The Future of AI and How It Will Shape Our World — with Mo Gawdat

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Learn more at ucsd.edu slash research. Episode 335.
In 1935, the first canned beer was sold in Richmond, Virginia, and Alcoholics Anonymous was founded. I really enjoy AA.
It's the only place where I can pee in an Uber and then show up and tell other guys who've peed in an Uber that it gets better. Go! Go! Go! Welcome to the 335th episode of The Prof G-Pod.
In today's episode, we speak with Mo Gadot, the former chief business officer of Google X, best-selling author, founder of One Billion Happy, and host of Slow Mo, a podcast with Mo Gadot. We discuss with Mo how AI could shape our lives in the coming decades, the opportunities it brings, and the risks it poses to society, ethics, and mental health.
We also get into his latest book, Unstressable, A Practical Guide to Stress-Free Living. Yeah, that's going to happen.
Yeah, I'm going to read a book and all of a sudden, Mr. Stress is going to leave the neighborhood.
Call me cynical. Color me a bit skeptical.
What's going on with the dog? What's going on with the dog? So I am in New York after a stop in Orlando where I went for a speaking gig. I have absolutely no sense of Orlando other than Disney World, which is the seventh circle of hell for parents.
Essentially, I do almost no parenting 364 days a year. And I compensate for all of it by agreeing to take my boys and their five or six closest friends to wild disney world which is just i mean that is cruel and unusual punishment for a parent uh but anyways i'm not doing it this time just bombing in speaking to a lovely group of people then getting back on a plane and going up to new york while i spent four days with the team and do a bunch i find new york i get so much New York.
There's something about, I don't know, everyone just seems to be on high, if you will. By the way, it's fascinating.
All these members clubs are opening. In the last couple of years, there's been Zero Bond, my favorite, Costa Cipriani, downtown, weird location.
They put a ton of money into it, has that Italian vibe. I get the sense it's trust fund kids from New Jersey, but that's just me.
And then what else has opened up? San Vicente Bungalows is opening up from Los Angeles. So everyone assumes it's going to be cool.
And I'm excited about that. The Crane Club, which is the guys from the Tao Group who are probably the most successful nightclub.
Pretty much a giant fucking red flag is when you find out that your

your daughter's dating a club promoter but these guys made good and it made so much dough and cabbage and really kind of professionalized the industry if you will and they're the folks or the power behind crane club so it should be interesting and then i went to another one last week and it's My favorite so far, based on my snap impressions,

Chez Marco.

Ooh, hello.

Hello, ladies. I don't know exactly how to describe it other than the thing that struck me was it was super cool, super crowded.
And the thing I liked about it was it was intergenerational. What do I mean by that? There was a lot of young hot people.
It was a good thing. It was a good thing.
New York, by the way, is run on hot women, hot young women, and rich men. That's it.
For everyone else, it's a soul-crushing experience. Anyways, and then it had people my age, and then it had parents eating and dining.
And I love that whole sort of like, we can be cool at any age, which is becoming increasingly important to me as I become 100 fucking years old. Anyways, I love being back in New York.
New York's on fire. Still think it's the greatest city in the world and am excited to be here.
I'm also gonna talk to Mo about, specifically, I think there's a paradigm shift going on in AI. A little bit of a teaser, a little bit of a teaser.
I'm like those promos for all those YouTube videos that say, the secret to happiness is, and then they cut out. But we're going to talk to Mo about what I think is, I think I had a realization around what is, how the whole AI economy might shift.
Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Mo Gadot. Mo, where does this podcast find you? I'm in Dubai today.
I am battling with the surprises of February so far. And yeah, enjoying every bit of it.
Well, let's start there. Surprises of February.
What are surprises in February from an individual such as yourself in Dubai? Dubai is wonderful in February. But, you know, we occasionally, remember last year we had this incredible flood that was really, really quite, you know.
And just a couple of days ago, we had a bit of rain that sort of like triggered the same fears. But of course, you know, the real surprises were deep seek and the responses in the market and how the world, I feel, overreacted a bit and then underreacted a bit and life.
Life, there you go. I hear you.
So let's bust right into it. The last time you were on, I think it was about a year ago, and you're sort of our go-to with this mix of spirituality and deep technical domain expertise.
And we were talking, as you might guess, kind of our need to control the response to AI. Give us what you think the kind of current state of play is in AI, given some of the recent developments, and how that may have influenced or did it influence your worldview or your predictions around or thoughts around the future of AI? You have to imagine that the short history of what I normally refer to as the third era of computing, you know, basically the two years between the time when ChatGPT came out and today, you know, that short history was a pace that humanity has never, ever seen before, I think.
You've seen what I used to refer to as the first inevitable, where basically everyone is in a prisoner's dilemma, don't want the other side to win. So everyone's competing, throwing everything on it, you know, at it.
And basically, you'd get releases of new technology that are sometimes separated by weeks, if not months at most.

And I think what most people don't recognize is that at least within the areas where we invested, we have made massive stride on tech. so when it comes to the march to AGI if you want which I think humanity would continue to disagree

about for a while because we don't really have a definition, an accurate definition of AGI, is still steady and very, very fast. right so we're gonna get there my prediction is we almost have already gotten there and that's

you know when it

comes to linguistic intelligence they've won they're winning in mathematics uh they're winning in reasoning uh you know and and everything we will pour resources on uh they will get to become better than humans so it's just a question of time really the part that hasn't changed in my mind caught which now i think is very very firm and much more accurate if you want is that the impact on humanity in the short term is going to be dystopian and that's that has nothing to do with the existential risk that people speak about with ai it has a lot to do with the value set of humanity at the age of

the rise of the machines basically unelected influential powers making decisions on humanity's behalf in ways that completely determines how things happen leading to massive changes in the very fabric of society and basically paying to an agenda where i tend to believe we will end up with very few big platform players completely in bed with governments completely um you know feeding on hunger for power uh hunger for wealth and uh sort of depriving the rest of us of the freedom to live the life we live i i can i can sort of so i summarize this in an acronym that i made seven seven changes to our way of life i call them face rips and we can go into them in details if you want but basically i see this as inevitable i see that the short-term dystopia is going to be upon us very, very soon, just because the massive superpower that is at the disposal of agendas is going to be in play very, very quickly. You said unelected officials that are reshaping society.
Are you talking about Sam Altman, Elon Musk? Who are you referring to? 100%. I mean, with all due respect, why is my life being determined by Sam Altman? We all had an accord, unwritten rule, if you want, that we won't put AI out in the public sphere until we feel that we've tackled safety or alignment or ethics, know, ethics, if you want all wonderful dreams to have.

Sam Altman, very soft spoken, comes out every now and then and says, this is the priority of what we believe in. But in reality, it's a publicly traded company creating billionaires.
Everyone's rushing very, very quickly. Yeah, it's all about the money.
and you know if you and i have lived in the tech world long enough to to understand that what um you know that all you need is a very clever pr manager to to craft a message that is almost exactly the opposite of what you focus on every day but you say it over and over until you yourself believe it the truth is uh the world is is not ready for for what is about to hit us whether you take the simple things like the economics of the world and how they will change as a result of ai all the way to the change of the dynamics of power and and you know the resulting deprivation of freedom you know all of the all the way to how the economics of the world are going to change and how you know the the jobs are going to change and how the human connection is going to change and our understanding of reality is going to change and these are decisions that are not made by us anymore i'm you know think about it this way uh spider-man's with great power comes great responsibility we've disconnected power from responsibility is massive, massive power concentration concentrated in hands that do not answer to anyone. So I 100% agree with you.
The idea that everything from which buildings are these targeted bombs, bomb first, what our perception of our government, election strategies, all of these things are now being decided by algorithms programmed by a very small number of people. That creates, I think, a lot of concern.
The steelman argument is that if we don't iterate around the public's usage of these things, that other entities will leap ahead of us and their intentions are even more malicious than ours. That while capitalism perverts things, at its heart, it's not malicious.
It might be indifferent, but it's not malicious. And the fear is that if we let other entities run unfettered with AI in the sense that it becomes the Wild West and the public provides feedback, and these models leap out ahead of ours, that ultimately the trade-off between a capitalist motive is worth it relative to letting other societies get out ahead of AI.
Respond to that argument. I find that this is a very valid argument if you think of the short term.
If you think of the long term, it could lead to a very dystopian place so allow

me to explain a competitive uh race arms race that basically says if i if i don't build a nuclear bomb first someone else will build it does not you know necessarily lead to a world where you're the only one that owns a nuclear bomb as a matter of fact it leads it leads to a world that has more than one owner of nuclear bombs. And I think what you saw from DeepSeek, for example, is a very interesting result that comes out of, okay, we're going to consider this a war.
We're going to compete against the other people. We're going to apply sanctions.
We're going to try to limit their ability to progress. And what do they do as a result? Necessity is the mother of all needs.
And so basically, they find ways to do things differently. Now, when you really look at the idea of testing things in public, which is an argument that's used very frequently, but by open AI ai i think the analogy almost sounds like let's

you know test the the trinity in manhattan not in new mexico just to see how it impacts

humanity right that's not how you do things the way you do things is when you are uncertain of the outcome you know you you normally can test it in ways that are much more contained but that's, you know, this genie is out of the bottle long ago

because the truth of the matter is that everyone is racing already.

The other outcome, believe it or not, and I say that with a ton of respect,

you know, is that, yes, the U.S. might lead, you know, the arms race or China.

You'll never really know. You know, it might be open AI or it might be alphabet, you'll never really know.
But the problem with that is that a more polar world where such concentrated power is not a fair world either. It's not a fair world to the world, but it's also not a fair world to most Americansicans and i think that's what most people don't recognize is that you eventually uh sooner or later as more and more power is concentrated in the hands of very very few uh which is the only way the u.s can have that can beat china if you want on in in this technology those very few eventually will turn on the american citizen and say you know what you're not really bringing any productivity we care about maximizing the same target we've been chasing so far more power more wealth and you're standing in the way and i think you can see that in the american society very very clearly today before ai takes over the only answer in my view believe it or not which i know sounds really idealistic idealistic if you want is a mutually assured destruction conviction is that we both understand uh you know both by by both i mean every two arch enemies on both sides that we are shifting the mindset and the and the existence of humanity from a world of scarcity where for me to be to feel safe i have to be stronger than the other person where for me to gain economically i have to compete with the other person to a world of total abundance i mean we spoke about this last time last time we met, Scott, and my definition of the current age of AI is what I call the intelligence augmentation.
So we're now augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence in ways where if I can lend you 250 iq points more imagine what you can invent, right? And I say that publicly all the time. I dare the world.
I say, give me 400 IQ points more and I will harness energy out of thin air. So why are we competing if that's the possibility ahead of us when the competition drives us to a point of absolute mutually assured destruction.
So it strikes me when we talk about mutually assured destruction, it strikes me that the two entities that would have to come to some sort of agreement around regulation or a pause, or it would be the U.S. and China.
And I'm sure there's other entities, but those are the lead dogs, right? Do you think it's realistic that the Chinese would be sympathetic to this argument and that there's enough mutual trust to say, look, we got to, I don't want to say slow down, but put some of this behind wraps, share with each other. I mean, this was sort of Oppenheimer's, was it Oppenheimer's initial vision that we share this technology and say, okay, when one gets too far out ahead of the other, that's a problem.

We need to control it together and realize that if one gets too far out in front of the other, the temptation to destroy the other is too great, at which point that person will destroy it. We'll make sure they can strike back in some limited fashion.
Do you think it's realistic, and maybe realistic or not, it's something we've got to do, that we try and strike some sort of treaty with the CCPO and China? It's not realistic in the current political environment, unfortunately. The current geopolitics of the world is heating up more and more, but it wasn't realistic in the case of Russia and nuclear weapons either.
By the way, I am not for slowing down at all. I'm actually for speeding up all the way, but speeding up in a direction that is not competitive, but rather for the prosperity of the whole world.
I mean, at the end of the day, Scott, again, give me 400 IQ points more and I'll solve every problem known to humankind. And this is quite you know straightforward really you and i have both worked with incredibly smart people and you understand what the difference of 100 iq points means right give me better reasoning better mathematics better understanding of physics and i can do things that humanity never dreamt of and and this is a promised utopia that is at our fingers that dips so i'm not saying slow down i'm simply saying there is no point to compete the issue that is facing our world is not a problem of technology that's moving too fast technology has always been good for us right it's a problem of trust that if the other guy gets the technology before me i'm in trouble and and that trust is not established in the lab it's not established in the data center it's basically established to the realization that we can create a world of absolute total abundance total abundance i could know every piece of knowledge that ever existed i i know you i know you, Scott.
I know how big of a dream this is for people like you and I who love to learn, right? And I can use that knowledge in ways that will make me richer. But how many Ferraris does anyone need? I think this is the challenge we have.
The challenge is, you know, the founders, by the way, I don't believe this is a question of money for the founders of AI startups. I think this is a question of ego rather than greed.
I'm the one that figured it out first. I'm the one that, you know, provided this amazing breakthrough to humanity.
But if you look back just 150 years at the king or queen of England, they had a much worse life than what anyone today has. Anyone in any reasonable city in the US today has air conditioning, has transportation, has clean water, has hot water, has sanitation.
So we're getting to the point where more doesn't actually make any difference anymore. It is a morality question of can we just shift the mindset to abundance instead of scarcity? We'll be right back.
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Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash VentureX Business. Do you think sequestering China from our most advanced chip technology was a mistake? 100%? That's the biggest mistake ever.
I mean, since when did we, you know, I mean, strategically, as I said as i said of course you know the two big sanctions there that america did in the last you know few years were you know backfired massively against america the the move against russia you know basically got a lot of people to try and de-dollarize a little bit and the move against china China drove China to become more inventive. It's as simple as that.
But it is also a massive statement of, you know what, I'm going to try everything I can to beat you. And I don't know how to say that in a polite way, but I've gone the first time to America in the 70s, and it blew me away.
It was a world apart from anywhere else in the world. I get that feeling today when I land in Shanghai.
It's not an easy fight. It's not a determined fight.
Let's say 70s, 80s, 90s, definitely, you know, post-Berlin, the U.S. could do whatever the F they wanted in the world.
I don't think it's as easy a slam dunk as it has been in the past anymore. I think America needs to recognize that when you win, it's going to be through strategies like what Trump is talking about by increasing defense, you know, spending even further than where it was, you know, loading the American debt clock even further than it is loaded.
And, you know, I had a very good boss of mine that used to say when we're under pressure, we tend to do more of what we know how to do best. But what we know how to do best is what got us under pressure in the first place.
And I truly and honestly think that imagine a world where there is an agreement that America adheres to, by the way, that basically says, let's just deliver that

world that everyone's dreaming of. Deliver a world where there is no need for you to attack me.
I think of a little bit of this, how I would couch some of your comments as you think we're entering into what I'll call an age of equivalence. I don't know how to, my semantics might be up, but I think of America was able to develop and sustain certain competitive advantages.
Manufacturing, mostly because the German and Japanese infrastructure had been leveled. Then services infrastructure and then technology, whether it was because of IP, risk-taking, multiculturalism.
And we were able to maintain one, two, three-decade leads and find the next thing and establish more prosperity and create and consume a disproportionate amount of the world's spoils. And tell me if I'm saying this correctly, you now believe that our competitive advantage around these things is shrinking from 30 years to 30 days.
So it sort of should bring on this incredible age of cooperation, and we should stop deluding ourselves that we're going to be able to get out ahead and win. Is that an accurate summary of what you're stating? That is a very accurate summary.
That it's still possible for the U.S. to win.
I think the most important competitive advantage that you may have not mentioned here is that money has always been free for the U.S., right? You had the ability to print money to create amazing wealth that got reinvested wisely and sometimes unwisely. Unfortunately, I think we're in a time where 500 billion dollars um on stargate is you know sounds unwise right uh but uh you know at a point in time it was a no issue you know it's like okay if this is what it takes to build the infrastructure we'll do it what i'm attempting to say here is it's not that the u.s has lost the capability to crush other nations on whatever, you know, full spectrum dominance that the U.S.
has been attempting to achieve for years. It's that other nations have grown an ability to resist, right? And that the more the U.S.
is becoming, you know, again, I worked my entire life in corporate America, So don't take that as an attack to the American approach at all. I'm basically saying that the more America will bully the world, the more you'll get responses like Deep Seek across the world, you know, where people are simply going to say, you know what, we don't like this anymore.
I will openly say I don't like the fact that there is a small chunk of whatever money I made anywhere in the world that was somehow handed to America because of the US dollar dominance. I don't feel, as a wealthy man, I don't feel that this tax, if you want, on all the money made everywhere in the world that this export of inflation to everywhere in the world is a just setup for all of us to succeed and so you can see across the world you know actions from japan from china from russia for sure that is basically attacking the u.s where it becomes becomes painful, which is the U.S.
dollar dominance. It's not going to go away anytime soon, but it makes things a little painful.
And it is, you know, in a typical environment, in a typical environment, the U.S. would say, you know what, I'm going to crush you.
I'm strong enough and you are strong enough. You know, I'm going to apply tariffs, as Trump would say, and make sure that nobody has access to my wonderful market.
Yeah, makes sense. It does make sense.
But it also causes pain on the U.S. side.
Right. And it comes from a mindset of we're still competing for limited resources where the world was made up of metals and mirrors, you know and and and power was acquired by by weapons i think we are on the cusp of a world where everything is possible just understand that from a difference of of manufacturing point of view right with enough understanding of nanophysics and an an understanding of uh you know, a level of intelligence that helps us bridge the remaining bits of nanophysics, we could manufacture things out of thin air, just reorganizing molecules of air, right? Instead of competing for minerals and resources.
And this is on at our fingertips. It's years away.
There is a need for a mindset change. I always like to pause and double-click on or at least cement and highlight what I think is real striking insight in the notion of an inability to sustain an advantage.
And all it does is create fear and weaken relationships and make one side more likely to strike while they're ahead and create workarounds because nothing creates innovation like war and the threat of survival, right? And what also really resonated was, and I've been saying this, I think Sam Altman is Sheryl Sandberg with hushed tones.

Sheryl Sandberg was weaponized for femininity, her charm, her maternal instincts, gender, the important conversation around gender to basically take what was a company that was creating rage, making our discourse more coarse, depressing our teens, and make it seem more palatable to basically rub Vaseline over the lens of pretty mendacious behavior. And I feel like Sam and his hushed tones and his, that's a real concern.
Senator, I'm worried too. Meanwhile, I'm about to raise $40 billion at a $350 billion market cap.
I mean, it's just, I have been to this fucking movie before and we are falling for it again and again. And so I want to propose something and have you respond to it.
And this is literally, you just inspired this thought. Similar to the way we have the UN or NATO, we have a new organization and the two founding members are China and the US.
And it's total open. There's offices in DC, Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing.
Every room, every team has a mix of U.S. and Chinese scientists, regulators, such that it's almost impossible to hide anything.
We're all working on the same damn thing. And we're trying to solve the world's most difficult problems, food distribution, health, poverty.
We're working together, but we're also making sure there's a very, very thick layer of supervision and enforcement such that we are constantly testing, how would you make bioweapons? And then we're sending our crawlers out to see, is anyone working on this that we don't want working on this? And we together try and create, you know, like what Interpol was doing, where we had multilateral cooperation around the drug trade and arms shipments. But we have this multilateral organization that says there's total transparency, and our job is to dole it out where we see the most opportunity to increase stakeholder value.
And the stakeholders are all 7.5 billion people on the planet. And we're there to ensure that there's trust and transparency and ensure that the bad guys don't get this and start doing.
And we're going to cooperate around either sequestering this or ensuring that the development of it to make weapons or create a new super virus, that we are hip to these things before anybody else and act against them.

With that type of organization, do you think that's possible? And in your mind, do you think that that has merit? That would be a dream. I mean, let me just double click on a very important comment that you said there at the end.
what both parties are unable to recognize while they are putting their heads down and competing with each other is how many bad guys are putting their heads down in silence and working against both of them the thing about ai is a massive democracy a massive set of open source once again because of the speed of this thing you know, it took Linux tens of years to actually be, I mean, at least around 10 years to be established. It took massive open source models weeks to be established, right? And so there is access, you know, anyone today can download a DeepSeq, you know, model to their computer in the jungles of Colombia and do something malicious without ever being detected.
Now, the dream here is that we work together to say, look, again, mutually assured destruction. If we are not both together against the bad guys, there is harm that can come to all of us.
And I think it's a beautiful dream. But believe it or not, there is a bit of that dream that's already happening.
I mean, I don't know if you know the statistics, but 38% of all top AI researchers in America are Chinese. It's quite staggering when you really think about it.
And if you count the Indians, and if you count, you know, some that have Russian origin and so on. What percentage of that 38% are spies? Great question.
And in all honesty. In the world you're defining it, those spies are assets to humanity.
And it's quite interesting that if you do not have a reason to spy, then become more of an asset to humanity i think i think that the truth here is there is no winning there's truly no winning and and i of course i don't want to to be grumpy but you know a massive advantage in ai is not going to trump the card of nuclear holocaust. So we're competing in the wrong arena, if you think about it, because in a world where we have so many superpowers, of which almost four or five can completely wipe out our planet in less than two hours, right? The quest for more power, for a dream that I can crush someone else is a very dangerous quest.
Nobody in this world today can crush anybody. I think this message needs to become really, really clear.
What are we competing on? What are we competing on? And so, of course, you know, what you recommended, by the way, can be done by governments, which I think is an impossible dream. But believe it or not, if just a few billionaires got together and built those things, the creation of the world of abundance will basically nullify the need to compete.
You see, the challenge we have in our minds is we're not in that world of abundance yet right and so and so we're still living in our capitalist way of every one of us has to to to to play to to aggregate more wealth which delivers more power and then that i take that wealth and power and protect my wealth and power and make more of it. This is a world that's about to end.
It is literally about to end for 6 billion of us as soon as jobs go away. Nobody's talking about this.
So you and I both know, you probably more so, but I would say I know personally or somewhat well, I don't know, a dozen or two dozen billionaires. And what I have found is that the majority of them have what I call their very expensive go-back.
And that is they have a plan, whether it's anti-Semitism or a nuclear war or some sort of AI catastrophe or revolution. and they have their Gulfstream 650 ready on a moment's notice, and pilots, and their bunker in New Zealand.
And what I've said when I've talked to a few people about this is like, let me get this. If things really get that bad, you don't think your pilots are going to get you to your destination and then kill you? You think they're going to sacrifice themselves to save your family? You don't think that everybody else is going to figure out where the billionaire bunkers are and come and take you? I mean, it's just, it's such a ridiculous, I feel like it's not only a stupid thesis, it's an unhealthy one.
Because they're under the impression that their money can buy them a ripcord, a way out.

And they can't.

And so shouldn't you be focusing all this energy on making sure that we just don't get to that point?

Colonizing Mars?

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Take your immense talent and capital to make this place a little bit more fucking habitable.

Because you're not going to want to live on Mars.

Mars is an awful place. You don't want to be there.
That's worse than death. That's not space exploration.
It's space execution. Isn't this, I mean, don't we have a real virus? It's almost like capitalism collapsing on itself where we get so caught up in our self-worth and our masculinity and our power around the number, and we see this way to a billion, 10 billion, a trillion dollars, which will increase in the current age, my worth as a human.
Doesn't this require an entirely different zeitgeist? Endlessly. You see, both directions of this dilemma are quite interesting.
interesting one of them is you know remember last time i don't remember when we were when we had a drink at after the event uh we spoke about the idea of what you can do with money you know there is there is a specific um you know range of wealth uh where money makes a difference. You know, if you've

never driven a sports car before and you managed to get yourself a sports car, you go like,

yeah, I made it. But then if you drive a real sports car and you know how annoying and fucking

broken they are and you know how they, you just eventually go like, I don't need any more of this.

The problem is the game of billionaire or multi, multi, multi millionaire is wonderful. Okay.
It's a, it's a nice game, but it has no significant impact on gains that you can achieve as a human. You'll still sleep in one bed and you can make it as fancy as you can, but it's still one bed.
You can still drive only one car. There could be 600 other cars, 600,000 other cars in the garage, but you're still driving only one.
And by the way, when you're a billionaire, you're not really driving it comfortably anyway, because you're targeted all the time. The other way of this crazy dilemma is even more worthy of discussion, because we remember the times when if you had an MBA, you were like a highly educated post-grad and, you know, now everyone has an MBA.
And then if you had a PhD, you know, you became the special one and now everyone has a PhD and, you know, many have many. And the idea here is there is an inflation to the value of something that you acquire, right? And what is happening with wealth today with artificial intelligence is if you just look at the current trajectory, we're going to see our first trillionaire within years for sure.
And that not only makes that person acquire more wealth that is not necessary, but it makes the price of every Rolls Royce higher. And then that makes the price of every Mercedes higher, and that makes the price of every Toyota higher, and so on and so forth, which basically means that as more of those exist, just in the single digits, more of the millionaires become poor.
And then a few years later, more of the hundred million millionaires become poor because they can no longer compete with that level of wealth to which everyone is now appealing and so if you take that cycle and continue to repeat it over and over eventually you'll end up with a very few like way less than 0.01 of one percent you know of all humans that have so much wealth. But then the great equalizer is that

the rest of us have no wealth at all. So once again, from an economics point of view, we are

getting to a point where money will have very little value as compared to a world where money

has no value because everything is becoming a lot cheaper, which is a world we can create with AI.

So I buy it theoretically, but what I've registered is that over the last 50 years, money becomes an even greater arbiter of the life you can lead. When I was a kid, the difference between my dad's house and his boss's house, a little bit nicer car, a little bit bigger house, but we were in the same neighborhood, golfed at the same country club.
The market in a capitalist society always figures out a way for you to offer you more with more money. There's coach, there's premium economy, there's business class, there's first class, there's chartering, there's fractional jet ownership, there's ownership, there's a challenger, there's a Bombardier Global Express, then there's a Gulfstream 650, then there's going into space.
My sense is life has actually gone the other way the last 50 years, that the life that the 0.1% lead is an entirely different life. It's like the delta between being middle-class and rich has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.
And so the incentives are actually the other way, that there really is a reason. When you're the richest man in the world, you can show up and turn off foreign aid without being elected.
Correct. I think we're saying the same thing.
What that means, however, is that the majority of us, even the ones that are now millionaires, are going to become poor. That what you're saying is exactly true it's that the the range in which we're now talking about the difference between what between what you can do with a lot of money and what you cannot do if you don't have that money makes everyone almost equal at the bottom everyone gets a reasonable car but not a massively fancy car you know, becomes equal as compared to those incredibly wealthy, if you know what I mean.
We'll be right back. Stay with us.
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Terms and conditions apply! Last week, we at Today Explained brought you an episode titled The Joe Rogan of the Left. The Joe Rogan of the Left was in quotations.
It was mostly about a guy named Hassan Piker, who some say is the Joe Rogan of the Left. But enough about Joe.
We made an episode about Hassan because the Democrats are really courting this dude. So Hassan Piker is really the only major prominent leftist on on twitch at least the only one who talks about politics all day what's going on everybody i hope everyone's having a fantastic evening afternoon pre-new no matter where they want his co-sign they want his endorsement because he's young and he reaches millions of young people streaming on youtube tiktok and especially.
But last week he was streaming us.

Yeah, I was listening on stream and you guys were like,

hey, you should come on the show if you're listening.

I was like, oops, caught.

You're a listener.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, I am.
Yeah.

Thank you for listening.

Head over to the Today Explained feed to hear Hassan Piker explain himself. We're back with more from Mo Godot.
Mo, I want to propose a thesis, and I'm going to do what we're supposed to do, and that is talk about your book. I was sort of blown away by this guy, Robert Armstrong.
He proposed or he talked about certain industries where the innovation has resulted in stakeholder value, not shareholder value. So we have fallen under the notion that if I can come up with a better search engine, I'm going to capture trillions of dollars in shareholder value for me and my investors and my employees.
Same way around social media, same way around e-commerce. I came to Orlando last night for a speaking gig.
I skirt along the surface of the atmosphere at eight tenths the speed of sound. I don't have to eat my niece going over the Rockies with scurvy.
I don't get seasick for 14 days as my parents did coming on a steamship. It has changed humanity, jet travel.
The PC changed humanity for better. I mean, it's just a supercomputer that used to cost $10 billion on inflation adjusted.
I can get for $300, put it on my desk and increase the productivity of everything. I was on the board of Gateway Computer.
We were the second largest computer manufacturer in the world. When I bought 17% of the company, it was worth $130 million.
If you added up all the profits of the airline industry, it's negative. They've lost more money than they've made.
There are certain industries in technology where because of a lack of competitive moats, the gains, the value, seep to humanity and to stakeholders. They're not able to be captured by a small number of shareholders.
And when DeepSeek came along, it sort of dawned on me, maybe, and I think this is an optimistic vision, maybe AI is more like the PC or the airline industry. And that is many of the benefits will accrete to stakeholders and citizens, but no one small set of company or people are going to be able to capture all of the value.
Do you think that's an optimistic view of where AI might be headed? In other words, do not participate in the SoftBank round at $350 billion in open AI. There is certainty in my mind that there is going to be a democratization of power, more access for everyone to more things.
Unfortunately, if you take a power-hungry scenario in the recent wars of 2024 in the world, you got the ultra-powerful, you got a concentration of power, some of it using AI, by the way, in terms of weapons that have massive impacts, but you also got access to drones that can be flown from a very far away distance and for $3,000 cause a lot of harm, right? And I think that dichotomy, if you want, that arbitrage between a massive concentration of power at the top and a democratization of power at the bottom is going to drive a very very high need of for control once again i i love the hypothesis or the ambition for ai to become that uh net positive to the world because it's not really driving only profits to the top which it will but i think that that the opposite direction of that is that when you have massive power at the top and you sense that the bottom has a democracy of power and that can threaten you at any point in time, you're going to have to oppress them. And so that will take away the benefits that the majority can get.
And I give a very stark and maybe a bit graphic example. Think about a world, Scott, where a bullet could kill.
But if you're a leader of a nation, you can have protection around you and can have everything to protect yourself. We've seen examples in the 2024 wars where a specific person is targeted anywhere in the world and killed.
You know, a tiny little drone carries that bullet, seeks you with AI, finds where you are, stands in front of your forehead, and then shoots. And these technologies are unfortunately under development.
Now think about what that does to democracy. Think about those who own that weapon.
By the way, they don't necessarily have to be governments and how they can influence the distribution of power, how they can ensure that whatever is created is directed in a way that's different than what than what would benefit the majority yeah in every war there's a new weapon that kind of changes the game and i think people don't talk about this enough but i think drones are the new weapon uh that's going to i mean i think about millions of self-healing assassin drones and ai and the ai direction of some individual, puts together a list of people who are not in the way of my wealth or my power, and those drones can be released at one of a thousand different... I mean, you can really get very dark very fast here, so I'm going to try and segue out of this into something a little bit more positive.
Is this the very first conversation where I'm grumpier than you? Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely grumpy old men.
It's grumpy, grumpier, and grumpiest. But I do find, whenever I speak to you, you manage to distill something down to something understandable and actionable for me.
I love the idea of this multilateral agency. I was thinking in a zero-sum game philosophy that we need to get out ahead, we need to develop AI, we shouldn't be shipping NVIDIA chips to China.
I was part of that crew. And what you have taught me is, okay, what if we cooperated around not only releasing it for the betterment of humanity, but also, quite frankly, policing the bad stuff together and being 100% transparent with each other and just saying, not only are there no secrets, but it would be impossible to have secrets amongst each other because we've just decided we're in the same office space.
I really love that idea. And I think that as I think about candidates that I want to support in 2028, I do, or 2026, I do have access, mostly because I have money.
But I think this is a really interesting view. Anyways, thank you for that.
Your latest book, Unstressable, a practical guide for stress-free living, addresses the pervasive issues of chronic stress in modern life. in an interview on the diary of a ceo with by the way stephen bartlett who i believe is going to be

the next joean, you described stress as an addiction and a badge of honor. Say more, why are we so addicted to stress? Part of the fakeness that leads us to success is I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy, which I have to say I found almost

always quite shocking because, you know, if you go across the range of intelligence, if you want, I think most of us know that a good 80 to 90 percent of all of the efficiency that you bring to any job that you do is done within 20 percent of the time. But yet, you know, part of your ego is I'm going to fill the other 20, you know, the, you know, the other 80 percent of the time with 20 percent work that's taking a lot of toll on me because it basically means I'm driven.
It basically means, you know, that I am maximizing my performance, maximizing my deliveries between waking up in the morning at 5 a.m. to run an Ironman and then going in the evening to attend I don't know what and flying all over the world and so on and so forth.
The truth of the matter is this is a self-perception, a form of ego that says, I am doing amazing. But it isn't.
And I think the biggest challenge we have is that we believe that the world stresses us. The world does not stress us.
I mean, when I wrote Unstressable, I started from physics. I basically said, look, the easiest way to understand stress in humans is to look at stress in objects.
And the stress in object is the force applied to the object, but that is divided by the cross-section of the object, how much resources the object has to carry that force. And so typical reality of our life, especially the lives of busy executives who live in busy cities and so on and so forth, is that there will be multiple challenges and forces applied to you every day, but that the cross-section of you, your capabilities, your skills, your connections, your abilities, and so on, the more you have those and apply them properly, the less stressed you feel.
There might be more force applied to you. You might be carrying more challenges, but you don't feel stressed, just like an object doesn't break when it has a bigger cross-section.
And the reality of the matter is that part of the badge of honor is not that I'm carrying a lot of things. It's that I'm busy, and I'm angry, and I'm stressed, and I'm this, and I'm that.
And I find that, honestly, yeah, and I worked with many people who are very successful, who are who appear to be that way and become a lot very obnoxious and unloved by their people. And I worked with a few that were totally chill.
You know, I used to be the one that used to tell my sales team, I really think this pipeline is too wide. I really think you should focus on 30% of it and close it, you know, rather than waste your time on things that you will not serve well.
And, you know, in a way, you make more money that way, you become more successful that way, you get more, you know, customer satisfaction that way. And the rest of the pipeline you hand over to a different channel that does it in a way that's suited for it so that it doesn't stress anyone.
How do we deal with stress in a more sustainable way? And as we wrap up here, are there any quick fixes? I feel that what we want to deal with is not stress. What we want to deal with is breakpoints.
So we want to avoid breakpoints. And I think there are three breakpoints that happen to us in our world today.
One is, of course, burnout. And burnout, algorithmically, is the sigma of all of the stressors that you're under, multiplied by their duration, multiplied by their intensity.
And basically, most of the time when you burn out, you burn out not because one big stressor is in your life, but it's because of the aggregation of all the little things, the loud alarm in the morning, the commute, the this and that. And then one little thing shows up on top of it and you break down.
And so burnout to me is a question of a weekly review. Literally every Saturday, you sit with yourself, you write on a piece of paper, everything that stressed you last week, and you scratch out the ones that you commit that you will not allow in your life anymore.
You can either remove them from your life or make them more enjoyable. So if

you have to be stuck in a commute or a long flight, take some good music with you, be healthy,