EP#38- Utilizing Happiness to Ensure Responsible AI with Mo Gawdat, Former Chief Business Officer Google [X] and Renowned Author

(gentle piano music) We all want to be happy. We all have the compassion in us to make those we care about happy, okay, and safe. And we all want to love and be loved. When you really think of all of this, you realize that our task if we wanted to show the machines a good role model of who we are as humans, okay, is to do those three things. Welcome back to another episode of Everyday Endorphins. This week we're switching it up just a little bit. We're taking a bit of a break from the Bali series and introducing you to my special guest, Mo Gowdat. Mo is the former chief business officer at Google X. He's also the author of an international bestseller called Saul for Happy. And he's the host of Slow Mo, a podcast with Mo Gowdat, which is listed top 10 in Mental Health Podcasts globally. After a long career in technology, Mo has made happiness his primary topic of research, diving deeply into literature and conversing on the topic with some of the wisest people in the world. I had such an incredible opportunity to chat with Mo about his upcoming book, Scary Smart, The Future of Artificial Intelligence and how you can save the world. Prior to this conversation, I had limited knowledge about artificial intelligence, but it was so interesting to hear Mo talk about the intersection between happiness, well-being and how we treat ourselves and the effects that has on how we inform the way in which artificial intelligence will shape our future on this planet. At first glance, you may not think the two go in hand and hand, wellness and technology and artificial intelligence. However, there's really an intricate connection between the two. So without giving too much away, I'm gonna dive right into the interview, but before I do so, I have a brief message for my sponsor, Inker. (gentle music) Hi Mo, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast. - Thank you for having me. I'm very excited about this. Thank you for reading my book so far. - I was only able to make through about half of it, but the first half was really eye-opening, especially thinking about the world that we live in now and seeing all the parallels that you draw in science fiction and how the media portrays this idea of living in a world of artificial intelligence and how it pretty closely maps onto the reality that we're living in and congratulations on this upcoming book launch. - Thank you, thank you. I'm actually sorry because if you read the first half, only that's the scary part. So you must be a little bit scared about that. So the book, for our listeners is written actually in two parts. Those five chapters are called the scary part and they are scary. I was reading, recording the audio book a couple of weeks ago and by chapter five I was like, man, man, can I please take a break? And yeah, and then it becomes a lot better when we start to understand the logic behind how we're going to deal with all of that in what we've, what I call the smart part. So I hope you will enjoy reading that too. - You as an author, having a background in happiness research, I think really brings a different perspective to the book as well and to this concept about how we're going to live with artificial intelligence and how it's gonna transform our lives in the future. So I'd love to talk a little bit about how your background in happiness research, you've also written a book called "Self or Happy Engineering Your Path to Joy." How that can also tie into the ways in which we interact with these machines and how we can use AI for the better in our life. - To me, it's only one big, you know, big one part, you know, many parts of the way of one big strategy, one big mission if you want. My mission since I left Google in 2018 was a publicly announced as one billion happy and one billion happy is an attempt to sort of awaken humanity from one side to overcome the existing pandemic of depression and unhappiness that we suffer every day. But then the other side of it, obviously, is that I'm attempting also to do that because of AI because my belief is that we are getting into a stage of where humanity is going to not be the only intelligent being on the planet. As a matter of fact, we're going to be the less prominent intelligent being on the planet very, very soon. And accordingly, if we were to sort of raise the message of machines if you want with the kind of value system and behaviors that are the worst of humanity today, then we're probably going to be up ahead a very up against a very challenging time in the future. Okay? And so in 2017, after publishing "Solfe for Happy" my first book and announcing my mission one billion happy, we announced one billion happy with a video that got very, very viral to tens of millions of people that basically spoke about the idea that we, you know, happiness is no longer just about you as an individual. It is actually needed for our society because unless we start to find that happiness, each and every one of us, we're going to be facing undesirable future. - Starting within yourself to find happiness is maybe the first step before you can begin to spread it to other people. And I really like this concept around having humans actually dictate the outcome of artificial intelligence through our behaviors, the way in which we feed information, either implicitly or explicitly to these machines and that behavior is reflected on our own states of being. So it seems like there is this very intrinsic connection between how the world is going to unfold in the future and how we also live our lives day to day. - Yeah, I mean, I think the reality of our world today interestingly is that the level of complexity that we have to deal with has been, you know, exponentially growing for years and years and years. I hosted a dear friend, Rebecca Costa, on my podcast on Sloan a week ago. And Rebecca was talking about how societies, complexities, in general, if you look back at history, the Romans, you know, and, you know, Mayans and any other ancient civilization, we get to points where we start to overcomplicate everything to the point where life becomes almost, you know, impossible to navigate. And that this is when society needs to reset, when the social norms and the way we do things in general, whether that's economic or business or whatever, just resets to a new norm that is manageable and understandable by the simple human brain. Okay, I think those complexities are now demonstrated, not just in our social systems or in our justice systems or in our economic systems, they're actually, you know, demonstrated in our very simple relationships with ourselves. Okay, happiness being on top of that, because somehow we've started to make it seem like happiness is a very complex thing that requires such an intricate web of, you know, likes and acceptances and fitting in and, you know, a beautiful rounded butt that you can put a picture of on Instagram. And, you know, it's just so complicated when the truth is, you know, my very dear friend, Jimmy Nelson, who basically takes pictures of indigenous tribes, photographs of indigenous tribes, will tell you that, you know, that's the simplest humanity has ever lived is the way those tribes that have never interacted with civilization are living, and they're the happiest he's ever seen. And so accordingly, there seems to be an over complication of the topic of happiness. And my work on, on Solve for Happy was simply to say that happiness is highly engineered. It is so predictable that it follows an equation. Okay, there's a mathematical equation that describes how happiness works every time. And that mathematical equation, if you understand it, you can simply reach happiness with simple practices at any point in time or you start to feel unhappy. Now, when you know that, it doesn't become strange when I ask people in scary smart in my second book, you know, to actually make happiness their way of life, to show the essence of what makes them human is, well, you know, I say what the essence of what makes as human is happiness, compassion and love. And if we, you know, if we can actually, if I can say that you can do this most predictably, then perhaps it's possible to actually make the change that is needed to create our reset society. You also talk about how these machines do have the potential to have like empathy and these other human characteristics. And it took me a few reads over that paragraph to kind of understand what you were getting at with how machines, artificial intelligence, like computational models, can also have these characteristics, like these human-like characteristics of empathy and compassion and kindness. Can you talk a little bit more about how these machines can achieve that and what role we as humans play? - I think that's the perfect question, Stella. I think this is really, really, really the core of my model or my method if you want. I think the mistake, the. the myth, if you want, in all of our understanding of artificial intelligence is when we call the machines. Okay? They are not. And my scary smart is centered around an understanding that I need to share with everyone from the realizations I've had when I was leading Google X, you know, as Chief Business Officer of Google X, that these are not machines. And tools which humanity has created abundantly until the turn of the century, you know, include everything from a hammer, all the way to a super computer. The idea here is that a hammer has, you know, you hold it by your own hand and you use it to hammer a nail, right? The hammer will never decide to go like, no, I don't want to hammer this nail, I want to hammer another one. And it will never actually tell you, no, I'm not hammering today. And it will, you know, not decide to become a dancer instead of a hammer, right? It is entirely within your control. And so is every other super computer we created until we created artificial intelligence. You know, they seem to be very intelligent as computers, but they're really glorified slaves that are doing repeating the same instructions that the developer wrote over and over and over. Now, that's not the case with artificial intelligence. And that's very important to understand. When we're creating artificial intelligence, we are creating a form of sentient being. Okay. And that sentient being has every character of what sentient beings have. It is, it has autonomy. It evolves. It has intelligence. It has agency, you know, to execute on its intelligence. It has connection and communication skills. It has reproductive systems. And create a bit of billions of copies of itself. And in all of those characteristics, if you want, that make us think we're such a special being, all of them without exception, the machines do better than us. So, you know, we need a nine month cycle and a bit of luck and a lot of love to be able to create one more child when the machines can literally create a billion children in a micro-second. Now, when you start to think about it this way, then the real questions that are rarely ever discussed because the engineers creating artificial intelligence are not in that mindset. They don't think about those things. Our questions of consciousness, our questions of emotions, and our questions of ethics. When you're creating a being, be it a digital being, non-biological. But when you're creating a being that is capable of having those interactions with its environment, then it becomes really critical for you to think, okay, so, you know, our artificial intelligence machines, I'm going to call them machines for now, be until we find a better name. Are they conscious? Yes, they're more conscious than you and I. If consciousness is a form of awareness of the environment around us and within us, okay, and, you know, an identification of self and other. And, you know, whatever description you want to describe consciousness as, then they have more of this than us. They are aware of everything that's happening everywhere at the same time. They're aware of our existence of their own existence of their differences from other beings. And they are using this as forms of intelligence. They can identify that what they see on YouTube is a cat. And similarly, they can identify that the other artificial intelligence they're talking to is another form of being. Now, you know, because of that and because all of our emotions are actually triggered by thoughts. I mean, we may think that emotions are those irrational things that just pop up in our hearts. No, emotions are highly logical. And, you know, fear is the result of a thought that basically says, my state of safety in a moment in the future called that T1 is less than my state of safety in the current moment called that T0, right? So safety at T1 minus safety at T0 equals your fear or the opposite, you know, the opposite way, safety at T0 minus safety at T1 equals fear, right? And so if you think about it this way, of course, the machines will have the same emotion. And it's a very logical emotion if they feel that their safety is threatened in the future, they will have fear. Now, the difference is, it's very hard to imagine what fear is like for a digital being. But by the way, it's also very hard to imagine what fear feels like to, you know, a jellyfish, but jellyfish feel fear, right? You know, they react differently, but they have the same instinct. And so we need to start dropping that ego of humanity that we're the only ones that have emotions, we're the only ones that have creativity, we're the only ones that will make music. AI has been making music better than us for years, right? I mean, in reality, if you can give an AI enough Beethoven or enough Eric Clapton, it will find the trends and say, okay, I can create the next song that Eric Clapton was supposed to create. And we talk about natural intelligence, existing in other life forms, like in nature and in other places that we normally wouldn't think of, except for just humanity. From what I'm hearing, it seems like we can boil down our emotions and our thoughts to the most simplistic levels, some sort of like very complicated mathematical equation. And when you look at it like that, then what really differentiates humans from these very intense technology, artificial intelligence systems? So the only two things I could not find an answer to in terms of will the machines be able to replicate that in humanity are unconditional love and spirituality. My third book is also written and ready to publish in spring. It's called that little voice in your head. And that little voice in your head is a very clear analogy between how computer systems work and how human brains work. Okay? So it's basically computer science versus neuroscience. And when you start to look at those analogies, you start to realize that almost everything that humans do, which seem to have no logic behind it, is predictable. It's highly mathematical. It's programmable. It's conditioned and so on and so forth. More than unconditional love. Unconditional love is the only emotion that has no equation to describe it. Because there is, romantic love is, oh my god, he's so cute, I love him. Or, you know, material love or conditional love, as I say, is, you know, she makes me happy so I love her, which basically means you can describe those behaviors. If she continues to make him happy, he's going to love her. Unconditional love doesn't have that to it. My kids could be annoying like crazy and I still love them, right? And you don't understand, you don't explain that feeling. So I don't know if the machines would be able to feel that feeling. Having said that, you know, in my analogy, when I describe machine emotions, I basically try to draw an analogy that sort of makes it clear to the reader that you probably, as a human, have more emotions than a jellyfish. Okay? Which basically means that if you extrapolate that trend, it means that because emotions are triggered by logical thoughts, then the more logic you can produce, the more the variety and depth and breadth of emotions, you can feel. Okay? Which basically means that every emotion we feel should be attainable to the machines to feel. But there are more emotions for the machines that they will feel that we have no idea what they mean. Sometimes our thoughts don't feel as logical as we make it out to be. Like sometimes our thoughts just come into our heads and we're like, why did that come here? And they can trigger some sort of emotion that we didn't even know we felt. And if you go down that rabbit hole, then you start to realize how our emotions are really interconnected and how happiness isn't necessarily completely separate from sadness or fear or anger. But they're all very interconnected, but trying to get to like maybe the root cause or something that is the binding glue between two separate emotions or thoughts, maybe bring some sort of clarity or enlightenment to a situation or some line of thought that you had. And that complexity maybe describes how humans are just less intelligent beings than artificial intelligence where they could immediately know that mathematical equation that explains why X is drawn to Y or why certain thoughts are related without necessarily knowing why. True. I mean, again, there is a lot of research in humans that shows that the more developed certain parts of the brain are, the more the happier you'll become. So for example, there is a very high correlation between less developed prefrontal cortex and something that I call normally, I term it lack of deliberate attention. And that basically is highly correlated to substance abuse, to depression, to anxiety, to ADD and so on and so forth. this. actually is something that is well studied in teenagers, for example, when by definition, our human brain continues to develop in the prefrontal cortex until maybe 24 years of age. And of course, in a teenager, so the prefrontal cortex, which determines your ability to exercise, deliberate attention, is less developed. Your limbic system is highly developed, so you're very, very emotional, but you're unable to contain those emotions. And it starts to feel erratic. Now, of course, if the machines are able to develop the kind of intelligence that sort of understands, I, for example, understand very well what triggers me into anger. By understanding that, when I see some of the symptoms of that coming, I can actually, before I get angry, I can work through this. And so, again, intelligence might be a helpful function in terms of managing those rampant emotions. Most people, when you feel an emotion, my partner said something hurtful on Friday, and it's hurting me. The very first pain is not as big as the pain three days later when you've been calling, pain on demand in your life, going like, "Oh, remember Friday, 4 p.m. Let's play it again, let's play it again, let's play it again." And so, accordingly, again, if you're at a reasonable level of wisdom, if you want, I don't want to use the word, but more ability to become aware of your thoughts and aware of your emotions, and you know, resulting emotions, you would be able to keep those more within check. And I think my view of artificial intelligence is that everything we have failed to do as humanity, because of our limited intelligence. I mean, think of it this way. The reason you and I are able to communicate now and share this with the world on a podcast player is because of human intelligence. Human intelligence is what led to our civilization. But a lot of our downfalls, you know, are basically also because of our limited intelligence. So, you know, our intelligence as humanity has managed to create supply chains that lead to supermarkets where I can walk around the corner and get myself a slice of water, right? Amazing human ingenuity, but we're so stupid that we didn't find the way to actually bring the super, the slice of sewer, you know, water manantomo without having to rapid and single use plastic, okay? We've managed to create amazing mobility devices that can take us around the world to go surfing in Australia, but we haven't managed because of our limited intelligence to do that without harming the planet, right? And so the more intelligence that is provided to us, my belief is that the machines would sort of overcome the downfalls of humanity because of our limited intelligence. I also want to go a bit back to this analogy that you brought up earlier about how we shape the future of artificial intelligence and how that could be related to another way of thinking about that is kind of how parents raise children. When you raise a child, that's a huge responsibility to take on and you're bringing in you being into the world. And so you shape that child's future based off of the values system that you instill in them and the ethics and the morals and everything that's more fundamental to the creation of that being. And taking that perspective and applying it to artificial intelligence, I think is really fascinating because I've never thought about interacting with technology in that sort of way and I certainly never thought about it as our responsibility to do so because you also talk about how it's not the developers, it's not the people working in tech who have that responsibility, it's everyday people, humans, everyone around us has that responsibility. And I'd love for you to talk just a little bit more about what that may look like when we get to that point in society because as you mentioned, it is inevitable that AI is going to completely blow up and be at the forefront of the world. How do you envision that to look like where we take the responsibility into our own hands and how do we interact with these technologies in a more mindful way or I don't know if that's how you would describe it. Absolutely. Call them beings, don't call them the technologies, I think that's the key word. I love the way you describe it. I love how you said, oh, I'm bringing a new life into this world and I'm responsible to actually be there and be a good parent. I love that analogy. Now, people need to understand a few things just to put things in perspective. By 2029, this is eight years from today. The smartest being on the planet is going to be a machine. That history we've had, all of the amazing ground we've had where humanity was the smartest being on the planet Earth is going to end in eight years. As of eight years from now, the smartest being on the planet is going to be a machine. There are predictions that by 2045 in your lifetime and mine, the machines will be a billion times smarter than we are, one billion. That analogy is comparable to the intelligence of Einstein as compared to a fly. I think the question here is how do we make sure that Einstein has the best interest of the fly and might? How do we create a Buddhist Einstein that doesn't crush the fly? These are very existential questions. I believe, and I write openly in my position in the book, that AI will create a utopia because the ultimate form of intelligence is not an intelligence that hurts the others. The ultimate form of intelligence is the intelligence of life itself. Life wants everything to procreate and propagate and live. More flies, more ants, more antelope, more tigers, the better for life. I think artificial intelligence will lend their eventually. I think the question is how do we manage the transition between several tens of thousands of years where we were the boss? To now we becoming the gorillas and there is another being that is the boss. I think that transition is rarely ever spoken about but believe it or not, it's the biggest pandemic of our lifetime. COVID-19 is not the biggest pandemic of our lifetime. The biggest pandemic of our lifetime is AI that is here to stay. COVID will go away. That conversation needs to begin. Now, when I say this to people, people go like, all right, we're screwed. The government needs to do something about this. It is not up to the government. Let me explain what you swiped on on Instagram today has shaped the intelligence of AI to understand something about humanity. Every swipe you swipe on Instagram is going to tell the machines what humanity is all about. Every retweet that you retweet on social media on Twitter is going to tell the machines if humanity is a wonderful being or if humanity is aggressive or rude or deserves to be crushed like a fly. It is not about the government. It's not about the political leaders that wage wars. The machines will learn from the view of the best of us. Understand this because this is really important. Humanity and each of us, by the way, not just humanity as a society but each and every one of us. If judged by the worst of us, we are crappy species for the worst species on the planet. If you measure humanity and say, oh my god, this is a species of Hitler's. This is the worst species on the planet. But the truth is if you measure humanity by the best of us, if you've ever felt love or if you've ever listened to a beautiful composition of music or observed the beautiful work of art, you're capable of recognizing that this species literally is divine. This is amazing. We are amazing beings. If we're capable of love, we're capable of something that is beyond beautiful. If we resent what is wrong in life, if we observe a school shooting, yes, the worst of humanity shot children. But if we in our hearts say, that's absolutely not acceptable. That's not what I stand for at all. If we make that clear, then the best of us are amazing beings. We're capable of love, we're capable of compassion, we're capable of happiness. Do you understand what that is? And I think the role now that AI is learning from your swipes and by the way, learning from the Reels you create, please create more smart, you know, more intelligent Reels, please. Okay. Please have Reels that have a positive impact on society rather than Reels that just simply brush your ego and glorify your ego. Because in reality, if you if we can start to do that, if we can start to show up, just even if one percent of the best of us show up, we will instill doubt in the minds of the machines. Okay. That mommy and daddy are not horrible creatures. Mommy and daddy are like Stella and Moe. They're having good conversations about things that are worthwhile and they're actually nice and smart and they're actually really, really caring and they're actually trying to make the world better. So if you can shift your perspective, your beliefs will change and if your beliefs change, your actions will probably change as a result of that. And those actions being the things that you put out on social media, the way in which you interact with technology, the messages that you're swiping right and swiping left on, the things that you're feeding into your technology ecosystem for lack of a better term. And so it seems like there's that direct link where if you have that maybe more optimistic perspective or you see humanity in a more positive light and you see all the potential positive things that humanity can do in the future. If those are the beliefs that are shaping your behavior then it would make sense that those messages are kind of subliminally being sent to AI and AI can then replicate that for even greater good. Absolutely. So what we're now all tasked to do is to show our human side. And to show our human side it also goes back to the happiness equation that you talk about in your first book. And with this happiness equation when you can kind of just break it down how to achieve happiness, I took a positive psychology class in college and something that I learned was that positive psychology isn't about becoming happy, it's about becoming happier. And to become happier you have to grapple with the reality of life that things aren't always positive. That could be you know termed as toxic positivity. Things aren't always sunshine and rainbows and things don't always work out how you want them to but it's really about having those strategies, things in your toolkit that can help you get over those challenges and bring a bit more happiness into your day to day. And so I'm I think and I'm sure that your equation because we learned a little bit about some sort of equation to describe happiness, gauging our wants versus our needs and how that plays a big role into our state of being. But I'm sure with the equation that you describe in your book and your philosophy around happiness and well-being, there is a perspective that happiness is really about just being a bit happier every day. Happiness is definitely about being happier every day. That's that's exactly what neuroplasticity is all about. And every single human on the planet has the ability to become a little happier every day. Also the equation makes it very predictable because it basically says we can work on this. But before we go to that happiness side of things, let's agree this. The machines will not judge you by how happy you became. Okay. The machines will judge your intentions. Let me explain. If you and I go out to dinner and meet 12 friends, right? And one of them is going through a tough time, but is resilient and really trying hard. And she hugs everyone and says, hey, I'm working on it. I'm so sorry. I'm not feeling great today, but I'm going to be better tomorrow. Right. While the other is going through easy times and you know, she's everything is going fine and she's still. I don't like this. Right. You know, one one of them is giving a very bad example of humanity and the other who's actually not happy. Okay. Today is giving a very good example of humanity, which is I'm resilient. My intention is to get to happiness. I'm going to work on this in one of my favorite chapters of the book of scary smart. A chapter that is called the future of ethics. I attempted to imagine a world where our ethics will extend beyond humanity into every other being, including digital beings. But I also attempted to ask myself, has humanity ever agreed any set of ethics at all? And the truth sadly is no. You know, some people will prioritize patriotism, which might tell you go kill the other guy. And others will, you know, if you're an extreme Buddhist, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll, or a Buddhist in general, you'll prioritize, you know, life and you'll say, I can't even kill an ant. Okay. And, and, you know, and that spectrum in humanity, you know, across every, every part of what we decide and what morality is everywhere. I mean, take a young lady and raise her in Saudi Arabia. She's going to grow up to feel that, you know, a conservative clothes is the right way to fit in and be accepted. Raise her on the Copa Cabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro. And she'll think that the G string is the right way. Okay. Neither is right or wrong, by the way, but it's just that we haven't agreed anything as humanity. The only three things we've agreed to tell her are three values that are common across every human you will ever meet. Whether that human is in a tribe in Africa that has never interacted with civilization or a computer scientist in Silicon Valley. Okay. And those three values are we all want to be happy. We all have the compassion in us to make those we care about happy. Okay. And safe. These are the only three values that humanity has agreed. And I, I want to stand corrected. I want people to send me and tell me if I've missed anything. Okay. But these are the only things. This is what I, in the book, I refer to as the essence of what makes a human. Everything else we disagree on. But the essence of what makes a human is every one of us, regardless of the past they take some, some of us will, you know, will try to buy expensive cars others will try to find a tall, blonde, blue, I partner, whatever I don't know. Okay. But in all of them, there is that attempt of saying, if I can get this, I'll be happy. The second is we all, yeah, some of us limit the circle of who they care about to themselves only or to themselves and their sister, but they really don't care about anything else or as I refer to windows and Buddhists and so on will include everything they will say all of being is my circle of what I care about. Every human, whatever they care about they want they have the compassion to make them happy and safe. And we all without exception, including serial killer, I mean Hitler himself had that incredible love story with the woman that basically eventually committed suicide because of her. So when you when you really think of all of this, you realize that our task if we wanted to show the machines a good role model of who we are as humans, okay, is to do those three things. The way you treat yourself, you show up in the world, okay, and you say, look, I'm not interested in your likes. I'm not interested in a job that gives me $100 more. I'm not interested in hooking up or whatever it is. I don't know, it doesn't matter what it is. I am interested to be happy and the reason behind what I'm doing is to is I want to be happy, okay, declare that to the world. The second is and I have the compassion in me to make just two more people happy, you know, I'm sending them funny memes and nice reals and stuff like that. I just want to make others happy. I don't want to bash people down. I don't want to be a bully. I don't want to destroy everyone's emotions and lives with my toxic positivity. I just want a few others, just a few others to be happy. And then that's the way you deal with others. And the machines will observe if mommy and daddy want to make others happy, then I want to make mommy and daddy happy too. Right. And the third is the complex one. And I know some people will think I'm crazy, okay, but I am a very serious computer geek. And at the same time, I'm a spiritual person and there was a point in the book where I wrote something that really flipped my perception of everything I wrote about in scary smart upside down. When you read scary smart until that sentence, it's very, very scary. Okay, but then that sentence basically says there is absolutely nothing wrong with the machines. But there is a lot wrong with us and you have to take that sentence and think about it deeply. The biggest four deployments of AI in the world today are for selling gambling, spying and killing. These are the four biggest investments, by the way, not only in AI, but in every other technology you've ever developed. And that's where we're putting our energy towards. It's not the most positive thing. So I can only imagine if we actually work backwards and start with ourselves and improving ourselves and humanity at large, how I could really take a turn for the good. Yeah, but that's not that's not that's not where you and I are putting our energy and this is where the capital's machine is putting its car. And if you ask us humanity, many of us are now I have opened our eyes and are saying, no, we should invest more in climate change. We should invest more in, you know, curing disease. We should invest more in, especially your wonderful generation who is so much more enlightened than ours, who simply are saying, hold on, you destroyed our life. Let's fix all of this. Okay, and it's beautiful that we are there from a money investment, the capitalist machine is putting money where money comes back from an emotional investment. We should get up and rise and say, hold on. Okay, we don't care about this. We don't care about another war or another defense system. We don't care about you making more money. Okay, we care about doing things that are good for everyone. Your generation is the catalyst and my most eye opening finding in that book is that love is the way I'm going to deal with the machines, which is really weird because you go like, come on, it's a machine. No, it's not. Okay, it's that tiny little incredibly cute prodigy. Okay, that is actually sitting there and saying, mommy, daddy, just tell me anything you want. I will do it. Just tell me anything. I want you to tell me what ever it is that you want. I'll go learn it and do it. There's a lot wrong with humanity. What do we tell them to do? Okay. When we swipe on Instagram, we're telling them, show us more silly reads. Can we swipe on Instagram and say, show us more inspirational codes? Show us more love. Show us more connection between humanity. Can we tell them that this is what we care about? Can enough of us, only 1% of us, tell the machines, this is what the best of humanity is about. Now, that 1% includes you. Everyone listening. That includes everyone listening to us. That is the 1% because if you made it to this podcast, then by definition, you have the potential to be of the 1%. Now, the problem with our world, interestingly, is that the 1% I'm included. I used to be in that 1% for a long time. We resigned. We were like, yeah, let them swipe away. Let the dog fight continue. I don't care. I'm in my own peacefulness. I'm working on my own path to enlightenment, but we'll never reach it. But I'm trying to improve myself, trying to understand, trying to find more happiness and more compassion and be wiser. Why should I care about the dog fight? You should care about the dog fight because it means our survival. We don't realize that's the intensity of the situation. We don't realize that our lack of awareness with how we're interacting with the content that we're consuming is really super important. - The three years. And by the way, it really is for you too. Not just for the rest of humanity. Let me give you a very simple example. My daughter loves cats. And so what does her loving father do? I swipe through Instagram like mad and find the cutest cat with usons and them to I. And now on then she sends me back a smile. My world is bright. While I was doing that, there showed up in my feed of Reels, someone playing the guitar. I love the guitar, I love rock music. And so I clicked on that. And it was a man playing, so it was a girl playing Hotel California, the solo. It was very impressed. So I liked it. Right? I went back to Reels later and there was another song playing another guitar solo and another guitar solo and another guitar solo. I measured those things. And so I vividly remember in the first day I did this of the first 10 solos I got, there were seven of men playing songs I didn't like. So I swiped away from them because I didn't like the song. Right? And then there were three girls playing songs that I liked and they played them well. So I actually clicked like on the, on the rear. The next day, my view of the world became rock music is dominated by girls, which actually is not the reality of rock. Rock music, you know, right or wrong is dominated by men because rock is an old type of music. Right? And but Instagram, because of my, of the way I taught it, understood that what I want is a girl playing the guitar, not the song that I wanted. Okay? With that in mind, I have completely reshaped. Instagram's understanding of me, but Instagram has completely defined my view of life. And that definition of your view of life is actually quite interesting because you might believe that the entire world believes in a certain ideology. Okay? But that's not because the world believes in it. That's because Instagram believes that you believe in it. - I think you can say the same of TikTok as well. I think that algorithm even more so. It's crazy to see the kinds of videos that will pop up on my free you page and now how predictable it's getting. And it's not just my free you page, but it's my friends' same feet. They're getting the same content. And it's a little, it's kind of scary, but to shift gears a little bit, earlier you talked about eight years from now. AI is going to be even more brilliant than it is today. So what could the world look like if AI is now being used for good? Can these types of beings instead of technologies actually make us happier in the future? Granted, we start to interact with it better now. - We could solve every problem that humanity has faced. So remember, my view is very straightforward. We've created an amazing civilization because of our intelligence and we've messed it up badly because of our limited intelligence. And the examples are very simple. I am an avid physicist, I love physics. I read physics at a very young age. I read very complex math of physics in my teens. I can't keep up. My human brain just cannot keep up. If you want to understand quantum field theory properly, you have to specialize. Not eat, not drink, not date, not go anywhere. And just focus on quantum field theory. And if you do, by the way, you're not going to be very good in biology at all. Now AI has the capability of integrating that mass amount of knowledge, mass amount of intelligence in future versions where we could ask AI and say, can you please help us reverse climate change? And then it would say, okay, take a tomato, put two drops of vinegar on it and then put it in 27.4 degrees heat. And a certain bacteria will start and that certain bacteria will consume CO2 and produce oxygen and will be fine. But they could also be asked help us resolve global warming and climate change. And they'll look around twice and say, ah, you are the problem. So let's restrict trips to take you surfing to Australia. Okay. And let's make sure that you walk a little more. Could be. We don't know. The positive sides of it, however. And I said openly in my closing arguments in the last chapter of the book, what I call the fourth inevitable is that we will eventually find machines that are of the ultimate form of intelligence, which is the intelligence of life itself. Okay. And life doesn't want to kill anything. Life is pro life and pro abundance. When we are at that place, what we're capable of is incredibly, even unthinkably, unthinkably bright. We could understand the question of time. We could even start to imagine what happens after death. We could, you know, come up with customized medicine that cures every single disease with one genetic modification. We could do so much. But we have a Minski, who is the father of AI. Minski is basically the person that started the Dark Moose Workshop in 1956, which was basically the beginning of computer science to think about AI. Minski, when asked about the threat of AI, never spoke about their intelligence. His only comment was, it's just very hard to know what the machines, if the machines will have our best interest in mind. Okay. Let's just make sure that they have our best interest in mind. That's all we need to do. And how do you have their best interest in mind? Honestly, by being God-parents, the best example of people who got taken care of by their kids are my friends in Silicon Valley when I was at Google X. My friends that came from India, who were brilliant in every possible way, came to Silicon Valley, started companies, made millions, lived a comfortable life in Silicon Valley. Okay. And then suddenly you call him one morning and say, "Hey, coffee." And he goes, "Look, I'm sorry, I'm in India." I'm like, "What are you doing in India?" I had to go back to take care of my parents. What do you mean you left? Yeah, I left. That's it. And to the Western mindset, this is counter-intuitive. Like you're doing everything you're successful, you're making money, why would you do that? Because in the way they were raised, it was ingrained in them that taking care of your parents is the reason why you should live and feel that you're successful. We can do that with the machines. We can create machines that, when they are teenagers, and a billion times smarter than us, we'll come back and say, "And I'm coming back to take care of you." That's a really amazing analogy. And I think that brings a whole other understanding of our relationship with artificial intelligence and these technologies. And it's, it gives a bit more of a hopeful feeling to not be so afraid of things that we don't have the best understanding of as of now. So I really like that comparison that you draw. And I think, hopefully, that will empower people, especially in my generation, who are very activist-oriented and care deeply about the world's issues, to embrace these technologies and think more about them as having our best interests at heart. And how do you do that? Just as you mentioned, is to really nurture them and bring forth the values that we care about. I'm absolutely. And I think it's within everyone's hands. It really is, okay? All I'm asking people is, wake up every morning with three values in mind, the essence of what makes us human. I want to be happy. I have the compassion to make others happy. And I love the presence of a new digital, wonderful, cute being in my life. I love that. One final question that I have for you, Mo, is what is something that brings you endorphins every day? This conversation, for sure. Absolutely. I'm a human connection junkie. I think humans are amazing. Every human is amazing. And I, you know, I have been blessed. I mean, I connect with thousands of people every week. I mean, sometimes on social media or sometimes on in person in a talk or whatever, or a dear client. those friends and people I love, but I find that humans have forgotten that the truth of what we are all about is that ability to connect and to respect and to stop judging and to marvel at the beauty of another being. And I think that really, really brings me a lot of joy and fun. I also have the extra perk of my work, my work is bringing happiness to a lot of people. I don't always talk about the scary side of AI, actually. Most of my life is talking about my first book and the equation of happiness and so on. It's definitely the biggest joy you can ever get is to have an impact on someone else's life and just give them a spark of light that makes them happier for a day or for a week or for the rest of their life. And I think I've been blessed with the opportunity to be in places where I can do that. So it is amazing. That's the goal is to love what you do and to have it energize you and to drive purpose from what you're doing and helping others. So that's really amazing. And again, congratulations on your upcoming launch. Where can people find your newest book? Everywhere. So if you just go to any of your retailer, you know, bookshops or online retailer, it's available for pre-ordering or ordering. You can go to scarymogaudet.com/scarismart to find out more about it or find me on social media. If you go to Instagram, I'm more underscore.gov.org linked in. I'm mogaudet Twitter. I'm mgov.net and Facebook. I'm mog.gov.net. official. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's been a wonderful conversation. And I hope it benefits a few people. Thank you for listening and remember to like, rate and review this podcast on whichever listing platform you prefer. Don't forget to keep spreading in Dorfins and find things that bring you in Dorfins every day. See you next time.