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

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Speaker 13 Episode 335. In 1935, the first canned beer was sold in Richmond, Virginia, and Alcoholics Anonymous was founded.
I really enjoy AAA.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Go, go, go!

Speaker 13 Welcome to the 335th episode of the Prop GPod.

Speaker 13 In today's episode, we speak with Mo Ga Dot, the former chief business officer of Google X, best-selling author, founder of 1 Billion Happy, and host of Slow Mo,

Speaker 13 a podcast with Mo Ga Dot. 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.

Speaker 13 We also get into his latest book, Unstressable, A Practical Guide to Stress-Free Living.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 I have absolutely no sense of Orlando other than Disney World, which is the seventh circle of hell for parents.

Speaker 13 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 Walt Disney World, which is just, I mean, that is cruel and unusual punishment for a parent.

Speaker 13 But, anyways, 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 doing a bunch of stuff.

Speaker 13 I find New York, I get so much done in New York. There's something about, I don't know, everyone just seems to be on high, if you will.

Speaker 14 By the way, it's fascinating. All these members' clubs are opening.

Speaker 13 In the last couple of years, there's been Zerobon, my favorite, Casa Cipriani, downtown, weird location. They put a ton of money into it.
It has that Italian vibe.

Speaker 13 I get the sense it's trust fun kids from New Jersey, but that's just me. And then what else has opened up?

Speaker 13 San Vicente Bungalows is opening up from Los Angeles. So everyone assumes it's going to be cool.
And I'm excited about that.

Speaker 13 The Crane Club, which is the guys from the Tau Group who are probably the most successful nightclub.

Speaker 13 Like 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

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And then I went to another one last week and it's my favorite so far based on my snap impressions. Shea Marco.

Speaker 14 Ooh, hello.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 What do I mean by that? There was a lot of young, hot people. It was a good thing.
What was a good thing? New York, by the way, is run on hot women, hot young women, and rich men. That's it.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 New York's on fire. I still think it's the greatest city in the world and am excited to be here.
I'm also going to talk to Mo about specifically, I think there's a paradigm shift going on in AI.

Speaker 13 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,

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Mo Gaddat.

Speaker 13 Mo, where does this podcast find you?

Speaker 14 I'm in Dubai today. I am

Speaker 14 battling with

Speaker 14 the surprises of February so far. And yeah, enjoying every bit of it.

Speaker 13 Well, let's start there. Surprises of February.

Speaker 13 What are surprises in February from an individual such as yourself in Dubai?

Speaker 14 Dubai is wonderful in February, but it, you know, we occasionally, remember last year we had this incredible flood

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 But of course, you know, the real surprises were deep seek and the responses in the market and how the world,

Speaker 14 you know,

Speaker 14 I feel overreacted a bit and then underreacted a bit. And, you know,

Speaker 14 life.

Speaker 13 Life, there you go. I hear you.
So

Speaker 13 let's bust right into it. The last time you were on, I think it was about a year ago, and

Speaker 13 you're sort of our go-to with this mix of spirituality and deep technical domain expertise. And we were talking, as my guest, kind of our need to control the response to AI.

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 14 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,

Speaker 14 you know, that short history was a pace that humanity has never, ever seen before. I think

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And I think what most people don't recognize is that at least within the areas where we invested, we have made massive strides on tech.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 14 when it comes to the march to AGI, if if you want,

Speaker 14 which I think humanity will continue to disagree about for a while, because we don't really have a definition, an accurate definition of AGI,

Speaker 14 you know,

Speaker 14 is still steady and very, very fast, right? So we're going to get there. My prediction is we almost have already gotten there.

Speaker 14 And that, you know, when it comes to linguistic intelligence, they've won.

Speaker 14 They're winning in mathematics, they're winning in reasoning, you know, and everything we will pour resources on, they will get to become better than humans. So it's just a question of time, really.

Speaker 14 The part that hasn't changed in my mind, Scott, which now I think is very, very firm and much more accurate, if you want, is that the impact

Speaker 14 on humanity in the short term is going to be dystopian. And that has nothing to do with the existential risk that people speak about with AI.

Speaker 14 It has a lot to do with the value set of humanity at the age of the rise of the machines.

Speaker 14 Basically, unelected, influential powers making decisions on humanity's behalf in ways that completely determines how things happen,

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 feeding on hunger for power, hunger for wealth, and

Speaker 14 sort of depriving the rest of us of the freedom to live the life we live.

Speaker 14 I can sort of, so I summarize this in an acronym that I made, seven changes to our way of life. I call them face RIPs, and we can go into them in details if you want.

Speaker 14 But basically, I see this as inevitable.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 13 You said unelected officials that are reshaping society. Are you talking about Sam Altman, Elon Musk? Who are you referring to?

Speaker 14 100%. I mean, with all due respect, why is my life being determined by Sam Altman? We we all had an accord, unwritten rule, if you want, that we won't put AI out in the public sphere

Speaker 14 until we feel that we've tackled safety or alignment or

Speaker 14 ethics, if you want, all wonderful dreams to have.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Everyone's rushing very, very quickly. Yeah, it's all about the money.
And you and I have lived in the the tech world long enough to

Speaker 14 understand that what,

Speaker 14 you know,

Speaker 14 that all you need is a very clever PR manager 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.

Speaker 14 The truth is,

Speaker 14 the world is not ready for what is about to hit us.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 the resulting deprivation of freedom,

Speaker 14 all the way to how the economics of the world are going to change and how

Speaker 14 the jobs are going to change and how the human connection is going to change and how our understanding of reality is going to change. And these are decisions that are not made by us anymore.

Speaker 14 Think about it this way.

Speaker 14 Spider-Man's with great power comes great responsibility. We've disconnected power from responsibility.

Speaker 14 There is massive, massive power concentration concentrated in hands that do not answer to anyone. Aaron Powell,

Speaker 13 so I 100% agree with you.

Speaker 13 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 program by a very small number of people.

Speaker 13 That creates, I think, a lot of concern.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Respond to that argument.

Speaker 14 I find that this is a very valid argument. If you think

Speaker 14 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 race, arms race, that basically says

Speaker 14 if I don't build the nuclear bomb first, someone else will build it,

Speaker 14 does not

Speaker 14 necessarily lead to a world where you're the only one that owns a nuclear bomb. As a matter of fact, it leads to a world that has more than one owner of nuclear bombs.

Speaker 14 And I think what you saw from DeepSeek, for example, is a very interesting

Speaker 14 result

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And what do they do as a result?

Speaker 14 Necessity is the mother of all needs. And so basically they find ways to do things differently.

Speaker 14 Now, when you really look at the idea of testing things in public, which is an argument that's used very frequently by OpenAI, I think the analogy almost sounds like, let's test the Trinity in Manhattan, not in New Mexico, just to see how it impacts humanity, right?

Speaker 14 That's not how you do things. The way you do things is when you are uncertain of the outcome, you know,

Speaker 14 you normally can test it in ways that are much more contained. But that's, you know, that's this genius out of the bottle long ago, because the truth of the matter is that everyone is racing already.

Speaker 14 The other outcome, believe it or not, and I say that with a ton of respect,

Speaker 14 is that yes, the US might lead

Speaker 14 the arms race or China, China, you'll never really know.

Speaker 14 It might be open AI or it might be Alphabet, you'll never really know.

Speaker 14 But the problem with that is that

Speaker 14 a 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 Americans.

Speaker 14 And I think that's what most people don't recognize, is that you eventually,

Speaker 14 sooner or later, as more and more power is concentrated in the hands of very, very few,

Speaker 14 which is the only way the U.S.

Speaker 14 can beat China, if you want, 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.

Speaker 14 We care about maximizing the same target we've been chasing so far, more power, more wealth, and you're standing in the way.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 idealistic, if you want, is a mutually assured destruction conviction, is that we both understand,

Speaker 14 you know,

Speaker 14 by both I mean every two arch enemies on both sides, that we are shifting the mindset and

Speaker 14 the existence of humanity from a world of scarcity, where for me 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.

Speaker 14 I mean, we spoke about this last time we met, Scott, and you know, my definition of the current age of AI is what I call the intelligence augmentation.

Speaker 14 So, 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?

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 So why are we competing if that's the possibility ahead of us when the competition

Speaker 14 drives us to a point of absolute mutually assured destruction?

Speaker 13 So it strikes me when we talk about mutually assured destruction, it strikes strikes me that the two entities that would have to come to some sort of agreement around regulation or a pause,

Speaker 13 it would be the U.S. and China.
And I'm sure there's other entities, but

Speaker 13 those are the lead dogs, all right?

Speaker 13 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,

Speaker 13 we got to, I don't want to say slow down, but put some of this behind wraps, share with each other.

Speaker 13 I mean, this was sort of Oppenheimer's, was it Oppenheimer's initial vision that we share this technology and say, okay,

Speaker 13 when one gets too far out ahead of the other, that's a problem.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 We'll make sure they can strike back in some limited fashion. Do you think it's realistic

Speaker 13 and maybe realistic or not, it's something we've got to do, that we try and strike some sort of treaty with the CCPM and China?

Speaker 14 It's not realistic in the current political environment. Unfortunately, you know, the current geopolitics of the world is heating up more and more.

Speaker 14 But it wasn't realistic in the case of Russia and nuclear weapons either.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I mean, at the end of the day, Scott, again, you know, give me 400 IQ points more and I'll solve every problem known to humankind. And this is quite

Speaker 14 straightforward, really. You and I have both worked with incredibly smart people and you understand what a difference of 100 IQ points means, right?

Speaker 14 Give me better reasoning, better mathematics, better understanding of physics and I can do things that humanity never dreamt of. And this is a promised utopia that is at our finger's tips.

Speaker 14 So I'm not saying slow down. I'm simply saying

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 It's a problem of trust that if the other guy gets the technology before me, I'm in trouble.

Speaker 14 And that trust is not established in the lab, it's not established in the data center. It's basically established with the realization that we can create a world of absolute total abundance.

Speaker 14 Total abundance. I could know every piece of knowledge that ever existed.

Speaker 14 I know you well, Scott. I know how big of a dream this is for people like you and I all have to learn.
Right? And I can use that knowledge in ways that will make me richer.

Speaker 14 But how many Ferraris does anyone need? I think this is the challenge we have.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I'm the one that figured it out first. I'm the one that

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Anyone in any reasonable city in the US today has air conditioning, has transportation, has clean water, has hot water, has sanitation.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 13 We'll be right back. Stay with us.

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Speaker 13 Do you think sequestering China from our most advanced chip technology was a mistake?

Speaker 14 100%.

Speaker 14 It's the biggest mistake ever. I mean, since when did we, you know, I mean, strategically, as I said, of course, you know,

Speaker 14 the two big sanctions that America did in the last, you know, few years were, you backfired massively against America.

Speaker 14 The move against Russia basically got a lot of people to try and de-dollarize a little bit. And the move against China drove China to become more inventive.
It's as simple as that.

Speaker 14 But it is also a massive statement of, you know, what I'm going to try everything I can to beat you.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I get that feeling today when I land in Shanghai.

Speaker 14 It's, you know,

Speaker 14 it's not an easy fight.

Speaker 14 It's not a determined fight. Let's say 70s, 80s, 90s, definitely, you know, post-Berlin.
The US could do whatever the F they wanted in the world.

Speaker 14 I don't think it's as easy a slam dunk as it has been in the past anymore.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 spending even further than where it was,

Speaker 14 loading

Speaker 14 the American

Speaker 14 debt clock even further than it is loaded. And

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 But what we know how to do best is what got us under pressure in the first place.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Deliver a world where there is no need for you to attack me.

Speaker 13 I think of a little bit of this.

Speaker 13 How I would couch some of your comments is you think we're entering into what I'll call an age of equivalence.

Speaker 13 I don't know how to, my semantics might be off, but I think of America was able to develop and sustain certain competitive advantages.

Speaker 13 Manufacturing, mostly because the German and Japanese infrastructure had been leveled, then a services infrastructure.

Speaker 13 and then a technology, you know, whether it was because of IP, risk-taking, multiculturalism.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 it sort of should bring on this incredible age of cooperation, and we should stop deluding ourselves that that we're going to be able to get out ahead and win.

Speaker 13 Is that an accurate summary of what you're saying?

Speaker 14 That is a very accurate summary.

Speaker 14 It's still possible for the U.S. to win.
I think the most important competitive advantage that

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 that got reinvested wisely and

Speaker 14 sometimes unwisely. Unfortunately, I think we're in a time where $500 billion

Speaker 14 on Stargate sounds unwise, right?

Speaker 14 But

Speaker 14 at a point in time, it was a no-issue.

Speaker 14 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...

Speaker 14 lost the capability to crush other nations on whatever

Speaker 14 full-spectrum dominance that the US has been attempting to achieve for years. It's that other nations have grown an ability to resist, right? And that the more the US is becoming,

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I'm basically saying that the more America will bully the world, the more you'll get responses like DeepSeek. across the world,

Speaker 14 you know, where people are simply going to say, you know what, we don't like this anymore.

Speaker 14 I will openly say I don't like the fact that there is a small chunk of

Speaker 14 whatever money I made anywhere in the world that was somehow handed to America because of the US dollar dominance, right?

Speaker 14 You know,

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 where it becomes painful, which is the US dollar dominance. It's not going to go away anytime soon, but it makes things a little painful.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 But it also causes pain on the US 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

Speaker 14 power was acquired by weapons. I think we are on the cusp of a world where everything is possible.

Speaker 14 Just understand that, from a difference of manufacturing point of view, right, with enough understanding of nanophysics and

Speaker 14 an understanding of

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 13 I always like to pause and

Speaker 13 double-click on, or at least cement and highlight what I think is real striking insight: in the notion of

Speaker 13 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 they're, you know, nothing creates innovation like war war and the threat of survival, right?

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 what also really resonated was, and I've been saying this, I think Sam Altman is Cheryl Sandberg with hush tones.

Speaker 13 Cheryl 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.

Speaker 13 And I feel like Sam and his hush tones and his, that's a real concern. You know, Senator, I'm worried too.
Meanwhile, I'm about to raise $40 billion to a $350 billion market cap.

Speaker 13 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.
I want to propose something and have you respond to it.

Speaker 13 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 U.S.

Speaker 13 And it's total open.

Speaker 13 There's offices in D.C., 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.

Speaker 13 We're all working on the same damn thing. And we're trying to solve the world's most

Speaker 13 difficult problems, food distribution, health, poverty.

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 13 And then we're sending our crawlers out to see, is anyone working on this that we don't want working on this?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 But we have this multilateral organization that says total transparency. And our job is to dole it out where we see the most opportunity to increase stakeholder value.

Speaker 13 And the stakeholders are all 7.5 billion people on the planet.

Speaker 13 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 things before anybody else and act against them.

Speaker 13 Would that type of organization, do you think that's possible? And in your mind, do you think that that has merit?

Speaker 14 That would be a dream. I mean, let me just double-click on a very important comment that you said there at the end.

Speaker 14 What both parties are unable to recognize while they are

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 The thing about AI is a massive democracy and massive set of open source. Once again, because of the speed of this thing,

Speaker 14 you know, it it took Linux tens of years to actually be I mean, at least around ten years to be established, it took massive open source models, weeks to be established, right? And so there is access.

Speaker 14 You know, anyone today can download a deep seek,

Speaker 14 you know,

Speaker 14 model to their computer in the jungles of Colombia and do something malicious without ever being detected.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And I think it's a beautiful dream. But believe it or not, there is a bit of that dream that's already happening.

Speaker 14 I I mean, I don't know if you know the statistic, but 38% of all AI, top AI researchers in America, are Chinese. You know, it's quite staggering when you really think about it.

Speaker 14 And if you, if you count, if you count the Indians and if you count, you know, some of some that have Russian origin and so on, what percentage of that 38% are spies?

Speaker 14 Great question.

Speaker 14 And in all honesty.

Speaker 13 In the world you're defining it, those spies are assets to humanity.

Speaker 14 And it's quite interesting that if you do not have a reason to spy,

Speaker 14 then they become more of an asset to humanity.

Speaker 14 I think that the truth here is

Speaker 14 there is no winning. There's truly no winning.
And I, of course, I don't want to be grumpy, but you know,

Speaker 14 a massive advantage in AI is not going to trump the card of nuclear Holocaust.

Speaker 14 So we're competing in the wrong arena, if you think about it, because in a world where we have so many superpowers,

Speaker 14 of which

Speaker 14 almost four or five can completely wipe out our planet in less than two hours, right? The quest for more power,

Speaker 14 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?

Speaker 14 What are we competing on? And so, of course, you know,

Speaker 14 what you recommended, by the way, can be done by governments, which I think is an impossible dream.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 You see, the challenge we have in our minds is we're not in that world of abundance yet.

Speaker 14 Right? And so and so we're still living in our capitalist way of every one of us has to

Speaker 14 play, to aggregate more wealth, which delivers more power. And then 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.

Speaker 14 It is literally about to end for 6 billion of us as soon as jobs go away.

Speaker 14 And nobody's talking about this.

Speaker 13 So you and I both know.

Speaker 13 You probably more so, but I would say I know personally or somewhat well, I don't know, a dozen or two dozen billionaires.

Speaker 13 And what I have found is that the majority of them have what I call their very expensive go-back.

Speaker 13 And that is they have a plan, whether it's anti-Semitism or a nuclear war or some sort of AI

Speaker 13 catastrophe or revolution. And they have their Gulfstream 650 ready on a moment's notice in pilots and their bunker in New Zealand.

Speaker 13 And what I've said when I've talked to a few people about this is like, let me get this.

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 13 You don't think that everybody else is going to figure out where the billionaire bunkers are and come and take care? I mean, it's just, it's such a ridiculous thing.

Speaker 13 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,

Speaker 13 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? I don't colonizing Mars.

Speaker 13 Well, here's an idea: 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.

Speaker 13 You don't want to be there. That's worse, 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?

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 a billion, 10 billion, a trillion dollars, which will increase in the current age, my worth as a human.

Speaker 13 Doesn't this require an entirely different zeitgeist?

Speaker 14 Endlessly.

Speaker 14 You see, both directions of this dilemma are quite interesting. One of them is, you know, remember last time, I don't remember when we were, when we had a drink after the event,

Speaker 14 we spoke about the idea of what you can do with money. You know,

Speaker 13 there is a specific,

Speaker 14 you know, range of wealth

Speaker 14 where money makes a difference. You know, if you've never driven a sports car before and you manage to get yourself a sports car, you go like, ah, I made it.

Speaker 14 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 it 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 There could be 600 other cars, 600,000 other cars in the garage, but you're still driving only one.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 worthy of discussion because we

Speaker 14 remember the times when if you had an MBA, you were like a highly educated post-grad, and now everyone has an MBA. And then if you had a PhD,

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And that not only makes that person acquire more wealth that is not necessary, but it makes the price of every Rolls-Royce higher.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And so if you take that cycle and continue continue to repeat it over and over, eventually you'll end up with very few, like way less than 0.01 of 1%,

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 has no value because everything is becoming a lot cheaper, which is a world we can create with AI.

Speaker 13 So I buy it theoretically, but what I've registered is that

Speaker 13 over the last 50 years, money becomes an even greater arbiter of the life you can lead.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 The market in a capitalist society always figures out a way for you to offer you more with more money.

Speaker 13 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, and there's a Gulfstream 650, then there's going into space.

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 When you're the richest man in the world, you can show up and turn off foreign aid without being elected.

Speaker 14 Correct. I think we're saying the same thing.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 It's that the range in which we're now talking about the difference between what you can do with a lot of money and what you cannot cannot do if you don't have that money makes everyone almost equal at the bottom.

Speaker 14 Everyone gets a reasonable car, but not a massively fancy car. Everyone, you know, becomes equal as compared to those incredibly wealthy, if you know what I mean.

Speaker 13 We'll be right back. Stay with us.

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Speaker 13 We're back with more from Mo Ga Dot.

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 certain industries where

Speaker 13 the innovation has resulted in stakeholder value, not shareholder value. So we have fallen under the

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 I don't have to, you know, 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

Speaker 13 changed humanity for better. I mean, it's 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 If you added up all the profits of the airline industry, it's negative. They've lost more money than they've made.

Speaker 13 There are certain industries and technology where because of a lack of competitive moats, the gains, the value, seep to humanity and to stakeholders.

Speaker 13 They're not able to be captured by a small number of shareholders.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Do you think that's an optimistic view of where AI might be headed? In other words, do not participate in the soft bank rounded at $350 billion in open AI.

Speaker 14 There is certainty in my mind that there is going to be a democratization of power, more access for everyone to more things, right?

Speaker 14 You know, unfortunately, if you take a power-hungry scenario in the recent wars of 2024

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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 for control.

Speaker 14 Once again, I love the hypothesis or the ambition for AI to become that

Speaker 14 net positive to the world because it's not really driving only profits to the top, which it will.

Speaker 14 But I think 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.

Speaker 14 And so that will take away the benefits that

Speaker 14 the majority can get. And I give a very stark and maybe a bit graphic example.
Think about a world, Scott, where

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 We've seen examples in the 2024 wars where a specific person is targeted anywhere in the world and killed.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And these technologies are unfortunately under development. Now, think about what that does to democracy.
Think about those who own that weapon.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 what would benefit the majority.

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 weapon that's going to come. I mean, I think about millions of self-healing assassin drones and AI.

Speaker 13 And the AI, under the direction of some individual, puts together a list of people who are not in the way of my wealth or my power.

Speaker 13 And those drones can be released at one of a, you know, a thousand different.

Speaker 13 I mean, you can really get very dark very, very fast here. So I'm going to try and segue out of this into something a little bit more broad.

Speaker 14 Is this the very first conversation where I am grumpier than you?

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Yeah, we're both, there's, this is a, there's, yeah, it's definitely grumpy old man. It's grumpy, it's grumpy, grumpier, and grumpiest.

Speaker 13 But I do find I do, whenever I speak to you, I, I, you like managed to distill something down to something understandable and actionable for me. I love the idea of this multilateral agency.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And what you have taught me is, okay, what if we cooperated around not only releasing it

Speaker 13 for, you know, the betterment of humanity, but also quite frankly, policing the bad stuff together and being 100% transparent with each other and just saying,

Speaker 13 not only are there no secrets, but it would be impossible to have secrets amongst each other because

Speaker 13 we've just decided we're in the same office space.

Speaker 13 I really love that idea. And I think that as I think about candidates that I want to support in 2028,

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Your latest book, Unstressible, a Practical Guide for Stress-Feliving, addresses the pervasive issues of chronic stress in modern life.

Speaker 13 In an interview on the diary of a CEO with, by the way, Stephen Bartlett, who I believe is a kind of ether next, Joe Rogan, you described stress as an addiction and a badge of honor. Say more.

Speaker 13 Why are we so addicted to stress?

Speaker 14 Part of

Speaker 14 the fakeness that leads us to success is I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy,

Speaker 14 which I have to say I found almost always quite shocking. Because,

Speaker 14 you know, if you go across the

Speaker 14 range of intelligence, if you want, I think most of us know that a good 80 to 90% of all of the efficiency that you bring to any job that you do is done within 20% of the time.

Speaker 14 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% of the time with 20% work that's taking a lot of toll on me because it basically means I'm driven.

Speaker 14 It basically means, you know, that I am maximizing

Speaker 14 my performance, maximizing my deliveries between waking up in the morning at 5 a.m.

Speaker 14 to run an Ironman and then, you know, 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

Speaker 14 this is a self-perception, a form of ego that says, I am doing amazing. Okay.
But it isn't. And I think the biggest challenge we have is that we believe that the world stresses us.

Speaker 14 The world does not stress us. I mean,

Speaker 14 when I wrote Unstressable, I started from physics. I basically said, look, the easiest way to understand physics in here, to understand stress in humans, is to look at stress in objects.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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,

Speaker 14 your abilities and so on,

Speaker 14 the more you have those and apply them properly, the less stressed you feel. There might be more force applied to you.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 honestly,

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 13 How do we deal with stress in a more sustainable way? And as we wrap up here, are there any quick fixes?

Speaker 14 I feel that

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 One is, of course, burnout. Okay.
And burnout algorithmically is the sigma of all of the stressors that you're under, multiplied by their duration, multiplied by their intensity.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 life anymore. You can either remove them from your life or make them more enjoyable.

Speaker 14 So if you have to be stuck in a commute or a long flight, take some good music with you, be healthy, and so on and so forth. The other break point, unfortunately, is trauma.
right?

Speaker 14 So basically massive stress that happens in a very short period of time that exceeds your ability to deal with it, the loss of a loved one, an accident, you know, being stuck in war or whatever, and so on.

Speaker 14 And this, unfortunately, is not within our hands, but believe it or not, it actually is not the reason for the stress pandemic of the world. So 91% of all of us would get

Speaker 14 at least one

Speaker 14 PTSD inducing, like the highest of all trauma,

Speaker 14 PTSD-inducing event once in their life. But 93% of those will recover in three months and 96.7% of those will recover in six months.
And all of those will enjoy post-traumatic growth.

Speaker 14 So there is no worry about

Speaker 14 trauma, if you want.

Speaker 14 It's not within your control to prevent, but

Speaker 14 if you work on it, you'll recover. The third and the most interesting reason for stress, especially in younger generations today, is what I call an anticipation of a threat, right?

Speaker 14 And the challenge with it is that looking forward with fear, worry, anxiety, and panic are probably the biggest stressors for the younger generations.

Speaker 14 And the funny bit is that fear is not a bad emotion. Fear is actually alerting you to something that you need to pay attention to.
So that's okay.

Speaker 14 Worry, anxiety, and panic are actually of a very different fabric. So worry is not about I know there is a threat coming.
Worry is I can't make up my mind if there is a threat coming or not.

Speaker 14 And so you keep flip-flopping and you don't take the action and you keep feeling the fear but not doing anything about it.

Speaker 14 When you're worried, you need to actually tell yourself openly, look, I'm going to decide if I should chill or panic, right?

Speaker 14 Chill or freak out. If it's freak out, then it's fear, deal with it.
If it's chill, then stop thinking about it. Anxiety is not about the threat.
Anxiety is actually about your capability.

Speaker 14 And most people, if they really visit themselves when they feel anxious, when you're anxious, there is a threat approaching you, but you constantly think that you're not capable of dealing with it.

Speaker 14 So the more you attempt to deal with the threat, the more you feel incapable. So the more anxious you become.
When you're anxious, work on your capabilities, not on the threat.

Speaker 14 And then panic is a question of time. Right.
And panic really is the stress. You know, the threat is imminent.
It's approaching me too quickly.

Speaker 14 And so accordingly, when you feel panicked, don't work on solving the problem. Don't work on addressing the the threat.
Work on giving yourself more time.

Speaker 14 You know, find someone to help you or delay the, you know, the presentation time or, you know, or cancel a few meetings so that you have more time for whatever it is that you need to focus on.

Speaker 14 And what I mean by all of this, this is a very, very quick summary of

Speaker 14 a lot of stuff that we discuss in Unstressable.

Speaker 14 But what I mean by this is that it all goes back to your cross-section. It all goes back to skills and choices that we make so that the external stressors that come to us from the world

Speaker 14 don't kill us.

Speaker 13 One of my favorite Steven Spielberg movies is this movie called Bridge of Spies, and this Russian spy who's been unmasked by the U.S. government is in court.
He's being tried for

Speaker 13 treason or spying, and he's potentially facing life in prison. And his lawyer, I think it's Tom Hague, says, Aren't you nervous? Aren't you stressed? And he looks at him and says, Would it help?

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 13 Anyways, Mo Godat is the former chief business officer for Google X, the founder of One Billion Happy Foundation and co-founder of Unstressable.

Speaker 13 He's also a best-selling author of books, including Solf for Happy, Scary Smart, and that Little Voice in Your Head. Mo, I mean this and seriously.

Speaker 13 You bring my stress down because I find you inspiring and relaxing, and you distill things into kind of actionable solutions. Really always enjoy speaking with you.

Speaker 13 I think you're really a profound thinker. Thanks for your good work.

Speaker 13 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our intern is Dan Shallon.
Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Profit Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Speaker 13 We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Profit Markets pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.

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