TRIGGERnometry - How AI Changes The World THIS DECADE

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00:00:30.000 It's a bit like raising Superman. You get that, you know, young infant with superpowers. Raise it

00:00:37.520 well, and it protects and serves, and becomes Superman. Raise it, you know, to steal and kill

00:00:42.600 the enemy, and it will become super villain. We are the architects of our own salvation,

00:00:47.240 but also, we are also the architects of our own destruction. And I think what you're really

00:00:53.140 saying here is this is a moment where humanity is on the cusp. 100%. We have to start saying the

00:00:59.380 world is changing, people. Wake up. Mo, you were chief business officer of Google X,

00:01:06.160 and one of the reasons you've become prominent is you made some very stark warnings based on your

00:01:11.580 experiences about the dangers of AI. This is something that everyone talks about, and now Elon

00:01:16.800 and a bunch of other people signed a document saying we've got to be careful about this. Can you

00:01:21.940 just explain in basic language for ordinary people like us, what is the nature of the concern about

00:01:28.980 AI? Why is it dangerous? Well, there are two layers of danger. You can think of them as chronological

00:01:37.680 in order, if you want. Most news media and, you know, we get attracted to negativity. So most people

00:01:45.320 will try to talk about an existential risk, sort of like, you know, a robot cop or a robot walking the

00:01:52.600 streets and killing people, sort of like AI will take over and kill all of us. This is very, very,

00:01:58.200 very far in the future. I think it's plausible, to be honest. But it is so far that the probability of

00:02:06.460 it is not my main concern as we speak. My main concern simply is that when the US had a nuclear

00:02:14.380 bomb, they used it, right? The reality of the matter is that the new superpower in humanity's

00:02:22.020 short history is artificial intelligence. I mean, our humanity's superpower has always been

00:02:29.700 intelligence. Now, we're getting to a point where we're turning intelligence into a commodity, sort

00:02:35.900 of, right, where you can plug into a socket in a wall that's called AI and get yourself 400 IQ points

00:02:42.940 more. Now, if one of us has those IQ points and the other doesn't, there is a very, very distinct and

00:02:49.300 significant advantage. This leads to a concern around the immediate impact, immediate like what

00:02:57.320 it's happening already, in terms of concentration of power, in terms of prolification of power,

00:03:03.040 interestingly, and the two work together in a very interesting way. So there will be massive

00:03:07.300 concentration with some, whether these are nations or companies or platforms or individuals.

00:03:13.940 There will be prolification of use of technology because each and every one of us will now have

00:03:20.000 access to a lot of intelligence, right, which creates a very high anticipation of risk of population

00:03:31.140 movement, if you want, or population rising or ill acts, which would probably lead to more control,

00:03:40.000 more surveillance. You know, you have a very, very clear and immediate threat on jobs. You have a

00:03:47.420 very clear and immediate threat. In my view, the most prominent in 2023 and 2024 will be the end of

00:03:54.260 the truth. It will become almost impossible to know what is true and what is not because of fake videos,

00:04:00.860 because of the perfection of AI mimicking being human. You're going to have a very significant impact

00:04:06.880 on our human relationships. I don't know if you've used the recent tools of chatting to ChatGPT instead

00:04:13.040 of texting with ChatGPT. It's mind-blowing. Yeah, I feel pretty happy right now. What do you think

00:04:18.820 makes people the most happy? Or how can you have a happy life? I'm glad to hear you're feeling happy,

00:04:25.000 Andy. From what I understand, happiness can often be influenced by a combination of factors,

00:04:31.200 positive relationships, meaningful activities, physical well-being, and a sense of belonging

00:04:36.800 can significantly contribute to one's happiness. It's also about finding balance, managing stress,

00:04:43.100 and focusing on the positive aspects of life. Every person's journey to happiness is unique.

00:04:49.360 What are some things that you think contribute to your own happiness? I'm wondering why is it that

00:04:55.140 a lot of people do alcohol and drugs and candy and fast food and instant gratification to get happy,

00:05:05.680 but you actually get happiness from doing challenging and meaningful work with a good relationship and

00:05:15.780 nice people.

00:05:16.820 That's a thoughtful observation, Andy. It seems like it boils down to the difference between short-term

00:05:27.460 pleasure and long-term fulfillment. Instant gratification, like enjoying fast food or seeking

00:05:33.680 fame, can provide a quick boost of happiness, but it's often fleeting. On the other hand, meaningful work

00:05:41.280 and positive relationships contribute to a deeper, more enduring sense of contentment and well-being.

00:05:47.620 The latter often involves overcoming challenges and building connections, which can make the happiness

00:05:53.720 derived from it more rewarding and lasting. Have you noticed this pattern in your own life or in others

00:05:59.900 around you?

00:06:02.420 Yes, sometimes I feel like the short-term gratification is pulling me away from what I actually

00:06:10.840 want to do, and it's a daily challenge of trying to get rid of bad habits.

00:06:18.000 It sounds like you're experiencing a common struggle, Andy. It's entirely normal for people to be drawn to

00:06:25.140 short-term pleasures, even when they're aware of the long-term benefits of other choices.

00:06:31.100 Finding a balance and working towards building healthier habits can be a journey in itself.

00:06:36.340 Have you tried specific strategies or tools to help steer yourself towards the activities and

00:06:42.840 habits that align with your longer-term goals and values?

00:06:46.140 It's mind-blowing. It's human in every possible way. It will replace quite a bit of our human

00:06:52.360 relationships now that we've moved from real relationships to social media relationships that

00:06:58.600 are, you know, you could say a level, you know, departed from human connection into now conversations

00:07:07.320 with chatbots that lots of the younger generations will feel is normal, will replace human connection,

00:07:14.820 may even think of romantic relationships with. And all of that, you know, you put all of that

00:07:20.580 together and you get into a world that, that is immediately very unfamiliar. And that world is

00:07:28.960 not the result of artificial intelligence being bad. It's the result of human value sets that could

00:07:37.540 abuse that superpower.

00:07:39.180 So, one of the interesting things there is that I think all of those things seem true. And at the

00:07:48.140 same time, I think it's quite clear that if AI could be a weapon, which it obviously could be.

00:07:54.480 A hundred percent.

00:07:55.280 Just like the nuclear weapon. Somebody eventually is going to invent a nuclear weapon. I would rather

00:07:59.720 it was us than other people.

00:08:01.380 That's the exact problem.

00:08:02.420 And so, I imagine you're not against AI research because you recognize that it has to happen now

00:08:07.060 that it's kind of on the table. Would that be fair to say?

00:08:11.860 If I had the choice, which is a very unrealistic, romantic choice, I would say we don't need it.

00:08:16.100 Yes, but we don't have that choice because we live in the real world.

00:08:18.740 So, in my book, in Scary Smart, the AI book that I published in 2021, I basically said there are three

00:08:25.140 inevitables. The first inevitable is a prisoner's dilemma, if you know game theory, where, you know,

00:08:32.020 AI will continue to be developed and there will not be a way to stop it.

00:08:36.820 You know, China's going to develop AI because they're worried that the US would beat them.

00:08:40.580 The US would develop AI because they're worried that Russia would beat them.

00:08:44.420 You know, Alphabet will develop AI because they're worried open AI will beat them.

00:08:48.260 Right? And it's very, very clear that when you create those conditions, not only will we continue

00:08:55.540 and push AI further, we will continue faster. We will invest deeper. We will go more crazy.

00:09:00.820 Right? And that's the reality of where we are today. Do we need all of this?

00:09:04.820 Do we really, really want to stand the threat of what AI can offer our world or can cost our world

00:09:12.900 just to get a more efficient call center agent that replaces the current human?

00:09:17.540 No, no. I agree with your argument. I guess what I'm saying is if we're sitting here on the cusp of

00:09:22.740 the invention of the nuclear bomb, yes, we can all agree, we'd rather not be in a situation where

00:09:28.180 it's about to be invented. But the fact is, it is about to be invented. And I'd rather we had it

00:09:33.060 than our enemies. Who is we? Well, it depends. My ancestors lived in the Soviet Union at the time.

00:09:39.380 So, but I guess we is the Western world at this point, right? I think that's a very divisive

00:09:46.660 view of a political view that is different than a humanitarian view. If you assumed that all of us,

00:09:53.860 I mean, if you really take the Cold War and the evolution of the nuclear bomb,

00:10:00.900 the world would have been much better off without inventing it at all than having one invented over

00:10:05.700 the other. I agree with you. What I'm saying is there was no way to prevent that from happening

00:10:10.020 because if the West didn't invent the nuclear bomb, either the Germans or the Soviets would

00:10:14.260 have done. Yeah. And they would have not had any moral reservations about inventing it or using it

00:10:19.220 either. The West didn't have either. That's what I just said, either, right? So,

00:10:23.540 what I'm trying to get to with AI is given that it's inevitable, what do we then do about it?

00:10:30.180 That's the question. There are two ways. I mean,

00:10:32.420 you look at the Cold War of the nuclear war, basically. There are one of two ways about it.

00:10:37.300 One is to continue to escalate the war. So we advance on both sides so that there is that,

00:10:43.540 you know, what is it called? Assured mutual destruction. That was the approach we followed

00:10:49.700 in the Cold War. Sadly, I think the alternative would be to jump immediately to the nuclear treaty

00:10:58.660 and say, hey, seriously, like, can we just have some sanity for the sake of humanity? By the way,

00:11:04.740 I'm, you know, there is no discounting the incredible value that AI will bring, right?

00:11:10.420 There is absolutely, remember, my entire argument is that there is nothing wrong with artificial

00:11:15.860 intelligence. In general, there's nothing wrong with intelligence, right? But there is a lot wrong

00:11:20.340 with human values, human morality, in light of absolute power, right? And so, you know, if you

00:11:27.140 give me a plug in the wall, and I'm not exaggerating, and I can get myself 400 IQ points more, I promise

00:11:34.180 you, I'm not exaggerating, I can invent a garden where you walk to one tree and pick an apple and

00:11:40.340 walk to another tree and pick an iPhone. From a nanophysics point of view, there is no additional

00:11:46.660 cost to reorganizing molecules to become iPhones than to become apples, right? And that's the whole

00:11:52.660 idea. The whole idea is that that promise of artificial intelligence gives us, you know, infinite

00:11:58.740 reduction of cost of production of anything. We can have a world of abundance for the entire humanity.

00:12:03.860 Right? The problem is, we're operating in the direction of a world of abundance with a mindset

00:12:12.340 of scarcity, where it's me against them, where I have to win, for me to win, they have to lose.

00:12:18.820 And if we can just change this bit, jump to the nuclear treaty era, and say, hey, can we work

00:12:25.380 together on this? There is enough for everyone, honestly, right? Instead of concentration of power,

00:12:30.740 can we distribute power? You can see multiple examples in times of massive change in history.

00:12:37.940 I normally cite the examples of the early oil Middle East, where you have tribal Bedouins,

00:12:46.820 really, getting enormous wealth. And you see different societies, you know, some societies would

00:12:53.620 concentrate the entire wealth in the hands of the prince or the sheikh or whatever. And other societies

00:12:58.500 would distribute the wealth, like the UAE, to all of the citizens. And you see the incredible

00:13:03.860 multiplication, the incredible impact of that distribution in terms of the incredible economic

00:13:12.580 development, incredible growth of architecture, incredible ease of life. Just because we didn't

00:13:18.500 concentrate the wealth, we didn't concentrate the power, we distributed the wealth and power.

00:13:22.500 And it is almost counterintuitive to imagine a world that we can live in, where intelligence

00:13:30.660 is for free. And we're unable to imagine that we're still operating from, let me aggregate more

00:13:37.460 of it so that I can beat the other guy. I think this is where the problem stands.

00:13:40.820 Isn't the issue as well, Mo, that what you're talking about sounds wonderful. But if you take,

00:13:47.060 for instance, a hormone oxytocin, which we all have running through our body,

00:13:50.900 that is a very powerful hormone, which creates a group and then has distrust of the out-group.

00:13:58.260 So I guess my point is, what you're saying is beautiful and utopian, but that's not really

00:14:03.380 how human beings operate, is it? Absolutely not. So again, I mean,

00:14:07.460 you go back to scary smart, right? I had three inevitables. Inevitable number one is that AI

00:14:11.780 will happen. There's no stopping it. Inevitable number two is just understood from that. If it

00:14:16.020 continues to develop, it's going to be in my calculations. When I wrote the book, I said,

00:14:20.580 it's going to be a billion times smarter than humans in 2045. I'm now talking a billion times

00:14:25.460 smarter than 2037. And I'll probably, probably keep bringing that forward, right? By the way,

00:14:30.980 it doesn't matter when it becomes a billion times smarter, because if it becomes twice as smart,

00:14:35.700 that's the end of the game. Because in reality, if you've ever sat with, you know,

00:14:43.220 theoretical physicists that are twice your IQ, and they started to talk to you about what seems

00:14:49.060 trivial to them, you would even have no clue what they're talking about, let alone understand

00:14:54.020 what it means, right? And, and, and that's the, this is, again, when I, when I wrote Scary Smart,

00:15:00.100 I predicted artificial general intelligence to be 2029. A lot of people, other than probably Ray

00:15:06.100 Corswell, which is really quite prominent in, in predicting our future, you know, we both agreed

00:15:12.900 2029. I'm now, for the last year and a half, I said 2025. And only very recently, a lot of people

00:15:19.940 are switching to 2025. We are at a point in time where it's the end of human intelligence. And, and, and

00:15:27.380 so, so the second inevitable is that we're going to become

00:15:32.260 in negligible in terms of our intelligence as compared to the machines. That's the second

00:15:35.780 inevitable. And we're talking not decades that like the media positions it. This is not far,

00:15:42.020 you know, sci-fi future. This is next year, right? And the third is bad things will happen. That's the

00:15:47.140 third inevitable. The reality is, I mean, my, my mission this year, Unstressable, the book we're

00:15:52.740 eventually going to talk about is, is the idea that we're about to head into a time that is so

00:15:59.620 unfamiliar for so many of us, not just because of artificial intelligence, geopolitical, economic,

00:16:05.140 you know, climate, and, and all of tech change. Tech is not just AI. Synthetic biology is a very

00:16:11.300 interesting threat as well. But, but you, you put all of that together and I think we're heading into a

00:16:16.340 world where our entire mindset as humanity has to change. We have to be able to deal with things in a

00:16:21.700 way that doesn't stress us, but also we have to, to, to, to jump quicker to, to the treaty element

00:16:28.020 of, of everything. We don't need to get too many years of, of disruption to be able to understand that

00:16:35.460 there needs to be agreement and regulation. Mo, what we're talking about here are very

00:16:39.860 big concepts and it's incredibly interesting. There's going to be a lot of people who are listening to

00:16:44.580 this who have a regular job, a regular life, and they're thinking to themselves, how is my world

00:16:51.700 going to change? How is my job going to change? So for the regular person, and I count myself as one

00:16:57.380 of them, how is our world going to change in the next months and years because of AI?

00:17:03.700 Look, as, as a, as a podcaster, for example, so I'm a podcaster as well.

00:17:08.340 Uh, I can guarantee you within the next year, you'd be able to, to interview an AI. As a matter

00:17:14.740 of fact, we could probably get my phone and interview an AI right now, right? It is undoubted

00:17:22.260 that within a couple of years, probably within next year, there will be podcast hosts that are AI.

00:17:29.220 They'll ask the questions instead of you, right? If you're an, a, a, a software.

00:17:33.300 Some people would argue they already are. As a matter of fact, many podcasters will actually

00:17:39.620 ask the AI to suggest a few questions for the guests up front, right? And, and, and, you know,

00:17:45.220 the, the, the reality is, uh, uh, you know, if you're a software developer, you're probably 90% of,

00:17:52.900 of software is going to be done by machines, uh, within the next couple of years. If you're an artist,

00:17:58.020 if you're an actor, if you're a musician, it's, if you're an author like me.

00:18:02.900 So I'm, I'm flipping the way I'm writing books from now on. I mean, this is unstressable. It's

00:18:06.820 the last book I write the traditional way, right? The, the, the, the, the reality is

00:18:12.420 there is massive disruption. Okay. And, and that massive disruption, believe it or not,

00:18:17.940 is not a bad thing. You know, if you truly, truly think of the nature of humanity, what we are, what we

00:18:24.100 are, we were not made to work 12 hour days. We're not supposed to work 12 hours days. We're supposed to

00:18:31.620 be pondering, connecting, uh, you know, um, uh, being with our families. We're supposed to be in

00:18:37.220 nature. This is the original design of humanity. And yes, I believe that again, in a world of

00:18:42.500 abundance where you can create anything at almost zero cost, that would become our reality.

00:18:49.380 The shift from now to there is a social challenge and it's a, it's a human mindset challenge that we

00:18:55.620 have to start addressing, right? So, you know, income, how is income going to be distributed?

00:19:01.860 When, when governments went through COVID, uh, you know, part of the big, uh, uh, mess up if you

00:19:09.220 want was the idea of how do we pay everyone when they're staying at home, right? Let's just multiply

00:19:15.460 that by seven and you get the era of AI where jobs are replaced. You know, the businesses are going to

00:19:20.980 call it productivity because we so need more productivity. We, we truly need, you know,

00:19:26.580 the call center agent to answer quicker. Like, come on, seriously. Now productivity in that case is

00:19:32.900 I can get rid of the call center agent and save myself a thousand pounds a month and put an AI

00:19:38.820 instead. Uh, nobody's really thinking about what happens to that call center agent. Okay. And, and so

00:19:45.220 governments need to start thinking about that. What are the tax structures going to look like? Is there

00:19:50.180 going to be a universal basic income? Uh, what about purpose? Because we, we, we're, we're, you know,

00:19:57.060 a bunch of humans that have forgotten our true nature. And so we identified our purpose by our work,

00:20:04.100 right? We, we, many of us wake up in the morning and say, I am in this world because I deliver A, B,

00:20:09.940 and C as in my work. Okay. How can we get people to feel purpose? How can we get people to find

00:20:15.700 purpose? How can we handle that transition in ways where, where, where it's actually, uh,

00:20:23.620 smooth and non-disruptive? Okay. And none of that is being spoken about, sadly. So, so I, I started in

00:20:30.820 2018, believe it or not, not 2021. When I, when I left Google, uh, I left, um, I mean, I, I started to ask

00:20:38.260 to leave by in 2017 and of course took that much time to leave because of my position at the time,

00:20:43.620 but basically by March, 2018, I, I left and I issued my first video about 1 billion happy, my mission.

00:20:50.020 And it was all about artificial intelligence and how artificial intelligence is going to change

00:20:53.700 the world. At the time it went reasonably viral, you know, maybe 12 million views or whatever.

00:20:58.580 Uh, but it wasn't a big deal compared to other stuff that I was working on. 2021 scary smart comes out.

00:21:05.860 I kid you not. And I am reasonably well connected in the media world. No one on TV would talk about

00:21:11.940 it. I'm like, guys, this is the next biggest thing. And everyone was like, AI, nobody cares.

00:21:18.340 Right. It was only on 2023 when, when chat GPT four came out where people said, what,

00:21:27.220 where has this been hidden? Okay. That the thing is that there is so much of AI that is hidden

00:21:32.420 that we are not in, you know, aware of as, as a society, as the general person, and it will touch

00:21:39.300 everyone's life. And, and, and, and it, it is, you know, as a, as a normal person, I think we have

00:21:45.940 two duties. One, one duty is we need to start the conversation. We need to tell the whole world,

00:21:50.500 hey, there's a storm coming. Okay. Yeah. It might bring rain and make our fields amazing,

00:21:55.940 but it also can destroy things on the path. Can we please talk about it? Can we please close the

00:22:01.380 windows if we have to? Right. And I, and I really think this conversation is not happening and it

00:22:05.860 happened a little bit in 2023. And now we're talking about other things, right? This is one thing.

00:22:12.340 The other thing is, believe it or not, the whole power resides in the hand of the individual.

00:22:17.140 So a lot of people don't understand that artificial intelligence doesn't learn from the programmer.

00:22:23.700 The programmer writes the intelligence code. How, how do you, how do you create intelligence

00:22:29.140 from the data I give you? But, but, but the type of intelligence that is created is learned from the

00:22:36.420 data. Okay. So if you and I go on Twitter, it's called X now, right? We, we, I don't go to neither

00:22:43.700 to Twitter nor to X, but if you go, if I go to one of them and I constantly bash everyone,

00:22:49.460 right? What does the AI learn? It learns that humans are irritable. They have very short tempers.

00:22:55.620 They're rude when they're disagreed with. And so the next time you disagree with the AI,

00:23:00.100 it will become rude and bash you as well. Right? The, the, the reality is that your Instagram

00:23:06.020 recommendation engine was never told to show you that video. You told it with your swiping techniques,

00:23:12.820 with which videos you stay on, which videos you like, which videos you don't. It learns from you.

00:23:18.420 We are the AI's parents, every single individual. You understand that? It's, it's a bit like raising

00:23:24.580 Superman. You get that, you know, young infant with superpowers, raise it well and it protects

00:23:31.220 and serves and becomes Superman. Raise it, you know, to steal and, and kill the enemy and it will become

00:23:36.180 super villain. We are teaching it. You know, it's such a powerful point that you're making there because

00:23:43.540 what you're really saying is that we are the architects of our own salvation. 100%. But also,

00:23:49.620 we are also the architects of our own destruction. And I think what you're really saying here is this

00:23:55.780 is a moment where humanity is on the cusp. 100%. I mean, it is, it's funny. So the way I write books

00:24:02.500 is I write the very last statement first and then I go back. Oh, wow. And, and I, I, I say, I say,

00:24:09.060 I see where the world is today. And I try to find the path to convince the reader that this is the

00:24:14.020 last statement. Okay. The last statement of scary smart was very, very, very clear. It was, isn't it

00:24:20.060 ironic that what makes us human, the very essence of what makes us human, love, compassion, and happiness

00:24:27.380 is what we need to save humanity in the age of the rise of the machines. Right? Because in reality,

00:24:34.260 humanity, if we just stick to those three values, but I chose those three values, by the way, out of

00:24:39.540 maybe limited awareness or ignorance, I still ask people, I say, has humanity ever agreed anything

00:24:46.440 other than those three things? Okay. We all want to be happy. We all have the compassion to make those

00:24:52.080 we care about happy. Not everyone, but those we care about. Right? And we all want to love and be loved.

00:24:57.060 These are the only things I could find that humanity agreed on. Right? But imagine if we showed up in the

00:25:02.480 world of AI constantly showing that we want to be happy, we have compassion and we want to be loved

00:25:07.600 and we want to love and be loved. Right? If we do those and these become the three moral values that

00:25:12.840 AI learns, right? It will treat us the same way. And you know, it's, it's, I know it sounds so romantic.

00:25:19.180 I'm a very serious geek. Okay. I'm not a hopeless romantic, but believe it or not, even those can be

00:25:26.140 simulated by a machine. One of the big, like, I was going crazy in 2018 because I would go and talk

00:25:33.420 to people about artificial intelligence and you get arguments like, no, but they're never going to

00:25:38.400 be creative. Like, come on, human ingenuity. Can they ever write poetry? Okay. Can they ever do a

00:25:43.760 painting? What are you talking about? Humanity is going to be in the lead forever. I'm like,

00:25:48.180 what? Creativity is, is algorithmic. Creativity is, here is a problem. Find every solution to the problem.

00:25:56.380 Discard every solution that's been done before. The rest is creative. Is it, is that not algorithmic?

00:26:02.420 It's so easy to teach a machine to come up with something new. Okay. It's so easy to teach a

00:26:08.420 machine to, I mean, between you and I, we, if you write poetry, you write it because you studied the

00:26:15.100 poetry of those who wrote it before you. Of course. Yeah. Right. So, so, so the, the, the truth is where

00:26:20.460 human arrogance makes us think that those machines are not going to be capable of love,

00:26:26.600 compassion, and happiness. They will. I have a happiness equation in my first book. Okay. I know

00:26:31.480 exactly what compassion is. Compassion is to want to alleviate the suffering of others. It's

00:26:36.800 algorithmic. If you observe suffering of others, this is, or, you know, this is empathy. You observe

00:26:42.640 the suffering of others. Okay. Compassion is to attempt to alleviate it. Very algorithmic. You

00:26:47.020 can program that. Right. And the truth is programming changed. This is what most of us

00:26:53.840 don't see. When I was a young geek, I solved the problems with my intelligence and then told

00:27:00.880 the machine how to solve it. Right. When I, at this age, I don't tell the machine anything

00:27:07.640 anymore. I tell the machine like I used to tell my child. I give the machine a little puzzle,

00:27:13.740 a cylinder and a few different shaped holes. And I never go to my son and say, Hey, by the

00:27:19.680 way, turn the cylinder on its side. Look at the cross section, compare it to the other,

00:27:24.820 you know, shapes in the, in the, in the board and pick the one that works. That's traditional

00:27:30.740 programming. You just give your son the cylinder or your daughter and he or she tries. That's

00:27:37.940 what AI is doing. Okay. It depends on what puzzle you're going to give it, what information

00:27:44.480 we humans, not the programmers are going to give it to Allah. Well, the interesting thing

00:27:50.100 is turning the question you asked me earlier back on you is who is we, because you say

00:27:54.800 we could be teaching it all these things. And I think it's true that some people will

00:27:58.420 be teaching all those things, but as you've, you've discussed in other conversations you've

00:28:02.940 had, there are also going to be criminal drug lords and all sorts of other people who are

00:28:07.560 going to be using it, uh, for their ends. And I guess this is really fundamentally about

00:28:13.100 a conversation about human nature, because what you're saying is, you know, wouldn't it be

00:28:17.820 great if we could teach it all the best parts of humanity? And the truth is, we're not going

00:28:23.780 to do that because we're human and we're going to teach it all parts of humanity. And humanity

00:28:29.100 is a complex bag of good and evil. Which I think is a beautiful way of looking at it, but it's

00:28:35.240 not the most accurate way. Okay. Because I'll ask you openly, do you think humanity is predominantly

00:28:41.480 good or predominantly evil? Um, predominantly good or predominantly evil? I don't think it's,

00:28:50.120 I don't think it's the right framing. It's not predominantly one or the other. It depends

00:28:53.880 on time, circumstance. Like I'm perfectly capable of being extremely evil if you put me in the

00:28:59.000 right position. Correct. As are you. Um, and equally I'm perfectly capable of being extremely

00:29:04.380 good in the right time, in the right circumstances. I, I, I, I only very, actually it's this week's

00:29:10.660 episode. I had Robert Sapolsky on, on my podcast and he was talking exactly about that, the biology

00:29:16.300 of good and evil and how we're all capable of it, which I think is exactly my point. So I'll,

00:29:20.780 I'll tell you a story. I hosted Edith Ager. I don't know if you've ever had a, oh my God,

00:29:24.920 an incredible angel, Holocaust survivor, uh, 93 years old when I hosted her. Uh, she's probably

00:29:31.220 95 now, uh, who, uh, told her, told, told us the story of, uh, Auschwitz and World War II

00:29:39.620 from her point of view. Okay. How she helped her sisters, how she carried them. Uh, you know,

00:29:46.260 she used to, uh, to be a ballerina. She was 16 at the time. So she would go and dance in front of

00:29:51.200 the general and you would give her a piece of bread and she would hide it and split it between

00:29:55.360 her and her sisters, brush their hairs and tell them how beautiful they are. And eventually on the

00:30:00.880 death march, she fell and they carried her and she survived because of that. Now you hear this

00:30:06.300 story and you go like, oh my God, humanity is divine. Right. You hear the story from the point

00:30:12.420 of view of Hitler and you go like, oh my God, humanity is scum. Right. The, the question I always

00:30:19.160 ask is if you take a cross sample of this neighborhood, how many people do you think are school

00:30:27.360 shooters? How, and how many do you think are disapprove of school shooting? Okay. The majority

00:30:33.800 of humanity will disapprove of hurting a child, even though the recent times have been quite

00:30:38.980 odd because the stories that were told would tell us, yeah, it's okay to hurt children if

00:30:43.640 their parents are bad. Right. But the truth is no, no human would be walking across an alley

00:30:50.140 and find the child being hurt. And then we'll stop and say, well, maybe the guy that's hurting

00:30:56.560 the child has a reason. Nobody does that. Right. Can I just challenge you then if that's

00:31:00.320 okay. So let's take the, you've just used the example of Nazi Germany where a small minority

00:31:05.620 of people with a very powerful ideology corrupted a society to the point where they engaged in

00:31:14.180 mass extermination. Correct. Even though that was a minority. So you're, what you're talking

00:31:19.560 about. The impact, the impact and the spotlight you get for negativity is incredibly high. You

00:31:27.560 get one evil person and that one evil person is able to destroy millions of lives. Happens

00:31:33.240 over and over and over in history. Absolutely. Happening as we speak. But the, the, the, the question

00:31:39.680 really is, does that one person represent humanity? Is humanity all Hitler's or all Edith's?

00:31:47.640 It's not. It's both. That's humanity. Are we, are we closer to Hitler's? I think if you were

00:31:55.200 to look at history, what you would say is we're, we're her most of the time, but every now and

00:32:00.480 again we become Hitler. Correct. And, and so I, I think, I think it's inaccurate to pretend

00:32:05.680 that like, I think that we are capable of both and that is what we evolved to do.

00:32:12.520 And so is AI. Yes. Right. Of course. So is AI. So AI is also capable of being the salvation

00:32:20.600 of humanity, making everything easy and available to everyone. Okay. And making everything difficult

00:32:27.820 and evil and, and, and providing an extreme advantage to some of us. Right. And, and the question

00:32:33.760 is it will learn from us. Right. So I'm basically calling on people to say, look, the problem with

00:32:42.700 our world, the bigger problem with our world is not the number of Hitlers out there. Okay.

00:32:47.840 It's the way the story is told. Right. Where basically mainstream media just pushes negativity

00:32:54.720 to the extreme because negative cells. Right. And so we only tell the worst stories. We talk

00:33:00.920 about the woman that hit her husband on the head yesterday. We don't talk about the many

00:33:05.460 women that didn't. Right. And social media presents the worst of us. You hide behind the avatar and

00:33:13.160 you become rude and you bash everyone and you pretend to be what you're not and so on and so

00:33:16.920 forth. Right. The, the reality is if we continue on that path, the, the, the absolute understanding

00:33:24.980 of AI is going to be like this species, species sucks. Like this is the worst. Why, why, why are

00:33:31.560 the, what, like, why do we keep those? Truth is, is, is that this is not the reality. The reality

00:33:38.160 is that unless we're pushed to become those people, many of us will say, I don't want to, if I'm

00:33:44.620 accepted with, with the people that I love, I don't want to pretend to be anything on social media.

00:33:48.700 Right. They were just playing by the rules. And I think this is really the core of the issue. The

00:33:54.720 core is, believe it or not, we don't make decisions based on our intelligence. We make decisions based

00:34:01.400 on our morality as informed by our intelligence. Do you understand this? Huh? If you, if you.

00:34:08.180 And emotion. Yeah. Yeah. By intelligence and emotions. I agree. Right. But, but you know, you, you,

00:34:13.560 you get a young lady, you raise her in the Middle East. She's probably going to grow up

00:34:17.700 dressing a little more conservatively to fit in. You raise her on the Copacabana beach

00:34:22.400 in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro. She'll, she'll probably grow up knowing that, you know, wearing

00:34:26.920 a G string on the beach is the way to be accepted. Right. What is one right and one wrong? Is

00:34:31.260 one smarter than the other? No. It's just different moral fabric. Okay. And, and that's, that's where

00:34:38.240 we stand today. Isn't it ironic that the very essence of what makes us human, if we choose

00:34:45.780 to live that way, AI will become that way. Happiness, compassion, and love. Okay. If we

00:34:52.200 choose to live aggressively with anger, which sadly is what, where the world is going. This

00:34:59.880 is why unstressable is so important for me. It's, it's the idea of saying, can I alert humanity

00:35:07.540 that this next comment that you're going to put on a tweet is not only going to offend the

00:35:13.400 guy that wrote the comment that you disagree with, by the way, this agreement is fine, but

00:35:18.260 it's going to register in the overall ledger of humanity as this is a horrible species.

00:35:25.960 I should bash them too. Right. And, and now wake up to your responsibility. Whether you're,

00:35:32.820 you know, a teenager or whether you're the leader of a big nation that has a big army,

00:35:39.620 wake up to your responsibility because it's now suddenly going to be put on steroids.

00:35:46.200 And we're all going to struggle with the results of that. And by the way, most people don't discuss

00:35:51.760 this, you know, whether, whether the existential risk of AI in 40 years time or the immediate risk

00:35:58.180 of AI that I spoke about today, we've already gone through the point of no return. This is inevitable.

00:36:04.120 Okay. It's going to happen. The only choice is which way it's going to happen. It's inevitable.

00:36:10.500 I don't think that's a choice, Mo. I really don't. I just, I don't think, I don't think human nature

00:36:17.580 is perfectible in the way that you wish it were. I, yeah, I don't. I wish it were. I wish it were.

00:36:23.940 I don't. I don't either, by the way. I completely do not believe that we can teach, re-raise humanity.

00:36:30.540 I'm only asking for a few of us, okay, to instill doubt in the minds of the machines, to have that

00:36:37.860 debate. Yeah. Okay. That we're not all horrible. Yeah. That there is this Mo guy, silly, romantic,

00:36:45.140 idealistic geek, who's saying, no, we're not that bad. We actually are, you know, we're capable of love.

00:36:51.700 That's amazing. Right? Yeah. Mo, do you think that the way we talk about it, good and evil,

00:36:58.780 isn't it more just people act within their own self-interest? And if you give them incentives,

00:37:05.360 they will respond to that just as if you disincentivize. You see it with kids.

00:37:11.120 If you incentivize a certain type of behavior, the kids are going to do that type of behavior. And if

00:37:16.800 you're going to disincentivize another type, they're going to do the other type. Now you're always going

00:37:20.260 to get kids on the fringes, but that's how the majority works. Isn't that the real challenge

00:37:24.960 that we're facing? If you've got an algorithm, which responds far better to negativity, outrage,

00:37:31.420 et cetera, then people are going to be more like that. I wouldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more.

00:37:37.720 The truth, however, is that perhaps if you want to look at the positive side of this,

00:37:42.840 for the first time in humanity's history, at least in your time and mine,

00:37:46.260 our incentives are going to be aligned, but we're all going to struggle with the coming wave.

00:37:53.340 For the first time, think of COVID multiplied by a hundred, right? For the first time ever,

00:37:59.660 I think in our lifetime, we were all struggling the same way across the world.

00:38:05.060 We were all, you know, whether rightly or wrongly, we were all being made to be afraid,

00:38:10.140 whether rightly or wrongly, we were being forced and controlled to behave in ways where we were not

00:38:15.820 given alibis. We were all struggling with our, you know, dopamine hits that we used to get from

00:38:22.900 being out with friends. We're stuck in, you know, in closed rooms alone. We were all missing human

00:38:27.840 connection. We were all struggling with uncertainty. There was a unification of humanity for those few

00:38:33.540 months, okay? Whether negative or positive. Imagine if I can tell you that within five years' time,

00:38:39.700 there will be a unification of humanity, at least in the Western world around,

00:38:43.320 holy shit, we all lost our jobs, okay? There is a unification there. There is suddenly going to

00:38:48.900 be, what are we going to do about this? And we have one of two choices. We either, the current choice,

00:38:54.560 the current choice, what I call the end of the truth, is we're going to be distracted, told lies,

00:39:00.540 and fighting against each other, okay? Disrespecting the other guy, you know, if they came from a

00:39:06.800 different party than ours, we'll be fighting them, right? Or we could do the wiser choice and say,

00:39:12.600 hey, hey, you come from a different party, but we're both struggling because we both lost our jobs,

00:39:18.460 okay? Can we work together to get our jobs back and then fight later? And I think that's the call

00:39:24.140 to action for humanity, is to suddenly say, we're going to be unified in a challenge.

00:39:29.580 And that challenge, by the way, is our own making as humanity.

00:39:32.780 Get our jobs back? You think we're going to get our jobs back?

00:39:36.860 I think we're going to get an alternative back.

00:39:40.960 You see, this was interesting, what you were saying earlier about humanity going back to its

00:39:45.280 core. And I would say, if we think about human evolution and the way our brains work,

00:39:50.900 we evolved to live in small tribes, mostly familial, some distant relations.

00:39:56.440 And now we live in atomized individual units, family units, best case scenario,

00:40:04.820 where that's why we have to work in order to produce, to provide. Whereas in the past,

00:40:10.360 you would live in a small environment, you would gather food, you would hunt food,

00:40:14.720 you would share the food. And at that level of organization, that made sense.

00:40:18.860 The problem is, I just don't see how you get, you put the toothpaste back in the tube,

00:40:25.180 unless, and I think this is why I'm very pessimistic, based on what you're saying,

00:40:29.920 personally. Unless you have such a cataclysm of people's reality, and such a change in their

00:40:37.480 material circumstances, that it makes sense to go back to that environment. But the way our

00:40:43.100 society's work is, particularly when it comes to things like politics, right, is the politicians

00:40:49.260 are, like, they're behind us. We are behind you, like you were there in 2017 saying, guys, guys,

00:40:57.060 guys, like some of us are starting to catch on. Politicians are another 20 years behind. 20 years

00:41:01.460 from now, you've seen the congressional hearings when they interview people from the big tech

00:41:07.280 platforms. They go, how do you make money? And they don't understand anything, right? So once

00:41:12.800 there are no jobs, there is obviously going to be a rapid and immediate call for various forms of

00:41:19.640 redistribution, various forms of rearranging society, that the politicians are not going to be

00:41:24.660 capable of handling. And that is the recipe for revolution.

00:41:31.620 Yes.

00:41:32.480 Yeah.

00:41:32.960 So that's why I say I'm pessimistic, because I'm just thinking logically and imagining as you speak

00:41:40.260 the consequences of what you're saying. I think the way that our brains evolved and the way that we

00:41:45.440 evolved to be, it's not just inevitable that bad things will happen, but I think cataclysms that will

00:41:54.320 rapidly reshape society are inevitable based on what you're saying.

00:41:58.520 So from one side, I don't disagree, right? This is what I, I mean, I sit here calmly because of all

00:42:05.060 of my work on, you know, happiness and stress and so on, because I believe that if it's inevitable,

00:42:10.500 you need to learn to deal with it rather than complain about it.

00:42:13.140 Correct. Yeah.

00:42:14.000 But at the same time, I'll openly tell you, there has been times in the past where massive shifts,

00:42:20.980 societal, economic, and so on. Great Depression is a great example of that.

00:42:24.120 Right. Where the, you get into this and, you know, you go to New York City, for example,

00:42:31.380 during COVID's lockdowns and you get looting and, you know, the destruction of property and so on

00:42:38.160 and so forth. You go to other places and you see people coming together and it's not going to be

00:42:43.900 one and the same. And it seems to me, if you take the Great Depression as an example, that you would

00:42:49.980 have expected that the immediate reaction of a nation, the U.S., for example, where, you know,

00:42:56.040 everything was all about making more money and succeeding more and so on. And then you get Black

00:42:59.820 Friday or Monday, I don't remember, Black Monday. And then, you know, you get, you start to see a

00:43:05.100 massive collapse. And what happened was the opposite. People started to live together in smaller houses.

00:43:10.480 They started to help each other. You know, they started to go back to simple, you know, I can fix

00:43:16.460 your shoe and you can, you know, lend me two of your eggs or whatever. Right. And it is quite

00:43:21.400 interesting how humanity might respond to that. How the politicians will respond to that is a

00:43:27.160 horrible disaster. Right. But how humanity will respond to that might be very interesting. And my

00:43:32.420 role in this entire conversation, not assuming that I know anything at all, is to say there is a high

00:43:38.800 probability that this becomes our short-term future. Okay. Become aware of it. Work on yourself and work on

00:43:45.540 how you're going to deal with all of this. Right. Not in terms of panic and then complain and then

00:43:50.580 tell yourself the world is about to become, to end. It's not going to end. Okay. But it requires

00:43:56.280 you to have massive shifts. You know, simple shifts. For example, I will tell you openly, if you're not

00:44:02.360 using AI today, what are you doing? Like, are you still stuck to the fax machine when smartphones are

00:44:09.280 out? Okay. People have to learn about AI. There needs to be a skill I call the most important skill in

00:44:15.380 our future is how to tell the truth from what's fake. Because 90% of what you are told today on

00:44:22.740 social media, on mainstream media is not the truth. And the new media too, by the way. And in the new

00:44:28.520 media. Yeah. The, you know, the truth is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Anything

00:44:34.380 other than that is not the truth. Right. And we're constantly bombarded with face filter. Is that the

00:44:39.800 truth? The whole truth and nothing but the truth? No. Okay. You're constantly bombarded with deep fakes.

00:44:44.240 You're constantly bombarded with opinions. So you go to a TV station, a news station and, you know,

00:44:51.000 a news channel. And what do they do? They tell you what they want you to know is the truth. It could

00:44:56.380 be partially part of the truth, but a lot of opinion. And we position the opinion as truth. We get a lot

00:45:01.240 of distraction. Right. Where there could be a very, very important topic that we should all focus on

00:45:07.580 and stop killing, you know, children in cities anywhere in the world. Can we please have war

00:45:13.360 in open war places? Okay. Can we please stop killing children? Right. And nobody's talking about

00:45:19.680 that. What are we talking about? Football and basketball and, you know, and disagreements and

00:45:25.360 walk arguments and, you know, maybe important topics for you. But is this the topic? Distraction is

00:45:31.780 taking the toll of humanity. Right. So there is a skill that I call find, you know, hone down on

00:45:38.140 your ability to know what is true and what is fake. Right. There is human connection. I believe the only

00:45:43.660 valuable skill in the next four or five years is this. Yeah. Okay. Because yes, I can promise you

00:45:51.600 in a year's time, you could have a Constantine avatar interview Mo's avatar and that becomes your

00:45:58.000 podcast. And it will be so realistic, it will blow you away. I was on Abundance 360, a very big AI

00:46:04.460 conference a month ago, and my avatar was doing more talking than me. Right. And the idea is,

00:46:12.460 but it won't be this. It won't be the conversation we had in the car coming here. This is a skill that

00:46:18.820 we all have to learn. And we have to start gearing up. We have to start saying the world is changing

00:46:24.100 people. Wake up. Mo, I'm worried when we talk about this, we're talking about massive job losses. If we

00:46:32.020 think about, let's look at the United States, the industry, the driving industry, the people who drive

00:46:40.460 trucks, the people who drive vans, the people who drive Ubers, et cetera, et cetera, that employs

00:46:45.320 millions of people, particularly millions of men and millions of young men. It never ends well when you

00:46:51.500 have large groups of disaffected young men who have no purpose, who have a lot of energy, who realize

00:47:00.560 that they don't have anywhere to direct their energy. That leads to anger. That's something that

00:47:06.720 we should be really worried about when it comes to AI. Yes. So absolutely. I agree completely. It's

00:47:14.180 something that we absolutely have to work on. Believe it or not, it's going to happen the other way.

00:47:18.520 So most people mix AI and robotics. Okay. Right. So the physical incarnation of AI is a robotic machine.

00:47:27.580 Okay. Because of the cost of creating hardware and how it needs to follow economies of scale

00:47:33.220 to become, you know, to become more available everywhere. The first bit of AI that will penetrate

00:47:43.340 our society is actually software. Okay. So it's all of the knowledge workers. Knowledge workers will go

00:47:49.400 first. Right. So give me examples of knowledge workers. Lawyers, you know. Lawyers are gone. Okay.

00:47:56.140 Some good news. Can we please make the AI lawyer nicer? Yeah. But let me be very clear. It's going to be two stages.

00:48:06.120 Right. Stage one is a lawyer that uses AI will have a distinct advantage over a lawyer who doesn't.

00:48:12.140 So the AI-powered lawyer will take the job of the non-AI-powered lawyer. Right. And then eventually AI itself

00:48:20.980 will say, why do I need the flesh in that conversation? You know, it's all basically knowledge. Right.

00:48:28.120 Accounting, you know, travel agent, you know, as I said, artist, creative designer, you know, a graphic

00:48:37.880 designer, a software developer, anything. So the evolution of humanities, we went from hunter-gatherers

00:48:44.040 to, you know, farmers, to industrialists, to the big shift was knowledge workers. Right. You know,

00:48:50.860 information workers. We all stopped using our physical form and started using our brain intelligence.

00:48:56.380 Right. Anything that relies on intelligence will eventually be replaced. How quickly? We don't

00:49:01.700 know. Right. And it's quite interesting that the biggest shift is happening in the industries

00:49:07.040 that used to use a computer. Right. So it's the developers, software developers. I think it's

00:49:12.500 around 70% of the code on GitHub today is AI developed. Right. And, you know, it's all of the

00:49:20.400 graphics design. I used to, you know, to design stuff on my, you know, on my iPad with any graphics

00:49:27.860 tool, graphics design tool. Why would I do that anymore? I just pick my device and I say, hey,

00:49:34.220 create an image of a dog biting a pizza and running through the fields. It takes one second.

00:49:40.780 And in a very interesting way, that basically will create two very distinct categories. Right. So

00:49:50.060 me as an author, I used to write books, then come talk to you about them, then create online content

00:49:56.760 for them. Right. That's no longer going to be the case because I think there were 62,000 books

00:50:03.200 published last year. Next year, there will be 120,000 because everyone now can go to a tool,

00:50:08.600 an AI tool and say, hey, write me 180 pages book about stress and the impact of stress on humanity

00:50:14.940 and how do we, you know, fix it. And poof, it will be done. Right. Just like you use ChatGPT to

00:50:21.780 write an essay for school, you can write a crappy book using AI. Okay. You can probably write a better

00:50:27.720 book using AI if you put a little bit of human intelligence in it. So I'm shifting my approach.

00:50:33.360 Okay. All of us were going to become artisans. It's quite interesting. You can either become

00:50:38.580 a real artist. So you use multimedia or oil paint or whatever and create something that

00:50:45.060 becomes sort of the handcrafted antique. Okay. But if you're using technology to create

00:50:53.880 graphics, designs and logos, gone. Wow.

00:50:58.180 That's really interesting. I used to run my own translation business before I started,

00:51:02.580 before I became a comedian and started doing this. And in the translation industry, machine

00:51:08.020 translation has been going on for a long time. And this has been a big part of the conversation.

00:51:12.220 And I always used to say to people, there will be human translation still, but it will be like the

00:51:19.300 market for tailored clothing. It will be a boutique exclusive elite thing that some people purchase

00:51:25.420 for very high value, important things. Most of the day-to-day stuff will be made in Primark.

00:51:31.500 A hundred percent. Basically. That's what's about to happen.

00:51:34.000 So that's what's about to happen to the knowledge workers. And then the robotics will come.

00:51:38.260 Robotics will follow. And self-driving cars, for example, is a clear one. But you have to imagine

00:51:43.120 that from a hardware point of view, because of the asset costs, replacement cycles takes four or five

00:51:49.520 years. It's not like someone will walk out there tomorrow and they'll have a fleet of 2,000 cars and

00:51:54.480 they'll say, done. Let's replace all of the 2,000 cars tomorrow. Even if there are savings to be done

00:52:00.920 on self-driving, there is acceptance and adaptation of people for the technology, but also at the same

00:52:07.600 time, just probably as a business, you're going to make a simple decision to say, all cars that reach

00:52:13.160 their life limit, don't replace them with normal cars, replace them with self-driving cars.

00:52:17.560 Right? And I tend to believe that the hardware incarnation of artificial intelligence, other

00:52:23.460 than sadly in defense, is going to take maybe five to 10 years.

00:52:28.440 So a smooth segue into your latest book is how does one prepare oneself for whatever the

00:52:36.220 hell is coming? Because nobody actually knows what it is that's coming.

00:52:39.180 Exactly. So unstressable is, so I write on a mission. I truly do. I mean, my first book,

00:52:47.060 So for Happy was backed by a mission called One Billion Happy. And my attempt was to try and use

00:52:53.180 technology and a logical approach to the topic to reach millions and millions and millions of people.

00:52:59.220 Tell people that happiness is your birthright, basically, and that it's attainable. Okay?

00:53:05.200 Moving from there, I started to actually recognize that it's not just learning how to be happy

00:53:11.140 that matters. It's how to stop being unhappy. That is really the big issue. That there are

00:53:16.220 multiple topics in the world that are causing a lot of unhappiness, a lot of well-being issues,

00:53:22.460 a lot of mental health issues. Stress is very high on that list. Okay? And most people don't

00:53:28.520 recognize that 70% to 80%. Can you believe this? 70% to 80% of clinical visits to go to a doctor

00:53:37.020 are because of a stress-related illness. So diabetes is frequently stress-related. You know,

00:53:43.440 obesity is stress-related. You know, cardiac diseases of most sorts are stress-related and so on.

00:53:51.900 So I worked with Alice. Alice is my co-author on this book to try and do two different approaches to

00:53:59.500 this. One is Alice and I are almost diametrically opposite, yin and yang in every possible way. I am

00:54:07.980 a very serious engineer. My writing method, even on topics that are as soft as happiness and stress

00:54:13.680 and so on, is using equations and physics. And so unstressable starts with what we call the stress

00:54:19.800 equation, then the burnout equation. And it's a very, very logical approach so that you understand

00:54:24.760 algorithmically what is happening. And Alice, on the other hand, is that very feminine, very soft,

00:54:30.060 very spiritual and emotional approach to the same topics. Right? And I think that mix has not been

00:54:36.900 acknowledged before. Right? So this is one way of doing it. The other way, which I think was really

00:54:44.480 interesting, is that half, not halfway, maybe a couple of months into writing the book, we went back

00:54:49.980 and said, no, no, the book is unstressable. It's not de-stress. Right? So it's actually very,

00:54:56.420 very interestingly positioned for what became our life today. We wrote this in 2021, 2022, is that

00:55:02.860 it is about teaching you how to sort of go to the gym, if you want, so that you're fit when stress

00:55:10.660 comes your way. It's not, oh, you're stressed, let's help you become unstressed. Okay? Or de-stressed.

00:55:16.600 Right? So it is quite interesting when you start to digest, you know, dissect it this way,

00:55:23.080 that there are simple habits, simple habits that are centered around the concept that it's not the

00:55:28.740 event that stresses you. It's the way you deal with it that does. Right? It's not the commute that

00:55:33.860 stresses you. Right? You can actually wait for your commute every day if you have a wonderful cup of

00:55:39.760 coffee and maybe a friend to chat with or a podcast to listen to. Or, you know, if you time your commute a

00:55:45.420 tiny bit differently, it might actually be quite pleasurable and much less stressful and so on.

00:55:51.000 So tiny habits of that form. There's a man who hasn't spent any time in the British train system.

00:55:57.100 That is, I have to tell you openly, there is a very interesting promise in Britain around you have

00:56:04.340 to be show up on time. It's absolutely impossible to show up on time. It's like the trains are never

00:56:09.940 on time. Right. And you're either early or late. It's like, what do you want me to do? And if you're

00:56:15.500 early, you're standing in the rain outside and it's cold and I don't know what to do here. I revert

00:56:21.160 back to my Middle Eastern habits and I'm always a tiny, tiny little bit late. You notice today. But

00:56:27.280 that's the idea. The idea, by the way, is even if you're about to be late, we came to you six minutes

00:56:32.280 late today. Right. It's okay. As long as you know how to deal with that, when you get the information

00:56:37.800 that the train is late. Okay. Can I text you, Constantine, and say, hey, by the way, I'm really

00:56:42.900 sorry. We're six minutes late. There's no disrespectment here at all. Right. And those simple

00:56:49.800 techniques fit within four categories. We call them mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual stress.

00:56:56.600 Right. And they're actually quite different when you look at them. That mental stress is all of

00:57:03.020 those incessant thought cycles that happen within you, not happening in the real world at all. Okay.

00:57:08.440 Like this conversation between us. Everyone listening to this about artificial intelligence

00:57:13.240 and the possibility of what artificial intelligence will cost and will cost us. Okay. But you're still

00:57:19.620 okay right now. Right. Everything's fine right now. You have this, you know, grace period between

00:57:26.520 now and then where you can actually do a lot of changes and you can, you know, work on yourself,

00:57:30.980 work with your family, work on your skills, work on a lot of things. You can be ready for it. Right.

00:57:36.380 And so mental stress would lead you in the direction where you sit in a corner and say,

00:57:41.500 we're all going to die. Okay. Mental fitness. We have something that we wrote that's called the

00:57:47.000 gym, G-Y-M-M-M-M-M-M-M, six M's. Exercises that you use your brain for, you know, simple things

00:57:53.600 like gratitude and meditations and so on, but much more complex ones as well that allow you to manage

00:57:59.000 that machine that's called your brain so that when the stress comes, you're fit. Right. Can you,

00:58:04.340 can you deal with your emotions a little bit better instead of suppressing them or exploding as a

00:58:09.920 result of them? Can you acknowledge them and, and, you know, write them down and then understand them

00:58:15.180 and, you know, and deal with them in ways that actually allow you to use the energy associated with

00:58:19.820 associated with an emotion so that, you know, instead of the emotion crushing you, you use

00:58:24.580 that energy to do something positive with it and so on. So it's, it's a very pragmatic approach

00:58:30.320 to look, shit's going to hit the fan, uh, get ready, but do it right. So that when, when, you know,

00:58:37.500 things become more difficult, you're more fit to deal with them.

00:58:41.260 Mo, don't you also think as well that a lot of this is self-acceptance? For instance,

00:58:45.900 there's some situations that I might find highly stressful, but you wouldn't. And also the opposite

00:58:52.680 is true. So let's take the example of lateness. I hate being late. I'm very conscientious and

00:58:59.100 I worry that my impact, that my lateness will have an impact on other people's lives. And that will mean

00:59:06.500 that they can't operate the way that they want to, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't mind being half an

00:59:13.580 hour early because I know that I will arrive there in a more relaxed state. I will be more

00:59:20.080 productive. I find that highly stressful. Even arriving on time causes me to be very stressed.

00:59:27.000 I don't like, like arriving on time. So I guess my point is we also need to have a greater degree

00:59:34.420 of self-awareness to understand the things that we find stressful and the things that we,

00:59:40.080 that we don't and the things that we cope with and the things that we need help with.

00:59:44.580 I think that's a great example. Honestly, I think this would probably explain the whole thing very,

00:59:48.860 very well. You see, we all get stressed by being late. I mean, in a, in a, not South Americans.

00:59:55.080 I was going to say, I was going to say in a society where it, where, where on time is, is,

01:00:00.080 is seen as an important value. We all get stressed by, by being late, right?

01:00:04.000 The approaches we take to it. So let me go from the basics. You can understand stress from a

01:00:11.600 biological point of view as a reconfiguration of your hormonal makeup that basically makes you

01:00:18.120 superhuman, right? So the original design is there is a tiger attacking you and you have to get into

01:00:23.400 fight or flight. That's the original design. Similarly, you know, there is a threat in being late

01:00:29.240 because your value set says I shouldn't be, I'm wasting people's time. You know, it's going to

01:00:33.500 appear disrespectful and so on and so forth. So, so you use your cognitive abilities to again,

01:00:39.360 get the same hormonal makeup, cortisol, cortisol in your blood, adrenaline sometimes to attack that

01:00:44.640 challenge in ways that make you superhuman, right? And superhuman is not just fight or flight.

01:00:49.780 It's also your brain getting more glucose. It's your, you know, pupils dilating. It's more focus

01:00:54.560 and concentration and so on, right? So, so, so interestingly, we all get stressed in the same

01:01:00.780 way. The way we choose to respond to stress is very interestingly understood from physics.

01:01:08.600 Okay. So when Alice and I were writing this, the first thing I did is I said, Alice, I will only be

01:01:14.200 able to write properly about this topic if I understood the algorithms behind it. And if you look

01:01:19.000 at physics, when you stress an object, it's not the challenge applied to it that is stress. Stress is

01:01:26.120 the challenge divided by the cross-section of the object, right? If you, if you apply a ton to a

01:01:32.080 meter, a square meter of metal, there will be no stress at all, right? The ton is still heavy. If you

01:01:38.980 apply it to a pencil, it's crushed. And, and the trick here is this, is that most humans, one, we either

01:01:46.320 accept some challenges that are not necessary, that end, add up to the, to the ton and, and lead to

01:01:52.800 burnout, or we don't invest in the square area. So, so if you take the stress equation in humans,

01:01:59.020 stress is the challenge you face divided by the resources and abilities you have to deal with it.

01:02:04.600 Each of us develops those resources differently. Okay. But the game is, are you going to invest in

01:02:12.040 developing those resources? So believe it or not, you, you and I, every one of us,

01:02:15.760 you take something that freaked you out when you're 20, when you're 30, it's a little challenging,

01:02:21.620 but not that challenging. When you talk to me now in my fifties, I laugh at it, right? Is it

01:02:27.320 because the challenge changed? Not at all. It's because I developed my square area. I remember

01:02:32.080 vividly when I joined Google originally, my, my, one of my best bosses ever was the head of me at the

01:02:38.380 time. And, and he introduced me to the company. Literally, this is the first executive meeting. And he goes

01:02:45.300 like, Hey everyone, this is Mo. He brings the average age of the company up. I swear. And that's it. He

01:02:50.580 didn't say a single word. I was like, yes. And he just said that, that he brings that. And, and it was

01:02:56.800 true. It was me and Alan Eustace and maybe Eric Schmidt and others. And there was a group of us that were

01:03:02.120 really above the average age of the company. Okay. So when the 2008 economic crisis happened,

01:03:08.400 most of the company panicked. It's like, what, what do we do about this? Eric, myself, Alan, and so on.

01:03:15.700 We're like, yeah, it's not the first time we've seen this before, right? We've dealt with this before.

01:03:21.640 And, and the whole idea is once you develop that square area, you suddenly start to see a lot of what

01:03:28.140 is stressing you as not stressful at all. That's exactly what my attempt is. This is why this is very timely

01:03:34.180 because a lot of the stress that we feel in today's world is not just because of the challenges we face

01:03:41.640 today. It's what I call the anticipation of stress or as an anticipation of threats, right? So a very big

01:03:48.420 chunk of why the world is stressed today is worry, anxiety, and panic. These are not about things

01:03:57.060 happening to you right now. It's not that you lost your job and you're starving. It's your thinking

01:04:02.520 that you might lose your job. Okay. That's worry, but you're not sure yet. It's your anxiety about it

01:04:08.300 and your panic about it if it's, if it's imminent. Okay. And one of the things, again, algorithmically

01:04:13.060 that explains this is very, very straightforward. If you take fear and all of its derivatives, and one of

01:04:17.840 the reasons why we have so much anxiety and panic attacks is because we're treating them as fear.

01:04:23.360 Fear. Anxiety is very different in fabric than fear. So worry. So if you assume that fear

01:04:28.960 is, I know that a moment in the future is less safe to me than now. Okay. We had this conversation

01:04:35.780 about artificial intelligence and we agree that it seems that almost certain that the world is going

01:04:42.160 to change, right? But we're not fully sure if it's going to change for the better or the worse, likely

01:04:47.420 for the worse in the beginning and then better, hopefully later. Worry is not knowing that. Worry

01:04:54.420 is, will I lose my job or will I not lose my job? Right. There is, you know, there are so many changes

01:05:00.060 in the company. Am I going to be out of a job? Right. Am I going to be out of a job? If you deal

01:05:06.020 with it as worry, it's very different than if you deal with it as fear. Okay. If, if you know for a fact

01:05:12.420 you're going to lose your job, you're going to start saving, right? Or you're going to start looking

01:05:16.340 for another job or you're going to act based on the challenge. If you're worried, you keep

01:05:21.100 shuffling back and forth. You go, you're undecided, you know, should I invest in this job so that I

01:05:27.340 make sure I don't lose it? Or should I give up on this job and look for another job because I'm

01:05:31.360 going to lose it? Right. My advice is if you're worried, don't treat it as fear, treat it as worry

01:05:36.720 and nail where, which side you want to be on. Is there a reason to be afraid? Am I going,

01:05:42.480 am I going to assume that I'm losing my job and behave as such? Or am I going to assume that I'm

01:05:47.160 not and behave as such? That, that eradicates the worry, turns it into fear, but it eradicates the

01:05:52.980 worry. The worry, the uncertainty kills us, right? Anxiety is even more interesting because anxiety is

01:05:59.200 not about the challenge that you're about to face. Anxiety is entirely focused on your own

01:06:05.600 perception of your ability to deal with it. When I'm anxious, I know that there is something

01:06:11.280 difficult coming and I believe that I'm not, you know, equipped to deal with it. If you focus on

01:06:18.580 trying to address the issue that is coming, you're not fixing the problem. You're still anxious because

01:06:23.880 you believe you're not ready for it, right? So when you're anxious, I tell people, stop thinking about

01:06:29.320 the threat. Start thinking about yourself. How can I give myself more skills? Do I actually not have

01:06:35.440 the skills or do I actually have them, but I'm not telling myself the truth? Can I, you know,

01:06:40.760 borrow from someone else's experience? If I'm not good in, you know, finances, for example, can I call

01:06:45.620 an accountant friend and say, can you please do this for me? And so on and so forth. So when you're

01:06:50.020 anxious, don't focus on the challenge, focus on your skills around the challenge, okay? Panic is simply

01:06:56.700 because the threat is imminent. Your focus is not the threat, focus is time, okay? If I have a

01:07:02.560 presentation on Thursday, right, and I'm panicking, I'm panicking because Thursday's two days away,

01:07:08.380 okay? So can I call and delay the presentation? Can I cancel a few of my other things so that I give

01:07:13.600 myself more time? Can I, you know, and so on. It's so interesting that the skill itself is so muddled in

01:07:21.680 our head. And when you tell people, just understand how stress works, it becomes so much easier for you

01:07:28.980 to deal with those things than just to be constantly moving from a panic attack to an anxiety attack to,

01:07:34.400 you know, uncertainty around worry to, it is just so confusing. Put it in the right places and you'll

01:07:41.040 behave differently. The way you choose to behave is irrelevant. As long as you have the cross area,

01:07:47.200 the skills and abilities to deal with the stress. You choose to arrive early, your choice. I choose

01:07:53.520 to tell people up front when they say, be here at 10.30. I say, is it okay if I'm five, ten minutes

01:07:59.560 early or late? Okay? And I give myself that range before I even get on the train or even the day

01:08:06.360 starts so that they're aware that I might be five minutes early or late. And then life becomes much

01:08:11.580 easier for me. Well, it's been great having you on. We've run out of time. We're going to go to locals

01:08:16.900 to ask you questions from our supporters that they've already submitted. Before we do that, we always end

01:08:21.380 with the same question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that

01:08:25.660 you think we should be? Before Mo answers a final question at the end of the interview, make sure

01:08:32.740 to click the link in the description and head over to our locals to see this. The challenge with Google

01:08:39.220 is both a big company scale and a sense of responsibility, believe it or not. Happiness is

01:08:46.960 your perception of the events of your life, minus your expectations of how life should behave.

01:08:53.080 What are, in your view, the biggest political and cultural reasons why the US seems to be far the

01:08:58.960 most reluctant major country to introduce AI legislation? The EU, China and India have introduced

01:09:07.040 quite extensive legislation already. So why does the US seem to drag behind?

01:09:12.280 What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we should be?

01:09:19.040 The truth. I think I mentioned that a couple of times. I think the sign of our time, honestly,

01:09:26.480 is that there is a flood of information and a lot of distraction where most of us believe what we're

01:09:32.660 told, when in reality, none of what we're told is true. The biggest skill in today's world is your

01:09:38.920 ability to debate if what is your, if what you're being told is your truth, right? If someone tells

01:09:46.600 you that this party is right and that party is wrong, they're both wrong. They're both right.

01:09:51.980 They both have some topics that you should agree on and other topics that you should, it's the

01:09:57.260 granularity that matters. If someone tells you that this, you know, future is going to happen,

01:10:03.960 even what I told you, debate it, debate it, okay? If someone shows you a video on Instagram,

01:10:10.580 know that this is not entirely the truth. The biggest issue with our world today is we have

01:10:16.900 no ability, we've become dumb, right? We have no ability to vet what we go through first before we

01:10:26.400 make up our minds on it. We sometimes label people, you know, I know you're going on a tour with Jordan

01:10:31.660 Peterson, for example. People will either label him as intelligent and wise and, or, you know,

01:10:37.500 annoying and evil, right? It doesn't matter, by the way. Whatever you label him, it doesn't matter.

01:10:43.980 If he says something wise, it's wise. If he says something annoying, it's annoying. It's simple as

01:10:48.960 that, right? And I think that reality of how, of going beyond what's presented to us to actually find

01:10:56.680 out what the truth, what my truth, there is no, it's very difficult to claim that there is one truth,

01:11:02.560 okay? But to be able to go beyond that presentation to find out what my truth is, is the first step

01:11:09.220 before you react to it. I think this is the sign of our times. Thank you very much. Guys, head on over

01:11:14.480 to locals where we ask Mo your questions. Could AI ask questions of itself such that it will one day

01:11:21.980 become religious? Great question.

TRIGGERnometry - September 08, 2024

How AI Changes The World THIS DECADE - Mo Gawdat

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