” Right? This is one of the ones that doesn’t—like hallucinating matters here. Otherwise—
ASHTON KUTCHER:
You can’t afford error.
REID:
Yes, exactly. So, what do you think are some of the ways that people can best kind of try to regrasp their agency? Because I think the part of the thing that people worry about is, “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, ‘I matter because I’m choosing, and I have agency.’”
ASHTON KUTCHER:
Someone said to me—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.” And I think that AIs are now going to be players in the game, and we have to decide what game we’re playing. And I have friends in my life that are incredibly smart about a lot of things, but they don’t know what I know. And they don’t feel what I feel. And they can give me advice about things. Sometimes I just have to learn it by making a mistake. And that’s okay, too.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
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, I wouldn’t take parenting advice from. Some of the smartest people I know, I wouldn’t take investing advice from. Like, I have a friend who’s probably like, IQ dwarf-me, IQ level Einstein—but I would not take investing advice from that individual. 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 the stock markets, and I think about 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.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
And I think that probably the place that the most value is going to be found is in emotional intelligence. And people who are playing the game with very high emotional intelligence are probably—we’re probably going to pivot towards that being a more prevailing strategy for some time. And, if we think about the course of humanity, there was a period of time in humanity where 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 brute force intelligence has become highly valued in the market. But I think that what we’ll likely start to see is an emotional intelligence that starts to slide up that value scale over the next century. 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. And I, the only advice I’d give to my kids is like, “Learn anything you want. 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.”
ARIA:
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.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
The biggest thing I look for is people I want to work for. 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.” 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 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 and with less pain.”
ASHTON KUTCHER:
Because no matter what, building a company is painful [laugh]. But what I—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 distance travel. I had this really—I did a project 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 six out of the eight companies that I interviewed had done very, very well. But one of the founders said to me, when he interviews talent, that he looks for distance travel. Then, I was like, explain that?
ASHTON KUTCHER:
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—but the distance that work that it took to get to there is the metric that I’m looking for.” And 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, you know, their parents telling them they can’t go to Coachella, that’s probably not going to be, you know, the, the probable—. And so I’m always trying to tease out like where you came from, how you got to where you are, what’s the most extraordinary thing that you’ve been able to achieve—and then measure what that distance is.
REID:
One of the things I love about your answer—it’s like learning speed, because it’s the learning together. And so do you, did they learn to adjust? Because entrepreneurship is always about jumping off a cliff, assembling on an airplane on the way down. You know, it’s like all these unknown, you know, gale force winds and all the rest. And this brings me back to, I think, another great lens on you, which you’ve described yourself as a trier, because I think that you go and try things. It’s part of the—you know, whether it’s, South Pole, AI, you know the most spectacular move in the technology investing that I’ve seen anyone 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?”
ASHTON KUTCHER:
Woo, thank you for the compliment. That feels a little bit fuzzy inside. This is going to sound really weird, so bear with me. I was a model. It was a—this was a really weird job to have. And I never understood why some people would get this job and somebody else wouldn’t get that job. But I would go to these casting calls and just get rejected for just being me. I wasn’t doing anything. 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 that’s some weird form of ego punishment that’s outstanding. Then I was an actor, and I—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.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
I wouldn’t get the role. And I got rejected and got rejected and got rejected and got rejected. And I think that function of consistent rejection is a really healthy thing. 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 it’s been very unhealthy for me. 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 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 improve.” And you’re constantly trying to do it. And by the way, down to 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.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
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? Or are you driven because you love winning?” And he said, “Neither.” 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 so I think that like, being willing to fail and being present to learn in the current moment will always allow you to try. Because all you can do is get better.
REID:
Amen. So let’s do rapid-fire. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
ASHTON KUTCHER:
I would say 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.
ARIA:
Love it. And I couldn’t agree more. So what’s a question you wish people would ask you more often?
ASHTON KUTCHER:
I can tell you a question that I wish people would ask me less often.
ARIA:
Great.
ASHTON KUTCHER:
Oh, [laugh]. Which is, “Can I take a picture?” Question I wish people would ask me more often is, “How are you?”
ARIA:
Love it.
REID:
Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?
ASHTON KUTCHER:
I think I see extraordinary progress in personalized medicine that I get insanely excited about.
ARIA:
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?
ASHTON KUTCHER:
I believe the medical field will only be challenged by new 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. 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 into 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. 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.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, Adrien Behn, and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, Ben Relles, Mike van Reekum, Kathleen Flaherty, and Little Monster Media Company.