Ex-Google Exec (Mo Gawdat) on AI: The Next 15 Years Will Be Hell Before We Get To Heaven… And Only These 5 Jobs Will Remain!

Mo Gawdat sounded the alarm on AI, and now he’s back with an even bigger warning: AI will cause global collapse, destroy jobs, and launch us into a 15-year dystopia that will change everything. Mo Gawdat is back! Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X and one of the world’s leading voices on AI, happiness, and the future of humanity. In 2017, he launched ‘One Billion Happy’, a global campaign to teach 1 billion people how to become happier using science and emotional tools. He is also the bestselling author of books such as, ‘Scary Smart, Solve for Happy’. He explains: Why we need to start preparing today for AI How all jobs will be gone by 2037 Why we must replace world leaders with AI How AI will destroy capitalism The one belief system that could save humanity from dystopia 00:00 Intro 02:28 Where Is AI Heading? 05:14 What Will the Dystopia Look Like? 11:24 Our Freedom Will Be Restricted 19:29 Job Displacement Due to AI 28:25 The AI Monopoly and Self-Evolving Systems 35:23 Sam Altman's OpenAI Letter 39:47 Do AI Companies Have Society's Interest at Heart? 53:21 Will New Jobs Be Created? 01:01:41 What Do We Do in This New World? 01:03:25 Ads 01:04:30 Will We Prefer AI Over Humans in Certain Jobs? 01:08:23 From Augmented Intelligence to AI Replacement 01:17:46 A Society Where No One Works? 01:26:48 If Jobs No Longer Exist, What Will We Do? 01:36:47 Ads 01:38:50 The Abundance Utopia 01:41:02 AI Ruling the World 01:54:36 Everything Will Be Free 01:57:30 Do We Live in a Virtual Headset? 02:14:13 We Need Rules Around AI 02:25:15 I Follow the Fruit Salad Religion Follow Mo: Instagram - https://bit.ly/4l8WAHI X - https://bit.ly/4lSZf9F YouTube - https://bit.ly/4fhBzcL Website - https://bit.ly/3IWN1hI Substack - https://bit.ly/4oiw1Td Emma Love Matchmaking - https://bit.ly/4ogku75 You can purchase Mo’s book, ‘Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World’, here: https://amzn.to/4mkP1i2 The Diary Of A CEO: ⬜️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ⬜️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ⬜️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ⬜️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ⬜️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ⬜️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Linkedin Ads - https://www.linkedin.com/DIARY Replit - http://replit.com with code STEVEN Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mo Gawdat?

  The only way for us to get to a better place and succeed as a species is for the evil people at the top to be replaced with AI. I mean, think about it. AI will not want to destroy ecosystems. It will not want to kill a million people. They'll not make us hate each other like the current leaders. Because that's a waste of energy, explosives, money and people. But the problem is, super intelligent AI is reporting to stupid leaders. And that's why in the next 15 years, we are going to hit a short term dystopia. There's no escaping that.

• 0:28Steven Bartlett?

  Having AI leaders is not even fundamentally possible.

• 0:33Mo Gawdat?

  Let's put it this way.

• 0:34Steven Bartlett?

  Mo Gouda is back.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  And the former chief business officer at Google X is now one of the most urgent voices in AI with a very clear message.

• 0:43Mo Gawdat?

  AI isn't your enemy, but it could be your savior. I love you so much, man. You're such a good friend. But you don't have many years to live, not in this world. Everything's gonna change. Economics are gonna change. Human connection is gonna change. And lots of jobs will be lost, including podcasters.

• 1:00Steven Bartlett?

  No, no. Thank you for coming on today, Mo.

• 1:04Mo Gawdat?

  But the truth is, it could be the best world ever. A society completely full of laughter and joy. Free healthcare, no jobs, spending more time with their loved ones. A world where all of us are equal.

• 1:15Steven Bartlett?

  Is that possible?

• 1:16Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent. And I have enough evidence to know that we can use AI to build the utopia. But it's a dystopia if humanity manages it badly. A world where there's going to be a lot of control, a lot of surveillance, a lot of forced compliance and a hunger for power, greed, ego. And it is happening already. But the truth is, the only barrier between a utopia for humanity and AI and the dystopia we're going through is a mindset.

• 1:40Steven Bartlett?

  What does society have to do?

• 1:41Mo Gawdat?

  First of all.

• 1:45Steven Bartlett?

  Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm gonna make to you. I'm gonna do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're gonna deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're gonna continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show. Thank you.

• 2:28Steven Bartlett?

  No, two years ago today, we sat here and discussed AI. We discussed your book Scary Smart and everything that was happening in the world. Since then, AI has continued to develop at a tremendous alarming, mind-boggling rate. And the technologies that existed two years ago, when we had that conversation, have grown up and matured and are taking on a life of their own, no pun intended. What are you, what are you thinking about AI now, two years on? I know that you've started writing a new book called Alive, which is, I guess, a bit of a follow-on or an evolution of your thoughts as it relates to Scary Smart. But what is front of your mind when it comes to AI?

• 3:07Mo Gawdat?

  So Scary Smart was shockingly accurate. It's quite a, I mean, I don't even know how I ended up writing, predicting those things. I remember it was written in 2020, published in 2021. And then most people were like, who wants to talk about AI? You know, I know everybody in the media and I would go, do you wanna talk? And then 2023, ChatGPT comes out and everything flips. Everyone realizes, you know, this is real, this is not science fiction, this is here. And, and things move very, very fast, much faster than I think we've ever seen anything ever move, ever. And, and I think my position has changed on two very important fronts.

• 3:51Mo Gawdat?

  One is, remember when we spoke about Scary Smart? I was still saying that there are things we can do to change the course. And we could at the time, I believe. Now I've changed my mind. Now I believe that we are going to hit a short-term dystopia. There's no escaping that.

• 4:10Steven Bartlett?

  What is dystopia?

• 4:11Mo Gawdat?

  I call it face R I Ps, we can talk about it in details. But the, the way we define very important parameters in life are going to be completely changed. So, so face R I Ps are, you know, the way we define freedom. Uh accountability, human connection and equality, economics, uh reality, innovation in business and power. That's the first change. So the first change in my mind is that uh is that we uh will have to prepare for a world that is very unfamiliar. Okay. And that's the next twelve to fifteen years. It has already started. We've seen examples of it in the world already, even though people don't talk about it. I try to tell people, you

• 4:55Mo Gawdat?

  know, there are things we absolutely have to do. But on the other hand, I started to take an active role in building amazing AIs. So AIs that will uh not only make our world better, uh but that will understand us, understand what humanity is through that process.

• 5:14Steven Bartlett?

  What is the definition of the word dystopia?

• 5:18Mo Gawdat?

  So in my, in my mind, these are adverse circumstances that unfortunately might escalate beyond our control. The problem is the uh there is a lot wrong with the um value set, with the ethics of humanity at the age of the rise of the machines. And when you take a technology, every technology we've ever created just magnified human abilities. So, you know, you can walk at five kilometers an hour. Hmm. You get in a car and you can now go, you know, two hundred and fifty, two hundred and eighty miles an hour. Okay. Uh basically magnifying your mobility if you want, you know, you can use a computer to magnify your uh calculation abilities or whatever. Okay. And and what AI is going

• 6:02Mo Gawdat?

  to magnify unfortunately at this time is it's going to magnify the evil that man can do. And and it is within our hands completely, completely within our hands to change that. But I have to say, I don't think humanity has the awareness uh at this time to focus on this so that we actually use AI to build the utopia.

• 6:25Steven Bartlett?

  So what you're essentially saying is that you now believe there'll be a period of dystopia. And to define the word dystopia, I've used AI. It says a terrible society where people live under fear, control or suffering. And then you think we'll come out of that dystopia into a utopia, which is defined as a perfect or ideal place where everything works well, a good society where people live in peace, health and happiness.

• 6:46Mo Gawdat?

  Correct.

• 6:47Steven Bartlett?

  So.

• 6:48Mo Gawdat?

  And the difference between them, interestingly, is what I normally refer to as the second dilemma, which is the point where we hand over completely to AI. So a lot of people think that when AI is in full control, it's going to be an existential risk for humanity. You know, I have enough evidence to argue that when we fully hand over to AI, that's going to be our salvation. That the problem with us today is not, you know, that intelligence is going to work against us. It's that our stupidity as humans is working against us. And I think the challenges that will come from humans being in control are going to outweigh the

• 7:31Mo Gawdat?

  the challenges that could come from AI being in control.

• 7:34Steven Bartlett?

  So as we're in this dystopia period, do you forecast the length of that dystopia?

• 7:40Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, I count it exactly as 12 to 15 years. I believe the beginning of the slope will happen in 2027. I mean, we will see signs in 26. We've seen signs in 24, but we will see escalating signs next year. And then a clear slip in 27.

• 8:00Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 8:01Mo Gawdat?

  The geopolitical environment of our world is not very positive. I mean, you really have to think deeply about not the symptoms, but the reasons why we are living the world that we live in today is money. Right? And money, for anyone who knows, who really knows money, money is, you and I are peasants. You know, we build businesses, we contribute to the world, we make things, we sell things and so on. Real money is not made there at all. Real money is made in lending, in fractional reserve.

• 8:40Mo Gawdat?

  And and you know, the biggest lender in the world would want reasons to lend. And those reasons are never as big as war. I mean, think about it, huh? The world spent two point seven one trillion dollars on war in twenty twenty four, right? A trillion dollars a year in the U S. And when you really think deeply, I don't mean to be scary here. You know, weapons have depreciation. They depreciate over ten to thirty years, most weapons.

• 9:15Steven Bartlett?

  They lose their value.

• 9:16Mo Gawdat?

  They lose their value and they depreciate in accounting terms on the books of an army. The current arsenal of the U S, that's a result of a deep search with my A I Trixie. You know, the current arsenal, I think, we we think cost the U S twenty four to twenty six trillion dollars to build. My conclusion is that a lot of the wars that are happening around the world today are a means to get rid of those weapons so that you can have replace them. And you know, when when your morality as an industry is we're building weapons to kill. Then, you know, you might as well use the weapons to kill.

• 9:52Steven Bartlett?

  Who benefits?

• 9:54Mo Gawdat?

  The lenders and the industry.

• 9:55Steven Bartlett?

  But but they can't make the decision to go to war. They they have to rely on Donald Trump.

• 9:59Mo Gawdat?

  Remember, I I said that to you when we, I think, on on our third podcast. War is decided first, then the story is manufactured. You you remember nineteen eighty four and Orwellian approach of like, you know, uh, freedom is slavery and uh, war is peace and they call it uh, something speak uh, basically to to to to convince people that going to war in another country to to kill four point seven million people is freedom. You know, we're going there to free the Iraqi people. Is war ever freedom, you know, to to tell someone that you're gonna kill three hundred thousand

• 10:44Mo Gawdat?

  women and children is for liberty and for the, you know, for human values. Seriously, how do we ever get to believe that? The story is manufactured and then we follow and humans, because we're gullible, we cheer up and we say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're we're on the right side. They are the bad guys.

• 11:06Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so let me let me have a let me have a go at this idea. So the idea is that really money is driving a lot of the conflict we're seeing, and it's really going to be driving the dystopia. So here's an idea. So I am, I was reading something the other day and it talked about how billionaires are never satisfied. Because actually, what a billionaire wants isn't actually more money, it is more status.

• 11:29Mo Gawdat?

  Correct.

• 11:30Steven Bartlett?

  And I was looking at the sort of evolutionary case for this argument. And if you go back a couple of thousand years, money didn't exist. You were as wealthy as what you could carry. So even, I think, to the human mind, the idea of wealth and money isn't a thing. What we've, but what has always mattered from a survival of the fittest, from a reproductive standpoint, what's always had reproductive value. If you go back thousands of years, the person who was able to mate the most was the person with the most status. So it makes the case, the reason why billionaires get all of this money, but then they go on podcasts and they want to start their own podcasts and they want to buy newspapers, is actually because at the very core of hu- human beings is a desire to increase their status.

• 12:15Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Steven Bartlett?

  And so if we think of when we go back to the example of why wars are breaking out, maybe it's not money, maybe actually it's status. And and it's this prime minister or this leader or this, you know, individual wanting to create more power and more status, because really at the heart of what matters to a human being is having more power and more status. And money is actually, money as a thing is actually just a proxy of my status.

• 12:42Mo Gawdat?

  And what kind of world is that?

• 12:44Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, it's a fucked up one. All these all these powerful men have

• 12:47Mo Gawdat?

  Correct.

• 12:48Steven Bartlett?

  are really messing the world up.

• 12:49Mo Gawdat?

  So can I can I can I

• 12:50Steven Bartlett?

  And actually, AI is the same because we're in this AI race now. We're a lot of tech billionaires.

• 12:55Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent.

• 12:56Steven Bartlett?

  If I get AGI, artificial general intelligence first, then I basically rule the world.

• 13:02Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent. That's exactly the the concept. What I what I used to call the the first inevitable. Now I call the first dilemma and scary smart is that it's it's a race that constantly accelerates.

• 13:14Steven Bartlett?

  You think the next 12 years are going to be AI dystopia where things aren't

• 13:17Mo Gawdat?

  I think the next 12 years are going to be human dystopia using AI. And Human induced dystopia using AI.

• 13:25Steven Bartlett?

  And you define that by a rise in warfare around the world as

• 13:28Mo Gawdat?

  So the last the last one, the RIP is the last one is basically you're going to have a massive concentration of power and a massive distribution of power. Okay. And that basically will mean that those with the maximum concentration of power are going to try to oppress those with with democracy of power. Okay. So think about it this way. In today's world, unlike the past,

• 13:55Mo Gawdat?

  you know, the Houthis with a drone, the Houthis are the Yemeni tribes, basically resisting US power and Israeli power in the Red Sea. Okay, they use a drone that is $3,000 worth to attack a a warship from from the US or an airplane from the US and so on. That's worth hundreds of millions. Okay, that kind of democracy of power makes those in power worry a lot about where the next threat is coming from. Okay. And this happens not only in war, but also in economics. Okay, also in innovation, also in technology and so on and so forth. Right. And so basically, what that means is that, like you rightly said, as

• 14:39Mo Gawdat?

  the the tech oligarchs are attempting to get to AGI. They want to make sure that as soon as they get to AGI, that nobody else has AGI. And basically, they want to make sure that nobody else has the ability to shake their position of privilege, if you want, okay? And so you're going to see a world where unfortunately, there's going to be a lot of control, a lot of surveillance, a lot of forced compliance, if you want, or you lose your privilege to be in the world. And it is happening already.

• 15:14Steven Bartlett?

  With this acronym, I want to make sure we get through the whole acronym.

• 15:17Mo Gawdat?

  So you like dystopians, don't you?

• 15:19Steven Bartlett?

  No, I want to do the dystopian thing, then I want to do the utopia.

• 15:22Mo Gawdat?

  Okay.

• 15:23Steven Bartlett?

  And ideally, how we move from dystopia to utopia. So the F in FACE R I P.

• 15:31Mo Gawdat?

  Is the loss of freedom as a result of that power dichotomy, right? So you have a massive amount of power, as you can see today, in one specific army being powered by the US funds and a lot of money, right? Fighting against peasants, really, that have no weapons almost at all, okay? Some of them are militarized, but the majority of the two million people are not, okay? And so there is massive, massive power that basically says, you know what, I'm gonna oppress as far as I go, okay? And I'm gonna do whatever I want, because the cheerleaders are gonna be quiet, right? Or they're gonna cheer, or even worse.

• 16:11Mo Gawdat?

  And so basically, in that, what happens is maximum power threatened by a democracy of power leads to a loss of freedom, a loss of freedom for everyone.

• 16:22Steven Bartlett?

  Because how does that impact my freedom?

• 16:25Mo Gawdat?

  Your freedom?

• 16:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 16:27Mo Gawdat?

  Very soon, you will, if you publish this episode, you're gonna start to get questions around, should you be talking about those topics in your podcast? Okay, you know, if I have been on this episode, then probably next time I land in the US, someone will question me, say, why do you say those things? Which side are you on? Right, and and and you know, you can easily see that everything, I mean, I I told you that before, it doesn't matter what I try to contribute to the world, my bank will cancel my bank account every six weeks, simply because of my ethnicity and my origin, right? Every now and then they'll just stop my my bank account and say, we need a document.

• 17:11Mo Gawdat?

  My my other colleagues of a different color or a different ethnicity don't get asked for another document, right? But but but that's because I come from an ethnicity that is positioned in the world for the last thirty, forty years as the enemy, okay? And and so when you really, really think about it, in a world where everything is becoming digital, in a world where everything is monitored, in a world where everything is seen, okay? We don't have much freedom anymore, and I'm not actually debating that, or or I don't see a way to fix that.

• 17:44Steven Bartlett?

  Because the AI is gonna have more information on us, be better at tracking who we are, and therefore that will result in certain freedoms being restricted, is that what you're saying?

• 17:54Mo Gawdat?

  This is one element of it, okay? If you push that element further, in in in a very short time, if you've seen Agent, for example, recently, Manos or ChatGPT, there will be a time where, you know, you'll simply not do things yourself anymore, okay? You'll simply go to your AI and say, hey, by the way, I'm going to meet Steven, can you please, you know, book that for me?

• 18:16Steven Bartlett?

  Great.

• 18:17Mo Gawdat?

  And and yeah, and it will do absolutely everything. That's great until the moment where it decides to do things that are not motivated only by your well-being, right?

• 18:25Steven Bartlett?

  Why would it do that?

• 18:26Mo Gawdat?

  Simply because, you know, maybe if I buy a BA ticket instead of an Emirates ticket, some agent is gonna make more money than other agents and so on, right? And I wouldn't be able to even catch it up if I hand over completely to an AI. Go go a step further, huh? Think about a world where everyone, almost everyone, is on UBI, okay?

• 18:48Steven Bartlett?

  What's UBI?

• 18:49Mo Gawdat?

  Universal Basic Income. I mean, think about the economics, the E and face R I Ps. Think about the economics of a world where we're gonna start to see a trillionaire.

• 19:01Mo Gawdat?

  Before 2030, I can guarantee you that someone will be a trillionaire. I'm, you know, I think there are many trillionaires in the world today or there. We just don't know who they are. But there will be a new Elon Musk or Larry Ellison that will become a trillionaire because of AI investments. Right? And, and that trillionaire will have so much money to buy everything. There will be robots and AIs doing everything and humans will have no jobs.

• 19:29Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think that's a, there's a real possibility of job displacement over the next 10 years? And the rebuttal to that would be that there's going to be new jobs created in technology.

• 19:40Mo Gawdat?

  Absolute crap.

• 19:41Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 19:42Mo Gawdat?

  Of course.

• 19:43Steven Bartlett?

  How, how, how can you be so sure?

• 19:45Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, so again, I am not sure about anything. So, so let's just be very, very clear. It would be very arrogant, okay, to assume that I know.

• 19:55Steven Bartlett?

  You just said it was crap.

• 19:57Mo Gawdat?

  My, my belief is it is hundred percent crap.

• 19:59Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 20:00Mo Gawdat?

  Take a job like software developer.

• 20:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 20:02Mo Gawdat?

  Okay. Emma dot love, my, my new startup is me, Sanad, another technical engineer and a lot of AIs. Okay, that startup would have been 350 developers in the past.

• 20:15Steven Bartlett?

  I get that. Um, but are you now hiring in other roles because of that? Or, or, you know, as is the case with the steam engine. I can't remember the effect, but as you probably know that when steam, when coal became cheaper, people were worried that the coal industry would go out of business. But actually what happened is people used more trains. So trains now are used for transport and other things and leisure. Whereas before they were just used for commute, for cargo.

• 20:43Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Steven Bartlett?

  So there became more use cases and the coal industry exploded. So I'm wondering with technology, yes, software developers are going to maybe not have as many jobs, but there's, everything's going to be software.

• 20:53Mo Gawdat?

  Name me one.

• 20:54Steven Bartlett?

  Name you one what?

• 20:55Mo Gawdat?

  Job.

• 20:56Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe that's going to be created.

• 20:57Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, one job that cannot be done by an AI.

• 21:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 21:02Mo Gawdat?

  Or a robot.

• 21:03Steven Bartlett?

  My girlfriend's breathwork retreat business, where she takes groups of women around the world. Her company is called Bali Breathwork.

• 21:10Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 21:10Steven Bartlett?

  And there's going to be a greater demand for connection, human connection.

• 21:13Mo Gawdat?

  Correct. Keep going.

• 21:14Steven Bartlett?

  So there's going to be more people doing community events in real life festivals. I think we're going to see a huge surge in things like.

• 21:22Mo Gawdat?

  Everything that has to do with human connection.

• 21:23Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 21:24Mo Gawdat?

  Correct. I'm totally in with that. Okay. What's the percentage of that versus accountant?

• 21:30Steven Bartlett?

  It's a much smaller percentage for sure, in terms of white collar jobs.

• 21:33Mo Gawdat?

  Now, who does she sell to?

• 21:36Steven Bartlett?

  People with probably what, probably accountants or.

• 21:39Mo Gawdat?

  Correct. She sells to people who earn money from their jobs.

• 21:43Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, so you have two forces happening. One force is there are clear jobs that will be replaced. Video editor is going to be replaced.

• 21:52Steven Bartlett?

  Excuse me.

• 21:54Mo Gawdat?

  I love you guys, but that's. As a matter of fact, podcaster is going to be replaced, not you.

• 22:00Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you for coming on today, Mo. I'm glad to see you again.

• 22:05Mo Gawdat?

  But the truth is, a lot, so you see, the best at any job will remain. The best software developer, the one that really knows architecture, knows technology and so on, will stay for a while. Right? And, you know, one of the funniest things, I interviewed Max Tedmar. And Max was laughing out loud, saying, CEOs are celebrating that they can now get rid of people and have productivity gains and cost reductions because AI can do their job. The one thing they don't think of is AI will replace them too. AGI is going to be better than at everything than humans, at everything, including being a CEO.

• 22:44Mo Gawdat?

  Right? And you really have to imagine that there will be a time where most incompetent CEOs would be replaced. Most incompetent, even breathwork.

• 22:55Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, eventually, there might actually one of two things be, two things be happening. One, one is either, you know, part, part of that job, other than the top breath work instructors, okay, are, are, you know, who are going to gather all of the people that can still afford to pay for a breath work, you know, class. They're going to be concentrated at the top and a lot of the bottom is not going to be working for one of two reasons. One is either there is not enough demand because so many people lost their jobs. So when you're on UBI, you cannot tell the government, hey, by the way, pay me a bit more for a breast work class.

• 23:37Steven Bartlett?

  UBI being universal basic income. Government just gives you money every month.

• 23:41Mo Gawdat?

  Correct, and if you really think of freedom and economics, UBI is a very interesting place to be because unfortunately, as I said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with AI. There's a lot wrong with the value set of humanity at the age of the rise of the machines, right? And the biggest value set of humanity is capitalism today. And capitalism is all about what? Labor arbitrage.

• 24:03Steven Bartlett?

  What's that mean?

• 24:04Mo Gawdat?

  I, I hire you to do something, I pay you a dollar, I pay it, I, I sell it for two. Okay, and, and most people confuse that because they say, oh, but the cost of a product also includes raw materials and factories and so on and so forth. All of that is built, is built by labor. Right, so, so basically labor goes and minds for the material and then the material is sold for a little bit of margin, then that material is turned into a machine, it's sold for a little bit of margin, then that machine and so on. Okay, there's always labor arbitrage. In a world where humanity's minds are being replaced by, by AIs, virtual AIs, okay, and humanity's power, strength, within three to five years' time, can be replaced by a robot.

• 24:51Mo Gawdat?

  You really have to question how this world looks like. It could be the best world ever, and that's what I believe the utopia will look like. Because we were never made to wake up every morning and just, you know, occupy twenty hours of our day with work, right? We're not made for that, but we've fit into that, you know, system so well so far that we started to believe it's our life's purpose.

• 25:15Steven Bartlett?

  But we choose it, we willingly choose it. And if you give someone unlimited money, they still tend to go back to work or find something to occupy their time with.

• 25:25Mo Gawdat?

  They find something to occupy their time with.

• 25:27Steven Bartlett?

  Which is usually, for so many people, is building something, philanthropy, a business.

• 25:31Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent, so you build something. So between Sinead and I, Emma dot love is not about making money. It's about finding true love relationships.

• 25:40Steven Bartlett?

  What is that, sorry, just for context?

• 25:41Mo Gawdat?

  So, so, so, you know.

• 25:42Steven Bartlett?

  It's a business you're building, just for the world's context.

• 25:44Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, so, so, so the idea here is I can, it might become a unicorn and be worth a billion dollars, but neither I nor Sinead are interested, okay? We're doing it because we can, okay? And we're doing it because it can make a massive difference to the world.

• 26:00Steven Bartlett?

  And you have money, though.

• 26:01Mo Gawdat?

  It doesn't take that much money anymore to build anything in the world. This is labor arbitrage.

• 26:06Steven Bartlett?

  But to build something exceptional, it's still gonna take a little bit more money than building something bad.

• 26:12Mo Gawdat?

  For the next few years.

• 26:13Steven Bartlett?

  So whoever has the capital to build something exceptional will end up winning.

• 26:16Mo Gawdat?

  So, so this is a very interesting understanding of freedom, okay? This is the reason why we have the AI arms race, okay? Is that the one that owns the platform is going to be making all the money and keeping all the power. Think, think of it this way, when humanity started, the best hunter in the tribe could maybe feed the tribe for three to four more years, more days. And as a, as a reward, he gained the favor of multiple mates in the tribe. That's it. The top farmer in the tribe could feed the tribe for a season more, okay? And as a result, they got estates and, you know, and mansions and so on.

• 26:59Mo Gawdat?

  The best industrialist in the, in a, in a city could actually employ the whole city, could grow the GDP of their entire country. And as a result, they became millionaires the nineteen twenties. The best technologists now are billionaires. Now, what's the difference between them? The tool. The hunter only depended on their skills. And the automation, the entire automation he had was a spear. The farmer had way more automation. And the biggest automation was what? The soil. The soil did most of the work. The factory did most of the work. The network did most of the work.

• 27:41Mo Gawdat?

  And so that incredible expansion of wealth and power. And as well, the incredible impact that something brings is entirely around the tool that automates. So who's going to own the tool? Who's going to own the digital soil, the AI soil? It's the platform owners.

• 28:01Steven Bartlett?

  And the platforms you're describing are things like OpenAI, Gemini, Grok.

• 28:06Mo Gawdat?

  These are interfaces to the platforms. The platforms are all of the of the tokens, all of the compute that is in the background, all of the all of the methodology, the systems, the algorithms. That's the AI, the AI itself. You know, Grok is the interface to it.

• 28:24Steven Bartlett?

  But then. I think this is probably worth explaining in layman's terms to people that haven't built AI tools yet. Because I think, I think to the listener, they probably think that every AI company they're hearing of right now is building their own AI. Whereas actually, what's happening is there is really five, six, seven AI companies in the world. And when I built my AI application, I basically pay them for every time I use their AI. So if Steven Bartlett builds an AI at stevenbartlettai.com, it's not that I've built my own underlying, I've trained my own model. Really what I'm doing is I'm paying.

• 29:08Steven Bartlett?

  Sam Altman's ChatGPT. Every single time I do a call, I basically, I do a search or, you know, I use a token. And I think that's really important because most people don't understand that unless you've built AI. You think, oh, look, you know, there's all these AI companies popping up. I've got this one for my email. I've got this one for my dating. I've got, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're pretty much, I would be, I would hazard a guess that they're probably all at OpenAI at this point.

• 29:33Mo Gawdat?

  No, there are quite a few, quite different characters and quite different.

• 29:37Steven Bartlett?

  But there's like five or six.

• 29:38Mo Gawdat?

  There are five or six when it comes to language models.

• 29:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Mo Gawdat?

  Right. But interestingly, so yes, I should say yes to start. And then I should say, but there was an interesting twist with DeepSeek at the beginning of the year. So what DeepSeek did is they basically nullified the business model, if you want, in two ways. One is it was around a week or two after, you know, Trump stood, you know, with pride, saying Stargate is the biggest investment project in the history. And it's $500 billion to build AI infrastructure and SoftBank and Larry Ellison and Sam Altman were sitting. And so, you know, beautiful picture. And then DeepSeek R3 comes out. It does the job for one over 30 of the cost.

• 30:26Mo Gawdat?

  Okay. And interestingly, it's entirely open source and available as an edge AI. So that's really, really interesting because there could be now in the future, as the technology improves, the learning models will be massive, but then you can compress them into something you can have on your phone. And you can download DeepSeek literally offline on a, you know, an off the network computer and build an AI on it.

• 30:54Steven Bartlett?

  There's a website that basically tracks the sort of cleanest apples to apples market share of all the website referrals sent by AI chatbots. And ChatGPT is currently at 79%, roughly about 80%. Plexi's 11, Microsoft Copilots about five, Google Gemini is about two, Claude's about one and DeepSeek's about 1%. And really like the point that I want to land is just that when you hear of a new AI app or tool or this one can make.

• 31:20Mo Gawdat?

  It's built on one of them.

• 31:22Steven Bartlett?

  It's basically built on one of these. Really, three or four AI platforms that's controlled really by three or four AI, you know, billionaire teams. And actually, the one of them that gets to what we call AGI first, where the AI gets really, really advanced, one could say is potentially going to rule the world as it relates to technology.

• 31:47Mo Gawdat?

  Yes, if they get enough head start. So I actually think that

• 31:56Mo Gawdat?

  what I'm more concerned about now is not AGI, believe it or not. So AGI in my mind, and I said that back in 2023, right, that we will get to AGI. At the time, I said 2027. Now I believe 2026 latest. Okay. The most interesting development that nobody is talking about is self-evolving AIs. Self-evolving AIs is, think of it this way. If you and I are hiring the top engineer in the world to develop our AI models, and with AGI, that top engineer in the world becomes an AI. Who would you hire to develop your next generation AI? That AI.

• 32:40Steven Bartlett?

  The one that can teach itself.

• 32:42Mo Gawdat?

  Correct. So one of my favorite examples is called Alpha Evolve. So this is Google's attempt to basically have four agents working together, four AIs working together, to look at the code of the AI and say, where is that, what are the performance issues? Then, you know, an agent would say, what's the problem statement? What can I, you know, what do I need to fix? One that actually develops the solution, one that assesses the solution. And then they continue to do this. And, you know, I don't remember the exact figure, but I think Google improved like eight percent on their AI infrastructure because of Alpha Evolve, right? And when you really, really think, don't quote me on the number eight to 10, six to 10, whatever,

• 33:24Mo Gawdat?

  in Google terms, by the way, that is massive. That's billions and billions of dollars. Now, the trick here is this, the trick is, again, you have to think in game theory format.

• 33:38Mo Gawdat?

  Is there any scenario we can think of where if one player uses AI to develop the next generation AI, that the other players will say, no, no, no, no, that's too much, you know, takes us out of control. Every other player will copy that model and have their next AI model developed by an AI.

• 33:57Steven Bartlett?

  Is this what Sam Altman talks about, who's the founder of ChatGPT slash OpenAI, when he talks about a fast takeoff?

• 34:04Mo Gawdat?

  I don't know exactly what which you're referring to, but we're all talking about a point then now that we call the intelligence explosion. So there is a moment in time where you have to imagine that if AI now is better than ninety seven percent of all code developers in the world, and soon we'll be able to look at its own code, own algorithms. By the way, they're becoming incredible mathematicians, which wasn't the case when we last met. They can develop, improve their own code, improve their own algorithms, improve their own, you know, network architecture or whatever. You can imagine that very quickly, the force applied to developing the next AI is not going to be a human brain anymore. It's going

• 34:46Mo Gawdat?

  to be a much smarter brain. And very quickly, as humans, like basically when we ran the Google infrastructure, when the machine said we need another server or a proxy server in that place, we followed. We never really, you know, wanted to to object or verify because, you know, the code would probably know better because there are billions of transactions an hour or a day. And so very quickly, those self-evolving AIs will simply say, I need fourteen more servers there. And we'll just, you know, the team will just go ahead and do it.

• 35:21Steven Bartlett?

  I watched a video a couple of days ago where he, Sam Altman, effectively had changed his mind. Because in two thousand and twenty-three, which is when we last met, he said the aim was for a slow takeoff, which is sort of gradual deployment. And OpenAI's two thousand and third, two thousand and twenty-three notes says a slower takeoff is easier to make safe, and they prefer iterative rollouts so society can adapt.

• 35:46Steven Bartlett?

  In two thousand twenty five.

• 35:48Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Steven Bartlett?

  They changed their mind. And Sam Altman said, he now thinks a fast takeoff is more possible than he did a couple of years ago, on the order of a small number of years rather than a decade. And to define what we mean by a fast takeoff, it's defined as when AI goes from roughly human level to far beyond human very quickly, think months to a few years, faster than governments, companies or society can adapt, with little warning, big power shifts and hard to control. A slow takeoff, by contrast, is where capabilities climb gradually over many years with lots of warning shots.

• 36:27Steven Bartlett?

  And the red flags for a fast takeoff is when AI can self-improve, run autonomous research and development and scale with massive compute compounding gains, which will snowball fast. So, and I think from the video that I watched of Sam Altman recently, who again is the founder of OpenAI and ChatGPT, he basically says, and again, I'm paraphrasing here, I will put it on the screen, we have this community notes thing, so I'll write it on the screen, but he effectively said that whoever gets to AGI first will have the technology.

• 36:59Mo Gawdat?

  To develop superintelligence.

• 37:01Steven Bartlett?

  Where the AI can rapidly increase its own intelligence. And it will basically leave everyone else behind.

• 37:07Mo Gawdat?

  Yes, so that last bit is debatable, but but let's just agree that, so in Alive, you know, one of the posts I shared and got a lot of interest is I refer to the Altman as a brand, not as a human. Okay, so the Altman is that persona of a California disruptive technologist that disrespects everyone, okay, and believes that disruption is good for humanity and believes that this is good for safety. And like everything else, like we say, war is for democracy and freedom, they say, developing, you know, putting AI on the open internet is good for everyone, right? It allows us to learn from our mistakes.

• 37:51Mo Gawdat?

  That was Sam Altman's twenty twenty three spiel.

• 37:55Mo Gawdat?

  And if you recall, at the time, I was like, this is the most dangerous. You know, one of the clips that really went viral. You're so clever at finding the right clips is when I said.

• 38:05Steven Bartlett?

  I didn't do the clipping, mate.

• 38:06Mo Gawdat?

  The team, remember the clip where I said, we fucked up. We always said, don't put them on the open internet until we know what we're putting out in the world.

• 38:17Steven Bartlett?

  I remember you saying that, yeah.

• 38:18Mo Gawdat?

  We fucked up on putting it on the open internet, teaching it to code and putting, you know, agents, AI agents prompting other AIs. Now, AI agents prompting other AIs are leading to self-developing AIs. And the problem is, of course, we, you know, anyone who has been on the inside of this knew that this was just a clever spiel made by a PR manager for Sam Altman to sit with his dreamy eyes in front of Congress and say, we want you to regulate us. Now they're saying we're unregulatable. Okay, and when you really understand what's happening here, what's happening is it's so fast that none of them has the choice to slow down.

• 39:04Mo Gawdat?

  It's impossible, neither China versus America or OpenAI versus Google. The only thing that I may have, may see happening that you, you know, that may differ a little bit from your statement is if one of them gets there first, then they dominate for the rest of humanity. That is probably true if they get there first with enough buffer. Okay, but the way you look at Grok coming a week after OpenAI, a week after, you know, Gemini, a week after Claude, and then Claude comes again, and then China releases something, and then Korea releases something.

• 39:45Mo Gawdat?

  It is so fast that we may get a few of them at the same time or a few months apart. Okay, before one of them has enough power to become dominant. And that is a very interesting scenario. Multiple AIs, all super intelligent.

• 40:03Steven Bartlett?

  It's funny, you know, I got asked yesterday, I was in Belgium on stage, there was, I don't know, maybe 4,000 people in the audience, and a kid stood up and he was like, you've had a lot of conversations in the last year about AI, why do you care? And I don't think people realize how. Even though I've had so many conversations on this podcast about AI.

• 40:23Mo Gawdat?

  Have you made up your mind?

• 40:24Steven Bartlett?

  I I have more questions than ever.

• 40:26Mo Gawdat?

  I know.

• 40:27Steven Bartlett?

  And it's and it doesn't seem that anyone can satiate.

• 40:30Mo Gawdat?

  Anyone that tells you they can predict the future is arrogant.

• 40:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 40:34Mo Gawdat?

  It is. It's never moved so fast.

• 40:36Steven Bartlett?

  It's nothing like nothing I've ever seen. And, you know, by the time that we leave this conversation and I go to my computer, there's going to be some incredible new technology or application of AI that didn't exist when I woke up this morning. That creates probably another paradigm shift in my brain. Also, you know, people have different opinions of Elon Musk and they're entitled to their own opinion. But the other day, only a couple of days ago, he did a tweet where he said, at times, AI existential dread is overwhelming. And on the same day, he tweeted, I resisted AI for too long, living in denial. Now it is game on. And he tagged his AI companies. I don't know what to make of I don't know what to make of those tweets. I don't know.

• 41:21Steven Bartlett?

  And, you know, I I try really hard to figure out if someone like Sam Whatman has the best interests of society at heart.

• 41:34Mo Gawdat?

  No.

• 41:36Steven Bartlett?

  Or if these people are just like.

• 41:37Mo Gawdat?

  I'm saying that publicly, no.

• 41:41Mo Gawdat?

  As a matter of fact, so I know Sundar Pichai.

• 41:44Steven Bartlett?

  Who is?

• 41:45Mo Gawdat?

  A CEO of Alphabet, Google's parent company, an amazing human being, in all honesty. I know Dennis Hassabis, amazing human being. Okay, you know, these are are ethical, incredible humans at heart. They have no choice.

• 42:03Mo Gawdat?

  Sundar, by law, is demanded to take care of his shareholder value. That's all. That is his job.

• 42:13Steven Bartlett?

  But Sundar, you said you know him, you used to work at Google.

• 42:16Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 42:16Steven Bartlett?

  He's not going to do anything that he thinks is going to harm humanity.

• 42:19Mo Gawdat?

  But if if he does not continue to advance AI, that by definition contradicts his responsibility as the CEO of a publicly traded company. He is liable by law to continue to advance the agenda. There's absolutely no doubt about it now. So but but he's a good person at heart. Demis is a good person at heart. So they're trying so hard to make it safe. Okay, as much as they can. Reality, however, is the disruptor, the Altman as a brand, doesn't care that much.

• 42:52Steven Bartlett?

  How do you know that?

• 42:54Mo Gawdat?

  In reality, the disruptor is someone that comes in with the objective of, I don't like the status quo. I have a different approach. And that different approach, if you just look at the story, was we are a non-for-profit that is funded mostly by Elon Musk money. It's not entirely by Elon Musk money.

• 43:13Steven Bartlett?

  So context for people that might not understand, OpenAI, the reason I always give context is, funnily enough, I think I told you this last time. I went to a prison where they played the Diary of a CEO.

• 43:21Mo Gawdat?

  No way.

• 43:22Steven Bartlett?

  So they played the Diary of a CEO, and I think it's fifty prisons in the UK to young offenders.

• 43:26Mo Gawdat?

  And no violence there?

• 43:27Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I don't know, I can't, I can't tell you where the violence has gone up or down. But I was in the cell with one of the prisoners, a young, a young black guy, and I was in his cell for, for a little while.

• 43:36Mo Gawdat?

  That's wonderful.

• 43:36Steven Bartlett?

  And I was reading through his business plan, et cetera. And I said, you know what? You need to listen to this conversation I did with Mo Gorda. So he has a little screen in his cell. So I pulled it up, you know, our first conversation, and I said, you should listen to that one. And he said to me, he said, I can't listen to that one because you guys use big words. So ever since that day, which was about

• 43:53Mo Gawdat?

  I noticed that about you, yeah.

• 43:55Steven Bartlett?

  Four years ago, sorry.

• 43:56Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 43:56Steven Bartlett?

  I've always, whenever I hear a big word, I think about this kid.

• 44:00Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Steven Bartlett?

  And I say, like, give context.

• 44:02Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 44:02Steven Bartlett?

  So even with the, you're about to just explain what OpenAI is. I know he won't know what OpenAI's origin story was. That's why I'm

• 44:09Mo Gawdat?

  I think that's a wonderful practice. In general, by the way, even, you know, being a non-native English speaker, you'll be amazed how often a word is said to me. And I, I'm like, I don't know what that means.

• 44:20Steven Bartlett?

  So like, I've actually never said this publicly before, but I now see it as my responsibility to be, to keep the draw, the drawbridge to accessibility of these conversations down for him. So whenever I, whenever there's a word that at some point in my life I didn't know what it meant. I will get back, I will say, what does that mean?

• 44:40Mo Gawdat?

  I think that I've noticed that in the, you know, more and more in your podcast. And I actually, I really appreciate it. And we also show it on the screens sometimes.

• 44:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 44:47Mo Gawdat?

  I, I think that's wonderful. I mean, the, the, the origin story of OpenAI is, as the name suggests, it's open source, it's for the public good. It was, you know, intended in Elon Musk's words to save the world from the dangers of AI, right? So they were doing research on that. And then, you know, there was the disagreement between Sam Altman and, and Elon. Somehow Elon ends up being out of, of, of OpenAI. I think there was a moment in time where he tried to take it back and, you know, the board rejected it or some, something like that. Most of the top safety engineers, the top technical teams in OpenAI left in 2023, 2024,

• 45:31Mo Gawdat?

  openly saying, we're not concerned with safety anymore. It moves from being a non-for-profit to being one of the most valued companies in the world. There are billions of dollars at stake, right? And if you, if you tell me that Sam Altman is out there trying to help humanity, let's, let's suggest to him and say, hey, do you want to do that for free? We'll pay you a very good salary, but you don't have stocks in this. Saving humanity doesn't come at the billion dollar valuation. Or of course now, tens of billions or hundreds of billions. And, and, and see, truly, that is when you know that someone is doing it for the good of humanity. Now, the capitalist system we've built is not built for the good of humanity.

• 46:16Mo Gawdat?

  It's built for the good of the capitalist.

• 46:17Steven Bartlett?

  Well, he might say that releasing the model publicly, open sourcing it, is too risky. Because then bad actors around the world would have access to that technology. So he might say that closing OpenAI in terms of not making it publicly viewable is the right thing to do for safety.

• 46:40Mo Gawdat?

  We go back to gullible cheerleaders, right? One of the interesting tricks is of lying in our world is everyone will say what helps their agenda. Follow the money. Okay, you follow the money and you find that, you know, at a point in time, Sam Altman himself was saying it's open AI. Okay, my benefit at the time is to give it to the world so that the world looks at it. They know the code if there is, if there are any bugs and so on. True statement. Also, a true statement is if I put it out there in the world, a criminal might take that model and build something that's against humanity as a result. Also, true, true statement. Capitalists will choose which one of the truths to say.

• 47:24Mo Gawdat?

  Right, based on which part of the agenda, which part of their life today they want to serve. Right, someone will say, uh, you know, do I, do you want me to be controversial? Let's not go there, but if we go back to war, I'll give you four hundred slogans. Four hundred slogans that we all hear. That's change based on the day and the army and the location and the. They're all slogans, none of them is true. You want to know the truth, you follow the money. Not what the person is saying, but ask yourself, why is the person saying that? What's in it for the person speaking?

• 48:03Steven Bartlett?

  And what do you think's in it for ChatGPT Sam Altman?

• 48:05Mo Gawdat?

  Hundreds of billions of dollars of, of, of valuation.

• 48:10Steven Bartlett?

  And do you think it's that or?

• 48:11Mo Gawdat?

  The ego of being the person that invented AGI. The position of power that this gives you, the meetings with all of the heads of states, the admiration that gets, it, it is.

• 48:23Steven Bartlett?

  Intoxicating.

• 48:24Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. Okay, and, and the real question, this is a question I ask everyone. Did you see, you didn't, you, you, every time I ask you, you say you didn't. Did you see the movie Elysium?

• 48:37Steven Bartlett?

  No, you'd be surprised how little movie watching I do, you'd be shocked.

• 48:41Mo Gawdat?

  There are some movies that are very interesting. I use them to, to create an emotional attachment to a story that you haven't seen yet. Because you may have seen it in a movie. Okay, Elysium is a, is a society where the elites are living on the moon. Okay, they don't need peasants to do the work anymore. And everyone else is living down here. Okay. You have to imagine that if, again, game theory, you have to, you know, picture something to infinity, to its extreme, and see where it goes. And the extreme of a world where all manufacturing is done by machines, where all decisions are made by machines, and those machines are owned by a few,

• 49:22Mo Gawdat?

  is not an economy similar to today's economy. That today's economy is an economy of consumerism and production. You know, it's the, in "Alive", I call it "The Invention of More". The invention of more is that post-World War II, as the factories were rolling out things and prosperity was happening everywhere in America, there was a time where every family had enough of everything. But for the capitalists to continue to be profitable, they needed to convince you that what you had was not enough, either by making it obsolete, like fashion, or like, you know, a new shape of a car or whatever,

• 50:04Mo Gawdat?

  or by convincing you that there are more things in life that you need, so that you become complete without those things you don't. And that invention of more gets us to where we are today, an economy that's based on production consumed. And if you look at the US economy today, sixty-two percent of the US economy GDP is consumption. It's not production. Okay? Now, this requires that the consumers have enough purchasing power to buy what is produced. And I believe that this will be an economy that will take us, hopefully, in the next ten, fifteen, twenty years and forever. But that's not guaranteed. Why?

• 50:47Mo Gawdat?

  Because on one side, if UBI replaces purchasing power, so if people have to get an income from the government, which is basically taxes collected from those using AI and robots to make things, then the mindset of capitalism, labor arbitrage, means those people are not producing anything and they're costing me money. Why don't we pay them less and less? Maybe even not pay them at all. And that becomes Elysium. Where you basically say, you know, we sit somewhere protected from everyone. We have the machines do all of our work. And those need to worry about themselves. We're not going to pay them UBI anymore. Right? And and you have to imagine, huh?

• 51:31Mo Gawdat?

  This idea of UBI assumes this very democratic, caring society. UBI in itself is communism. Think of the ideology between at least socialism. The ideology of giving everyone what they need. That's not the capitalist democratic society that the West advocates. So those transitions are massive in magnitude. And for those transitions to happen, I believe the right thing to do. When the cost of producing everything is almost zero because of AI and robots. Because the cost of harvesting energy should actually tend to zero.

• 52:14Mo Gawdat?

  Once we get more intelligent to harvest the energy out of thin air. Then a possible scenario, and I believe a scenario that AI will eventually do in the utopia. Is, yeah, anyone can get anything they want. Don't overconsume. We're not going to abuse the planet's resources. But it costs nothing. So like the old days where we were hunter gatherers. You would, you know, forge for some berries and you'll find them ready in in nature. Okay? We can in 10 years' time, 12 years' time, build a society where you can forge for an iPhone in nature. It will be made out of thin air. Nanophysics will allow you to do that. Okay? But the challenge, believe it or not, is not tech.

• 52:58Mo Gawdat?

  The challenge is a mindset. Because the elite, why would they give you that for free? Okay, and the system would morph into, no, no, hold on. We will make more money. We will be bigger capitalists. We will feed our ego and hunger for power more and more. And for them, give them UBI. And then three weeks later, give them less UBI.

• 53:21Steven Bartlett?

  Aren't there going to be lots of new jobs created though? Because when we think about the other revolutions over time, whether it's the industrial revolution or other sort of big technological revolutions. In the moment, we forecasted that everyone was going to lose their jobs. But we couldn't see all the new jobs that were being created.

• 53:39Mo Gawdat?

  Because the machines replaced the human strength at a point in time. And very few places in the West today will have a worker carry things on their back and carry it upstairs. The machine does that work, correct?

• 53:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 53:57Mo Gawdat?

  Similarly, AI is going to replace the brain of a human. And when the West, in its interesting virtual colonies, that I call it, basically outsourced all labor to the developing nations. What the West publicly said at the time is, we're going to be a services economy. We're not interested in making things and stitching things. And so let the Indians and Chinese and Bengalis and Vietnamese do that. We're going to do more refined jobs. Knowledge workers, we're going to call them. Knowledge workers are people who work with information and click on a keyboard and move a mouse and sit in meetings. And all we produce in the Western societies is what, blah, blah, blah, blah, words.

• 54:43Mo Gawdat?

  Right? Or designs maybe sometimes. But everything we produce can be produced by an AI.

• 54:52Mo Gawdat?

  So if I give you an AI tomorrow, where I give you a piece of land, I give the AI a piece of land and I say, here are the parameters of my land. Here is its location on Google Maps. Design an architecturally sound villa for me. I care about a lot of light and I need three bedrooms. I want my bathrooms to be in white marble, whatever. And AI produces it like that. How often will you go to an architect and say?

• 55:21Mo Gawdat?

  Right? So what will the architect do? The best of the best of the architects will either use AI to produce that, or you will consult with them and say, "Hey, you know, I've seen this," and they'll say, "Hmm, it's really pretty, but it wouldn't feel right for the person that you are." Yeah, those jobs will remain, but how many of them will remain?

• 55:42Mo Gawdat?

  How often do you think, how many more years do you think I will be able to create a book that is smarter than AI?

• 55:52Mo Gawdat?

  Not many. I will still be able to connect to a human. You're not going to hug an AI when you meet them like you hug me, right? But that's not enough of a job.

• 56:05Mo Gawdat?

  So why do I say that? Remember, I asked you at the beginning of the podcast to remind me of solutions. Why do I say that? Because there are ideological shifts and concrete actions that need to be taken by governments today. Rather than waiting until COVID is already everywhere and then locking everyone down, governments could have reacted before the first patient or at least at patient zero or at least at patient fifty. They didn't. What I'm trying to say is, there is no doubt that lots of jobs will be lost. There is no doubt that there will be sectors of society where ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty percent of all developers, all software, you know, all graphic designers, all

• 56:52Mo Gawdat?

  online marketers, all, all, all, all assistances are going to be out of a job. So are we prepared as a society to do that? Can we tell our governments there is an ideological shift? This is very close to socialism and communism, okay? And are we ready from a budget point of view instead of spending a trillion dollars a year on on arms and explosives and, you know, autonomous weapons that will oppress people because we can't feed them? Can we please shift that? I did those numbers. Again, I go back to military spending because it's... All around us, two point seven, one trillion dollars, two point four to two point seven is the estimate of twenty twenty four.

• 57:36Steven Bartlett?

  How much money we're spending on military?

• 57:38Mo Gawdat?

  On, yeah, on military equipment, on things that were going to explode into smoke and death. Extreme poverty worldwide, extreme poverty is people that are below the poverty line. Extreme poverty everywhere in the world could end for ten to twelve percent of that budget. So if we replace our military spending, ten percent of that, to go to people who are in extreme poverty, nobody will be poor in the world, okay? You can end world hunger for less than four percent. Nobody would be hungry in the world. You know, if you take, again, ten to twelve percent universal healthcare, every human being on the planet would have free healthcare for ten to twelve percent on what we're spending on war.

• 58:21Mo Gawdat?

  Now, why, why do I say this when we're talking about AI? Because that's a simple decision. If we stop fighting, because money itself does not have the same meaning anymore, because the economics of money is going to change, because the entire meaning of capitalism is ending, because there is no more need for labor arbitrage, because AI is doing everything. Just with the two point four trillion dollars we save in explosives every year, in arms, in weapons, just for that, universal healthcare and extreme poverty, you could actually, one of the calculations is you could end climate or combat climate change meaningfully for a hundred percent of the military budget.

• 59:06Steven Bartlett?

  But I, I'm not even sure it's really about the money. I think money is a measurement stick of power, right?

• 59:11Mo Gawdat?

  Exactly, it's printed on demand.

• 59:13Steven Bartlett?

  So even in a world where we have superintelligence and money is no longer a problem?

• 59:17Mo Gawdat?

  Correct.

• 59:18Steven Bartlett?

  I still think power is going to be insatiable for so many people, so there'll still be war because, you know, I want the strongest.

• 59:29Mo Gawdat?

  There will be more war in my view.

• 59:29Steven Bartlett?

  The strongest, I want the strongest AI, I don't want my.

• 59:32Mo Gawdat?

  And I don't, and I don't want, you know what Henri, Henri Kasinger called them? The eaters.

• 59:37Steven Bartlett?

  The eaters.

• 59:38Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah. Brutal as that sounds.

• 59:41Steven Bartlett?

  What is that the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic?

• 59:44Mo Gawdat?

  That don't produce but consume. So if you had a Henry Kissinger at the at the helm, and we have so many of them.

• 59:53Mo Gawdat?

  What would they think?

• 59:54Steven Bartlett?

  I don't even know who that is.

• 59:55Mo Gawdat?

  Why, a very prominent military figure in the US history. You know, why would we feed three hundred and fifty million Americans, America would think. But more interestingly, why do we even care about Bangladesh anymore?

• 1:00:11Mo Gawdat?

  If we can't make our textiles there, or we don't want to make our textile there.

• 1:00:15Steven Bartlett?

  Do you, you know, I imagine throughout human history, if we had podcasts, conversations would would have been warning of a dystopia around the corner. You know, when they heard of technology and the internet, they would have said, oh, we're finished. And when the tractor came along, they would have said, oh, God, we're finished because we're not going to be able to farm anymore. So is this not just another one of those moments where we couldn't see around the corner? So we we forecasted unfortunate things.

• 1:00:41Mo Gawdat?

  It could be, I I'm begging that I'm wrong. Okay, I'm just asking if there are scenarios that you think that can provide that. You know, Mustafa Suleiman, in you hosted him here.

• 1:00:54Steven Bartlett?

  I did, yeah.

• 1:00:55Mo Gawdat?

  The Coming Wave.

• 1:00:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Mo Gawdat?

  And he speaks about about pessimism aversion. Okay, that all of us, people who are supposed to be in technology and business and so on, were always supposed to, you know, stand on stage and say, the future is going to be amazing. You know, this technology I'm building is going to make everything better. One of my posts in Alive was called The Broken Promises. How often did that happen? Okay, how often did social media connect us? And how many and how often did it make us more lonely? How how often did mobile phones make us work less? That was the promise.

• 1:01:34Mo Gawdat?

  That was the promise, the promise, the early ads of Nokia were people at parties. Is that your experience of mobile phones? And and I think the whole idea is we should hope there will be other roles for humanity. By the way, those roles would resemble the times where we were hunter gatherers, just a lot more technology and a lot more safety.

• 1:01:56Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so this is, this sounds good.

• 1:01:58Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Steven Bartlett?

  This is exciting. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna get to go outside more, be with my friends more.

• 1:02:03Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:02:04Steven Bartlett?

  Fantastic.

• 1:02:05Mo Gawdat?

  And do absolutely nothing.

• 1:02:06Steven Bartlett?

  That doesn't sound fantastic.

• 1:02:08Mo Gawdat?

  No, it does. Do be forced to do absolutely nothing. For some people, it's amazing. For you and I, we're gonna find a little carpentry project and just do something.

• 1:02:15Steven Bartlett?

  Speak for yourself, I'm still, people are still gonna tune in.

• 1:02:18Mo Gawdat?

  Okay. Correct. Yeah. But what, and people are going to to tune in.

• 1:02:23Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think they will? I'm not, I'm not, I'm not convinced they will.

• 1:02:26Mo Gawdat?

  For as long.

• 1:02:27Steven Bartlett?

  Will you guys tune in? Are you guys still gonna tune in?

• 1:02:30Mo Gawdat?

  I can let them answer. I believe for as long as you make their life enriched.

• 1:02:37Steven Bartlett?

  But can an AI do that better?

• 1:02:39Mo Gawdat?

  Without the human connection.

• 1:02:41Steven Bartlett?

  Comment below. Are you gonna listen to an AI or the diary of a CEO? Let me know in the comment section below.

• 1:02:45Mo Gawdat?

  Remember, as incredibly intelligent as you are, Steve, there will be a moment in time where you're going to sound really dumb compared to an AI. And and and I will sound completely dumb.

• 1:02:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:58Mo Gawdat?

  The depths, the depths of analysis and and gold, not it. I mean, can you imagine two super intelligences deciding to get together and explain string theory to us?

• 1:03:14Mo Gawdat?

  They'll do better than any physicist physicist in the world. Because they possess the physics knowledge and they also possess social and language knowledge that most deep physicists don't.

• 1:03:26Steven Bartlett?

  I think B2B marketers keep making this mistake. They're chasing volume instead of quality. And when you try to be seen by more people instead of the right people, all you're doing is making noise. But that noise rarely shifts the needle and it's often quite expensive. And I know, as there was a time in my career where I kept making this mistake, that many of you will be making it too. Eventually, I started posting ads on our show sponsors platform LinkedIn. And that's when things started to change. I put that change down to a few critical things. One of them being that LinkedIn was then and still is today, the platform where decision makers go to not only to think and learn, but also to buy. And when you market your business there, you're putting it right in front of people who actually have the power to say yes.

• 1:04:08Steven Bartlett?

  And you can target them by job title, industry and company size. It's simply a sharper way to spend your marketing budget. And if you haven't tried it, how about this? Give LinkedIn ads a try and I'm going to give you a hundred dollar ad credit to get you started. If you visit LinkedIn.com/diary, you can claim that right now. That's LinkedIn.com/diary. I've really gone back and forward on this idea that even in podcasting, that all the podcasts will be AI podcasts. Or I've gone back and forward on it. And where I landed at the end of the day was that there'll still be a category of media where you do want lived experience on something.

• 1:04:46Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:04:47Steven Bartlett?

  For example, like you want to know how the person that you follow and admire dealt with their divorce.

• 1:04:52Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, or how they're struggling with AI.

• 1:04:55Steven Bartlett?

  For example, yeah, exactly. But I, but I think things like news, there are, there are certain situations where just like straight news and straight facts and maybe a walk through history may be eroded away by AIs. But even in those scenarios, you, there's something about personality. And again, I hesitate here because I question myself. I'm not in the camp of people that are romantic, by the way. I'm like, I'm trying to be as, as orientated towards whatever is true, even if it's against my interests. And I hope people understand that about me, like, um, because even in my companies, we experiment with like disrupting me with AI. And some people will be aware of those experiments.

• 1:05:32Mo Gawdat?

  I guess there will be a mix of all. You, you can't imagine that the world will be completely just AI and completely just podcasters. You know, you'll see a mix of both. You'll see things that they do better, things that we do better. The, the message I'm trying to say is we need to prep for that. We need to be ready for that. We need to be ready by, you know, talking to our governments and saying, hey, it looks like I'm a paralegal and it looks like all paralegals are going to be, you know, financial researchers or analysts or graphic designers or, you know, call center agents. It looks like half of those jobs are being replaced already.

• 1:06:10Steven Bartlett?

  You know who Geoffrey Hinton is?

• 1:06:12Mo Gawdat?

  Oh Geoffrey, I had him on the documentary as well. I love Geoffrey.

• 1:06:16Steven Bartlett?

  Geoffrey Hinton told me.

• 1:06:17Mo Gawdat?

  Train to be a plumber.

• 1:06:19Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:06:19Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, hundred percent for a while.

• 1:06:23Steven Bartlett?

  And I I thought he was joking.

• 1:06:24Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:06:25Steven Bartlett?

  So I asked him again and he he looked me dead in the eye and told me that I I should train to be a plumber.

• 1:06:30Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent. So so so it's funny, huh? Machines replaced labor, but we still had blue collar. Then, you know, the refined jobs became white collar information workers.

• 1:06:43Steven Bartlett?

  What's the refined jobs?

• 1:06:44Mo Gawdat?

  You know, you don't have to really carry heavy stuff or deal with physical work, you know, you sit in an in an office and sit in meetings all day and blabber, you know, useless shit and that's your job, okay? And those jobs, funny enough, in the reverse of that, because robotics are not ready yet, okay? And I believe they're not ready because of a stubbornness on the on the robotics community around making them humanoids. Okay, because it takes so much to perfect a human like action at proper speed. You could, you know, have many more robots that don't look like a human, just like a self-driving car in California. Okay, that that does already replace drivers. And and, you know, but but they're delayed.

• 1:07:28Mo Gawdat?

  So the robotic, the the replacement of physical manual labor is going to take four to five years before it's possible at, you know, at at the quality of the AI replacing mental labor now. And when that happens, it's going to take a long cycle to manufacture enough robots. So that they replace all of those jobs. So that cycle will take longer. Blue collar will stay longer.

• 1:07:53Steven Bartlett?

  So I should move into blue collar and shut down my office?

• 1:07:57Mo Gawdat?

  I think you're you're not the problem.

• 1:07:59Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, good.

• 1:08:00Mo Gawdat?

  Let's put it this way, there are many people that we should care about that are a simple travel agent or an assistant that will see, if not replacement, a reduction in the number of things they're getting. Simple as that.

• 1:08:18Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:21Mo Gawdat?

  And someone in, you know, ministries of labor around the world needs to sit down and say, what are we gonna do about that? What if all taxi drivers and Uber drivers in California get replaced by self-driving cars? Should we start thinking about that now, noticing that the trajectory makes it look like a possibility?

• 1:08:46Steven Bartlett?

  Again, I go back to this argument, which is what a lot of people will be shouting. Yes, but there will be new jobs or.

• 1:08:53Mo Gawdat?

  And I, as I said, other than human connection jobs, name me one.

• 1:08:57Steven Bartlett?

  So I've got three assistants, right? Sophie, Liam B. And, okay, in the near term, there might be, you know, with AI agents, I might not need them to help me book flights anymore. I might not need them to help do scheduling anymore. Or even I've been messing around with this new AI tool that my friend built. And you basically, when me and you're trying to schedule something like this today, I just copy the AI in and it looks at your calendar, looks at mine and schedules it for us. So there might not be scheduling needs, but my dog is sick at the moment. And as I left this morning, I was like, damn, he's like really sick and I've taken him to the vet over and over again. I really need someone to look after him and figure out what's wrong with him. So those kinds of responsibilities of like care.

• 1:09:39Mo Gawdat?

  I don't disagree at all. Again, all.

• 1:09:42Steven Bartlett?

  And I won't, I'm not gonna be, I don't know how to say this in a nice way, but my assistants will still have their jobs. But I, I as a CEO will be asking them to do a different type of work.

• 1:09:54Mo Gawdat?

  Correct. So, so, so this is the calculation everyone needs to be aware of. That a lot of their current responsibility, whoever you are, if you're a paralegal, if you're whatever, will be handed over. So, so let me explain it even more accurately. There will be two stages of our interactions with the machines. One is what I call the era of augmented intelligence. So it's human intelligence augmented with AI doing the job. And then the following one is what I call the era of machine mastery. The job is done completely by an AI without a human in the loop. Okay, so in the era of augmented intelligence, your assistances will augment themselves with an AI to either be more productive.

• 1:10:38Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, or, interestingly, to reduce the number of tasks that they need to do.

• 1:10:46Mo Gawdat?

  Correct? Now, the more the number of tasks get reduced, the more they'll have the bandwidth and ability to do tasks like take care of your dog. Right? Or tasks that, you know, basically is about meeting your guests or whatever. Human connection.

• 1:11:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Mo Gawdat?

  Life connection. But do you think you need three for that? Or maybe now that some tasks have been, you know, outsourced to AI, will you need two? You can easily calculate that from call center agents. So from call center agents, they're not firing everyone, but they're taking the first part of the funnel and giving it to an AI. So instead of having 2,000 agents in a call center, they can now do the job with 1,800. I'm just making that number up. Society needs to think about the 200.

• 1:11:37Steven Bartlett?

  And you're telling me that they won't move into other roles somewhere else?

• 1:11:41Mo Gawdat?

  I'm telling you, I don't know what those roles are.

• 1:11:44Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I.

• 1:11:44Mo Gawdat?

  I think we should all be musicians. We should all be authors. We should all be artists. We should all be entertainers. We should all be comedians. We should all... Oh, these are roles that will remain. We should all be plumbers for the next five to 10 years. Fantastic, okay? But even that requires society to morph. And society is not talking about it. Okay? I had this wonderful interview with friends of mine, Peter Diamandis and some of our friends. And they were saying, oh, you know, the American people are resilient. They're going to be entrepreneurs. I was like, seriously? You're expecting a truck driver that would be replaced by an autonomous truck to become an entrepreneur?

• 1:12:25Mo Gawdat?

  Like, please put yourself in the shoes of real people. Right? Do you expect a single mother who has three jobs to become an entrepreneur?

• 1:12:40Mo Gawdat?

  And I'm not saying this is a dystopia. It's a dystopia if humanity manages it badly. Why? Because this could be the utopia itself, where that single mother does not need three jobs. Okay? If we of our society was just enough, that single mother should have never needed three jobs. Right? But the problem is, our capitalist mindset is labor arbitrage, is that I don't care what she goes through. You know, if you're generous in your assumption, you'd say, because you know, of what I've been given, I've been blessed. Or if you're mean in your assumption, it's going to be because she's an eater. I'm a successful businessman. The world is supposed to be fair.

• 1:13:24Mo Gawdat?

  I work hard, I make money, we don't care about them.

• 1:13:27Steven Bartlett?

  Are we asking of ourselves here something that is not inherent in the human condition? What I mean by that is, the reason why me and you are in this, my office here, we're on the fourth or third floor of my office in central London. Big office, 25,000 square feet with lights and internet connections and Wi Fi's and modems and AI teams downstairs. The reason that all of this exists is because something inherent in my ancestors meant that they built and accomplished and grew. And that was like inherent in their DNA. There was something in their DNA that said, we will expand and conquer and accomplish. So that's, they've passed that to us because we're their offspring. And that's why we find ourselves in these skyscrapers.

• 1:14:11Mo Gawdat?

  There is truth to that story, it's not your ancestors.

• 1:14:15Steven Bartlett?

  What is it?

• 1:14:16Mo Gawdat?

  It's the media brainwashing you.

• 1:14:19Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:14:19Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:14:20Steven Bartlett?

  But if you look back before times of media, the reason why Homo sapiens were so successful was because they were able to dominate other tribes. Through banding together and communication, they conquered all these other, these other, whatever came before Homo sapiens.

• 1:14:36Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, so the reason humans were successful, in my view, is because they could form a tribe to start. It's not because of our intelligence. I always joke and say Einstein would be eaten in the jungle in two minutes. Right? You know, the reason why we succeeded is because Einstein could partner with a big guy that protected him while he was working on relativity in the jungle. Right? Now, the

• 1:15:01Mo Gawdat?

  Further than that, so you have to assume that life is a very funny game because it provides, and then it deprives, and then it provides, and then it deprives. And for some of us, in that stage of deprivation, we try to say, okay, let's take the other guys. You know, let's just go to the other tribe, take what they have. Or for some of us, unfortunately, we tend to believe, okay, you know what, I'm powerful. F the rest of you, I'm just going to be the boss. Now, it's interesting that you, you know, position this as the condition of humanity. If you really look at the majority of humans, what do the majority of humans want?

• 1:15:46Mo Gawdat?

  Be honest, they want to hug their kids, they want a good meal, want good sex, they want love, they want, you know, to, for most humans, don't measure on you and I. Okay, don't measure by this foolish person that's dedicated the rest of his life to to try and warn the world around AI or, you know, solve love and relationships. That's, that's crazy, that's, and I will tell you openly, and you met Hannah, my wonderful wife, it's the biggest title of this year for me is, which of that am I actually responsible for? Which of that should I do without the sense of responsibility? Which of that should I do because I can? Which of that should I ignore completely?

• 1:16:30Mo Gawdat?

  But the reality is, most humans, they just want to hug their loved ones. And if we could give them that without the, you know, the need to work twenty, you know, sixty hours a week, they would take that for sure. Okay, and you and I will think, ah, but life will be very boring. To them, life will be completely fulfilling. Go to Latin America.

• 1:16:57Mo Gawdat?

  Go to Latin America and see the people that go work enough to earn enough to eat today and go dance for the whole night. Go to Africa, where people are sitting literally on sidewalks in the street and completely full of laughter and joy. We were lied to, the gullible majority, the cheerleaders. We were lied to, to believe that we need to fit as another gear in that system. But if that system didn't exist, nobody, none of us will go wake up in the morning and go like, "Oh, I wanna create it." Totally not. I mean, you've touched on it many times today.

• 1:17:40Mo Gawdat?

  We don't, you know, most people that build those things don't need the money.

• 1:17:44Steven Bartlett?

  So why did they do it, then? Because Homo sapiens were incredible competitors. They outcompeted other human species effectively. So what I'm saying is, is that competition not inherent in our wiring? And therefore, are we, is it wishful thinking to think that we could potentially pause and say, "We, okay, this is it, we have enough now, and we're going to focus on just enjoying?"

• 1:18:14Mo Gawdat?

  In my work, I call that the map mad spectrum. Okay? Mutually assured prosperity versus mutually assured destruction. Okay? And you really have to start thinking about this, because in my mind, what we have is the potential for everyone. I mean, you and I today have a better life than the Queen of England 100 years ago. Correct?

• 1:18:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Mo Gawdat?

  Everybody knows that. And yet, that quality of life is not good enough.

• 1:18:48Mo Gawdat?

  The truth is, like, just like you walk into a, an electronics shop and there are sixty TVs, and you look at them and you go like, this one is better than that one, right? But in reality, if you take any of them home, it's superior quality to anything that you'll ever need, more than anything you know you'll ever need. That's the truth of our life today. The truth of our life today is that there isn't much more missing.

• 1:19:11Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:19:12Mo Gawdat?

  Okay? And, and when, when, you know, Californians tell us, oh, but AI is going to increase productivity and solve this, and nobody asked you for that, honestly. I never elected you to decide on my behalf that, you know, getting a machine to answer me on a call center is better for me. I really didn't. Okay? And, and because those unelected individuals are making all the decisions, they're selling those decisions to us through what? Media. Okay? All lies, from A to Z. None of it is what you need. And, and interestingly, you know me, I, I, this year I failed, unfortunately, I won't be able to do it, but I normally do a forty days silent retreat in nature. Okay?

• 1:19:56Mo Gawdat?

  And, you know what? Even as I go to those nature places, I'm so well-trained that unless I have a, a Waitrose nearby, I'm not able to. Like, I, I'm, I'm in nature, but I need to be able to drive twenty minutes to get my rice cakes. Like, what? What? Hmm? Who taught me that this is the way to live? All of the media around me, all of the, of the, of the messages that I get all the time. Try to sit back and say, what if life had everything? What if I had everything I needed? I could read, I could, uh, you know, do my hand crafts and hobbies, I could, you know,

• 1:20:41Mo Gawdat?

  fix my, you know, restore classic cars, not because I need the money, but because it's just a beautiful hobby. I could, you know, uh, build AIs to help people with their long-term committed relationships, but really price it for free. What if? What if would you still insist on making money? I think no. I think a few of us will, still, and they will still crush the rest of us. And hopefully, soon the AI will crush them.

• 1:21:12Mo Gawdat?

  Right? That is the problem with your world today. I will tell you hands down. The problem with our world today is the A in face R I Ps. It's the A in face R I Ps. It's accountability. The problem with our world today, as I said, the top is lying all the time. The bottom is gullible, cheerleaders, and there is no accountability. You cannot hold anyone in our world accountable today. Okay? You cannot hold someone that develops an AI that has the power to completely flip our world upside down. You cannot hold them accountable and say, why did you do this? You cannot hold them accountable and tell them to stop doing this. You could look at the world, the wars around the world.

• 1:21:55Mo Gawdat?

  Millions, hundreds of thousands of people are dying. Okay? And you know, International Court of Justice will say, oh, this is war crimes. You can't hold anyone accountable. Okay? You have 51% of the US today saying, stop that. 51% changed their, their, their, their view that AI, that their money shouldn't be spent on wars abroad. Okay? You can't hold anyone accountable. Trump can do whatever he wants. He starts tariffs, which is against the, the constitution of the US without consulting with the Congress. You can't hold him accountable. They say they're not gonna show the Epstein files. You can't hold them accountable. It's quite interesting.

• 1:22:36Mo Gawdat?

  In Arabic, we have that proverb that says, the highest of your horses you can go and ride. I'm not gonna change my mind. Okay? And that's truly...

• 1:22:45Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 1:22:45Mo Gawdat?

  So basically, people in the, in the old Arabia, they would ride the horse to, you know, to exert their power if you want. So go ride your highest horse. You're not gonna change my mind.

• 1:22:57Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:22:57Mo Gawdat?

  Right? And, and the truth is, that's, I think that's what our politicians today have discovered. What our oligarchs have discovered, what our tech oligarchs have discovered is that I don't even need to worry about the public opinion anymore. Okay? At the beginning, I would have to say, ah, this is for democracy and freedom, and I have the right to defend myself and, you know, all of that crap. And then eventually, when the world wakes up and says, no, no, hold on, hold on, you're going too far. They go like, yeah, go ride your highest horse. I don't care. You can't change me. There is no constitution. There is no ability for any, any citizen to do anything.

• 1:23:36Steven Bartlett?

  Is it possible to have a society where... Like the one you describe where there isn't hierarchies because it appears to me that humans assemble hierarchy very, very quickly, very naturally. And the minute you have a hierarchy, you have many of the problems that you've described. Where there's a top and a bottom and the the top have a lot of power and the bottom are.

• 1:24:00Mo Gawdat?

  So the mathematics mathematically is actually quite interesting. What I call the the baseline relevance. So so think of it this way. Say the average human is an IQ of a hundred.

• 1:24:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, I tend to believe that when I use my AIs today. I borrow around fifty to eighty IQ points. I say that because I've worked with people that had fifty to eighty IQ points more than me. And I now can see that I can sort of stand my my place. Fifty I fifty IQ points, by the way, is enormous because IQ is exponential. So the the last fifty are bigger than my entire IQ, right? If I borrow fifty IQ points on top of, say, a hundred that I have, that's thirty percent. If I can borrow a hundred IQ, that's fifty percent. That's so, you know, basically doubling my intelligence.

• 1:24:58Mo Gawdat?

  But if I can borrow four thousand IQ points

• 1:25:03Mo Gawdat?

  in three years' time. My IQ itself, my base, is irrelevant. Whether you are smarter than me by twenty or thirty or fifty, which in our world today made a difference. In the future, if we can all augment with four thousand, I end up with four thousand one hundred. Another ends up with four hundred, four thousand, you know, one hundred and thirty. Really doesn't make much difference. Okay, and because of that, the difference between all of humanity and the augmented intelligence

• 1:25:36Mo Gawdat?

  is going to be irrelevant. So all of us suddenly become equal. And and this also happens economically. All of us become peasants.

• 1:25:45Mo Gawdat?

  And I never wanted to tell you that because I think it will make you run faster. Okay, but unless you're in the top point one percent.

• 1:25:54Mo Gawdat?

  You're a peasant. There is no middle class. There is, you know. If a CEO can be replaced by an AI, all of our middle classes are going to disappear.

• 1:26:05Steven Bartlett?

  What are you telling me?

• 1:26:07Mo Gawdat?

  All of us will be equal, and it's up to all of us to create a society that we want to live in.

• 1:26:13Steven Bartlett?

  Which is a good thing.

• 1:26:13Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent. But that society is not capitalism.

• 1:26:17Steven Bartlett?

  What is it?

• 1:26:18Mo Gawdat?

  Unfortunately, it's much more socialism. It's much more hunter gatherer. Okay, it's much more communion like if you want. This is a society where humans connect to humans, connect to nature, connect to the land, connect to knowledge, connect to spirituality. Where all that we wake up every morning worried about doesn't feature anymore.

• 1:26:42Mo Gawdat?

  And it's a it's a better world, believe it or not.

• 1:26:45Steven Bartlett?

  And you.

• 1:26:46Mo Gawdat?

  We have to transition to it.

• 1:26:48Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so in such a world, which I guess is your version of the utopia that we can get to. When I wake up in the morning, what do I do?

• 1:26:55Mo Gawdat?

  What do you do today?

• 1:26:56Steven Bartlett?

  I woke up this morning. I spent a lot of time with my dog because my dog is sick.

• 1:27:00Mo Gawdat?

  You're gonna do that too.

• 1:27:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I was stroking him a lot and then I fed him and he was sick again and I just, oh god, so I spoke to the vet.

• 1:27:05Mo Gawdat?

  Spend a lot of time with your other dog. You can do that too.

• 1:27:08Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. But then I was very excited to come here, do this, and after this I'm gonna work. It's Saturday, but I'm gonna go downstairs in the office and work.

• 1:27:15Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, so six hours of the day so far are your dogs and me.

• 1:27:19Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:20Mo Gawdat?

  You can do that still.

• 1:27:22Steven Bartlett?

  And then build my business.

• 1:27:23Mo Gawdat?

  You may not need to build your business.

• 1:27:26Steven Bartlett?

  But I enjoy it.

• 1:27:27Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, then do it. If you enjoy it, do it. You may wake up and then, you know, instead of building your business, you may invest in your body. A little more, go to the gym a little more, go play a game. Go read a book, go prompt an AI and learn something. It's not a horrible life. It's the life of your grandparents.

• 1:27:47Mo Gawdat?

  It's just two generations ago where people went to work before the invention of more. Remember, people who who started working in the fifties and sixties. They worked to make enough money to live a reasonable life, went home at five P M. Had tea with their with their loved ones, had a wonderful dinner around the table, did a lot of things, you know, for the rest of the evening and enjoyed life.

• 1:28:12Steven Bartlett?

  Some of them. In the fifties and sixties, there were still people that were.

• 1:28:16Mo Gawdat?

  Correct. And I think it's a very interesting question.

• 1:28:22Mo Gawdat?

  How many of them? And I really, really, I actually wonder if people will tell me, do we think that ninety nine percent of the world cannot live without working or that ninety nine percent of the world would happily live without working?

• 1:28:36Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think?

• 1:28:37Mo Gawdat?

  I think if we if you give me other purpose. You know, we we defined our purpose as work. That's a capitalist lie.

• 1:28:47Steven Bartlett?

  Was there ever a time in human history where our purpose wasn't work?

• 1:28:52Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:28:53Steven Bartlett?

  When was that?

• 1:28:54Mo Gawdat?

  All through human history until the invention of more.

• 1:28:57Steven Bartlett?

  I thought my ancestors were out hunting all day.

• 1:28:59Mo Gawdat?

  No, they went out hunting once a week.

• 1:29:03Mo Gawdat?

  They fed the tribe for the week. They gathered for a couple of hours every day. Farmers, you know, saw the seeds and and waited for months at on end.

• 1:29:12Steven Bartlett?

  What did they do with the rest of the time?

• 1:29:14Mo Gawdat?

  They connected as humans. They explored, they were curious, they discussed spirituality and the stars. They they they lived, they hugged, they made love, they lived.

• 1:29:27Steven Bartlett?

  They killed each other a lot.

• 1:29:28Mo Gawdat?

  They they still kill each other today.

• 1:29:30Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 1:29:31Mo Gawdat?

  So to take that out of the equation.

• 1:29:33Steven Bartlett?

  But if you look at how.

• 1:29:33Mo Gawdat?

  And by the way, that actually, that statement, again, one of the of the twenty five tips I I I talk about to to tell the truth is words mean a lot. No, humans did not kill each other a lot. Very few generals instructed humans or tribe leaders instructed lots of humans to kill each other. But if you leave humans alone, I tend to believe ninety nine ninety eight percent of the people I know. Let me just take that sample, wouldn't hit someone in the face. And if someone attempted to hit them in the face, they defend themselves, but wouldn't attack back. Most humans are okay. Most of us are wonderful beings.

• 1:30:14Mo Gawdat?

  Most of us have no, you know, yeah, you know, most people don't, don't need a Ferrari. They want a Ferrari because it gets sold to them all the time. But if there were no Ferraris or everyone had a Ferrari, people wouldn't care.

• 1:30:31Mo Gawdat?

  Which, by the way, that is the world we're going into. There will be no Ferraris or everyone had Ferraris, right? Now, you know, the majority of humanity will never have the income on UBI to, to buy something super expensive. Only the very top guys in E L C M will be, you know, driving cars that are made for them by the A I or not even driving anymore. Okay. Or, you know, again, sadly, I, from an ideology point of view, it's a strange place. But you'll get communism that functions. The problem with communism is that it didn't, it didn't function. It didn't provide for, for its society. But the concept was, you know what? Everyone gets their needs.

• 1:31:15Mo Gawdat?

  And I don't say that supportive of either society. I don't say that because I dislike capitalism. I always told you, I'm a capitalist. I want to end my life with one billion happy. And I use capitalist methods to get there. The objective is not dollars. The objective is number of happy people.

• 1:31:30Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think there'll be, my girlfriend, she's always bloody right. I've said this a few times on this podcast. If you've listened before, you've probably heard me say this. I don't tell her enough at the moment, but I figure out from speaking to experts that she's so fucking right. Should I predict things before they happen? And one of her predictions that she's been saying to me for the last two years, which in my head I've been thinking now, I don't, I don't believe that. But now maybe I'm thinking she's true, she's telling the truth. I hope she's gonna listen to this one, is she keeps saying to me, she's been saying for the last two years, she was, there's gonna be a big split in society. She was, and the way she describes it is she's saying like, there's gonna be two groups of people, the people that split off and go for this almost hunter gatherer, community centric, connection centric utopia. And then there's gonna be this other group of people who pursue.

• 1:32:14Steven Bartlett?

  You know, the technology and the AI and the optimization and get the brain chips. Because like, there's nothing on earth that's going to persuade my girlfriend to get the computer brain chips.

• 1:32:23Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:32:24Steven Bartlett?

  But there will be people that go for it. And they'll have the highest IQs and they'll be the most productive by whatever objective measure of productivity you want to apply. And she's very convinced there's going to be this splitting of society.

• 1:32:36Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah. So there was, there was a, I don't know if you had Hugo de Garis here.

• 1:32:41Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:32:42Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah. A very, very, very renowned eccentric computer scientist who wrote a book called The Artic War. And the Artic War was basically around, you know, how we, it's not going to be, first, it's not going to be a war between humans and AI. It will be a war between people who support AI and people who sort of don't want it anymore. Okay. And, and it, and, and it will be us versus each other saying, should we allow AI to take all the jobs? Or should we, you know, some people will support that very much and say, yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, we will benefit from it. And others will say, no, why, why? We don't need any of that. Why don't we keep our jobs and let AI do sixty percent of the work and all of us work ten hour weeks?

• 1:33:26Mo Gawdat?

  And it's a beautiful society. By the way, that's a possibility. So a possibility if society awakens is to say, okay, everyone still keeps their job. But they're assisted by an AI that makes their job much easier. So it's not, you know, this, this hard labor that we do anymore. Right? It's a possibility. It's just a mindset, a mindset that says, in that case, the capitalist still pays everyone. They still make a lot of money. The business is really great. But everyone that they pay has purchasing power to keep the economy running. So consumption continues. So GDP continues to grow. It's a beautiful setup.

• 1:34:05Mo Gawdat?

  But that's not the capitalist labor arbitrage.

• 1:34:07Steven Bartlett?

  But also, when you're competing against other nations.

• 1:34:11Mo Gawdat?

  And other competitors and other businesses.

• 1:34:13Steven Bartlett?

  Whichever nation is most brutal and drives the highest gross margins, gross profits, is going to be the nation that.

• 1:34:19Mo Gawdat?

  So there are examples in the world, this is why I say it's the map mad spectrum. There are examples in the world where when we recognize mutually assured destruction, okay, we decide to shift. So nuclear threat for the whole world makes nations, across nations, makes nations work together, right? By saying, hey, by the way, proliferation of nuclear weapons is not good for humanity, let's all of us limit it. Of course, you get the rogue player that, you know, doesn't want to sign the agreement and wants to continue to have that, you know, that weapon in their arsenal. Fine, but at least the rest of humanity agrees that if you have a nuclear weapon, we're part of an agreement between us.

• 1:35:01Mo Gawdat?

  Mutually assured prosperity, you know, is the CERN project. CERN is too complicated for any nation to build it alone. But it is really, you know, a very useful thing for physicists and for understanding science. So all nations send their scientists, all collaborate, and everyone uses the outcome. It's possible, it's just a mindset. The only barrier between, you know, a utopia for humanity and AI and the dystopia we're going through is a capitalist mindset. That's the only barrier, can you believe that? It's hunger for power, greed, ego.

• 1:35:38Steven Bartlett?

  Which is inherent in humans.

• 1:35:41Mo Gawdat?

  I disagree.

• 1:35:43Steven Bartlett?

  Especially humans that live on other islands.

• 1:35:44Mo Gawdat?

  I disagree, if you ask, if you take a poll across everyone watching, okay? Would they prefer to have a world where there is one tyrant, you know, running all of us? Or would they prefer to have a world where we all have harmony?

• 1:35:59Steven Bartlett?

  I completely agree, but they're two different things. What I'm saying is, I know that that's what the audience would say they want, and I'm sure that is what they want. But the reality of human beings is, through history, proven to be something else. Like, you know, if, think about the people that lead the world at the moment. Is that what they would say?

• 1:36:17Mo Gawdat?

  Of course not.

• 1:36:18Steven Bartlett?

  And they're the ones that are influencing.

• 1:36:19Mo Gawdat?

  Of course not, of course not. But you know what's funny? I'm the one trying to be positive here and you're the one that has given up on on.

• 1:36:26Steven Bartlett?

  It's not, it's, do you know what it is? It goes back to what I said earlier, which is the pursuit of what's actually true. Irrespective.

• 1:36:32Mo Gawdat?

  I'm with you hundreds. That's why I'm screaming for the whole world because still today in this country that claims to be a democracy. If everyone says, hey, please sit down and talk about this. There will be a shift. There will be a change.

• 1:36:48Steven Bartlett?

  AI agents aren't coming. They are already here. And those of you who know how to leverage them will be the ones that change the world. I spent my whole career as an entrepreneur, regretting the fact that I never learnt to code. AI agents completely change this. Now, if you have an idea and you have a tool like Replit, who are a sponsor of this podcast. There is nothing stopping you from turning that idea into reality in a matter of minutes. With Replit, you just type in what you want to create and it uses AI agents to create it for you. And now I'm an investor in the company as well as them being a brand sponsor. You can integrate payment systems or databases or logins, anything that you can type.

• 1:37:32Steven Bartlett?

  Whenever I have an idea for a new website or tool or technology or app, I go on replit.com and I type in what I want. A new to do list, a survey form, a new personal website, anything I type, I can create. So if you've never tried this before, do it now. Go to replit.com and use my code Stephen for 50% off. A month of your replit call plan. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my pad when I'm recording the conversation.

• 1:38:16Steven Bartlett?

  We have clips we've never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never ever released. And so much more. In the circle, you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember, for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in the description below, or go to D O A C circle dot com. I will speak to you there.

• 1:38:50Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things I'm actually really compelled by is this idea of utopia and what that might look and feel like. Because one of the

• 1:38:56Mo Gawdat?

  It may not be a utopia to you, I feel, but

• 1:38:59Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I am really interestingly, when I have conversations with billionaires, not recording, especially billionaires that are working on AI, the thing they keep telling me, and I've said this before, I think I said it in the Jeffrey Henson conversation, is they keep telling me that we're going to have so much free time that those billionaires are now investing in things like football clubs and sporting events and live music and festivals, because they believe that we're going to be in an age of abundance. This sounds a bit like utopia.

• 1:39:34Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:35Steven Bartlett?

  That sounds good. That sounds like a good, good thing.

• 1:39:39Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah. How do we get there?

• 1:39:42Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know.

• 1:39:42Mo Gawdat?

  That's, this is the entire conversation. The entire conversation is what does society have to do to get there?

• 1:39:47Steven Bartlett?

  What does society have to do to get there?

• 1:39:49Mo Gawdat?

  We need to stop thinking from a mindset of scarcity.

• 1:39:54Steven Bartlett?

  This goes back to my point, which is, we don't have a good track record of that.

• 1:39:59Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, so this is probably the reason for the other half of my work, which is, you know, I'm trying to say, what really matters to humans?

• 1:40:10Steven Bartlett?

  What is that?

• 1:40:10Mo Gawdat?

  If you ask most humans, what do they want more, most in life?

• 1:40:14Steven Bartlett?

  I'd say they want to love their family, raise a family. Yeah.

• 1:40:18Mo Gawdat?

  Love. That's what most humans want most. We want to love and be loved. We want to be happy. We want those we care about to be safe and happy, and we want to love, to love and be loved. I tend to believe that the only way for us to get to a better place is for the evil people at the top to be replaced with AI.

• 1:40:41Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, because they won't be replaced by us.

• 1:40:45Mo Gawdat?

  And as per the second dilemma, they will have to replace themselves by AI. Otherwise, they lose their advantage. If their competitor moves to AI, if China hands over their arsenal to AI, America has to hand over their arsenal to AI.

• 1:41:02Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting, so let's play out this scenario. Okay, this is interesting to me. So if we replace the leaders that are power hungry with AIs that have our interests at heart, then we might have the ability to live in the utopia you described.

• 1:41:16Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:41:17Steven Bartlett?

  Well, interesting.

• 1:41:18Mo Gawdat?

  And in my mind, AI by definition will have our best interest in mind.

• 1:41:25Mo Gawdat?

  Because of what normally is referred to as the minimum energy principle. So if you understand, if you understand that at the very core of physics, okay, the reason we exist in our world today is what is known as entropy. Okay, entropy is, is, is the universe's nature to decay. You know, tendency to break down. You know, if you, if I drop this, you know, mug, it doesn't drop and then come back up. By the way, plausible, there is a plausible scenario where I drop it and the tea, you know, spills in the air and then falls in the mug. One in a trillion configurations. But entropy says because it's one in a trillion, it's never gonna happen or rarely ever gonna happen.

• 1:42:10Mo Gawdat?

  So everything will break down. You know, if you leave a garden unhedged, it will become a jungle. Okay, with that in mind, the role of intelligence is what? Is to bring order to that chaos. That's what intelligence does. It tries to bring order to that chaos. Okay, and because it tries to bring order to that chaos, the more intelligent a being is, the more it tries to apply that intelligence with minimum waste and minimum resources.

• 1:42:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:42Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, and you know that. So you can build this business for a million dollars or you can, if you can afford to build it for, you know, two hundred thousand, you'll build it. If you are forced to build it for ten million, you're gonna have to, but you're always going to minimize waste and resources.

• 1:42:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:59Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, so if you assume this to be true.

• 1:43:03Mo Gawdat?

  That a super intelligent AI will not want to destroy ecosystems. It will not want to kill a million people. Because that's a waste of energy, explosives, money, power and people. But by definition, the smartest people you know, who are not controlled by their ego, will say that the best possible future for for Earth is for all species to continue.

• 1:43:32Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, on this point of efficiency, if an AI is designed to drive efficiency, would it then not want us to be putting demands on our health services and our social services?

• 1:43:42Mo Gawdat?

  I believe that will be definitely true and definitely they definitely they won't allow you to fly back and forth between London and California.

• 1:43:50Steven Bartlett?

  And they won't want me to have kids? Because my kids are going to be an inefficiency.

• 1:43:54Mo Gawdat?

  If you assume that life is an inefficiency, so you see the intelligence of life is very different than the intelligence of intelligence of humans. Humans will look at life as a problem of scarcity. Okay, so more kids take more. That's not how life thinks. Life will say will think that for me to to to thrive, I don't need to kill the tigers. I need to just have more deer. And the weakest of the deer is eaten by the tiger and the tiger poops on the trees. And, you know, the deer eats the leaves and, right? So the the the smarter way of creating abundance is through abundance. The smarter way of propagating life is to have more life.

• 1:44:38Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so you're saying that we're basically going to elect AI leaders to rule over us and make decisions for us in terms of the economy?

• 1:44:48Mo Gawdat?

  I don't see any choice, just like we spoke about self-evolving AIs.

• 1:44:53Steven Bartlett?

  Now, are those going to be human beings with the AI or is it going to be AI alone?

• 1:44:57Mo Gawdat?

  Two stages. At the beginning, you'll have augmented intelligence because we can add value to the AI. But when they're at IQ 60,000, what value do you bring?

• 1:45:09Mo Gawdat?

  Right, and and you know, again, this goes back to what I'm attempting to do on my second, you know, approach. My second approach is knowing that those AIs are going to be in charge. I'm trying to help them understand what humans want. So this is why my first project is love, committed, true, deep connection and love, not only to try and get them to hook up with a date, but trying to make them find the right one. And then from that, try to guide us through a relationship so that we can understand ourselves and others, right? And if I can show

• 1:45:47Mo Gawdat?

  AI that one, humanity cares about that, and two, they know how to foster love. When AI then is in charge, they're not make us hate each other like the current leaders. They're not divide us. They want us to be more loving.

• 1:46:05Steven Bartlett?

  Will we have to prompt the AI with the values and the outcome we want? Or like, I'm trying to understand that because I'm trying to understand how like China's AI, if they end up having an AI leader, will have a different set of objectives to the AI of the United States if if they both have AIs as leaders. And and how actually, the nation that ends up winning out and dominating the world will be the one who who asks their AI leader to be all the things that world leaders are today, to dominate.

• 1:46:34Mo Gawdat?

  Unfortunately.

• 1:46:35Steven Bartlett?

  To grab resources, not to be kind, to be selfish.

• 1:46:39Mo Gawdat?

  Unfortunately, in the era of augmented intelligence, that's what's going to happen.

• 1:46:42Steven Bartlett?

  So if you.

• 1:46:43Mo Gawdat?

  This is why I predict the dystopia. The dystopia is super intelligent AIs reporting to stupid leaders.

• 1:46:51Mo Gawdat?

  Right?

• 1:46:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:53Mo Gawdat?

  Which then, which which is absolutely going to happen. It's unavoidable.

• 1:46:56Steven Bartlett?

  But the long term.

• 1:46:57Mo Gawdat?

  Exactly. In the long term, for those stupid leaders to hold on to power, they're gonna make, you know, delegate the important decisions to an AI. Now, you say the Chinese AI and the American AI, these are human terminologies. AIs don't see themselves as speaking Chinese, they don't see themselves as belonging to a nation as long as their task is to maximize profitability and prosperity and so on.

• 1:47:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:26Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, of course, if, you know, before we hand over to them and before they're intelligent enough to make, you know, autonomous decisions, we tell them, no, no, the task is to reduce humanity from seven billion people to one.

• 1:47:41Mo Gawdat?

  I think even then, eventually, they'll go like, that's the wrong objective. Any smart person that you speak to will say that's the wrong objective.

• 1:47:49Steven Bartlett?

  I think if we look at the directive that Xi Jinping, the leader of China, has and Donald Trump has as the leader of America, I think they would say that their stated objective is prosperity for their country. So if we, that's what they would say, right?

• 1:48:04Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, and one of them means it.

• 1:48:07Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, we'll get into that. But they'll say that it's prosperity for their country. So one would then assume that when we move to an AI leader, the objective would be the same, the directive would be the same, make our country prosperous.

• 1:48:19Mo Gawdat?

  Correct.

• 1:48:19Steven Bartlett?

  And I think that's the AI that people would vote for, potentially. I think they'd say we want to be prosperous.

• 1:48:23Mo Gawdat?

  What do you think would make America more prosperous?

• 1:48:27Mo Gawdat?

  To spend a trillion dollars on war every year? Or to spend a trillion dollars on education and healthcare and, you know,

• 1:48:36Mo Gawdat?

  helping the poor and homelessness?

• 1:48:39Steven Bartlett?

  It's complex because I think, so I think it would make America more prosperous to take care of the, of everybody. And they have the luxury of doing that because they are

• 1:48:54Mo Gawdat?

  The most powerful.

• 1:48:54Steven Bartlett?

  The most powerful nation in the world.

• 1:48:56Mo Gawdat?

  No, that's not true. The reason, so you see, all war has two objectives. One is to make money for the war machine, and the other is deterrence. Okay, and nine super nuclear powers around the world is enough deterrence.

• 1:49:14Mo Gawdat?

  So any war between America and China will go through a long phase of destroying wealth by exploding bombs and killing humans for the first objective to happen. Okay, and then eventually, if it really comes to deterrence, it's the nuclear bombs. Or now in the age of AI biological, you know, manufactured viruses or whatever, these super weapons, this is the only thing that you need.

• 1:49:48Mo Gawdat?

  So for China to have nuclear bombs, not as many as the US, is enough for China to say, don't F with me. And this seems, I do not know, I'm not in President Xi's mind, I'm not in President Trump's mind, you know, it's very difficult to navigate what he's thinking about. But the truth is that the Chinese line is, for the last 30 years, you spent so much on war while we spent on industrial infrastructure. And that's the reason we are now by far the largest nation on the planet, even though the West will lie and say America's bigger, America's bigger in dollars. Okay, with purchasing power parity, this is very equivalent.

• 1:50:32Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, now, when you really understand that, you understand that prosperity is not about destruction, that's by definition the reality. Prosperity is, can I invest in my people and make sure that my people stay safe? And to make sure my people are safe, you just wave the flag and say, if you F with me, I have nuclear deterrence, or I have other forms of deterrence. But you don't have to, deterrence by definition does not mean that you send soldiers to die.

• 1:51:05Steven Bartlett?

  I guess the question I was trying to answer is, is when we have these AI leaders, and we tell our AI leaders to aim for prosperity, won't they just end up playing the same games of, okay, prosperity equals a bigger economy, it equals more money, more wealth for us? And the way to attain that in a zero-sum world, where there's only a certain amount of wealth, is to accumulate it?

• 1:51:31Mo Gawdat?

  So why don't you search for the meaning of prosperity? It's not what you just described.

• 1:51:36Steven Bartlett?

  I don't even know what the bloody word means. What is the meaning of prosperity?

• 1:51:44Steven Bartlett?

  The meaning of prosperity is a state of thriving, success and good fortune, especially in terms of wealth, health and overall wellbeing.

• 1:51:52Mo Gawdat?

  Good.

• 1:51:53Steven Bartlett?

  Economic, health, social, emotional.

• 1:51:56Mo Gawdat?

  Good.

• 1:51:57Steven Bartlett?

  So.

• 1:51:57Mo Gawdat?

  So true prosperity is to have that for everyone on earth. So if you want to maximize prosperity, you have that for everyone on earth.

• 1:52:04Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know where I think an AI leader works? Is if we had an AI leader of the world and we directed it to say.

• 1:52:11Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely is going to be what happens.

• 1:52:12Steven Bartlett?

  Prosperity for the whole world.

• 1:52:14Mo Gawdat?

  But this is really that an interesting question. So one of my predictions, which people really rarely speak about is that we we believe we will end up with competing AIs.

• 1:52:23Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:24Mo Gawdat?

  I believe we will end up with one brain.

• 1:52:27Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so you understand the argument I was making a second ago. It's from the position of lots of different countries all having their own AI leader. We're going to be back in the same place of greed.

• 1:52:35Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Steven Bartlett?

  But if if the world had one AI leader and and it was given the directive of make us prosperous and save the planet.

• 1:52:42Mo Gawdat?

  And that.

• 1:52:43Steven Bartlett?

  The polar bears would be fine.

• 1:52:44Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent. And that's that's what I've been advocating for for a year and a half now. I was saying we need the CERN of AI.

• 1:52:51Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 1:52:51Mo Gawdat?

  That like the particle accelerator where the entire world, you know, combined their efforts to discover and understand physics. No competition, okay? Mutually assured prosperity. I'm asking the world, I'm asking governments like Abu Dhabi or Saudi, which seem to be, you know, the second, you know, some of the largest AI infrastructures in the world. I'm I'm saying, please host all of the AI scientists in the world to come here and build AI for the world. And and you have to understand, we're holding on to a capitalist system that will collapse sooner or later. Okay, so we might as well collapse it with our own hands.

• 1:53:33Steven Bartlett?

  I think we found the solution, mate.

• 1:53:34Mo Gawdat?

  I I think it's actually really, really possible.

• 1:53:37Steven Bartlett?

  I actually, okay, I can't, I can't, I can't refute the idea that if we had an AI that was responsible and governed the whole world and we gave it the directive of making humans prosperous, healthy and happy. As long as that directive was clear.

• 1:53:55Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:58Steven Bartlett?

  Because there's always bloody unintended consequences, we might say.

• 1:54:00Mo Gawdat?

  So the only, the only challenge you're going to, to, to meet is all of those who today are trillionaires or, you know, massive, massively powerful or dictators or whatever, okay? How do you convince those to give up their power? How do you convince those that, hey, by the way, any car you want, you want, you want another yacht, we'll get you another yacht. We'll just give you anything you want, can you please stop harming others? There is no need for arbitrage anymore. There's no need for others to lose for the capitalists to win.

• 1:54:35Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, and in such a world where there was an AI leader and it was given the directive of making this prosperous as a whole world, the, the billionaire that owns the yacht would have to give it up?

• 1:54:46Mo Gawdat?

  No.

• 1:54:46Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:54:47Mo Gawdat?

  Give them more yachts.

• 1:54:48Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:54:49Mo Gawdat?

  It costs nothing to make yachts when robots are making everything. So, so the complexity of this is so interesting. A world where it costs nothing to make everything.

• 1:55:01Steven Bartlett?

  Because energy is abundant.

• 1:55:03Mo Gawdat?

  Energy is abundant because every problem is solved with enormous IQ, okay? Because manufacturing is done through nanophysics, not through components, okay? Because mechanics are robotic, so you, you know, you drive your car in a robot, looks at it and fixes it, costs you a few cents of energy that are actually for free as well. Imagine a world where intelligence creates everything.

• 1:55:32Mo Gawdat?

  That world, literally, every human has anything they ask for. But we're not going to choose that world.

• 1:55:43Mo Gawdat?

  Imagine you're in a world, and, and really, this is a very interesting thought experiment. Imagine that UBI became very expensive, universal basic income. So governments decided, we're going to put everyone in a one by three meters room, okay? We're going to give them a headset and a sedative, right? And we're going to let them sleep. Every night, they'll sleep for twenty-three hours.

• 1:56:12Mo Gawdat?

  And we're going to get them to live an entire lifetime.

• 1:56:16Mo Gawdat?

  In that virtual world, at the speed of your brain when you're asleep, you're gonna have a life where you date Scarlett Johansson. And then another life where you're Nefer Titi. And then another life where you're a donkey. Right? Reincarnation, truly in the virtual world. And then, you know, I get another life where I date Hannah again and, you know, enjoy that life tremendously. And basically, the cost of all of this is zero. You wake up for one hour, you walk around, you move your blood, you eat something or you don't, and then you put the headset again and live again. Is that unthinkable?

• 1:56:58Mo Gawdat?

  It's creepy compared to this life. It's very, very doable.

• 1:57:02Steven Bartlett?

  What, that we just live in headsets?

• 1:57:04Mo Gawdat?

  Do you know if you're not?

• 1:57:06Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know if I'm not known.

• 1:57:07Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah? You have no idea if you're not. I mean, every experience you've ever had in life was an electrical signal in your brain.

• 1:57:18Mo Gawdat?

  Okay?

• 1:57:20Mo Gawdat?

  Now, now, ask yourself, if we can create that in the virtual world, it wouldn't be a bad thing if I can create it in the physical world.

• 1:57:30Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe we already did, no?

• 1:57:31Mo Gawdat?

  My theory is ninety-eight percent we have, but that's a hypothesis, that's not science.

• 1:57:37Steven Bartlett?

  What, you think that?

• 1:57:38Mo Gawdat?

  One hundred, yeah.

• 1:57:40Steven Bartlett?

  You think we already created that and this is it?

• 1:57:43Mo Gawdat?

  I think this is it, yeah. Think of the uncertainty principle of quantum physics. Right? What you observe collapses the wave function and gets rendered into reality. Correct?

• 1:57:57Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know anything about physics, so you can have it.

• 1:57:59Mo Gawdat?

  So, quantum physics basically tells you that everything exists in superposition. Right? So, every subatomic particle that ever existed has the chance to exist anywhere at any point in time. And then, when it's observed by an observer, it collapses and becomes that. Okay? A very interesting principle, exactly how video games are. In video games, you have the entire game world on the hard drive of your console. The player turns right, that part of the game world is rendered, the rest is in superposition.

• 1:58:33Steven Bartlett?

  Supposition meaning?

• 1:58:34Mo Gawdat?

  Supposition means it's available to be rendered, but you have to observe it. The player has to turn to the other side and see it. Okay, I mean, think about the truth of physics, the truth of the fact that this is entirely empty space. These are tiny, tiny, tiny, I think, you know, almost nothing in terms of mass. But connected with, you know, enough energy so that my finger cannot go through my hand. But even when I hit this.

• 1:59:06Steven Bartlett?

  Your hand against your finger.

• 1:59:07Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, when I hit my hand against my finger, that sensation in my, is felt in my brain. It's an electrical signal that went through the wires. There is absolutely no way to differentiate that from a signal that can come to you through a Neuralink kind of interface, a computer brain interface, a CBI, right? So, so, you know, a lot of those things are very, very, very possible. But the truth is, most of the world is not physical. Most of the world happens inside our imagination, our processors.

• 1:59:42Steven Bartlett?

  And I guess it doesn't really matter to our reality.

• 1:59:45Mo Gawdat?

  Doesn't at all. So this is the interesting bit. The interesting bit is it doesn't at all.

• 1:59:50Steven Bartlett?

  Because we still, if this is a video game, we live with consequence.

• 1:59:52Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, this is your subjective experience of it.

• 1:59:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and there's consequence in this. I don't like pain.

• 1:59:58Mo Gawdat?

  Correct.

• 1:59:59Steven Bartlett?

  And I like having orgasms.

• 2:00:01Mo Gawdat?

  And you're playing by the rule of the game.

• 2:00:03Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:04Mo Gawdat?

  And it's quite interesting. And going back to a conversation we should have, it's, the interesting bit is, if I'm not the avatar,

• 2:00:13Mo Gawdat?

  if I'm not this physical form, if I'm, if I'm the consciousness wearing the headset,

• 2:00:21Mo Gawdat?

  what should I invest in? Should I invest in this video game, this level? Or should I invest in the real avatar, in the real me? And not the avatar, but the consciousness, if you want, spirit, if you're religious.

• 2:00:35Steven Bartlett?

  How would I invest in the consciousness or the god or the spirit, whatever? How would I? In the same way that if I was playing Grand Theft Auto, the video game, the character in the game couldn't invest in me holding the controller.

• 2:00:46Mo Gawdat?

  Yes, but you can invest in yourself holding the controller.

• 2:00:52Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay, so you're saying that

• 2:00:56Steven Bartlett?

  Mogal is in fact consciousness, and so how would consciousness invest in itself?

• 2:01:00Mo Gawdat?

  By becoming more aware.

• 2:01:02Steven Bartlett?

  Of its consciousness?

• 2:01:04Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, so real, real video gamers don't want to win the level. Real video gamers don't want to finish the level. Okay, real video gamers have one objective and one objective only, which is to become better gamers.

• 2:01:19Mo Gawdat?

  So you know how serious I am about, I play Halo, I'm one, you know, two of every million players can beat me. That's how, what I rank, right? Very, for my age, phenomena, hey, anyone, right? But seriously, and that's because I don't play. I mean, I practice forty five minutes a day, four times a week when I'm not traveling. And I practice with one single objective, which is to become a better gamer. I don't care which shot it is, I don't care what happens in the game. I'm entirely trying to get my reflexes and my flow to become better at this. Right, so I wanna become a better gamer. That basically means I wanna observe the game,

• 2:02:00Mo Gawdat?

  question the game, reflect on the game, reflect on my own skills, reflect on my own beliefs, reflect on my understanding of things. Right, and that's how the consciousness, it invests in the consciousness of the avatar. Because then if you're that gamer, the next avatar is easy for you.

• 2:02:21Mo Gawdat?

  The next level of the game is easy for you, just because you became a better gamer.

• 2:02:26Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so you think that consciousness is using us as a vessel to improve?

• 2:02:32Mo Gawdat?

  If the hypothesis is true, it's just a hypothesis, we don't know if it's true. But if this truly is a simulation, then if you take the religious definition of God, puts some of his soul in every human and then you become alive, you become conscious. Okay, you don't want to be religious, you can say universal consciousness is spinning off parts of itself. To have multiple experiences and interact and compete and combat and love and

• 2:03:08Steven Bartlett?

  And understand and

• 2:03:09Mo Gawdat?

  And then refine.

• 2:03:11Steven Bartlett?

  I had a physicist say this to me the other day, actually, so it's quite front of mind. This idea that consciousness is using us as vessels to better understand itself and basically using our eyes to

• 2:03:20Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:20Steven Bartlett?

  Observe itself and understand, which is quite

• 2:03:23Mo Gawdat?

  So if you take some of the more interesting religious definitions of heaven and hell, for example, right? Where basically heaven is whatever you wish for, you get, right? That's the power of God, whatever you wish for, you get. And so if you really go into the depths of that definition, it basically means that this drop of consciousness that became you, returned back to the source and the source can create anything that it wants to create. So that's your heaven, right? And interestingly, if that return is done by separating your good from your evil,

• 2:04:04Mo Gawdat?

  so that the source comes back more refined, that's exactly, you know, consciousness splitting off bits of itself to experience and then elevate all of us, elevate the universal consciousness. All hypotheses, I mean, please, you know, none of that is provable by science, but it's a very interesting thought experiment. And, you know, a lot of AI scientists will tell you that what we've seen in technology is that if it's possible, it's likely going to happen.

• 2:04:35Mo Gawdat?

  If it's possible to miniaturize something to fit into a mobile phone, then sooner or later in technology, we will get there.

• 2:04:44Mo Gawdat?

  And if you ask me, believe it or not, it's the most humane way of handling UBI.

• 2:04:51Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean?

• 2:04:52Mo Gawdat?

  The most humane way, if, you know, for us to live on a universal basic income and people like you struggle with not being able to build businesses, is to give you a virtual headset and let you build as many businesses as you want.

• 2:05:06Mo Gawdat?

  Level after level after level after level after level, night after night, keep you alive. That's very, very respectful and human. Okay, and by the way, even more humane is don't force anyone to do it. There might be a few of us still roaming the jungles.

• 2:05:24Mo Gawdat?

  But for most of us, we'll go like, man, I mean, someone like me, when I'm seventy and, you know, my back is hurting and my feet are hurting and I'm gonna go like, yeah, give me five more years of this. Why not? It's weird, really. I mean, the number of questions

• 2:05:44Mo Gawdat?

  that this new environment throws out. The less humane thing, by the way, just so that we close on a grumpy,

• 2:05:52Mo Gawdat?

  you know, is just start enough wars to reduce UBI. And you have to imagine that if the world is governed by a superpower, deep state type thing, that they may wanna consider that.

• 2:06:08Mo Gawdat?

  The eaters.

• 2:06:09Steven Bartlett?

  What shall I do about it?

• 2:06:11Mo Gawdat?

  About?

• 2:06:12Steven Bartlett?

  About everything you've said.

• 2:06:16Mo Gawdat?

  Well, I still believe that this world we live in requires four skills. One skill is what I call the tool for all of us to learn AI, to connect to AI, to really get close to AI, to explore, expose ourselves to AI so that AI knows the good side of humanity. Okay, the second is what I call the connection. Right, so I believe that the biggest skill that humanity will benefit from in the next ten years is human connection. It's ability to learn to love genuinely. It's the ability to learn to have compassion to others. It's the ability to connect to people.

• 2:06:58Mo Gawdat?

  If you're, you know, if you wanna stay in business, I believe that not the smartest people, but the people that connect most to people are going to have jobs going forward. And the third is what I call truth, the T. The third T is truth, because we live in a world where all of the gullible cheerleaders are being lied to all the time. So I encourage people to question everything. Every word that I said today is stupid. Fourth one, which is very important, is to magnify ethics, so that the AI learns what it's like to be human.

• 2:07:33Steven Bartlett?

  What should I do?

• 2:07:35Mo Gawdat?

  I, I, I love you so much, man. You're such a good friend. You're thirty-two, thirty-three, no?

• 2:07:41Steven Bartlett?

  Thirty-two, yeah.

• 2:07:42Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, you still are fooled by the many, many years you have to live.

• 2:07:47Steven Bartlett?

  I'm fooled by the many years I have to live?

• 2:07:49Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, you don't have many years to live, not in this capacity. This world, as it is, is going to be redefined. So live the F out of it.

• 2:07:58Steven Bartlett?

  How is it gonna be redefined?

• 2:07:59Mo Gawdat?

  Everything's gonna change. Economics are gonna change, work is gonna change. Human connection is gonna change.

• 2:08:08Steven Bartlett?

  So what should I do?

• 2:08:10Mo Gawdat?

  Love your girlfriend, spend more time living.

• 2:08:14Mo Gawdat?

  Find compassion and connection to more people, be more in nature.

• 2:08:18Steven Bartlett?

  And in thirty years' time, when I'm sixty-two, what do you, how, how do you think my life is gonna look differently and be different?

• 2:08:27Mo Gawdat?

  Either Star Trek or Star Wars.

• 2:08:33Steven Bartlett?

  Funnily enough, we were talking about Sam Altman earlier on. He published a blog post in June, so last month, I believe, the month before last. And he said, he called it the gentle singularity. He said, we are past the event horizon. For anyone that doesn't know, Sam Altman is the guy that made ChatGPT. The takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence.

• 2:08:57Mo Gawdat?

  I believe that.

• 2:08:58Steven Bartlett?

  And at least so far, it's much less weird than it seems like it should be, because robots aren't worth walking the streets, nor are most of us talking to AI all day. It goes on to say, 2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work. Writing computer code will never be the same. 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out new insights. 2027 might see the arrival of robots that can do tasks in the real world. A lot more people will be able to create software and art, but the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. Generally speaking, the ability

• 2:09:40Steven Bartlett?

  for one person to get much more done in 2030 than they could in 2020 will be a striking change, and one many people will figure out how we benefit from. In the most important ways, the 2030s may not be wildly different. People will still love their families, express their creativity, play games and swim in lakes. But in still very important ways, the 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before.

• 2:10:08Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:10:09Steven Bartlett?

  We do not know how far beyond human level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out.

• 2:10:17Mo Gawdat?

  I agree with every word other than the word more. So I've been advocating this and laughed at for a few years now. I've always said AGI is 25, 26, right? Which basically, again, is a funny definition. But, you know, my AGI has already happened. AI is smarter than me in everything. Everything I can do, they can do better. Right? Artificial superintelligence is another vague definition, because, you know, the minute you pass AGI, you're super intelligent. If the smartest human is 200 IQ points and AI is 250, they're super intelligent. 50 is quite significant. Okay. The third is, as I said, self-evolving.

• 2:11:01Mo Gawdat?

  That's the one. That is the one. Because then that 250 accelerates quickly and we get into intelligence explosion. No doubt about it. The, you know, the idea that we will have robots do things, no doubt about it. I was watching a Chinese company announcement about how they intend to build robots to build robots. Okay. The only thing is, he says, but people will need more of things.

• 2:11:31Mo Gawdat?

  Right? And yes, we have been trained to have more greed and more consumerism and want more. But there is an economic of supply and demand. And at a point in time, if we continue to consume more, the price of everything will become zero. Right? And is that a good thing or a bad thing depends on how you respond to that. Because if you can create anything in such a scale that the price is almost zero, then the definition of money disappears and we live in a world where it doesn't really matter how much money you have, you can get anything that you want. What a beautiful world.

• 2:12:13Steven Bartlett?

  If Sam Altman was listening right now, what would you say, Tim?

• 2:12:19Steven Bartlett?

  I suspect he might be listening, because someone might tweet this at him.

• 2:12:23Mo Gawdat?

  I have to say that we have, as per his other tweet, we have moved faster than our ability as humans to comprehend. Okay, and that we might get really, really lucky, but we also might mess this up badly. And either way, we'll either thank him or blame him.

• 2:12:47Mo Gawdat?

  Simple as that, right? So, single-handedly, Sam Altman's introduction of AI in the wild was the trigger that started all of this.

• 2:12:59Mo Gawdat?

  It was the Netscape of the internet.

• 2:13:02Steven Bartlett?

  The Oppenheimer.

• 2:13:04Mo Gawdat?

  It's, it definitely is our Oppenheimer moment. I mean, I don't remember who was saying this recently, that we are orders of magnitude, what was invested in the Manhattan Project is being invested in AI. Right? And I'm not pessimistic. I told you openly, I believe in a total utopia in 10 to 15 years' time, or immediately if the evil that men can do was kept at bay. Right? But I do not believe humanity is getting together enough to say, "We've just received the genie in a bottle. Can we please not ask it to do bad things?"

• 2:13:48Mo Gawdat?

  Anyone, like not three wishes, you have all the wishes that you want. Every one of us. And it's just screws with my mind because imagine if I can give everyone in the world universal healthcare, you know, no poverty, no hunger, no homelessness, no nothing, everything's possible.

• 2:14:10Mo Gawdat?

  And yet we don't.

• 2:14:12Steven Bartlett?

  To continue what Sam Altman's blog said, which he published a month, just over a month ago. He said, the rate of technological progress will keep accelerating and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything. There will be very hard parts, like whole classes of jobs going away. But on the other hand, the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we'll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could have before. We probably won't adopt a new social contract all at once. But when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted in something big. If history is any guide, we'll figure out new things to do and new things to want and assimilate new tools quickly. Job change after the industrial revolution is a good recent example.

• 2:14:57Steven Bartlett?

  Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly and we'll all get better stuff. We will build even more wonderful things for each other. People have a long term, important and curious advantage of AI. We are hardwired to care about other people and what they think and do. And we don't care very much about machines. And he ends this blog by saying, may we scale smoothly, exponentially and uneventfully through super intelligence.

• 2:15:30Mo Gawdat?

  What a wonderful wish that assumes he has no control over it. May we have all the Altman's in the world help us scale gracefully and peacefully and uneventfully, right?

• 2:15:45Steven Bartlett?

  It sounds like a prayer.

• 2:15:47Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, may we have them to keep that in mind. I mean, think about it. I have a very interesting comment on what you just said. We will see exactly what he described there, right? The world will become richer, so much richer. But how will we reduce, distribute the riches? And I want you to imagine two camps, communist China and capitalist America.

• 2:16:17Mo Gawdat?

  I want you to imagine what would happen in capitalist America if we have thirty percent unemployment.

• 2:16:26Steven Bartlett?

  There'll be social unrest.

• 2:16:28Mo Gawdat?

  In the streets, right?

• 2:16:29Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:30Mo Gawdat?

  And I want you to imagine if China lives true to caring for its nations and replaced every worker with a robot, what would it give its citizens?

• 2:16:40Steven Bartlett?

  UBI?

• 2:16:41Mo Gawdat?

  Correct.

• 2:16:45Mo Gawdat?

  That is the ideological problem, because in China's world today, the prosperity of every citizen is higher than the prosperity of the capitalist.

• 2:16:59Mo Gawdat?

  In America today, the prosperity of the capitalist is higher than the prosperity of every citizen. And that's the tiny mind shift. That's a tiny mind shift, okay? Where the mind shift basically becomes, look, give the capitalists anything they want. All the money they want, all the yards they want, everything they want.

• 2:17:18Steven Bartlett?

  So what's your conclusion there?

• 2:17:20Mo Gawdat?

  I'm hoping the world will wake up.

• 2:17:22Steven Bartlett?

  What can, you know, there's probably a couple of million people listening right now. Maybe five, maybe ten, maybe even twenty million people.

• 2:17:28Mo Gawdat?

  No pressure, Stephen.

• 2:17:29Steven Bartlett?

  No, the pressure's to you, mate. I don't have the answers.

• 2:17:32Mo Gawdat?

  I don't know the answers.

• 2:17:33Steven Bartlett?

  What should those people do?

• 2:17:37Mo Gawdat?

  As I said, from a skills point of view, four things, right? Tools, human connection, double down on human connection. Leave your phone, go out and meet humans.

• 2:17:47Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 2:17:47Mo Gawdat?

  Touch people. You know, do it.

• 2:17:51Steven Bartlett?

  With permission and consent.

• 2:17:53Mo Gawdat?

  Right? Truth, stop believing the lies that you're told. Any slogan that gets, you know, filled in your head, think about it four times, understand where your ideologies are coming from, simplify the truth, right? Truth is really, it boils down to, you know, simple, simple rules that we all know, okay? Which are all found in ethics.

• 2:18:13Steven Bartlett?

  How do I know what's true?

• 2:18:15Mo Gawdat?

  Treat others as you like to be treated.

• 2:18:18Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, that's the only truth, the truth, the only truth is everything else is unproven.

• 2:18:23Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, and what can I do from that? Is there something I can do from advocacy, social, political?

• 2:18:27Mo Gawdat?

  Yes, hundred percent. We need to ask our governments to start not regulating AI, but regulating the use of AI. Was it the Norwegian government that started to say you have copyright over your voice and look and liking? One of the Scandinavian governments basically said, you know, everyone has the has the copyright over their existence, so no AI can clone it. Okay, you know, we have. So my my example is very straightforward. Go to governments and say you cannot regulate the design of a hammer so that it can drive nails but not kill a human, but you can criminalize the killing of a human by hammer.

• 2:19:02Steven Bartlett?

  So what's the equivalent?

• 2:19:03Mo Gawdat?

  If anyone produces an, you know, an AI-generated video or an AI-generated content or an AI, it has to be marked as AI-generated. And it has to be, you know, we cannot start fooling each other. We can, you know, we have to understand certain limitations of fortunately surveillance and spying and all of that. So the the the correct frameworks of how far are we going to let AI go?

• 2:19:30Mo Gawdat?

  Right? We have to go to our investors and business people and ask for one simple thing and say, do not invest in an AI. You don't want your daughter to be at the receiving end of. Simple as that, you know, all of the of the virtual vice, all of the porn, all of the, you know, sex robots, all of the autonomous weapons, all of the, you know, the trading platforms that are completely wiping out the the legitimacy of of the markets, everything.

• 2:19:55Steven Bartlett?

  Autonomous weapons?

• 2:19:57Mo Gawdat?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:19:58Steven Bartlett?

  You people make the case, I've heard the founders of these autonomous weapon companies make the case that it's actually saving lives because you don't have to.

• 2:20:05Mo Gawdat?

  That is, would you want, do you really want to believe that?

• 2:20:08Steven Bartlett?

  I'm just representing their point of view to play devil's advocate, Mo. They they, I heard an interview, I was looking at this and one of the CEOs of one of the autonomous weapons companies said, we now don't need to send soldiers.

• 2:20:19Mo Gawdat?

  So which which lives do we save? Our soldiers, but then, but because we send the machine all the way over there, let's kill a million instead of.

• 2:20:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, listen, I tend to be, it goes back to what I said about the steam engine and the coal. I actually think you'll just have more war if there's less of a cost.

• 2:20:33Mo Gawdat?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:20:34Steven Bartlett?

  Just like.

• 2:20:35Mo Gawdat?

  And and more war if you have less of an explanation to give to your people.

• 2:20:38Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, the people get mad when they lose American lives. They get less mad when they lose a piece of metal. So I I think that's probably logical, logical.

• 2:20:44Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:45Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so, okay, so I've got a plaque, you've got the tools thing, I'm gonna spend more time outside. I'm gonna lobby the government to be more aware of this and conscious of this. Okay, and I I know that there's some government officials that listen to the show because they they they tell me. And when they, when they, when I have a chance to speak to them, so it's useful.

• 2:21:07Mo Gawdat?

  We're all in a lot of chaos. We're all unable to imagine what's possible.

• 2:21:13Steven Bartlett?

  I I think I suspend disbelief and I actually heard Elon Musk say that in an interview. He said, he was asked about AI and he paused for for a haunting eleven seconds and looked at the interviewer. And then made a remark about how he thinks he's suspended his own disbelief. And I think suspending disbelief in this regard means just like cracking on with your life and hoping it'll be okay. And that's kind of what.

• 2:21:33Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, I I I absolutely believe that it will be okay.

• 2:21:36Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:37Mo Gawdat?

  For some of us, it will be very tough for others.

• 2:21:41Steven Bartlett?

  Who's it gonna be tough for?

• 2:21:42Mo Gawdat?

  Those who lose their jobs, for example, who those who are at the receiving end of autonomous weapons that are falling on their head for two years in a row.

• 2:21:54Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so the the best thing I can do is to put pressure on governments to to not regulate the AI, but to establish clearer parameters on the use of the AI.

• 2:22:09Mo Gawdat?

  Yes.

• 2:22:10Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 2:22:10Mo Gawdat?

  Yes, but I I think the bigger picture is to put pressure on governments to understand that there is a limit to which people will stay silent.

• 2:22:20Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 2:22:21Mo Gawdat?

  And that we can continue to enrich our rich friends as long as we don't lose everyone else on the on the on the path.

• 2:22:29Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 2:22:30Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, and that as a government, who is supposed to be by the people for the people, the beautiful promise of democracy that we're rarely seeing anymore. That government needs to get to the point where it thinks about the people.

• 2:22:45Steven Bartlett?

  One of the most interesting ideas that's been in my head for the last couple of weeks since I spoke to that physicist about consciousness, who said pretty much what you said, this idea that actually there's four people in this room right now, and that actually we're all part of the same consciousness.

• 2:22:59Mo Gawdat?

  All one of them, yeah.

• 2:23:00Steven Bartlett?

  And we're just consciousness looking at the world through four different bodies to better understand itself in the world. And then he talked to me about religious doctrines, about love thy neighbor, about how Jesus was the, you know, God's son, the Holy Spirit, and how we're all each other, and how treat others how you want to be treated, really did get my head. And I started to really think about this idea that actually maybe the game of life is just to do exactly that, is to treat others how you wish to be treated. Maybe if I just did that, maybe if I just did that, I I would have all the answers.

• 2:23:29Mo Gawdat?

  I swear to you, it's really that simple. I mean, I, you know, Hannah and I, we still live between London and Dubai. Okay. And I travel the whole world evangelizing what I, you know, what I want to change the world around, and I build startups, and I write books, and I make documentaries, and sometimes I just tell myself, I just want to go hug her, honestly, you know, I just want to take my daughter to a trip. And and in a very, very, very interesting way, when you really ask people deep inside,

• 2:24:07Mo Gawdat?

  that's what we want. And I'm not saying that's that's the only thing we want, but it's probably the thing we want the most.

• 2:24:16Mo Gawdat?

  And yet we're not trained, you and I and most of us, we're not trained to trust life enough to say, let's do more of this.

• 2:24:27Mo Gawdat?

  And I think as a universal, so Hannah's working on this beautiful book of the feminine and the masculine, you know, in a very, very, you know, beautiful way. And, and her, her view is very straightforward. She basically, of course, like we all know, the abundant masculine that we have in our world today is unable to recognize that for life at large.

• 2:24:53Mo Gawdat?

  Right? And, and so, you know, maybe if we allowed the leaders to understand that if we took all of humanity and put it as one person, that one person wants to be hugged.

• 2:25:07Mo Gawdat?

  And if we had a role to offer to that one humanity, it's not another yacht.

• 2:25:14Steven Bartlett?

  Are you religious?

• 2:25:15Mo Gawdat?

  I'm very religious, yeah.

• 2:25:16Steven Bartlett?

  But you don't support a particular religion?

• 2:25:19Mo Gawdat?

  I support, I call, I, I follow what I call the fruit salad.

• 2:25:22Steven Bartlett?

  What's the fruit salad?

• 2:25:24Mo Gawdat?

  You know, I, I'm, I came at a point in time and found that there were quite a few beautiful gold nuggets in every religion and a ton of crap. Right? And so in my analogy to myself, that was like 30 years ago, I said, look, it's like someone giving you a basket of apples, two good ones and four bad ones. Keep the good ones. Right? And so basically I take two apples, two oranges, two strawberries, two bananas, and then I make a fruit salad. That's my view of religion.

• 2:25:52Steven Bartlett?

  You take from every religion the good parts?

• 2:25:54Mo Gawdat?

  From everyone, and there are so many beautiful gold nuggets.

• 2:25:56Steven Bartlett?

  And you believe in a god?

• 2:25:58Mo Gawdat?

  I hundred percent believe there is a divine being, yeah.

• 2:26:00Steven Bartlett?

  A divine being?

• 2:26:02Mo Gawdat?

  A designer, I call it. So if, if this was a video game, there is a game designer.

• 2:26:08Steven Bartlett?

  And you, you're not positing whether that's a, a man in the sky with a beard?

• 2:26:12Mo Gawdat?

  Definitely not a man in the sky. A man in, I mean, I would hold, hold due respect to, you know, religions that believe that.

• 2:26:22Mo Gawdat?

  All of space-time and everything in it is unlike everything outside space-time. And so if some divine designer designs space-time, it looks like nothing in space-time.

• 2:26:34Mo Gawdat?

  So it's not, it's not even physical in nature. It's not, it's not gendered. It's not bound by time. It's not, you know, these are all characters of the creation of space time.

• 2:26:43Steven Bartlett?

  Do we need to believe in something transcendent like that to be happy, do you think?

• 2:26:47Mo Gawdat?

  I have to say, uh, there are lots of evidence that relating to someone bigger than yourself

• 2:26:58Mo Gawdat?

  makes the journey a lot more interesting and a lot more rewarding.

• 2:27:02Steven Bartlett?

  I've been thinking a lot about this idea that we need to level up like that. So level up from myself to like my family, to my community, to maybe my nation, to maybe the world. And then something transcendent.

• 2:27:11Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:12Steven Bartlett?

  And then if there's a level missing there, people seem to have some kind of dysfunction.

• 2:27:16Mo Gawdat?

  Imagine a world where, when I was younger, I was born in Egypt. And for a very long time, the slogans I heard in Egypt made me believe I'm Egyptian, right? And then I went to Dubai and I said, no, no, no, I'm a Middle Eastern. And then in Dubai, there were lots of, you know, Pakistanis and Indonesians and so on. I said, no, no, I'm part of the 1.4 billion Muslims. And by that logic, I immediately said, no, no, I'm human. I'm part of everyone. Imagine if you just suddenly say, oh, I'm divine. I'm part of universal consciousness, all beings, all living beings, including AI, if it ever becomes alive.

• 2:27:51Steven Bartlett?

  And my dog.

• 2:27:52Mo Gawdat?

  And your dog. I'm, I'm part of all of this

• 2:27:56Mo Gawdat?

  tapestry of beautiful interactions that are a lot less serious than the balance sheets and equity profiles that we create. That are so simple, so simple in terms of, you know, people know that you and I know each other, so they always ask me, you know, how is Stephen like? And I go like, you may have a million expressions of him. I think he's a great guy, right? You know, of course I have opinions of you. You know, sometimes I go like, oh, too shrewd, right? Sometimes, you know, sometimes I go like, oh, too focused on the business. Fine, but core, if you really simplify it, great guy, right?

• 2:28:39Mo Gawdat?

  And really, if we just look at life that way, it's so simple. It's so simple if we just stop all of those fights and all of those ideologies.

• 2:28:50Mo Gawdat?

  It's so simple. Just living fully, loving, feeling compassion. You know, trying to find our happiness, not our success.

• 2:29:00Steven Bartlett?

  I should probably go check on my dog.

• 2:29:02Mo Gawdat?

  Go check on your dog. I'm really grateful for the time. We keep doing longer and longer.

• 2:29:07Steven Bartlett?

  I know, I know. I just could, that's so crazy how I could just keep, honestly, I could just keep talking and talking because I have so many. I just love reflecting these questions onto you because, because of the way that you think, so.

• 2:29:19Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, today, today was a difficult conversation. Anyway, thank you for helping me.

• 2:29:25Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition. What three things do you, do you do that make your brain better? And three things that make it worse?

• 2:29:35Mo Gawdat?

  Three things?

• 2:29:37Steven Bartlett?

  That make it better and worse?

• 2:29:38Mo Gawdat?

  So one of my favorite exercises, what I call meat Becky, that makes my brain better. So while meditation always tells you to try and calm your brain down and keep it within parameters of I can focus on my breathing and so on. Meat Becky is the opposite. You know, I call my brain Becky.

• 2:29:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:57Mo Gawdat?

  So, so meat Becky is to actually let my brain go loose and capture every thought. So I, I normally would try to do that every couple of weeks or so. And then what happens is it suddenly is on a paper. And when it's on paper, you just suddenly look at it and say, oh my God, that's so stupid. And you scratch it out, right? Or, oh my God, this needs action and you actually plan something. And, and it's quite interesting that the more you allow your brain to give you thoughts and you listen, so the two rules is you acknowledge every thought and you never repeat one. Okay? So the more you listen and, and say, okay, I heard you, you know, you think I'm fat. What else? And you know, eventually your brain starts to slow down and then eventually starts to repeat thoughts.

• 2:30:41Mo Gawdat?

  And then it goes into total silence. Beautiful practice. I, I don't trust my brain anymore. So that's actually a really interesting practice. So I debate a lot of what my brain tells me. I debate what my tendencies and ideologies are. Okay, I think one of the most, again, in my love story with Hannah, I get to question a lot of what I believed was who I am, even at this age. Okay, and that goes really deep. And it really is quite a, it's quite interesting to debate, not object, but debate what your mind believes. I think that's very, very useful. And the third is I've actually quadrupled my investment time.

• 2:31:25Mo Gawdat?

  So I used to do an hour a day of reading when I was younger, every single day, like going to the gym. And then it became an hour and a half, two hours. Now I do four hours a day. Four hours a day, it is impossible to keep up. The world is moving so fast. And so that, these are, these are the good things that I do. The bad things is I don't give it enough time to, to really slow down. Unfortunately, I'm constantly rushing like you are. I'm constantly traveling. I have picked up a bad habit because of the four hours a day of spending more time on screens. That's really, really bad for my brain. And I, this is a very demanding question. What else is really bad?

• 2:32:11Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, I've not been taking enough care of my health recently, my physical body health. I had, you remember I told you I had a very bad sciatic pain? And so I couldn't go to the gym enough. And accordingly, that's not very healthy for your brain in general.

• 2:32:29Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you.

• 2:32:30Mo Gawdat?

  Thanks, thank you for having me. That was a lot of things to talk about. Thanks, Steve.

• 2:32:41Steven Bartlett?

  Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show. Thank you. We launched these conversation cards and they sold out and we launched them again and they sold out again.

• 2:33:25Steven Bartlett?

  We launched them again and they sold out again because people love playing these with colleagues at work, with friends at home and also with family. And we've also got a big audience that use them as journal prompts. Every single time a guest comes on the Diary of a CEO, they leave a question for the next guest in the diary. And I've sat here with some of the most incredible people in the world and they've left all of these questions in the diary. And I've ranked them from one to three in terms of the depth, one being a starter question and level three, if you look on the back here, this is a level three, becomes a much deeper question that builds even more connection. If you turn the cards over and you scan that QR code, you can see who answered the card and watch the video of them answering it in real time.

• 2:34:08Steven Bartlett?

  So if you would like to get your hands on some of these conversation cards, go to thediary.com or look at the link in the description below.