1338: Jamie Metzl | The AI Ten Commandments

25:14They would have thought that's magic. All this stuff is magic and then it normalizes. It's funny you mentioned AG-1. So this morning, my wife, Jen, goes, I was looking at your Jamie Metzl notes and you wrote that AGI is BS because you and I were talking about that. So she goes, I don't think you should say AG-1 is BS because they sponsor the show, but I'm curious what his problem is with it. And I was like, I was so confused. So I called her and I said, I don't know what you're talking about. She's like, he's got this problem with AG1. He said, it's bullshit. And I was like, wait a minute. And I said, are you talking about AGI?

25:48And she goes, I could just see her over the phone squinting and going, oh, that's like his Saturday night live. It is. Yeah. So I guess, is that the segue to why AGI was nonsense? So I have summarized a big part of my view on AGI, artificial general intelligence. And by AGI, what most people mean is a point when our machines will be able to do most cognitive or all cognitive tasks better than the average human. And I summarize my response in seven letters, I-S-B-S. A-G-I is bullshit. And what I mean by that is we don't even know what we know. We don't know how we know it. Ed Young had a wonderful book called An Immense World where he describes all of these different animals, all of whom are relatives of ours.

26:40And they have just different ways of sensing the world and some smell through their hands. And we have all of those things. You and I are together as people. There's so much more that's happening right now than the transcript of the words or predicting what word is going to come after. That's what human knowledge is. And so this idea that we're going to be able to replicate that or have machines do everything that humans can do is such an insult to the majesty of what a human is. We represent almost four billion years of embodied evolution. We're not some kind of disjointed brains walking around coincidentally with these physical bodies.

27:28It's all one thing. So I definitely believe in machine intelligence. Machine may be super intelligence, but we're going to have to recognize that there's a Venn diagram of us and machines, and there are going to be some areas where there's overlap. But the people who are saying that we're on the verge of AGI, of machines doing everything that humans can do, or that humans are the new Neanderthals, I just don't buy it. I think that humans, we have so many skills, and we're selling ourselves short. And frankly, I think that a lot of the people who are promoting this narrative are a bit self-interested.

28:02And the message should be humans are incredible. These machines are incredible. We are building these machines. Let's build them in a way that makes everybody's lives better. And that won't be perfect. And we'll have some screw ups along the way, as we've had with every technology. And you can't have the positives without at least some negatives. But this fatalism that AI is just going to take over everything and humans are finished, I think it's really destructive. Definitely the way you work is going to change. But the name of the game is figuring out how can you help your humans be the best possible humans doing essentially inherently human stuff?

28:41And then how can you have machines doing essentially machine stuff? And so you don't want your machines functioning as second-rate humans or your humans functioning at second-rate machines. And that's the name of the game. And while GPT-5 is busy trying to drag humanity toward moral clarity like a substitute teacher breaking up a knife fight, let's hear from today's sponsors. This episode is sponsored in part by Earning. Waiting for payday is one of those things we've all just accepted as normal, even though it's kind of ridiculous. You work the hours, you earn the money, and then somehow you still have to wait days or even weeks to get paid.

29:15Meanwhile, bills, groceries, random life expenses keep coming at you hot. Earning is a financial technology company, not a bank, and it gives you access to the money you've already earned up to$150 a day with a max of$1 ,000 between paydays. And no, this is not a payday loan. There's no interest, no credit checks, no mandatory fees. Standard cash outs take one to two business days with no mandatory fees. Expedited transfers are available for a fee, and tips are totally voluntary and don't affect the service. I like this. It actually feels like a tool that works with people instead of making timing more stressful than it needs to be.

29:44Download Earning on the App Store or Google Play. It's spelled like earning money without the G. Type in Jordan Harbinger under podcast when you sign up. It'll really help the show. Access limits are based on your earnings and risk factors. Available in select states. Terms and restrictions apply. Visit Earning.com for full details. This episode is brought to you in part by Lufthansa. When people talk about travel, they usually focus on the destination, the hotel, the restaurants, all the stuff that happens after you land. But the flight is part of the experience, too. Just like a great hotel can shape an entire trip, so can a great flight.

30:13That's exactly what Lufthansa Allegris is built around. On a long haul route, comfort matters more than people realize. If you're cramped, tired, and can't relax, you feel it the second you land. But when a flight is comfortable, you can actually stretch out, rest, work, or just enjoy the ride. It changes the whole trip. I was thinking about that on my recent Intercontinental Lufthansa flight. I got so comfortable, I honestly didn't want the flight to end, which is not something you say very often after a long international trip. That's why Lufthansa Allegris stands out. It's built around the idea that people travel differently.

30:38Lufthansa Allegris' business class has five seat options. You've got the suite, the privacy seat, and the extra long bed, the extra space seat, and the classic seat so you can choose what works for you. And that's what I like most. It feels elevated but still practical. More privacy, more comfort, more thoughtful design for the way people actually travel now. Visit Lufthansa.com and search for Allegris to learn more. Lufthansa Allegris. All it takes is a yes. Limited availability on select routes. More routes coming soon. All right, a little inside scoop you might not be aware of. When you use our promo codes, you're not just scoring a discount.

31:09You're giving the show a big boost. We don't earn commissions from sales or anything like that. But when companies see that listeners are engaging with the ads on the show, it encourages them to keep supporting us. So if you're planning to sign up for something, please remember to use our code. It's usually Jordan. You can find all those on the deals page. It's a win-win. You get a great deal and you help keep the show going strong. We really do appreciate your support. Now back to Jamie Metzl. You're no stranger to questioning spirituality. Age nine, Jewish day school in Kansas City, dragged out by the ear.

31:40Yes. After saying, I don't believe any of this crap. I don't need God to have morals. Yes. That went over well. My whole thing since I was a little kid, I was one of those annoying little kids, as I imagine you were. Sure. Who's just saying, why? Why? I don't get it. Explain it. Why? That doesn't make sense. And I just think we live in cultures and we inherit a lot of things. And I think that's great. We have cultural legacies. We're speaking in a language, English, that neither of us invented, but it creates a set of possibilities for us. And so I massively value the cultural inheritance. That's why if you and I just were on our own to go to some desert island somewhere, we would have a very hard time, an impossible time replicating the most basic aspects of our society.

32:26But I just think it's very healthy for thinking people to challenge and say, why? And sometimes that pushes you and me into questioning things, saying this doesn't make sense. And sometimes, like with this new book, AI Ten Commandments, this is a really interesting opportunity. What could it mean? Like, how could it expand us in new and creative ways? And so, yeah, I know I've been a pain in the ass for my entire life. You got expelled after seventh grade. I mean, that's generally - I was so happy about that. Your parents must have been thrilled too, yeah. I was so happy because I was in seventh grade.

32:59There were four kids in my entire grade. And two of them, and bless their hearts, they were Russian immigrants who didn't speak a word of English. So there were two kids who spoke English and two kids who only spoke Russian. And we were in a little trailer home with four people. And it was awful. And so when I switched schools in the beginning of eighth grade. This sounds like a fake school. It was so awful. I guess it built character. When I switched schools in eighth grade, I went from this four person school in a trailer park to this wonderful school. And I'll shout out if anyone's listening from the Barstow School in Kansas City, where I went in eighth grade.

33:39And it was just this amazing school. But I was like a feral kid because I just I didn't know any English. The only thing I learned was math because one year in math in the old school, they had one of those self-timing things where you just go at your own pace. And so in that year, I got three years ahead of everybody else. But when I switched, I was like this feral kid. I didn't know grammar. I just hadn't learned anything. I hadn't learned how to write. I just had learned nothing. By eighth grade. By eighth grade. I mean, I was like Mowgli. And luckily, I learned pretty quickly in eighth grade, as I remember, I had my first history test when I was in eighth grade.

34:16And it asked a question. And I had just memorized kind of everything, but I didn't know anything about how to write an essay. So everybody was gone. And I was just writing and writing. And I had great recollection of everything I'd read. And I got a C minus, which was the best and worst grade I've ever received. And the history teacher, Mr. Gratwick, he said, this isn't how you write an essay. You have to actually think about it. And I said, oh, actually, that makes sense. It took me not that long, maybe a few months to figure out what the new thing was. But I'm glad that I had that chance to transition.

34:52I'm starting to see why you chose ChatGPT as your co-author, if that's your approach to writing. Yeah. Well, that's its approach to writing. And that's why I gutted the book and rewrote the entire book. And I think that's, and again, coming back to our earlier conversation about authorship, I wanted to be radically transparent because I think that there are a lot of people who are using AI and they're not saying they're using AI. And so I thought people would say, oh, that's really great. You're being radically transparent. It's been a mixed story. You must have been really bored in school because you end up at a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border at 18, human rights work in Cambodia with the UN, Clinton White House, Yugoslavia.

35:33You don't do that when you're enjoying your time in school, generally speaking. From my experience, I was like, how do I get out of here? What can I do? That's exciting. Well, I've loved my time in school. I mean, it's kind of preposterous when I say this, and I have no clue why I did it. But I did my PhD at Oxford in two years because I was on such a mission. And I remember my advisor saying, like, this is supposed to take four or five years. Why are you doing it so fast? Where are you going? And I got to get out. I just don't drink every night. You know, it's true. In Oxford, there's the drinking at late night.

36:06And then after lunch and dinner, you go to the tea and coffee room. And then you have your tea and coffee and people serve you. And then in those days, you read all the newspapers. And I thought, God, these guys are going to be here for like 100 years. But it turns out that's the goal. Like the graduate students, I went back like eight, nine, ten years later, and some of the people were still there. But they were having a great life. They were tea after every meal and drinking. I was on a big hurry. So I did my. Yeah, this is their lifestyle. Yeah, it's a great lifestyle, frankly. And so for me, I did my Ph.D.

36:38and my law degree, but I was really anxious to get out into the world. And that's why I went to the Thai-Cambodian border. I went in Cambodia where I was a human rights officer for the UN for two years when I was in the Clinton White House. I spent a lot of time in the former Yugoslavia and was deeply involved in that. Everything for me was about what's the idea and then how is the idea realized in the world? Yeah, I'm curious. You must have seen moral language in the middle of some real human catastrophe. So what did Cambodia and Yugoslavia teach you, maybe about the gap between having principles and actually living principles?

37:16Such a great and important question. Maybe I'll back up a little bit. My father and grandparents technically are Holocaust survivors, and now all are deceased. They weren't in a camp, but my father was born in Austria in 1938. They escaped to Switzerland at the end of 1938, were displaced persons for 10 years, and then came to the United States. So for my whole life, I've always felt the accident and the opportunity and the responsibility of that history. And so I even wrote about this in my first novel. There's one idealistic character who says that his mission is to stare into the darkness. It doesn't end well for this character, but as a hero of the world, that the way to be an idealist is not through isolation or blindness.

38:02The way to be an idealist is to go to the hardest places and see what you can do and try to help people insofar as you can. And so both in Cambodia, on the border and in Cambodia and in the former Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan, where I actually was pretty active and I created a youth leadership network of these incredible Afghan young leaders everywhere. There's so much despair and so much hope in these dark places, in these difficult places. You see the worst of people and you see the best of people. The Italian writer Primo Levi has a wonderful book, a wonderful, terrible book called Survival in Auschwitz, where he talks about being in Auschwitz.

38:46And you see these extremes of humanity. You see the absolute worst, not just the Nazis, but even among the prisoners, that these people who are it's like they become their worst. And then you see the people like the Viktor Frankl's and others who in these terrible environments are really being their best. So for me, that's been I can't I'm not saying that I've lived up to that principle, but my goal for myself is to not avert my eyes to what's really difficult in the world and to dedicate as much of my life energy to saying, well, what can I do either to help or to inspire people or help people think or things like that?

39:23So I think a lot of people are thinking, cool, but we already have Ten Commandments. Why do we need more again? Why have them rewritten? I'm very proud that I've gotten pretty strong support for this book, both from the Vatican. And from Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, who I just absolutely love, who's one of the lead reform rabbis in the United States. And the reason why I think that's the case is what I'm saying is these are not replacement Ten Commandments. I'm not saying these are better than anything else. What I'm saying is that we have these multiple traditions. Judaism and Christianity has the Ten Commandments.

40:02Islam has the fivefold path and Buddhism and has the eightfold path. I'm getting it all confused. But every tradition has these distillations of their ethical principles. And I'm not saying we need to get rid of those. I'm saying, actually, these are really wonderful principles. But our ancestors, even if they are mythical or real, the people who were maybe in Sinai or the people who came up with these original Ten Commandments, they had no clue there was an advanced civilization where we are now in the Americas, where these people had their own ethical traditions trying to answer the exact same questions.

40:44What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to build a meaningful community and all of these other things? We should celebrate our individual traditions. But wouldn't it be wonderful if we could look at all of them and see ourselves collectively like the Artemis II astronauts saw when they looked at Earth and just kind of saw us as one thing? And they didn't look like, oh, there's the U.S.-Mexico border. There's this little ball of life in a dark and lifeless surroundings. And so for me, that's what my message is not. We need to get rid of those original Ten Commandments. But these are ten principles based on all of us.

41:21And I will say that when I gave that first talk at Chautauqua and I went through our Ten Commandments and I explained why if you take them literally, it's hard to do. That's what AJ's book was about, taking them literally and it becomes ridiculous. My neighbor doesn't have a manservant or an ox for me to covet. Even then you can kind of crook your neck and say, well, it means this other thing. And then I presented these, quote unquote, AI Ten Commandments. All these older people at Chautauqua, I was kind of mobbed because they said, give me the new Ten Commandments. And I said, well, I'm going to publish a book.

41:52I've already broken a lot of these. I want to see the new ones. Exactly. You give the eight asterisks argument, right? Day, thou shalt not murder. That means moral context. Enigma, machine theft. you wanted to steal that from the Nazis so we could save some lives. Lying to Nazis, lying to slave catchers, morally justified false witness, coveting as the engine of consumer capitalism. I thought that was a creative one. You got to want things, otherwise our society... What are we going to do? What are we going to do? We got to sell you something. Yeah, so a lot of that is clever. You don't trash the original Ten Commandments.

42:23They're a gift with the asterisks are there, which I thought was quite funny. So you have this great line of argument. Humans don't just invent tools, help us invent gods. So yeah, walk us briefly from fire to agriculture to AI. When we have these new technologies, they don't just change the way we live. They often can change us. So a million years ago, our ancestors learned to control fire. And once we controlled fire, we could tame the world around us and we could cook food. Once our ancestors learned how to cook food, it was a very efficient way. It made it easier for our guts. And so unlike our relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, they have to use so much energy to process their food.

43:08We had extra energy which went to our brains. And with these expanded brains, because we had access to fire and we had these more accessible calories, our brains could expand where we could have social organization. And our social organization and our cultural heritage is why we are more powerful than all of these animals that have much stronger muscles than we have. And by changing that world and building those communities, we then had the mental capacity to start saying, what are the stories around us? And that's the foundation for animism. And then 12 ,000 years ago, starting 12 ,000 years ago in many different places, we started to uncover at the end of the last ice age the ability to grow crops, the beginnings of agriculture.

43:58And in these agricultural worlds, we said, well, how is this all happening? And so we came up with these different stories about agriculture. And that's why all of our traditions have these agricultural rhythms. And every time there's a harvest ceremony, like all of our religions have, that's about agriculture. And ancient Egyptians, they had these agricultural gods like Osiris and Renenet. And they were these gods that represented the spirit of agriculture. And in the Americas, we have the Mesoamerican corn gods. And you can understand why there were these corn gods, because it's not just the domestication of corn.

44:42The teosinte weed, which is the precursor of corn, it doesn't look a thing like corn. It's like a weed, and it's got a few very rough kernels. And so over thousands of years, corn was created essentially by our ancestors, at least in the Americas. And it was corn. So it's biotech. Agriculture is the most aggressive form of biotechnology. GMOs are nothing compared. I mean, GMOs are this. Big strawberries? Come on, pal. This used to be corn. Now look at it. No, but the radicalness of agriculture, that is the big biotech story. And so no wonder corn was so essential because it was the major source of power and calories and just group expansion.

45:30And once you could grow corn, you could feed a lot of people. And that meant you could have all kinds. You could have cultural growth. You could have armies that could raid other people. You could do all sorts of things. And so it wasn't just that corn was important. It was that corn became a god. In the picture, in the book, I have a picture of the Mayan corn god. And it's like a corn with the ears pulled down. And there's the little face of this god. And people prayed to the corn god, which means praying to technology. In the book, I compare that to the Return of the Jedi scene when the Ewoks capture everybody and they're going to cook Luke and Han and Chewbacca.

46:13But then when they see C-3PO, they think, oh, he must be a god. And they say, oh, we're still going to cook these other guys. But then Luke elevates C-3PO and they say, oh, my God, this technology is a God. So we have a tradition of praying to our technology. And in the beginning of our conversation, I trashed this way of the future church, this Corey Lewandowski church, because I think it's really dangerous to say we're going to pray to our own technology. I mean, it's praying to our own creation. But I think it is appropriate to say that all of our technological innovations have changed our religious and spiritual lives.

46:50And I think it's okay for us to keep an eye on how is that going to apply here. And I say this over and over. Our technologies may be new, even though they're dependent on thousands of years of technological innovation. but the values that we need to navigate wisely are in many cases very old and that's why in Judaism even though I got kicked out of the Hebrew day school in Kansas City I learned a couple of things along the way and one of them is that in Judaism the early at least books of interpretation are themselves considered sacred texts so like in Islam there's the Quran and that's the holy thing Nothing else in Judaism, the debates about the meaning of the original text are themselves sacred.

47:39And so you could be the most fundamentalist Jewish person. You have to enter into the debate about meaning because you can't just say this is what the original thing means. And I think that's the case here. We're entering into this new phase of just what it means to be a human. And we need to be challenging everything and exploring everything and continually asking what does it mean to be a human? But we don't need to invent new morality. As a matter of fact, I think it's dangerous to say that we need to invent new morality because we have these wonderful traditions and these wonderful principles, and every religion has them.

48:14But in our globalized world, it's hard for us to say, oh, my one group or your one group has an absolute monopoly on truth. As a matter of fact, anyone who is saying that, I think, can be actually quite dangerous. Yeah, sure. And it's like, why wouldn't we say, well, what are the things that we can learn from all of these traditions? What are the common themes? What are areas where maybe one tradition has done something really beautiful? Like Buddhism, which I really love, has a great tradition of how to think about the process of self-exploration. And Judaism, I believe, is very thoughtful about the process of mourning, how to have a structure after somebody dies.

48:52And Christianity, I think, is fantastic. Thinking about forgiveness and letting go. And every tradition has these things. And so my feeling is, like, if we could have, I would love it if somebody said, we're going to have a group of 100 wise people and they're going to come from all different backgrounds and all over the world. And we're going to bring people together and we're going to say we really love all of our traditions and we're not against them. We're not trying to supplant them in any way. But these 100 diverse wise people come together, look at all of our traditions and come up with 10 universal principles that you think are not in big picture terms discordant with anybody else.

49:30People have tried it. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, I tried it with this big group of people with the One Shared World, our global interdependence movement. But there's a weird kind of legitimacy, like a neutrality of asking GPT-5 to review the entirety of our recorded history. And it's like a neutral arbiter. It's like the new umpire calling balls and strikes in professional baseball games. It feels like, well, it must be a strike because the machine says it's a strike. Can we make it practical? Suppose a listener asks AI for advice, which happens all the time, whether we like it or not, about, I don't know, forgiving a family member or leaving a job or handling some sort of big conflict.

50:13What should they ask the model and what should they never outsource? So I think it's okay to ask the model anything. What you should never outsource is your own judgment. And that's the thing that I'm really worried about. People will ask something to an AI algorithm. them, they'll get something back and it'll all seem well and good. But if we don't train young people to really know who you are and what you stand for and trust your own perspective, people are going to get all kinds of stuff that looks good and they're going to say, oh, that's me. And we could really have a human drift. I have a little bit of a halfway house for that in that I have my own chatbot and I worked with this company called Delphi.ai.

50:59And we uploaded all of my interviews and all of my books and other writing for many decades. And now people can go to my jamiemetzel.com website or to the AI Ten Commandments. So you created a derivative work of a podcast that I created with you. Is that what you're saying? That's exactly right. Okay. Yeah. Where do I send the season? Of all the zero profits I am getting, I will share 50-50 with you. But you can go and let's just say you wanted to have that conversation with me. Sure. I just think that the most important thing is judgment. And I just I say this a lot. I get asked a lot. How should we educate our kids in this age of AI?

51:36And I say you should divide it up. On one hand, we need to teach our children how to use these technologies and use them well. And we need to have a big chunk of life for people at every age, which is completely separate from technology. No phone, no nothing. We need to have this bifurcated life because if we don't, all of this digital stuff is going to seep into us. And so we have all these advertisements coming at us. And every time you go into a digital space, who knows what that information is? Right now, I think the stuff that people are getting back is pretty decent. But OpenAI has basically borrowed a massive amount of money.

52:21So they're going to have to monetize what they do in a huge way. My 20 bucks a month is not going to pay back their debt. It is not. It is not. There's going to be advertising. And who knows whether the suggestions you get, it's like, oh, my God, you look really peaked today. You'd really benefit from a big glass of AG1. That's right. Man, am I thirsty. How about some St. James organic brew tea? Exactly. There's a black mirror where, I think Rashida Jones, the actress, she gets into a car accident. and part of her brain goes missing. I saw that, yeah. Yeah, and I can't remember, but they can't afford the way to save her, so they do this thing, and it's like she can't leave the house because it's a limited range, and then they set it up so that there's ads in there suddenly, so she'll be sitting, so for people who don't know, she'll be teaching a class, and she'll say something like, all right, everybody, open your books to page 12, and if you're thirsty, St.

53:14James Organic Brewed Tea is available at your local grocery store, and then she's, oh, what happened? She starts getting reports of like how this shouldn't be a thing. It was one where they were cloning kids who were killed in like school shootings, very dark. And you'd get this kid back, but it wasn't quite your kid. And they started running ads as well. Like, oh my God, you're back, honey. The parents are overjoyed to see them. And like, what do you want? And they're like, I want St. James organic brewed tea. And then the mom's like, okay. All we have is AG1. He goes to the store and buys it and he's just slamming these keys and he keeps asking for more and more.

53:47And that's why this idea that our future should just depend on the judgment of these big tech companies is insane. I'm sure you followed this debate between Anthropic and what I still call the Defense Department. And people are saying the Anthropic is the good guy and OpenAI is the bad guy because OpenAI stepped into the vacuum. But my feeling is if we're counting on Anthropic or OpenAI or anybody else to not just create Skynet for money without saying this is a societal transformation, we need to have governance. Governance is bigger, but includes regulation at every level. We need to say, what do we want this to look like?

54:29And how do we create a set of guardrails and incentives and norms and structures and regulations and laws that can lead us in the direction of what we want? And we see what happens when we don't do that with social media. So with Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act, the decision was made that these internet, later social media companies, would have no content liability. You mentioned Tristan Harris. It was a total license to basically weaponize these algorithms to push people toward becoming the insane zombies that our young people are. And everyone's all agitated about one issue, and it's the meaning of their life is this thing.

55:09And then it's something else. It turns out that there are lots of foreign intelligence agencies that are manipulating it, and people don't even know why they believe the things that they believe. There's a reason why we came together to form governments is that some issues we need to solve together. So that's why I'm a big believer in governance. And if we have technological innovation without accountability and standards and governance, this whole thing's going to end poorly. Speaking of commandments, here's one we actually follow around here. Thou shalt pay the bills. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Drip Drop.

55:47It's easy to think electrolytes are just for elite athletes, marathon runners, or people doing insane workouts. But really, electrolytes are an everyday thing. You lose them when you sweat, travel, sit in the heat, get sick, or just have one of those packed days. And that's when water alone doesn't always cut it. Drip Drop is doctor-developed, proven fast hydration that helps your body and mind work better. It uses science-based formulas for rapid hydration with three times the electrolytes of leading sports drinks. There's a reason Drip Drop is trusted by firefighters, medical professionals, and over 90 % of top college and pro sports teams.

56:14It's engineered to hydrate you faster and more effectively than water alone, so you can actually feel the difference when your body needs more support. They've also just launched Zero Sugar Plus with six key electrolytes, 15 essential vitamins and nutrients, and no sugar or artificial sweeteners. I keep Drip Drop around for busy days, workouts, travel, and that midday slump when I need to feel a little bit more like a functioning human. Right now, Drip Drop is offering podcast listeners 20 % off your first order. Go to dripdrop.com and use promo code Jordan. That's dripdrop.com, promo code Jordan for 20 % off.

56:42Stock up now at dripdrop.com and use promo code Jordan. This episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show is brought to you by Booking.com. Look, if you've got a vacation rental and you want to grow that business, you've got to make sure people can actually find you. That's where Booking.com comes in. It's one of the most downloaded travel apps in the world, and since 2010, they've helped more than 1.8 billion vacation rental guests find places to stay. That's an enormous number of people looking for places like yours. But here's the thing. Most vacation rental hosts don't even realize they can list their properties on Booking.com.

57:10And if you're not on the platform, your rental is basically invisible to millions of Booking.com travelers worldwide. After all, they can't book what they can't see, right? Once you list, your property gets in front of a huge global audience of travelers, which means more visibility, more bookings, and more chances to build real momentum with your rental business. And the barrier to entry is low here. You can register your property in as little as 15 minutes, and nearly half of hosts get their first booking within a week. So if your vacation rental isn't listed on booking.com, it could be invisible to millions of travelers searching the platform.

57:40Don't miss out on consistent bookings and global reach. Head over to booking.com and start your listing today. Get seen. Get booked on booking.com. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment, support the sponsors. They do make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find a code, email us, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. We're happy to surface codes for you.

58:09It really is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Jamie Metzl. so for people who maybe didn't follow the anthropic thing and you'll have to fill in some blanks here they were working with the pentagon and they were saying okay we can target and help assign targets and help fire the missiles at the bad guys but we want a human to just check it sanity check it and make sure that we're not making a system that launches missiles against a bunch of kids playing soccer and nobody noticed because there's no human involved and i I think the Pentagon essentially went, no, we don't really necessarily want to agree to that.

58:45And so Anthropik said, we're not going to do it. And then OpenAI was like, we'll do it. So it's mostly right. And so I think what they were saying is targeting decisions and surveillance of Americans. And I think they were both very legitimate concerns. But at the same time, my feeling is, like I said before, if our strategy to protect civilians is one supplier among thousands of suppliers to the Defense Department or whatever else they call it now, behaving ethically, and then our strategy is, well, every supplier to the Defense Department should put standards of whatever their thing, you know, this screw can only be used in these circumstances and not other circumstances.

59:30Like that's an insane way to organizing. So what I was saying is we need to have standards that apply to everybody and all of the suppliers. And frankly, what we're seeing in the Ukraine war now is that we're going to have to be pretty permissive with the use of AI in the battlefield. Because if the Ukrainians said, actually, we're going to limit the autonomy of our killer robots and the Russians aren't, the war's over. So I just think that I fully agree with the issues and the concerns. But I think it would be a terrible way to run our Defense Department to allow each contractor to have its own ethical terms for how its little piece of this bigger puzzle works.

1:00:12Also, should we even be in the position where one person probably fighting against their own shareholders for the business of the government says, I'm just not comfortable being a guy who goes down in history as flipping the on switch to Skynet and then everything that happens after that. Why are we even at this point where one guy goes, you know what, I just can't do it. It's like they shouldn't even be asking this guy this particular question. Because we don't have standards. And part of that is because this is relatively new. And it's interesting. I mean, maybe you should have this guy, Emil Michael, on the show.

1:00:44But Emil, he's the undersecretary in the, I'll say, the Department of War. And he's the guy who's responsible for this. And when I first heard his name, actually, somewhere else, I thought, this name sounds so familiar. Why is this name so familiar? And then I got triggered. I remembered, I can't remember the name, but there was a TV series about Uber. It was this actually very entertaining show. But there was the number two at Uber who was this kind of crazy cowboy guy and who was at the center of the whole thing collapsing. And it turned out that's the same guy, that guy who was the number of two under Travis at Uber in the kind of crazy out of control days at Uber.

1:01:25He's now the person in charge. And like me, a former White House fellow. And he is a very smart guy. And I understand the instinct of saying we're not going to let individual suppliers control what we're doing. And I totally support what he's saying is we can't have one supplier for any critical mission because we have to have that kind of freedom. And I want the American warfighters to be as empowered as they can possibly be. But we need to have societal and in maybe international and even global standards because all of this is happening so fast. We're seeing, as I mentioned before, what's happening in Ukraine.

1:02:02And we're seeing that application of all of those lessons learned now with the war in Iran, where I think the United States was caught flat-footed because we were using these million-dollar Patriot missiles to shoot down$30 ,000,$25 ,000 drones. And so it doesn't matter how much bigger your economy is, you can lose. And that's why the Ukrainians are winning, in my view, now. So a lot of this is happening. The easy answers are easy, but this is really complicated stuff. And everybody needs to be part of wrestling with all of this. I think a lot of people are going to stumble on or get tripped up by asking AI what a moral decision is.

1:02:43Because AI, they recognize patterns, right? But that's not really wisdom, right? Pattern recognition is not really wisdom. So a model can see correlations, but it still misses suffering, meaning, stakes. So how do you keep AI Seesmore from becoming AI Knows Best? Does that make sense, that question? It connects to what I was saying before about education. I just think that we need to educate people to have a whole lot of skepticism about what they are getting back. If we don't educate people to trust your own voice. Coming back to me becoming an atheist in fourth grade and saying, well, I know you're telling me this is true.

1:03:21I don't think it's true. But there were a whole lot of other kids who just, you get, oh, that must be true. And so I just think that we have to teach critical thinking. Like I said before, I do a lot speaking to people about education. I think all these things about young people, I think we should have handwritten essays in the little blue books like we had when we were younger. I think we should have debates where people do debates with no notes or only handwritten notes. Improvisational theater. I think people who are thinking about ethics, there's so much opportunity for our traditional religious and spiritual and other communities to help people listen to their own voice, listen to their own hearts.

1:04:04But if everybody lives these digitized lives, and especially if they're all being hacked, so people think, oh, I'm so free. I'm just looking at stuff on Instagram and TikTok. You are being completely hacked. I even find it. I'm pretty active on Twitter. I hate all these new names. Twitter. Hacks, yeah. I'll go on Twitter, and it'll be like two minutes later, and I'll find like, oh, I'm so angry. Why am I so angry? I've been scrolling. It's like, ah, it's that thing. Yeah, of course. I just think that it's so important. We're moving toward every day is peak technology relative to all of human history up to this day.

1:04:45But we need to keep getting better as humans. We need to keep training ourselves to be the best humans that we can be. And the good news is we have thousands of years of history of wonderful humans who've been asking those same questions. If we separate ourselves from our humanity and from our history and from each other and enter into these atomized, digitized worlds, we are really going to get lost and not for the better. I want to double click on something or actually circle way back around. You mentioned AGI is not coming anytime soon. And AGI being where these AI models or services are better than the average human at quote unquote everything.

1:05:32Why isn't that coming soon? Because I think a lot of these guys would have us think this is almost right around the corner. That's what they say when they're asking for$100 million in a data center in Utah. But I've heard experts, and I have not had any on the show explain this to me, but essentially they'll say something like, there's AI deserts where we get this amazing model and it can predict things and it can write like chat GPT 5.5, but we're at nine at that point. But it doesn't get over this weird black box hump of where it can think for itself, quote unquote. It's just remixing things better and better and faster.

1:06:06So we'll have different algorithms and different models of AI that will do some things better and worse. Right now, the LLMs, the large language models, are the dominant AI systems that are doing this prediction without cognition. People like Gary Marcus are justifiably raising questions about the limits. And then I mentioned the world models that people like Fei-Fei Li and Yan Le Koon are exploring. And I think that will be just a different way of thinking about how we process. And don't get me wrong, these systems will be incredible. They will do incredible superhuman things in many areas. But in my view, as a humanist, there will be massive areas where humans can do things that we deeply value and we can do them better than or different than our machines.

1:06:59And I think that saying that AGI is coming where the machines can do everything better than humans, I just think that it's preposterous and self-defeating. What we should say is AIs are going to be able to do some pretty incredible things and humans are going to be able to do some pretty critical things in our education, in our lives. We need to keep asking ourselves, what does it mean for us to be the best humans we can possibly be? living the most meaningful lives, doing amazing human stuff. And I don't think that that set of what humans can meaningfully do is some kind of limited set. And it's all going to be taken over.

1:07:37Right now, if you and I were to get in some time travel machine, go back 13 ,000 years ago and explain what we do. And it's like, hold on. So, all right. So you sit around and you talk about some stuff and then you think about it and then you talk about it. It's like a campfire. But there's a lot of people sitting around. Exactly. So they would understand that part of it. But then they would say, well, how do you get your food? Do you hunt or do you gather? Hold on a second. Exactly. Well, yeah, there's a thing, DoorDash. And so we're living these radically different lives. And it's because of agriculture, because of controlled fire, because of electricity, that we can do all of these careers.

1:08:18Imagine going back 13 ,000 years ago and say, well, I'm quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs. It's like, what? I don't get it. And so I just think there's an unlimited set. And I was at a conference in Berlin earlier this year and someone said, well, we're just going to do bullshit jobs. And I said. I wanted to ask you about that because you were talking about meaning and it's what happens when 80 percent of the jobs go away. What I said is everybody in this conference is doing bullshit jobs compared to our ancestors. You're just getting paid for it. Yeah. All of these things that we do, whatever, anything, like we've invented the NFL.

1:08:53I love the NFL. I'm a huge fan of the Kansas City Chiefs. And now so many people get so much meaning through the NFL. We've invented the Catholic Church, all these things. And so many people. And these create economic opportunities. We've invented games like Go and chess that machines can do better than we can. And so I just think that my mother is in an independent living facility in Denver. And when I go and visit her, I'm always just very mindful of what are these human tasks that are essential. So there are people who come in and they clean her apartment. And I think you could probably have a machine come and clean an apartment.

1:09:31But these people who come, my mother has a lot of family support, but not everybody there does. They're playing this essential human role, like while they're cleaning, talking to the people. They're checking them. How are you doing? How are you feeling? That's something very, very human. So would it be so crazy to think that even in my mother's independent living facility, where let's say we have a robot that goes and does all the cleaning, but we hire people who are the visitors and that's their job. They just watch Wheel of Fortune with old people all day. That's how meaningful. That's true, actually.

1:10:05So I just think that's a better job. You're doing more of the essential human thing. And I would pay an unlimited amount for that. But where the job challenge is that this transition is going to happen very quickly. Just the other day, I was with a close friend of mine and he owns just a huge number of apartments in different cities. And what he was saying is they now have this AI bot that can go on its own at three o 'clock in the morning, floor to floor and just vacuum. And so it used to be that at 10 in the afternoon, they would have a human go to every floor and vacuum every floor and it would be noisy.

1:10:41And so now it's cheaper and easier. And the only problem they have is drunkards who come home at three o 'clock in the morning. They trip over the thing. I wish they was that, but they F with the thing just because it's like that's what drunkards do. I don't think I would have to be drunk to do that, honestly. Exactly. I'm being completely honest. And then he said, and they now have this bot that can paint dining rooms and living rooms. It can't do kitchens or bathrooms. But only specific rooms? What am I missing? Why is that? Because the dining rooms and the living rooms are just pure blank walls.

1:11:13And the kitchens and the bathrooms have all these weird funky spaces that require the more tactile human skills that machines can't have. So it's a robotics issue. Okay. And these robots are using 40 % less paint than the human who would be painting the same thing just because it's just more efficient and they have different distributions. And so those humans who are doing those jobs, I think we are going to have some pretty significant layoffs as we figure out what can machines do in certain circumstances like these that may be better. But it also may be the case that we will have humans that can do things that machines can't do.

1:11:53So I do think I'm not a doomer on the jobs situation, but I do think that the speed of this transition, that's going to really cause a lot of pain. And I think it's a fundamental requirement that our government and the state of California just passed its AI bill this week trying to do this is to say, well, this thing is coming. What are the different things that we can do? How do we make sure that everybody has universal health care, universal access to high quality education, retraining programs, unemployment insurance, all of these kind of social safety net things? things. And so I know you've had people on your show talk about universal basic.

1:12:33I was just going to ask you if we're going to end up with UBI. And I was going to make a quip about good thing we're in the US, which is famous for really caring about its poor people. So I, for one, am against UBI, even though I understand the underlying motivation. And the reason is, I just think that people get a sense of accomplishment through work. But I think there's an unlimited amount, like I was saying with my mother, there's an unlimited amount of things that we call work. So what I would rather do is to have UBS, Universal Basic Services. So like in Europe, if you lose your job in Europe, you're not afraid that you're going to not have any healthcare.

1:13:13The basic services, so the people, there's this less existential fear. But then I think that we need to really think about what are these investments in new industries? We're doing podcast. We definitely need more podcasters, Jamie. What I'm saying is podcasting is a huge industry. A lot of wouldn't have existed before. So we're going to have lots of these new things. There's going to be a painful transition, as was the case with industrialization. And when people came off of the farms and then they went into these horrible early industrial jobs in these tariffs. So I'm not saying this is going to be painless.

1:13:48As a matter of fact, I think it's going to be painful. We also can't stop it. And so the question is what is the role, our collective role of responsible governments to ease this transition and invest in the new things that we can't yet imagine. And we can't be like Europe or India has been traditionally where you say, if you hire someone once, you have to keep them on your payroll forever. That's not competitive. So I think that we need to grow our economy, but it can't be at the expense of humans. And that comes back to the central theme everywhere, that this can't be a story about technology.

1:14:24This is a story about realized values and realizing the best human values. And that's why, coming back to the book, The AI Ten Commandments, what it's about is, well, how do we articulate what those collective values are? And one of the ways, and this is just one, is to say, well, let's look at all of us and say, what are our principles, the universal principles that might help guide us? Before we replace Mount Sinai with a server farm in Nevada, let's thank the people keeping this show out of bankruptcy. We'll be right back.

1:14:56I'm Kiana, and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted. it. Start your free trial at Shopify.com. Treat it, feel better, then start all over again. That was my pattern for years. I kept dealing with the same symptoms, getting the same treatments, and ending up right back where I started.

1:15:37That's when I found Evie. Evie is an at-home vaginal microbiome test that analyzes over 700 bacteria and fungi from a single swab. It goes far beyond traditional testing that only checks a few things. When I used Evie, I finally saw patterns that had never been explained to me before. Then a licensed clinician reviewed my results and created a personalized prescription care plan based on my actual microbiome. And for the first time, I wasn't just reacting. I had direction. Evie also isn't just data. It connects you to real clinical next steps based on your results. If you're tired of repeating the same cycle, this is where that changes.

1:16:18Visit Evie.com and take the Evie test at home today. Don't forget about our newsletter, We Bit Wiser. It's available almost every Wednesday. An under-two-minute read, highly practical, a little gem from us to you from a past episode, past guest, or just something we're thinking about that we think can help improve your life. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of Jamie Metzl. I know people are like, tell us the commandments, but I kind of don't even necessarily want to spend the time to go over those. I mean, I'll spoil them, which if that's all right with you.

1:16:50Compassion and dignity for every being. Do no harm. Protect the vulnerable. Truth, integrity, humility. Generosity towards those in need. Understand before judging. Good luck with that one, by the way. Resolve conflict with fairness, forgiveness, and healing. Harmony with nature and life. Wisdom over dominance, inner growth. Freedom and uniqueness of others. sacredness of life, awe, gratitude, and love. And I know that probably other interviews have gone over all these. I wanted to scratch that itch for people, but I think it's just better to, people need to take their time with these if they're interested.

1:17:18And if people want, they can go to my website, theai10commandments.com, spelling out the word 10. And I have a poster you can download. I wanted to share so people don't go, oh, he teased it and never told us what they were. Because some people are just like, I'm going to write these things down already. My hope is that everybody who's listening to this, So I agree with all those things. And so I think that's what I want. And I want people to say, oh, these all sound like really good things. And if you had said number 11 is do not covet thine neighbor's ox or manservant, you'd have to say, well, it says this, but maybe it means something else.

1:17:50So I want this to be intuitive. And there are a number of states in the United States that now have these Ten Commandment laws requiring that the biblical Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom. And so we live in a multicultural society. I actually think that it would be totally appropriate for those schools and the teachers in those schools to say, well, in addition to the Ten Commandments, next to them, we're going to have different sets of principles from different traditions. And I hope that any teachers who do that would include these AI Ten Commandments as one of those things. And again, not in the least bit to denigrate the original biblical Ten Commandments, which I say in the book and I say it repeatedly.

1:18:30These are one of the great moral codes of all of human history. We are beneficiaries in Europe, here in the United States, and around the world of a system of laws that is in many ways connected to those sets of principles. So I love them. I value them. But maybe we can also have principles to complement these that incorporate many different traditions. Keep giggling. People are probably wondering why they see this. We were talking before about needing more podcasts, jokingly, and I got a one star review. This is probably years ago now, but I still remember it. And it said, this guy is the reason we need a 10 million percent tax on podcast.

1:19:12microphones. That's really funny. It's so fun. That's why this social media is so powerful. Because if you were home, in your home, and somebody banged down the door and ran in during your dinner and said, Jordan, you suck. You're the worst person I've ever heard. You would be kind of shocked. This is really scary. And so I don't know how many supporters and fans you have on social media, but my guess is it's like a gazillion. No, I only remember the negative stuff. It's human nature. It's human nature because we're on social media. And this person who's saying to you or to me or someone like you suck, whatever, just our brains are we've evolved to notice those things.

1:19:54And so our attention is being hacked by these systems. And these systems are not neutral. These systems have their own values. And that's why I think, again, Tristan Harris, that just unleashing these algorithms against us and just saying algorithms are going to prioritize engagement, even if we're turning people into zombies or even if we literally have had deaths of people who are agitated. Oh, yeah. AI psychosis is a real thing. All these things. So I just think that's why we can't just say, oh, let this play out. We don't need governance. We don't need regulation. We don't need norms. This is a societal transformation.

1:20:35And I think that we all need to have a voice, not on every little detail, but directionally. And that's why I actually think it's quite positive that the issue of AI and accountability has really shifted. I talked before about how it's been a little bit of a headache for me personally. But when you think of the Trump administration, last February, J.D. Vance went to Paris and there was a thing. It had been called the AI Safety Summit. And he essentially said, America is out of the AI safety business. We're in the acceleration business. And now Anthropic Mythos has come out and it turns out it has a lot of benefits and a lot of potential harms hacking all of these different systems.

1:21:14Is this the one that they said they weren't going to release to the public? Yes, exactly. Yet because they needed to show Microsoft and Google like, hey, there's 8 million bugs in all of your popular software that you need to fix. So the world's going to fall apart. Exactly right. And so now even the Trump administration, which has said we're all about acceleration, is now having a conversation about what are the kind of safeguards that we need. And even though the Trump administration on its first day canceled all of the Biden administration executive orders, which I thought were pretty good, now it's quietly resuscitating some of the organizations created by Biden with changing their names.

1:21:51And I think we should be happy about that because the last thing that we want is to be victimized by the AI companies like many people. And I think our kids have been victimized by the social media companies. And so now is the time when we need to lay guardrails. And if we don't do it now, it's going to get harder and harder as things play out. Biden should have seen this coming. He should have named everything really important. The Donald Trump 2022, like something, something action. And it's like, he won't get rid of that one. Yeah, no, I know. Obamacare? No, it's called Trumpcare now, and it's going to stick around.

1:22:27You know, I'm very bipartisan. I founded a bipartisan foreign policy and national security organization, co-founded, called Partnership for a Secure America. Whether it's in politics or interacting with AI, critical human thinking, empowering everybody to take a step back from it all and say, who am I? What do I stand for? What am I trying to do? It's so important because if we don't educate ourselves and our children in order to do that, these manipulations are so powerful. And it's why I'm such a critic of the social media companies. They've hired the brain scientists to teach about addiction.

1:23:04Again, Tristan Harris was one of the Cassandras of all this. And so we're so addicted. Even I've had a long attention span since I was a little kid, but I'll be sitting there working. And then every little bit, I'll just have this need to check my phone. And then people who don't have that kind of attention span, our attentions are being hacked. We need to protect ourselves. Quite a bit on the show, yes. It's really tough. The problem with saying, hey, we're not going to be AI accelerationists, we got to slow them down, is China is not really going to do that. Because it's probably not an exaggeration to say whoever gets the fastest AI that can go on the offense first, you basically need what, like a one or two hour, hour advantage, then get into our systems and shut them down and make it so that we can never catch up.

1:23:51So I am an accelerationist. I'm not against being an acceleration, but the question is, what is the unit at which we are competing? If it's only at the model level, then I think that's really dangerous. If you have a sports car in your garage and you go out on the street and your foot is on the gas the entire time, it's going to feel great. You're going to be the fastest car on the street for a little while, and then you're going to crash. And so the competition can't just happen at the model level. It has to happen at the societal level. And so who can have the best models in the context of all of these other things that enable success and whether it is integration into government services or even the military, whether it's making sure that your society doesn't totally break down because of these new capabilities or all of your businesses don't go out of business because everybody gets hacked on the same day.

1:24:49It's not acceleration versus safety. We need to go as fast as we possibly can that makes sense. But if all we say is our sole strategy is our foot on the gas, we're going to crash the car. And so the competition happens on the societal level, not at the model level. So what happens, you wrote about this in a recent blog post, what happens if China wins the AI race? So what are people right to be afraid of? China wins in a significant, meaningful way, meaning that they have systems that are so much better than ours, that they can neutralize ours, that they become the standard for the rest of the world, their military becomes very quickly more capable than ours, and we're defenseless in responding.

1:25:34The world that we know it falls apart. We live in a world that is built on American leadership, and American leadership stems from U.S. technologies. Just when I was walking over, I was having a conversation with somebody actually from the New York Times. And what I was saying is that we live in a world largely based on somebody who most people haven't heard of named Vannevar Bush, who is the former president of MIT. He worked with FDR during the Second World War. And he had the idea and he was the leader of efforts to build this military, industrial, academic base and investing in basic sciences and having that foundation, which was what allowed us to win the Second World War.

1:26:23It was radar systems developed by the U.S. and the U.K. that made it possible for the U.K. to survive the Battle of Britain. And had Britain been defeated by the Nazis early on, we wouldn't have had D-Day. We wouldn't have had all these other things. The Manhattan Project, these were all major technological achievements. And because of that leadership, the United States was in the position to lay the foundation for this whole world that sadly we are now taking the pickaxe to. But this whole world built on U.S. standards and U.S. technology and U.S. systems like NATO and our system of alliances with Japan, this whole thing that academics boringly but call the liberal international order, that's all based on largely U.S.

1:27:14technology and largely U.S. military enabled by the wealth created by technology and the technology itself. So if we live in a world where we have that same kind of shift, but it's China that is in the position of setting all the standards for everything, just like our world over the last 82 years, 81 years has come to look more like America. That world is going to look more like China. And in a whole lot of ways, that's a pretty shitty world where the state tries to control individuals, where there isn't room for the basic rights and freedoms that we enjoy, where people are just living in fear.

1:27:55And that's why it's so important that we stand up to China, for example, supporting Taiwan or stand up to Russia, supported by China, by supporting Ukraine. There's a real world that has foundations. And people don't feel those foundations every day, but those foundations are very real and they come from someplace. it's not a state of nature that we have these wonderful lives and the world is as peaceful as it has been over the last eight decades that is actually at odds with how humans have lived for a very long time and so if this breaks and there's all kinds of ways that it could break the world could be a much worse place and i absolutely with all of the flaws as you can tell i'm not a huge fan of many many things that are happening in our country right now and that's a critique of the right and the left.

1:28:44But if we live in a world where China is setting the standard for everyone, or China and Russia and Iran and North Korea are setting the standards for, that's a much shittier world than the world that we have. And leading every technological revolution, I think, is really important. You and I have spoken at length about biotechnology. Now we are outsourcing the fruits of decades of US innovation to China because we have so many restrictions and we're against mRNA technology, which isn't just about vaccines. It's about delivering instructions to living cells to do all sorts of things. And so we're seeing this shift of the center of gravity of the entire biotechnology industry out of the United States and towards China.

1:29:29And this is going to be one of the biggest drivers of wealth in the future of the world. I want America to take the lead. And so we are killing ourselves with these horrible divisions between right and left, Democrat and Republican. Who cares? We are all Americans. I think patriotic Americans should say, well, here's the best of what America can be. And then how can we work together in order to make sure, one, that America is that thing, which means a strong democracy and a strong foreign policy, where we're supporting our friends and allies and partners and standing up for principles that we believe in.

1:30:02And then underpinning that is a very successful economy. So a company, Moderna, that made the vaccines, they made recently a decision to merge their AI department and their human resources department. And the reason is it's now the department of shit we need to do. I assume that's not the official name. That is not. Yeah, it's an acronym. I'm just kidding. So if they say, well, here's what we need to do. And then the question is, what's the right mix of humans and machines that can optimally achieve this thing that we're trying to achieve? I think that's a good way for us to think about it. And as I said before, I'm a real humanist, but we're spending too much energy in this country fighting each other when we should be collaborating to build great things in line with our best values.

1:30:53And our, that word our in that sentence, people say, what's our best values? And that's why we have democracy. We can come together and say, well, we have these differences, but where can we find common ground? And we have individuals, we have leaders who are not doing that. They're not serving us because they're spending so much of their energy in the combative, my enemy is the other guy. Whereas I wish we could have a point. I don't know this make America great again. If you look back, there's times that we've been great in some ways and less great in other ways. But I'm definitely an MAG, make America greater.

1:31:27I think we should make mag and a purple hat. A purple hat. Okay. I was going to ask what color hat. Yeah. Purple hat. Mag. Jamie Metzl. Thank you so much. It's always a great pleasure. I think this is our fourth time together and it's, I always learned a lot and I always really enjoy it. Thank you very much. You're about to hear a preview with Ken Burns, who says the real American revolution wasn't a clean break from Britain, but a messy, violent civil war whose contradictions we are still debugging 250 years later. A good story neutralizes the binary yes and no, you know, you're bad, left, right, young, old, rich, poor, whatever the dialectic is you're involved in.

1:32:08A good story can sort of neutralize it and go, oh wow, I didn't know that. There's no test. We'd share with you our process of discovery. So all the stuff I've said about the revolution, I had no idea going in. And I am so overwhelmed with the joy of acquiring it, that giving it away feels even better. The ideas are really, really powerful at the heart of this. The idea that you could be a citizen, that you could have a say in your government after your family has worked the land for a thousand years for somebody else, and all of a sudden you come here and you own some land and farm and you can do this and you're literate.

1:32:46Democracy is a really messy form of government, but it's better than all the other forms because the other forms involve a kind of tyranny on authoritarian certainty. Democracy is messy because you actually have to listen to people that you disagree, and you have to compromise. When that breaks down, then you lose the possibility of having it. America comes out of violence. It's born in violence. What would you guys do? What would I do? Would I be a loyalist? Would I be a patriot? What would I be willing to fight for? What would I be willing to give my life and all that I've accumulated in my life, my fortune?

1:33:18Would I do that? We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. For more on what else we've been getting wrong about our own origin story, check out episode 1238 with Ken Burns. This episode forces you to confront the version of America you didn't learn in school. Big thanks to Jamie Metzl. This conversation could have gone full TED Talk at Burning Man. You know, what if humanity, like, uploaded compassion, man? but I do appreciate that Jamie's actual point is more grounded and more uncomfortable. Every technology changes more than what we do. It changes what we worship, what we fear, what we outsource, what we obey, and what we mistake for wisdom.

1:33:58Fire gave us stories around the flame. Agriculture gave us harvest gods. Printing gave us mass religion, science, nationalism, and pamphlet-based chaos. AI may give us something even stranger, a medium that doesn't just transmit ideas but responds, argues, synthesizes, flatters, hallucinates, and occasionally sounds like a monk trapped inside a customer support portal. The useful takeaway here is not AI is some kind of God. Please don't be that guy. Don't be anyone. Come to your basement sacrament where the holy text is a screenshot from a prompt chain. The takeaway is that AI can be a mirror, a weird, powerful, biased, useful, and dangerous mirror, and it can help us stress test our own rules.

1:34:35It can show us contradictions. It can ask what we're missing. It can generate the chess move that breaks us out of stale thinking. But pattern recognition is not wisdom. Synthesis is not conscience. A model can process more text than any human alive and still have no skin in the game, no grief, no body, no child, no country, no funeral, no moral injury, and no lived cost. So the question is not whether AI should write our commandments. The question is whether AI can help us see the commandments we're already living by, the ones embedded in our markets, our phones, our institutions, our attention spans, our politics, and our incentives and ask whether those rules are making us more human or just more efficient little monsters.

1:35:15In the meantime, don't outsource your conscience to a chatbot, especially one that still occasionally thinks that glue belongs on pizza. All things Jamie Metzel will be in the show notes on the website. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about 6 Minute Networking as well. That's over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One.

1:35:44My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in AI, morality, philosophy, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

1:36:34geography, and stories of remarkable people always in a way that keeps you hooked. Not sure where to jump in? Start with these favorites. The eruption of Krakatoa, nature's fury in one of the deadliest volcanic events ever recorded, or the spice trade, how a handful of spices changed the course of global history. If you want to make learning effortless and fun, check out Everything Everywhere Daily. It's quick, fascinating, and a perfect way to stay curious. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.