Understanding AI’s Threats and Opportunities — with Mo Gawdat

26:29This is a checkmate, basically. And it is not unlikely that there is some defense department on every side of the Cold War that's working on that right now, trying to create, to crack through the codes of the other guy. Even at the individual level, if you want to go into the crazy path of augmenting humans with AI, which would happen in multiple ways, right? So, you know, the idea of Neuralink, for example, or even if it's just through preferential application of intelligence to some humans over the others, which normally, you know, the Californication of technology will position it as, oh, this is an amazing way to improve the lives of everyone, even in Africa.

27:12But the reality of the matter is that if there is a single group of individuals or a single individual in specific that can gain a tremendous advantage of intelligence, that individual is likely to try to keep that advantage by not sharing that intelligence with others. So if you assume that there is a certain place where that augmentation of intelligence with humanity starts, then everyone else is at a disadvantage. Everyone else is likely not going to get their smartphone connected to the same level of intelligence because, by definition, that provides a very significant competitive advantage.

27:56So let's go on to the next one, the end of truth. My sense is that truth has been under attack for a while. Quite a bit. Yeah. That it comes down to the incentives. And the incentives are that some of the best resource firms in the world have a profit incentive to elevate information, not based on its veracity, but based on what causes the most enragement and engagement. And oftentimes that type of content has no fidelity to the truth. The algorithms are neutral or benign in the sense that whatever causes controversy, whether it's vaccine misinformation or election misinformation, if it causes a controversy and more comments and more enragement, more engagement, more Nissan ads, that these companies have incentive to not provide any guardrails around the pursuit of truth or something or avoiding stuff that's just blatantly false and result in bad outcomes.

28:51Don't we have the opportunity if we put in place the right incentives, couldn't we use AI as a missile shield as opposed to just a hypersonic missile? Isn't it a function of we have the wrong incentives as opposed to the technology itself being a threat? Spot on. Spot on. I mean, as we continue our conversation, you will more and more uncover that my true view here is that I'm not afraid of the machines at all. I think the machines are absolutely neutral in terms of what they can provide or deprive us of at any point in time. The worry is that we live in a system that is highly capitalist, highly consumerist, highly power hungry, right?

29:39And so accordingly, if you apply the same principles of today's society to AI, basically putting them on very, very powerful steroids, then more of what we do today will be done and more of what we do today will be untraceable, will be unmanageable in many ways. And so when it comes to the truth specifically, you are absolutely spot on. The truth has not only been under attack, it has been put to the side because it doesn't serve agendas, not even political agendas. It just doesn't serve the agenda of the big news networks which want to capture your attention with more negativity than positivity.

30:22And by definition, that means that they're sort of one-sided on the truth. You can see that social media, for example, is attempting to highlight certain sides of exaggerated fakeness fakeness instead of attempting to give you the truth as it is, because that's where you get the likes and the followers and so on and so forth. And AI is just putting that on steroids. AI is going to, by definition, which has been happening for quite some time, reinforce the bias. So, you know, when our choices is to show violence in the news, for example, AI will notice that as the trend of humanity and basically continue to magnify that.

31:08If the marketplace is available for face filters and deep fakes, then lots more investments will go into faking the truth so that social media has nothing to do with the truth anymore. I always ask people to go to any of the social media platforms and search for the hashtag AI model, for example, which will give you examples of beauty that have already surpassed humans' abilities to catch up with, which means that humans will continue to compete with an illusion, a mirage, really. I think the biggest challenge, however, Scott, which really needs to be brought to the spotlight is creation. So we've magnified biases of the truth for a very long time, but we're now creating complete fakes that are almost undetectable.

32:02and we're doing that at a very, very low cost in very, very fast speeds. So things like stability AIs, stable diffusion, for example, and the ability to use prompts to create images that are very indistinguishable from reality or the idea of being able to fake my look and my voice and my tone in a deep fake video and creating anything really. from a creation point of view, it's becoming more and more difficult to even know that what you're seeing existed in the first place. Let's go on to the next one, job loss. My sense is that we've been to this, or at least I feel like we've been to this movie before, whether it's automation or the cotton gin or textile manufacturing technology, there is some job loss early on.

32:51And then we find that that additional productivity creates new opportunities. We knew that automation was going to eliminate jobs on the factory floor and factories, but we didn't anticipate car stereos or heated seats, and we ended up actually growing the employee base. And my sense is that arc has happened in almost any industry when there is technological innovation. Why is it different this time? It is different. Why do you think this would be permanent job loss? It is different because we have moved the definition of a job along the capabilities of a human for a very long time. So, you know, when we were out there hunting in the caves, our capability were sort of aggression and strength, right?

33:35Then as we moved to the agricultural revolution, it became, again, maybe a little bit of the use of strength and discipline. And then when we moved to the industrial revolution, it became a skill. And then really not a skill, but more ours. And then we moved to the information revolution, and basically we replaced our capabilities with brains, with intelligence. as the jobs that depend on intelligence as we go up the hierarchy of human skills and talents and we end up at intelligence as the last resort of jobs that we had in this current age as that is taken away by machines that are more intelligent than us we don't have any more skills as humans to replace that other than one skill which I keep advocating to the whole world which I believe will become the most valuable skill in the next four to five years, which is human connection, right?

34:34So, you know, me as an author, I claim to have written insightful books for the last five, six, seven years, you know, that people found intriguing and thought provoking and so on. Going forward, the industry of being an author is going to dwindle because I think not only can, books be written quicker, but they will be written in abundance with people that are not typically authors. So there is a very significant disruption to the supply-demand equation when it comes to my books in comparison to everyone else. So it doesn't mean that the book industry will decline as a total, but the book industry will be distributed along a very large spectrum of providers, if you want, right?

35:23Which basically from a supply-demand equation diminishes the value of any product provided. But what will not go away is if I am in a stadium or in a big theater with 10 ,000 people as a human speaking to 10 ,000 people, this is not going to be replaced in the immediate future. It will be, by the way, replaced in that longer term future with avatars and maybe virtual reality or maybe holograms or whatever, but not in the immediate future. I am maybe a little luckier in that I can achieve that human connection, but think of music, think of movies, think of graphics design, think of all of that.

36:05These are jobs that dependent on creating a persona that can now be created better with AI. you know so so to me i think music the music industry will shift back to the origin of the music industry which is live performances because music creation can definitely be done by the machines uh you know and i think eventually we will end up not in the very far future i think within a year or two we're going to end up watching movies that are from a to z created by a machine where no human has ever contributed or acted in that movie but then we will still have the few vintage actors that humans would say, oh, no, can you imagine Tom Hanks is actually a human?

36:47You know, let's go watch that movie. Could it go the other way? Because both of us are authors, and I've thought that similar to what technology did in the music industry, where it made it global and the top artists started, you know, doing 10 million albums instead of one. Could it go the other way? And that is really great authors use AI as a tool and your books become better. But the initial kernel of that value, that creativity, I mean, I'm using AI. I'm writing a new book and I'm using AI for thoughts and an outline. but I find it really does lack. And I don't know if it ever gets there. I don't know if there's ever the ghost in the machine or a move sentient where it comes up with something original.

37:37Not yet. Not yet. Right. That the creativity, the connection you're talking about, the human connection, I see it as like word processing or a thesaurus. And obviously it's more powerful than that. And that is AI is not going to take your job, but somebody who understands AI is going to take your job. Couldn't it be something that like most technological innovation just makes the best even better. And if you're a mediocre lawyer, a mediocre author, a mediocre artist, you're in deep trouble, which creates a set of social externalities and problems. But it strikes me, at least so far, and granted, I realize we haven't hit the real curve here.

38:14We have unemployment at historic lows in the West. Couldn't this be a deflationary force that forces mediocre professionals to find another job and brings down wage pressure, which is fueling inflation and be great for the economy. I mean, isn't there an optimistic view that this tool could be part of the solution and not the trouble because the problem, because there's been so many movies about the end of work, right? The jobs are going to go away. We're all going to be sitting on our couch with no purpose and no meaning. And it hasn't happened. But you see a future where this will slowly, the march up the food chain here will not stop and slowly but surely job destruction will far outpace ideas for new businesses and new opportunities.

38:59That's where you are. Yeah, I think while I don't disagree with what you said at all, I think what you're looking at is the immediate future, right? And I think the debate that a lot of computer scientists and AI scientists are not making clear to the world is that the midterm future is not that far. Okay. So the truth is, yes, today Scott can still definitely write a better book than someone who has never written a book and is asking Chad GPT to write a book for him or for her. Right. So So this is the reality in the short term. Very quickly, however, so in that short term reality, the supply-demand imbalance, because readers will be excited to try those things.

39:49Sometimes some of those books will hit and so on. You know, there will be a supply-demand imbalance, simply as if you can imagine that 50 ,000 new authors came on the market today, right? Maybe 500 ,000, maybe a million. We don't know, right? So this is one side. The other side, which is really the core of my message when I talk about this topic, is where is the near future? The near future is that those machines are advancing at paces that are completely misunderstood by those who have not lived within the lab. So let me give you an example. ChatGPT today is estimated to have an IQ of 155. If you just look at the tasks that it can perform, you know, passing the bar exam or whatever, it is estimated to be at 155.

40:41Einstein was 160, right? ChatGPT 4 is 10 times more intelligent than ChatGPT 3 in a matter of eight months. So if you can assume that another 10 times improvement will happen by version 5, version 6, version 7, whatever you want, Then within the next couple of years, you're talking about a machine that is at a thousand plus IQ, which is not, with all my due respect for you, it's definitely not a territory you can compete in. That's number one. Number two, you spoke about ingenuity, which I believe is definitely still on the human side. So they're currently generative, where we basically believe that they're coming up with new things, but they're basically coming up with the best summation possible of the data set that we give them.

41:34The interesting bit is, first of all, the data set is expanding very quickly. And a big part of the data set, believe it or not, is no longer coming from humans. So a big part of the data set is machine-generated knowledge that becomes part of the data set. And we've seen that before. Those who are deep into artificial intelligence, we remember what is known as Move 37. When AlphaGo Master was playing against the world champion of the game Go, one move was the Move 37, where the machine made a move that has never been seen before in the game Go. It was mathematically odd, but strategically very interesting.

42:25And it completely disrupted our understanding of how the machine works to the point that Lee, the world champion, asked for a 15-minute recess to understand what happened. So we've seen that endless, countless times on AI, where you would see that the machine comes up with strategies and with ingenuity, things that we have not taught it. It was never available in the data set. and it would learn that on its own. Okay, emerging properties is one way where we refer to that. And those emerging properties include creativity. They include ingenuity. They include emotional sentiments. They include language we haven't taught them.

43:07They include quite a bit of what we didn't expect will happen. So if you want to be optimistic, you have every right to be optimistic because we're still in a good place. But if you attempt to imagine how something moving at that pace will sooner or later reach, then you have to start getting concerned. Because even if it takes seven years instead of two for chat GPT to be a thousand times more intelligent than the most intelligent human on the planet, seven years is not that far. And that point in our future is inevitable. There is no turning back. With the kinds of investments pouring in AI, it is inevitable.

43:47that they'll be smarter than us with their architectures, with their memory size, with their, you know, compute capabilities. It's inevitable that they will be smarter than you. They already are in the tasks we assign to them. So when we figured out a way, when we figured out fission and we split the atom and this incredible new energy source was discovered, we sort of immediately went to weaponizing it as opposed Just to trying to figure out how to turn it into, you know, free energy, do away with carbon. And a lot of scientists, my understanding is once the atom was split, became very depressed and some even committed suicide because they understandably said now that the world, an unstable world with different agendas, is able to split the atom, it's the end of the species.

44:33And you could understand at that time how they thought that. But we went on to create the International Atomic Energy Commission. We have reduced nuclear weapons from 50 ,000 to 10 ,000. My understanding is that there's battlefield technology, lasers that in an instant would blind everybody on the field. And we've decided even adversaries have decided to cooperate and not make these weapons available. We've done what I think is important work around cross-lateral or multilateral treaties around halting the progress of bioweapons. Couldn't we do the same thing here? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but are you arguing for some sort of global agency, whether it's under NATO or multilateral agency that says, okay, similar to the other threats we faced, we have to come to some sort of agreement around what this can or cannot be used for?

45:21I love that you bring this up. This is a big chunk. It's not my entire message, but a good chunk of the message is get up and start acting. Now, you have to understand that the nuclear treaty took us tens of years to reach and that we still have 10 ,000 nuclear heads out there. And that last year when Putin started to threaten NATO, we were still discussing the threat of nuclear weapons. So we haven't ended the threat. We've just sort of reduced the threat to the superpowers. So this is one side of the debate. The more interesting side of the debate, and I think the core of the matter, is my call to action.

46:06I call this, and Tristan Harris of the AI dilemma and the social dilemma talks about that as well, that we call this an Oppenheimer moment. This is where the nuclear head is about to be manufactured. And the best time ever to have evaded nuclear war and the threats of nuclear war would have been by not inventing or by agreeing as humanity up front that this is devastating. We don't need this as part of humanity. But now we're late. So now this is already here. And we needed to see the devastation to be able to realize that this is something threatening enough for one objective to happen. And that's what I keep calling for when I talk to governments, when I speak publicly.

46:50I keep calling for this is a moment where there is such a significant disruption to the fabric of society, to the safety of humanity. As I said, not because of the existential crisis, we'll talk about that later, but because of the possibility of someone using this against the rest of us. that we need humanity to rise above our individual selfishness, above our nation's selfishness, and get together and talk about the well-being of humanity at large. We need some place where we say, look, AI can be amazing for every one of us, to the point that we actually may not ever need to fight again, because there is abundance for everyone.

47:38But can we please get together and put our differences between China, Russia, and the U.S., and try to do a treaty that says, let's do this together for the benefit of humanity, not for the benefit of any individual nation. Now, as I say that, I sound very naive. Why? For two reasons. One is, this is a typical prisoner's dilemma. And the problem with the prisoner's dilemma is that I cannot trust the other guy. So when two prisoners are given options that play them against each other, the challenge they have is not understanding that choosing the better option is better for them. It's that they don't trust if the other guy will keep to it.

48:22And in this stage of development of AI, it's not just that America doesn't trust China and Alphabet doesn't trust Meta. It is that we don't trust that there is no other criminal somewhere off the grid capable of developing AI and we are unaware of their existence. So by definition, every player in this current life that we're living is in an arms race. This is an arms race. Because the threat of one of them beating the others is extremely expensive. to the others. And so everyone will continue to pour resources on this. Everyone will continue to pour investments on this. And everyone will attempt to be the first one that creates the nuclear bomb that's called artificial intelligence.

49:15The thing that really scares me about this is that when you're talking about previous technologies that have been represented this type of threat, if you believe, as I do and obviously you do, that it could be used for pretty malicious objectives is the inability for verification. We know when someone's performed an underground nuclear test. This is really hard. It would be very hard to verify that Iran is not going full force at AI. When you speak to people about, I think a lot of people in a lot of agencies in a lot of countries are going to probably nod their head and say, this warrants thoughtful regulation and cross-lateral agreements.

50:01And I can't imagine or I would think that the biggest nations would get together and say, okay, we do have a shared interest in trying to wrap our arms around this and maybe figure out a way if there's a way of addressing the prisoner's dilemma here. What is that? Let's assume that people have incentives or nations have incentives to figure this out. What does the organization and the mechanism and the regulation potentially look like? Is it a Geneva Convention sort of thing? Is it an Interpol? How do you think you begin to address this problem, assuming we can get good actors or nations, good and bad actors, to agree this is something that warrants additional resources?

50:39I would picture something that's more analogous to the FAA or FDA, right? Let's say FAA a little more than FDA, to be honest. But basically something that says build anything you want as long as it's safe, inspected, agreed by everyone to be published in public and available to the world, right? So something that basically says, and I don't debate what Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, when he speaks about developing it in public so that we can iron it out together. Interesting idea, if you ask me. But the truth is that having ChatGPT out in the world with crossing all three barriers, by the way.

51:26So all of us, you know, AI scientists and business people and so on, we said there were three barriers that we were not supposed to cross. One is don't put them on the open internet until you're sure of their safety. Two is don't teach them to write code. And the massive wave that you have today is that AIs are prompting AIs. So we're being sidetracked from the conversation of AI developing new code that AI is asking it to develop. This is a disaster waiting to happen, if you ask me. Now, when we compare this to nuclear weapons, the statement that I say, which is a little scary, so I apologize, but it really is worthy of attention, is we've never ever before created a nuclear weapon that was capable of creating nuclear weapons.

52:21Understand that. So we now have created artificial intelligence code that's capable of creating code. As a matter of fact, it is incented to create code, and it's incented to create better code than humans. So if you take, as I said, the immediate threats of that, is that some of the, Imad Mushtaq, for example, the CEO of stability.ai, basically predicts that there will be no developers, no human developers in the next five years. And when you really think about that, again, stability's work will also enable us to have AI with the capability of chat GPT on your mobile phone within a year to a year and a half without connection to the Internet, file sizes of a couple of gigabytes.

53:12okay i mean at least that's the claim so they may get there in a year and two and five doesn't matter but the claim is that and the attention and the investment is those minimum personalized copies of artificial intelligence that are everywhere now when you really look at the big picture of this you're in a place where where the ball is today is not that scary as a matter of fact it's quite exciting when you really look at you know someone like me who loves knowledge so much to be able to talk to someone or something with so much knowledge is amazing, right? But it's where the ball is going to be.

53:49This is why I say there is a point of no return, right? Where the ball is going to be, in my personal view, is that the advancements of the capabilities of AI are going to continue on the pace that we've seen. And then there will be a case that I call patient zero, right? Patient zero is a disastrous event that will capture the spotlights and the headlines of the news where we will say, whoops, this thing can go wrong. The problem is that by the day we agree to that, governments agree to that, we start to put all of that infrastructure in place to try and regulate and have oversight and so on.

54:28You've already had so much code out there that has no control in it, that has no code that says switch me off, that has no code that says don't come to this part, right? And by then, we will have patient zero, we will all agree that we need to do something about it. But it will become really difficult to do anything about it because that point has been crossed. When we had chat GPT and Bard and others online, writing code being prompted by other machines and out in the open internet, we're already crossing that point. But at least we're not crossing it with 1000 different incarnations of AI. So maybe now is the time to act.

55:09We'll be right back.

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56:52So I want to put forward a couple of theses and you tell me where I've got it right and where I've got it wrong. I think it's Carlo Cipola the professor from Berkeley who wrote a book on intelligence and the stupid and you tell me where I've got it right. while helping others. And he described people who helped themselves while hurting others is the bandits. And I would argue that the majority of capitalist corporations are run by bandits. They're not immoral people, but they're amoral. And there's a lot of distance between them and the externalities that they create. And money is an incredible, I don't know, it's incredible at blurring your vision in terms of seeing the actual impact and stopping what you're doing.

57:40It feels like we've outsourced intelligence to government. And I'm not hopeful. As a matter of fact, I'm rather cynical at the strategy of calling on business leaders, better angels to show up. I just haven't seen it happen. I don't think they're bad people, but I think they'll consistently in a capitalist society make an excuse for what gets them the Gulfstream 650 extended range versus just the Gulfstream 650. Isn't this really about an appreciation for institutions and government and asking them to step in and do what they're supposed to do, and that's prevent a tragedy of the commons. I worry that it's dangerous to think the better angels of Alphabet or Meta or Amazon or Alibaba are going to show up.

58:17Doesn't this really require swift and thoughtful and strong government intervention? Absolutely. Absolutely. If you want the short answer, absolutely. Not because those people are evil, just like you said. It's because of systemic bias where society would blame Sundar more if he missed a quarter or destroyed the wealth of Google. Then they would blame him if he created an AI that had an issue in it. And I know Sundar, I worked with him. I know that he wants what's good. But he is in a system that's telling you, these are your incentives, grow the business, protect the business. And in a very interesting way, when I lived inside Google, and you know, I worked very closely with Larry and Sergey, you know, Larry's point of view openly was, if we don't do it, someone else will do it.

59:17Okay. And we're the good people, whether they are, you know, I loved working with Larry and Sergey, and I think they were values driven. But the truth of the matter is, everybody thinks they are the good people. okay so so so leaving it to the to business you're not leaving it to individuals you're leaving it to a system that chooses to prioritize gdp growth and profit growth over everything else okay we're leaving it to a system that says it doesn't matter if it's ethical as long as it's legal there's a mega mega difference between the two you can do a lot of things that are not ethical but find the loophole that allows you to do it legally.

59:58And I think the reality of the matter is that by doing that, we're going to lose. Now, on the other hand, again, it's naive to expect the government to regulate. Why? Because the U.S. government wants Google and Alphabet to lead because they're afraid that Alibaba and, you know, whichever other Chinese companies will lead. So they don't have the system that we created as humanity is what is about to kill us. I mean, I don't mean kill us physically, but the system, that systemic bias of constantly magnifying profit and power is where we are today, where every single one of us knows. You know, it takes a very ethical, courageous position to stop at a point in your life and say, that's it.

1:00:52I'm going to leave. And when I did that in 2018, understand so that you don't blame those executives that until 2017, 2016, I believed I was making the world better. And I was. Okay, I think the problem with systemic bias is that there is a point in our constant strive for a better iPhone when the advantages no longer outweigh the disadvantages and the price we pay. right and this is where this point in my personal view we have achieved by maybe 2010 2012 you know enough technology anything further than that has been mainly to maximize profit for those corporations now so where does this power lie this power lies in do not subscribe to threads when when when meta gives you another product that is mainly out there to compete with twitter and then you feel the pressure that i'm not going to be on it and so accordingly i'm going to lose my followers i think there is a courageous position that we all need to start taking by saying i'm not going to stand in line to buy the iphone 15 i'm not going to subscribe to another social media network that's trying to use me as a product.

1:02:15I'm not going to engage in rude and aggressive conversations on social media just to gratify my ego. I'm not going to let the system propagate. Is government going to do it on your behalf? I pray to God they will. But do I expect they will? I don't think so. I don't think they're fast enough, and I don't think their incentives are aligned. So when I, we talk about this a lot on my other podcast, Pivot, I speculate, and I'm curious what you think, that the first major scary moment or externality of AI is going to happen Q1 or Q2 of next year. Spot on. Spot on. It's our patient zero. And it's going to be focused around misinformation concerning the U.S.

1:03:05election. Spot on. That's exactly my prediction. Okay? The first realization, the problem, Scott, is will we view it as such? Or will we get into another debate like we did in previous U.S. elections of who did what, how can you prove it, and so on and so forth. But if you ask me, war is not only fought on the battlefield. war is fought economically and it's fought in the minds of the people. You know, you have Noah Harari's view of AI hacking the operating system of humanity because now it can master language better than most humans can. Okay. This is it. If I tell you right now, by the way, Scott, there is a new, some kind of shampoo that will grow your hair within 24 hours and make it red.

1:04:06Okay? Doesn't matter if what I told you is right or wrong. This, I have just seen. Exactly, right? Exactly. I have seeded an idea in your head that requires you to verify or approve or disapprove. And I have just occupied your head already. And there are so many ways that you can influence a human's perception of the world that are entirely in the hands of the machines. People don't understand this. You have at least 90 % of the information you receive today was dictated by a machine. Everything you see on social media is dictated by a machine. Every ad you see next to Google is dictated by a machine.

1:04:50Anything that Google, you know, displays to you as organic results, it's organic as per the machine of Google. You know, four of the top 10 apps on the App Store, you know, this last month were generated by machines.

1:05:11So do you think, well, I don't want to cheapen the conversation about talking about corporations and shareholder value, but I can't help it. It strikes me that overnight Alphabet appeared, went from being what was arguably the most innovative organization in the world to being perceived as flat-footed. That it was the ultimate example of the innovator's dilemma. then rather than being out in front and first on the commercialization of this, they didn't want to threaten this$150 billion amazing business, arguably the best business in the history of business, Search. And then Microsoft with less to lose around Search came in and bested them.

1:05:48One, do you agree with that? And two, who do you think from just a pure corporate strategy standpoint and intellectual property and depth of domain expertise, who would you argue are likely going to be the big winners and losers around AI's application in a corporate setting? That's a very multi-layered question. So what people probably don't recognize, and maybe I'm not the best person to say that, but equivalents of bards were available in AI terms to Google for a very long time, right? So the idea of providing one answer to your query has been definitely toyed around with for a very long time.

1:06:30This is why BARD showed up very quickly after ChatGPT was on the market, correct? What is in the AI labs would blow you away in comparison to what you out here in the world will see, okay? Now, the trick is this. The trick is there were two reasons in my personal view. I'm not speaking on behalf of Google. But one, how do you monetize, Bart? If there is one answer to the question, why do I need an ad? That's one side of it. But the other side, which is what I loved about the Google I worked in, is there was no arrogance around the fact that there was no one answer to any truth. Okay? So Google ethically said, I don't have the right to give you one answer.

1:07:23The choice of what answer is true is yours. Okay? I can only show you what everything out there says, and then you choose what you believe is the truth. That's a very ethical position, and I respect Google for that. Okay? What we're doing with ChatGPT and the likes today is a different formatting of that one answer. We're saying, look, there has been two million answers to the question you asked. Google would list the two million answers for you. Transformers and language models will say, and here is the average of those two million answers. If we really, really blend them together and give you the essence, the very essence of them as we believe the essence is, here is the essence.

1:08:07Okay. Now, with that, you have to understand that Google then took an ethical position saying, one, we don't know the truth, so we shouldn't say the truth. Two, we also don't have the right to put something out there that is not tested enough for safety, for AI safety. I think that's a very responsible position. OK, the problem is it's a prisoner's dilemma. We're stuck in capitalism. So the minute you put chat GPT out there, Sundar is in a checkmate position. So what can he do other than say respond? Because if he doesn't say respond, he will get fired as the CEO. OK, because his business is going down the drain and someone else will say respond.

1:08:52Whoever the next person is will say respond, put put Barda out there. Yeah. And there's, I mean, I want to take the glass half full approach here, and that is whether it was pouring mercury into the river. General Motors would be pouring mercury into the river from its factories right now if it hadn't been outlawed because they'd be at a competitive disadvantage by those who are allowed to do it. So it feels to me that we just need thoughtful people such as yourself advising our elected representatives to form the right bodies, whether it's a division of NATO or whatever it might be to the UN and then and then regulatory bodies here.

1:09:25And it feels like there's a lot of incentive for cooperation here. So just before. Can I just publicly announce what, because you said rightly that the next U.S. election is the battlefield, right? This is the patient zero. I strongly recommend that the U.S. government and every other government on earth criminalizes fake content or AI-generated content that is not marked as fake or AI-generated. Okay? So you need a law in place that says if what you're displaying is found to not be actual truth, you will be put in prison for the rest of your life. Or what about – everyone keeps talking about an AI pause.

1:10:06I found that letter was very naive. And I also found that it lost a lot of credibility when it had Elon Musk sign it because I don't think he's looking for an AI pause. I think he's looking for other people to pause so he can catch up. I found the letter was very self-defeating. but what about the idea of an AI pause around all election information 90 days before the election? Just trying to discern what is true or not true. What if you just said to all the big platforms for 90 days, we need you to put a pause on all election information 90 days before the election? As a matter of fact, wouldn't it be wonderful if we just went back to old school that all information about the election is removed automatically other than actual debates on stage filmed by old cameras?

1:10:49right that's right so but but but again the problem is a prisoner's dilemma scott so by doing that you're criminal you're you're penalizing social media companies so they don't have that content which is a big revenue for them you're penalizing news networks so they don't have content to you know they don't have opinions and noise and and sticky eyes that are staying there to listen to all of the fluff and all of the arguments and it's again the system but you're absolutely spot on. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we said everything about the election should be viewed in the classical old form of humans talking to humans?

1:11:28So you've been very generous through time. I just wanted to touch on a moment. We share that we both sort of, we're both really interested in happiness or the exploration of happiness. And I'm just curious, what was the transformation? Why did you decide to start to kind of pivot from, you know, obviously these deep, really important subjects, including AI and technology, and start talking about happiness. Was it a personal pursuit? Was there a moment in your life where you thought you needed to spend more time on this? What was the inspiration? There were two moments. So first of all, I was the extreme example of the grumpy, rich brat.

1:12:03Very early in my life, I made massive amounts of money by understanding mathematics and programming before online trading was a big thing. And, you know, I was, as a result, as always, the more money I made, the more miserable I became And I remember vividly one Saturday morning where I completely broke my daughter's heart Completely broke her heart You know, she's coming Saturday morning, jumping up and down And feeling very happy about what we're about to do And I look at her, grumpy as always, looking at my, you know, laptop And I said, can we please be serious for a moment, okay? And my daughter was five at the time and her heart broke and she cried and I really realized I didn't like that person.

1:12:44So I started to research the topic of happiness. It took me 12 years to move from being that miserable, annoying, grumpy executive to being a very calm, very, very open-minded and cheerful and a nice person, if you want. Through that journey, I used the aid of my son who was born a tiny little Zen monk, always had peace in him somehow, who unfortunately in 2014, I was chief business officer of Google X at the time. He called us. He used to live in Boston, and he had a US tour played in a band at the time in August. And he basically called us in June and said, can I come visit you in Dubai for a week?

1:13:28I feel obliged to come and spend time with you. And we said, sure. And then he went through the simplest surgical operation, an appendix inflammation. Normally it takes four minutes and the patient is out. But the surgeon sadly did five mistakes in a row. All of them were preventable. All of them were fixable. But within four hours, my son left our world. No, I'm so sorry. I didn't know that. No, it's okay. I actually think he's in a good place. I really do. And Ali, before he left, he had a dream which he spoke to his sister about, the only person who he spoke about. So she comes running to me and she says, Papa Ali told me that he had a dream that he was everywhere and part of everyone.

1:14:18Which in most spiritual, I didn't know that at the time, but in most spiritual teachings, everywhere and part of everyone is to disconnect from the physical, which basically is the definition of death. And so when Ali died, when Aya, my daughter, told me that, to my crazy executive mind, chief business officer of Google, seven years building Google's emerging markets, it translated into my mind as a quote. So I somehow responded by saying, sure, Habibi, consider it done. Okay. Because I was responsible for the next 4 billion user strategy at Google. I knew exactly how to reach billions of people.

1:14:59And so in my mind, I said, okay, I'm going to write a book. And I am going to share everything my son taught me about happiness. And in a very selfish way, the objective of the book was that a part of the essence of my son, Ali, which is what he taught me about happiness, is going to be read by enough people who will tell enough people. And if I could reach 10 million through six degrees of separation in 72 years with my math, he will be everywhere and part of everyone. Right? That's where the project started. And then somehow the universe made it work. So within six weeks after the book launch, we were already a bestseller in like eight countries.

1:15:39My videos were viewed 180 million times. And it was clear that 10 million happy was happening. So we went to a billion happy as a target. Basically, the rest of my life was targeted for a billion happy. My work on AI, believe it or not, is part of a billion happy. because I don't think we will be very happy as humanity if we don't get AI right. And so when I resigned from Google 2018, I published a video that was called One Billion Happy, basically the name of the mission, and that was entirely about that, entirely about the fact that AI is going to magnify human tendencies, and that if we continue to be rude and aggressive and grumpy and unhappy and selfish and so on, that this will be the magnification of AI.

1:16:26And my effort has been to try and magnify the true human values, love, happiness, and compassion, to try and say if we show enough of that online, maybe we can influence the views of AI so that they start to show us more of that and basically expect us to want more of that. And that was the original work. And since then, I've spent the last five, six years doing nothing but this, doing, you know, my dream is that by the end of my life, I would have contributed somehow to waking a billion people up to the fact that they have the right to find happiness and hopefully will have spent all of the money that I have earned from Google.

1:17:07And hopefully, we will be forgotten enough for the mission to continue after we leave as a small team. So I would love your advice. I wasn't expecting to go here. I lost a close friend a week ago and totally unexpected leukemia that just kept getting worse and worse over the course of 12 months. And I'm really struggling with the grief. I'm just not, I wasn't prepared for it. I don't, I don't know how to deal with it. That is meaningful grief. You have dealt with profound grief. There is, I can't imagine any more profound grief than losing a child. We grow up with this comfort as parents that we're going to get to go first.

1:17:41It's a huge source of comfort that I have. What advice do you have for people who are dealing with this type of grief? Well, I mean, it's difficult to give any advice that would take the grief away that quickly. Let's just be very open and honest about it. There is a finality to death that contradicts everything we've ever been trained to as humanity. It triggers our fear. It triggers our helplessness. It triggers our insecurity. We cannot trust life. We miss the person that we love that left us. we are scared about where they are. We have lots of uncertainties. It's a very overwhelming trauma.

1:18:25And the reality of the matter is that my first advice is grief, fully grief. If you're angry, be angry. If you're unsure, be unsure. If you want to take a break, take a break. this is the first step on the way, then there are two steps in my mind that are one is very logical and the other is very spiritual. The logical one is very harsh to say. It's very harsh, but it is, you know, when sometimes they say the truth will set you free, there's absolutely nothing, nothing you can ever do to bring them back. Okay? So my very mathematical, logical mind actually, believe it or not, went out and did the research.

1:19:14It's like, has anyone ever come back? Right? Yeah, we had many people that came back from near-death experiences. But you know for a fact that your friend is gone. Okay? The first thing I started to think about after Ali left was if I hit my head against the wall for 27 years, He's not going to come back. I'm going to be torturing myself and the world is not going to get better. Okay. So I found in my heart a space that basically said, I don't know how I will get there, but I will hopefully find the positive in all of this. I don't know how I will get there, but I will learn to accept that he left.

1:19:54And I think accepting that he left, I call this committed acceptance. And committed acceptance is that sometimes life throws things at you that are so final, you know, from the silliest thing of being stuck in traffic when you have an appointment that you're about to miss, okay, all the way to losing a loved one. There are very frequent things that happen in your life that are out of your control. And what I say is committed acceptance. Accept that this is your new baseline. Accept logically and emotionally that as painful as it is, this is the end of that hug that I could get from my son. It's not going to happen again.

1:20:36And then commit to make your life and the lives of those around you better, despite the pain, which is a very interesting thing. You don't have to know how. You do not have to know how. You just tell yourself, now that I've accepted this tragedy, I accepted this pain, I'm going to crawl out of it. Literally, the world is crawl out of it. I'm going to do one thing today that makes my life better than yesterday. And I'm going to do another thing tomorrow that makes life a little better than today. That's it. Okay. So this is the practical side, if you want. The spiritual side, I think, is very key so that I don't lie to people.

1:21:13Okay. And in my first book, Solve for Happy, I spoke about the concept of death from a physics point of view. okay because we struggle with this with the scientific method in measuring anything that we can't and with understanding anything that we can't measure and you cannot measure what happens after we die okay but there are lots of concepts in quantum physics specifically and with the idea of theory of relativity and the fact that space-time completely exists maybe we shouldn't go into those today but that will tell you that life is separate from the physical call it consciousness, call it spirit or soul like religions call it, but there is a non-physical element to us.

1:21:57That non-physical element is the part that disconnected from my son's body when he left. And that same handsome form of his that was on the intensive care table was no longer him. You could feel it. You could feel that his essence was no longer there. And if you can accept the fact that there is a non-physical element to us, okay, that non-physical element by definition exists outside space-time because otherwise it wouldn't be able to perceive time and the passage of time, it's a simple object-subject relationship, then that non-physical element is not affected by the events of the physical. So my son really never died, okay, so my son's physical form was born and my son's physical form decayed, but the essence of my son, his consciousness, has never gone anywhere.

1:22:47And when you really understand this, you understand that death is not the opposite of life. Death is the opposite of birth. And life exists before, during, and after. That I don't expect everyone to agree with. But to me, because I see it from a physics point of view more than a religious point of view, I tend to believe that my son is okay. I don't know okay how, but I know for a fact that I will join him sooner or later, and that I too will leave this physical form, and that I too will be okay. And you know, if I am optimistic about my life, it may take 25 more years before I leave. But if I look back at my last 56 that passed literally like that, then 25 is not that long.

1:23:31So in my heart, I have a certainty that I will be there too. And I think there is not a bad place. There is not even a place. It's not even a time. It's an eternity of consciousness. And that's the truth of who we are. Very difficult to explain that quickly. But at the end of the day, I don't see the departure of my son necessarily as a bad thing. Not for him, and definitely not for the world that benefited from his departure. It's just very painful for me. And if it's painful for me, then I'm the one responsible for managing that pain. I'm the one responsible for dealing with that pain because that pain doesn't add any positivity to me at all.

1:24:15Mo Gaddad is the former chief business officer at Google X and an expert on happiness. He's also the author of three international bestselling books that have been published in over 30 languages. After a 30-year career in tech, Mo switched gears and made happiness his primary focus. In 2020, he launched his podcast, Slow Mo, a podcast with Mo Gadot. He joined us from Dubai. Mo, I mean this so sincerely. This was very meaningful, and I appreciate your good work and generally just really wish the best for you and yours. And so appreciate not only how thoughtful and how just incisive you are, but how spiritual and authentic you are.

1:24:52Really appreciate your time. I really can't thank you enough, Scott. So not for the opportunity, not just for the opportunity to speak to your audience, but I really felt connected during this conversation. I really enjoyed the level of depth that we went into, and I'm really grateful for that.

1:25:16Algebra of happiness. I had a close friend pass away last week. my friend Scott Sabah, 54, I believe, literally almost a year ago, maybe 15 months ago, we went to Loom together. We were sort of, not sort of, we were close friends. And we like to do the same things. We like to go out. We like to party. We like to drink. And lived in New York as a real estate developer, graduated from USC, three kids, two that just graduated from USC, one who is a freshman at UVA. I met Scott probably 15 years ago. We lived in the same building and we just hit it off and started traveling together. And whenever I was in New York, I would just call Scott.

1:25:58And he was always up for going and grabbing a drink with me at Zero Bond, or he was kind of cooler than me. I go to the same places over and over. And Scott would always find his cooler places in the East Village. He just kind of knew what was going on. Nice man, ton of fun, great shape. A year ago, bump on his head, ends up it's leukemia, no problem. We're going to treat it with pills, not chemo. You don't need it. Oh, the pills aren't working. We need to go to chemo. Oh no, it looked like it was better, but now it's converted to something much more serious. I think it was called Richter's. And we need to do a stem cell transplant.

1:26:37Okay, your son's a match. That's good news. We're literally going to reset your entire blood makeup. I mean, even different blood type, just the stem cell transplant. Good news, it worked. You're all clear. Oh, no, it's back. And there's nothing we can do. I mean, just from bad to worse to tragic. and I got to be honest, I was sitting here thinking about this, like, what is the lesson here? And I don't, you know, I'm struggling with this. I don't, I don't have anything profound or moving or inspiring to say around this. This is a tragedy and I'm struggling with it. It is something I still can't wrap my head around.

1:27:17I've had some death in my life, but not a lot. I lost my mom. But when your parents die, it's sort of the natural order. I think it, you know, I'm not going to say you're prepared for it, but at least rationally, it makes sense. But when you lose a friend who's healthy and who's younger than you, you're just kind of struggling to wrap my head around it. The only thing I can come to and the only thing I would take away or what I would try and impart on people is that when I would text him towards the end, I would say, I love you, and there's a lot of people in your life who love you, and I know you know that.

1:27:47And I thought to myself, why is it I wait till someone's dying to tell them these things? And I think it is healthy. Something that has been inspiring for me or has been a big source of strength and help me register my own emotions and help me be more emotive to the people I care about is recognizing that death is pretty final and it's waiting for all of us. And I realize that's very macabre and it's also I can prove it to every one of us. The mortality rate is 100%. And I don't think it's a bad idea to have a sense of mortality at a pretty young age because what you find is rather than being scared or thinking about something you're not supposed to think about as a young person, you do recognize you're going to lose your parents and you become more courageous with your emotions and you become a little bit more graceful.

1:28:34You don't feel as awkward. I hug my male friends now. I never used to hug my male friends. You think more about a little bit more about others and maybe trying to be the person that you always thought. Like I have a cartoon of me that I'm this generous, nice, loving man, and I'm kind of not. Sometimes I am, but I'm mostly not. And I had breakfast this morning with a guy named Scott Harrison, who's a total inspiration, started a charity called Charity Water. And he always invites me to Africa with my boys. And I think, do I really want to go to Africa? I'm not like a roughet kind of guy. If I go to Africa, I want to go to like some douchebag tenant camp.

1:29:08And I've always kind of put it off. And I thought, you know what, my 12 and 15 year old boys, it can't help, mostly my fault, are going to be a little bit spoiled. I need them. I need to take them to Africa and to see how, not the other half, but the other, you know, much less fortunate people live. And so I'm going to do it. So it's given me more of a, you know, Scott's death has sort of given me more of a sense of the presence or of the present. But look, the only learning here, and I'm not going to pretend there is a learning, I am struggling with this, is it's not a bad idea to look at the people in your life and realize that randomly you're going to lose some of them?

1:29:50And how does that change? Knowing that you are going to lose some of them, what would you say to them? Because you don't regret it. I regret not saying these things to Scott Sooner. I don't think you're ever going to look back and say, oh, it was embarrassing to tell my friends that I love them or I admire them or say to my dad, you know, I really admire you. I'm impressed by you. And, you know, I remember us doing these things together. I just don't think you'll ever regret saying those things, but get on it, get on it. And the way you get on it and the way you find the courage around these things is the harsh recognition that randomly, especially when you get to my age, you're going to lose people you care a great deal about.

1:30:33This episode was produced by Caroline Shager and Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod and Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show. This message comes from AT &T. America's first network is also its fastest and most reliable. Based on RootMetrics United States Root Score Report, First Half 2025. Tested with best commercially available smartphones on three national mobile networks across all available network types.

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