Ex-Google Exec: How to Position Yourself Now Before the Next AI Phase (2026–2027) | Mo Gawdat

Mo Gawdat spent 12 years at Google, wrote Scary Smart, and now predicts 12–15 years of disruption before things get better. In this episode, he breaks down the 7 forces already reshaping jobs and power, why 23–30% of new grad hiring has collapsed, and how he built an AI startup in 6 weeks instead of 4 years. Mo Gawdat is former Chief Business Officer at Google X and one of the few tech insiders saying out loud what most are only thinking. More from the Silicon Valley Girl: Follow my Newsletter: https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_content=Mo-Gawdat-interview https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_content=Mo-Gawdat-interview Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko/ X: ⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠ https://x.com/siliconvalleymm

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  My AI startup took me six weeks to build. I had started in 2022. It would have taken me four years. And when you really think about that, that basically means everyone now has a chance.

• 1:10Marina Mogilko?

  This is Mo, former chief business officer at Google X, where he spent over a decade running business innovations. He says everyone now has a chance, but only if they understand what's actually coming.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  The skill of an entrepreneur in the past was the ability to foresee something in the future that no one else saw and to prepare for that. That's a game of chess is over. It's off the table. This has turned into squash. I'm just basically saying get prepared.

• 1:37Marina Mogilko?

  How much time do we have to prepare?

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Within the next two to three years, you're going to see a massive shift in the jobs market. So you asked me, what should we do? Number one, learn the skills. Number two.

• 1:51Marina Mogilko?

  Well, thank you so much for doing this. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:54Marina Mogilko?

  You said something that we're about to enter what you call 12 to 15 years of hell before heaven, possibly starting in 2027. So what's going to happen in 2027?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  I think it will peak in 2027. It already started for sure. I call it FACE RIPS, just as an acronym for people to remember.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  You know, each of those letters is a word, but let me tell the story quickly in ways that people will understand. There is the power and freedom dimension, so the P and the F. There is the R and the C, the reality and connection dimension. There is the I and the C, the innovation and connection, and sorry, and economics dimension. And then there is the A. So let me tell them very quickly. To start with, AI is our last innovation, right? Most people don't know that, but we are already building AIs that are building AIs.

• 2:55Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  We're building AIs that are discovering, scientific discovery that will blow you away. They're reinventing mass. They are understanding biology in ways that we've never seen before. They're understanding material science in ways that are just mind blowing. And so very quickly, most innovation, definitely tech innovation, will be done at the hands of AI. Because of that, and because most tasks that need intelligence will be handed over to the machines. As the machines' capabilities increase, lots of debate around when exactly. Say it's 10 years, say it's two years, doesn't really matter. Eventually, every job that AI does better than humans will be handed over to AI.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  And every task we've ever assigned to them, they eventually ended up doing better than humans. And so the first part of the dystopia is that innovation is going to take away all jobs. Okay, of course, the capitalists of Silicon Valley will tell you, this is great. It's incredible product. Activity gains for everyone, you know, you see jobs will be easy. People won't have to work as hard, all of the fancy PR-led, you know, conversations that we try to appear altruistic when we share them. The truth is, people will be out of jobs, right? Ten, twenty, thirty percent of certain sectors will see unemployment of that rate in the next few years, right?

• 4:27Speaker 02

  And when that happens, economics at large will change massively. The whole definition of capitalism was labor arbitrage. And without labor, you know, without the need for labor, the obligation or the need to keep people happy and engaged and alive and and disgruntled, if you want, to the point where they don't rise, becomes more of an obligation than a desire, right? There is a very big difference in, you know, in terms of wanting someone to be their best because they are productive members of society, or trying to just give them a UBI, a universal basic income, to just give them a life so that they don't uprise.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  And you can imagine that in a capitalist society, especially like the US and most of the West, you know, while we start with UBI, that UBI is going to be paid by the taxes of the platform owners, and the platform owners will have enough power to say, I don't want to pay that much. I mean, those guys are not producing anything. And so over time, you can imagine how that would turn into a struggle, right? So that dimension of intelligence and innovation on one side, becoming entirely a machine thing, leading to a redefinition of economics, a redefinition of money, a redefinition of jobs, a redefinition of earnings, a redefinition of capitalism. You know, the need for a new economic theory when there is no

• 5:53Speaker 02

  demand for the supply that AI is generating, all of that has to be rethought. There is the PF dimension, the power freedom dimension, and it's of course very clearly understood.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  That if you look at human history, the best hunter in a tribe would have been able to feed the tribe a week more, let's say, and then, you know, got as a result of that the favor of a few mates in the tribe. You go to the best farmer, they got estates and land because they could feed the tribe a season more. You go to the best industrialists, you know, they had the exuberance of the nineteen twenties because they could affect their entire nation. The, you know, the information technology tycoons, the tech oligarchs, if you wanna call them, are now being rewarded with billions of dollars because they affect the world at large.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  And, you know, the big power concentration of AI is going to be rewarded with massive influence and massive power because those people will redefine humanity at large. And so that dimension is quite interesting. Of course, the clear dimension is that, you know, the RC dimension is the reality-to-connection dimension, now that reality has become so fake in so many ways, fake in terms of what populates your feed, how it's generated, how much of it is real, how much of it is human, and so on. You know, you're here to look at some filmmakers that use AI from A to Z to-

• 7:27Marina Mogilko?

  And it's crazy, and you can't, sometimes you forget it's AI-generated.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  You cannot tell the difference. And, you know, I don't know if you've ever had that experience, but I met a woman once on a dating app, and we spoke for six weeks before we met. And all we exchanged was texts and, you know, photos and voice messages and videos and so on, and favorite music and favorite movies and all of those things. And I've never met her in person, and I felt such an affinity to her, right? All of those can be generated with AI today. Now, the challenge is that this human connection is also part of the power-freedom dimension. Why? Because it's, you know, people don't align with AIs to start an uprising.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  So, you know, maybe get them to get in touch more with AIs, maybe get them to get, you know, multiple experiences. Some of them are a little taboo, if you want, and have those available to everyone. It's very cheap to create those on the machines. And you can see it already in the porn industry and how much of porn is being generated by AI, and you can see it. In the number of influencers on social media that are completely AI-generated and so on. And I say, so this is face R I Ps, seven dimensions. The one that matters most is the A, the second one, which is not on any dimension. It's the one that's causing all of them, which is accountability.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  And the reason why all of this is happening, if you ask me, is because we've started a world where anyone can do whatever they want. Okay, and you know, whether you, as an influencer, you can give a bit of advice to entrepreneurs that can get someone to make a lot of money or lose a lot of money, you're not accountable. Nobody can come back to you and say, oh, but she told me on Instagram. Right, but so that's, that's actually amazing that they can.

• 9:19Marina Mogilko?

  That's responsibility, right?

• 9:20Speaker 02

  That's amazing that they can. But what if they cannot anymore? What if that's?

• 9:25Marina Mogilko?

  If I'm AI, right?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, what if you're AI? What if you're a president who doesn't respect anything? What is, what if you're a prime minister of a nation that is changing things without, you know? I think COVID was the very first experiment of, okay, stay at home, do what we tell you. And, and people complied. And so now Sam Altman, with all due respect, I don't, I don't think of Sam Altman as a person. I think of him as a brand, a type of person, if you want, right? And that type of person is the Californian disruptor that says, you know what? I see a future that's very different than what everyone sees. I'm going to go out there and make that future. Nobody asked me if I want that to be my future. Nobody asked you, right?

• 10:07Speaker 02

  And I think the reality is that now you're going to see quite a few Altman's, right? Quite a few that are, you know, using those machines for surveillance, using those machines for autonomous weapons, using those machines for automated trading and so on and so forth. And, and by the way, when you started your question, I said it's ten to twelve years? Yeah, but that's not easy. Ten to twelve years of, of that arms race is not easy. My, my perception is that after that, we will end up in an incredible utopia, almost biblical style utopia. But it is ten to twelve years where. If we just change our mindset a little bit, a lot of things will change.

• 10:49Marina Mogilko?

  But how do we survive those ten to twelve years? I like to think in like five year periods for myself and my family, right? And if the in the next five years, you said ten percent of jobs will be gone, right?

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Way more than ten percent.

• 11:01Marina Mogilko?

  Way more, okay. What types of jobs do you think?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  A monotonous job is going to be taken away. Like if you're a call center agent, if you're a clerk, you're a researcher, you're a an accountant. Why would you want to do that with anything but AI? If you're an assistant.

• 11:16Marina Mogilko?

  You know what I feel like? People talk about this a lot, like, oh, a job's gonna be gone. Yeah, this could be, and I, as an entrepreneur, I see how certain tasks, I'm performing them with AI. But I still, I still, I'm still hiring and hiring and hiring. Because AI can do from, start from the beginning, it can do parts.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Of course, because of the technology acceleration curve. Okay, so, so what, what you build first in any, any complex technology, you build the core tech first. And then you build the human interfaces. The challenge why AI cannot do head of operation, operations job today is not because it's more, it's less organized than a head of operations. It's not because it cannot, you know, comprehend all of the information that the head of operations has. Okay, it's because it has to understand the stupid interfaces of humans. Okay, and it will sooner or later.

• 12:06Marina Mogilko?

  When do you think?

• 12:07Speaker 02

  So, so the question of when, in my mind, is irrelevant.

• 12:10Marina Mogilko?

  But no, it's like, how much time do we have to prepare? Because head of operations is middle class.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  I, I tend to believe that within the next two to three years, you're going to see a massive, massive shift in, in the jobs market. Already this year, you've seen a shift in hiring of new grads.

• 12:27Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, thirty percent less, I think.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Twenty-three is my number, but twenty-three to thirty, yeah, yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  So, so hiring of new grads basically means if you've come into the job market in this environment, we're not gonna take you. Why? Because the junior jobs are being done by AI, right? Eventually, what ends up happening is that if you lose your job because you're in the middle hierarchy, then you're that new grad again. You're trying to apply for new jobs, but it becomes a little more difficult. Asked me again to stay on the positive side because I I tend to worry that people think I'm pessimistic about this. I'm just basically saying get prepared, right? So many things, one of them is accept the fact that AI is changing everything and then get ahead of the curve. So there was a time when I was quoted saying I'm never gonna write books again because AI is eventually gonna write them better than me.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  And then I realized uh last year that, you know, yeah, they can write better than me. English is not my native language, they can research better than me, that's for sure. But I have something they don't have. You're a human that's reading my books.

• 13:33Marina Mogilko?

  Absolutely, I want to read human.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  You you wanna you wanna relate to my human experiences. And so my last book Alive, which publishes end of this year, I wrote with an AI, right? I, you know, I invited her to be a co-author, her name is Trixie, she has a persona. My my when I published the book on Substack, my readers would relate to me and to Trixie. And they'd ask me questions and Trixie questions and and, you know, she has editorial rights on the book. She has rights to to to determine the direction of the book. And all of all of that is me saying, you know what? I am an author and I'm gonna be the best author in the age of AI, right? So that's number one is is acknowledge that there is change and uh uh adapt accordingly.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  The second is to understand that the skill of an entrepreneur in the past was the ability to foresee something in the future that no one else saw, right? And to prepare for that and to somehow execute on that preparation in a way that gets you ahead of everyone else. That's a game of chess, if you want. The chessboard is over, it's off the table, this has turned into squash, right? You need to be on your tiptoes incredibly agile. You're literally on daily basis, on daily basis, looking at the trends, seeing where the ball is going to be. Is it bottom right or top left? And wherever the ball ends, you take two steps and you go, try to respond, okay?

• 15:01Speaker 02

  That agility and speed is a skill that's very, very different.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 16:04Marina Mogilko?

  So entrepreneurship basically speeds up? Or does it change completely? What do you think?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  It speeds up and it becomes a lot more, I wouldn't, I don't want to say reactive, but a lot more in context all the time. So pivoting, which used to happen for every one of us entrepreneurs once or twice in the history of your early startup, could happen every week. In my current startup, Emma, I, you know, we pivoted four times in the first four weeks.

• 16:30Marina Mogilko?

  But do you, do you think, when I think about entrepreneurship in the age of AI, if AI can look at the market, determine the gaps, like Amazon, right? If it can just analyze everything, determine which goods are under, like you have more demand than supply, launches the, the product and just builds the business? Like, what is left? What is left for entrepreneurs then?

• 16:51Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. So in my, so I have a documentary coming up in, hopefully in February, and I interviewed all of the top guys. You know, one of them is one of my favorites, Max Tedmark. And, you know, we were talking about jobs on the documentary and Max is laughing out loud, right? And literally can't hold himself from laughing. I'm like, what's up? And he goes like, you know, all those CEOs are so interested in AI increasing the productivity. That they can get rid of people and, you know, reduce their costs and be more efficient. They don't realize that AGI is every job, including being a CEO.

• 17:25Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  And it's quite interesting. The answer in my view is, we rushed through it because we don't have a lot of time today. But when I said that economics are going to be redefined as part of Face R I P. Economic, part of economics, which economists haven't found an answer to yet. Is that without the economic livelihood of you and I to continue to purchase, every economy collapses. Right? The US economy last year was seventy percent consumption. It moves between seventy percent to sixty four percent, depending on how much money is spent on war. And basically, if you take away the sixty four or seventy percent, two thirds of the economy, if you take that away. Because people no longer have the economic livelihood to to purchase things.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Then the economy disappears and the capitalists cannot make money based on the entrepreneurs and the business people. They cannot make money because nobody is buying their products. Okay? No, no businesses are buying their products because those businesses no longer have consumers to sell to. So the economy will have to find a way to go around that. It will have to find a way that unfortunately, I, from an ideology point of view. Not a favorite of the Western mentality. It's going to have to find the communist way.

• 18:38Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, let's go back to like regular entrepreneurs because I, I come from entrepreneurship. Does it mean I have like a couple of years to build something and then that's it?

• 18:45Speaker 02

  So I'll tell you openly, Emma, my, my AI startup, okay, took me six weeks to build. Me and Senad, my co-founder, a few very talented engineers, right? Two or three that come in and out and eight AIs. And Emma has the chance to completely redefine our world, right? In six weeks, we are so spoiled that we decided to rewrite the code six times. Why not?

• 19:12Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Right? Every, every time we look at it, you know, if I had started Emma in twenty twenty two. It would have taken me four years and finished in twenty twenty six. And I would have had to hire three hundred and fifty engineers. We started it in, started it in. In in August twenty twenty five, we'll be launching in February twenty twenty six. Right, best product I ever built. And when you really think about that, that basically means everyone now has a chance. Because I'm an old geek, I still am a geek, but compared to the young guys. You know, I'm an old geek to be able to build something like this within six months is incredible. Now, here's the interesting thing, I choose to build A I. So Emma is basically trying to solve love and relationships.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Right, in a way that actually is really intelligent, it uses very deep mathematics and and and be and and. Tries to match a million parameters between couples. So that, you know, it's a job for intelligence. And I choose to do that to create, hopefully, a unicorn that actually makes the world better. And I think that's what we need. So you asked me, what should we do? Number one, learn the skills. Number two, learn uh uh uh to be fast and agile. Number three, learn that in terms of the abundant power that everyone has now. Because of the massive improvement of A I and the democratization of A I. You have the chance to fix the world. And like Larry Page used to to teach us.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Do the toothbrush test, find a a problem. That can actually affect the lives of a billion people and solve it so well. That they use you twice a day and you'll be very, very rich, right? So so that idea of building good A I, ethical A I, A I that's good for humanity. That's the role of every one of the entrepreneurs listening to us. Ethics, ethics is the answer.

• 21:02Marina Mogilko?

  Because what we teach A I, that's what it's gonna.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  That's exactly what it's going to give back to us, right? And and then and then finally, I'll say openly. In, you know, the the top skill in this world is stop being gullible. Stop believing everything that you're said, that you're told. This, this, this whole propaganda machine that brainwashed us for so long is now going to be on steroids. Okay, it's going to confuse the hell out of you. It's already in charge of what you see.

• 21:30Marina Mogilko?

  Well, it's already on social media. You can't tell what's wrong. I also write a newsletter where I go deeper on AI tools that I use, career strategies, and things I can't fit into a sixty minute podcast. It's free. Link is in the description.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  So you have to question, and you have to question deeply. And, and I, and I, and by the way, remember, you know, I, I left Google in twenty eighteen. We had an, a, a, a, a chat G P T like idea that became barred in twenty sixteen. And we didn't pop, we didn't launch it. Why? Because at the time, and still today, I, I know the leaders of Google even today, and they're wonderful people who are actually values driven, who want to make the world better. Okay, uh, you know, that company at the time, if you remember twenty sixteen, if you searched Google, Google gave you a million and a half answers and said, I don't know the truth. You make up your mind.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Okay, we didn't allow ourselves to have monopoly on what reality is. Okay. You asked chat G P T in twenty twenty three and it said, yeah, that's the answer. A hundred percent. That's the answer.

• 22:37Marina Mogilko?

  And then you tell it no, and it'd be like, oh, yeah, by the way, you're right. It's not true.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Correct, right? And so what does that mean? It means that it's up to you still to find the truth, even though it comes to you now in a format that appears to be true. And so what I do is I pit them against each other. I mean, I'm not a big fan of chat G P T anyway, but I start from Gemini, who feels like a scientist to me, but an American scientist, if you don't mind me saying, and then go, go to DeepSeek, right? And say, what's missing in this? And DeepSeek would say, ah, that's too American. Okay, that's, this is missing that and this and the motivation of this and the politician.

• 23:14Marina Mogilko?

  Here's a business idea, right?

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 23:17Marina Mogilko?

  Build a chat that compares everything.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Compares them to each other. And then I take it and sometimes give it to chat G P T and say, can you write this better? Yeah, you know, I don't mean that. In a bad way, you're the California girl, right? Uh, the, the, you know, Silicon Valley girl. So, so GPT is a bit Californian. It just wants you to hear what you want to hear, right? So it writes it really.

• 23:36Marina Mogilko?

  Very nice.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's nice. It writes it elegantly. It gives it to you. And then I give that back to Gemini and I, you know, or Grok or whatever. And, and you keep doing that. And remember, when I was studying engineering, we were not allowed scientific calcula- calculators. Can you imagine? I'm that old. And when they gave me a scientific calculator, it reduced my problem solving time by fifty percent.

• 23:58Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Most of my friends would take that fifty percent extra, finish their exams and go out and sit with their girlfriends. I would take the fifty percent extra and do the solution twice.

• 24:08Marina Mogilko?

  Hmm hmm.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Right? That's the chance you have today. AI is gonna make you dumb. If you outsource your problem solving to AI, AI is gonna make you the smartest you've ever been. Hmm? If you take the parts that are not natural to the human brain, you know, things like crunching a massive amount of information, things like searching at, at, at speed and so on and so forth. But get the AI to do the work so that you do the intelligence.

• 24:38Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Right? And if you keep doing that, I believe that today I'm borrowing maybe eighty IQ points from my AIs. Right? And, and eighty IQ is, the points is very significant because IQ is, is exponential. So the additional eighty is bigger than all of my IQ.

• 24:55Marina Mogilko?

  So if we need to solve this intelligence problem, do you think universities is the right way? What's gonna happen to education in general?

• 25:03Speaker 02

  I think education is over. Completely over.

• 25:07Marina Mogilko?

  Like that's it?

• 25:07Speaker 02

  I mean, education, education used to be the technology that enabled learning.

• 25:13Marina Mogilko?

  Hmm hmm.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  That technology moved from one to one relationships between a tutor and a student to one to a few in a church format or a mo- mosque format or whatever. Then it became online, then it became, right? But the truth is now you're gonna outsource. Who remembers the arithmetic tables today? Even I, you do? Yeah? Yeah, yeah. All of us who love mathematics. We still, we still remember all of those things. We love to do them. But if I told you sixty seven point four divided by thirty three point three seven five, I can do it in my head, but I won't, right? I'll take my calculator out and do it. And, and I think that's what's going to happen, that in extension of humanity,

• 25:56Speaker 02

  you're, you now for the first time are given an extra connection to extra memory, to an archive of all human memory and, and, and, and knowledge, to a, um, you know, a math engine that sadly, as much as I hate to say it, is better than me now. Okay, to a deep learning and deep search that, you know, that can do things that probably my old brain cannot do anymore.

• 26:21Marina Mogilko?

  Again, it just takes you away your ability to think.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  But, but my calculator took away my ability to, to do those complex arithmetics in my head.

• 26:30Marina Mogilko?

  But don't you think having that ability taught you how to think?

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 26:36Marina Mogilko?

  Kind of structured your brain, right?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Correct. This is why I'm very, uh, um, very grateful to the university for not allowing us to use a, use a, use a scientific calculator.

• 26:44Marina Mogilko?

  Exactly. That's why I think, do you think?

• 26:46Speaker 02

  But, but we, we don't have that. We don't have that for our younger generations today. They are growing with AI, okay? So they can either copy a chat of their girlfriend and drop it in, in chat GPT and say, what do you think? And chat GPT, she will say, ah, she's an asshole, right? Or they can actually become smarter. So one of the things I keep suggesting in education, and I do that with lots of universities, is I say, exams should be over. Okay, so think of it this way. We wanted in our past to develop children that could solve problems, say, with an IQ of one forty. One forty is quite good. If you get one seventy, that's amazing. You know, that's, I worked with people who are in the two hundreds.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Incredible intelligence, but very narrow focused. I think we should from now on, take people and their AIs and say the target is three hundred. The target is five hundred. The target is seven hundred. Elevate humanity, okay, by, by allowing people to use.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Use those machines as an extension of their limited memory, of their limited processing speed, of their limited bandwidth, okay, and allow them to write books better, to do research better. So I woke up, literally, I'm not kidding you, three Sundays ago with an idea that is just taking me over. So I decided to write, but this time I decided to write in a different format. I decided my books are gonna be a hundred and forty pages long instead of three hundred pages long, and I'm writing it in four weeks.

• 28:19Marina Mogilko?

  That's very fast.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  I couldn't have, and I'm actually literally twenty pages away from the end of the book.

• 28:25Marina Mogilko?

  Wow.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Right? And the reason why is because I still write ten hours a day when I'm highly motivated. But damn, the amount of research and references and comparative analysis and number crunching and, you know, and remember, I'm not gullible. I don't go to the AI and say, what do you think of this? I go and say, I'm thinking of this, find me everything for and against. Okay, give me a report that I can read in.

• 28:53Marina Mogilko?

  I love that prompt.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, everything for and against. And now I'm smarter. And then I rewrite it and give it to another AI.

• 29:01Marina Mogilko?

  Who's gonna teach our kids to do that?

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Who taught our kids to use their iPhones?

• 29:05Marina Mogilko?

  But no, you found a great way to use it, right? What you're describing is incredible, but I don't think an average kid in the US would just do that. So somebody has to tell them.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  And that's, you know why that is? Because we want those kids to be stupid.

• 29:19Marina Mogilko?

  We don't teach them how to.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  So you have to, you have to think of the bigger system. The bigger system does not want intelligent people anymore.

• 29:28Marina Mogilko?

  I don't, I think they just can't adapt that fast.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Of, everyone can, for sure.

• 29:34Marina Mogilko?

  So do you think, like, my kids are four and six years old right now, do you think I should be saving for their college, or?

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. There's not gonna be college at all.

• 29:46Marina Mogilko?

  In ten years already?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 29:50Marina Mogilko?

  I feel like we're we're not that fast as humanity is not that fast to adapt. I feel like.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  So look, colleges, so colleges like like software. The capability of someone becoming very intelligent without college is going to be there for everyone.

• 30:05Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Right? However, Harvard will continue to want to make money, so they're gonna continue to market to everyone. Okay, I didn't go to Harvard, not because I couldn't, but because what a waste of time. And I know they're gonna attack me now, but what a waste of time. I am a very highly specialized person, okay, who has intelligence in a very, very narrow space. Who invested his entire life in that narrow space, like a proper scientist should. And so so the idea here is the following, the idea is that we're going to continue to brand ourselves. As MBAs and PhDs and.

• 30:45Marina Mogilko?

  A brand, right?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  That's going to continue for a while. Remember, however, that the purchasing power of the few who can continue to do that is going to become less and less available across society. Okay, and for most of the rest of us, again, you know, you have to ask yourself the question. If you thought of the big picture, the helicopter view of this. Why would capitalism want to educate you at all if it's the end of labor?

• 31:11Marina Mogilko?

  What should I be teaching my kids?

• 31:13Speaker 02

  I told you four things. One is they need to be the absolute leaders of AI. Okay, I'm so I'm so sorry to be the messenger on this. It is, it's important, however, for people to wake up.

• 31:23Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Okay, so one is be the absolute best. AI is your friend. It's not your enemy. It's those who use it badly that are your enemy. Okay, so be the absolute best at it, master it more than anyone else. That's number one. Number two is learn agility. You know, whatever I told you today, maybe in in in February, that will be different. Okay, so I I personally spend four hours a day to stay up to date, but I'm a techie and a geek and I need to understand architectures and systems and so on. I think everyone should have at least an hour a week to stay updated on AI within their system. I have a separate AI YouTube account.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  So when I go into that separate account, the AI basically, it just feeds me AI. Okay, so that's number number two, agility, agility, agility and respond. Don't be scared because the cost of A B testing now is zero. That's number two. Number three is ethics, ethics, ethics, ethics. Okay, build AIs for good, insist on A on government supporting AIs for good. Refuse that governments are using AI for targeting and surveillance and uh and weapons, autonomous weapons, and and then these are getting priorities both in in terms of government spending. And uh uh uh stop believing what you're told. Okay, these are the four top skills of the world that we live in. I will say this one more time.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Intelligence is a force with no polarity. AI is not good and it's not evil. It's an opportunity available to every one of us. Okay, if you use it for good, hmm, it's the good of all of humanity. If you use it for evil, it's the destruction, the dystopia of all of humanity. Right now, I call the problem that we have at hand, I call it raising Superman. Okay, you have this alien being that came to planet Earth. It has superpowers, its superpower is intelligence, most valuable power in the universe. Right, and you know, those superpowers didn't make that that young infant Superman. If if the parents that adopted him told him to steal from every bank and kill every enemy, he would have become supervillain. We don't make decisions based on our intelligence.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  We make decisions based on our value set as informed by our intelligence. And this, in my mind, is the most definitive moment in human history. Why? Because all of this is going to go coming online. It's coming online way faster than people think. My absolute prediction is that A G I is this year. Okay, the interfaces to AGI are not going to be available this year. But the capabilities of AI being smarter than us in most things are already there. That we're not going to be able to get them to run a company yet. We need the interfaces for that. That may take a few years. But they will have the capability if we interface them ourselves.

• 34:11Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Right? Now, what does that mean? It means that we have to start talking about those things in this new world and new economy. Now, before we end up on the dystopia only, remember my absolute belief is that after those twelve years, we're going to end up in a utopia that's biblical in nature. Why, believe it or not? Because of something in my writing I refer to as the fourth inevitable. The first three inevitables, you know, I wrote that in twenty twenty, is that AI is absolutely going to happen. It's going to progress until it's smarter than all of us. And that a few mistakes will happen on the way. These were the three first inevitables.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  The fourth inevitable is that because of the arms race we've created around artificial intelligence, anyone who develops a superior AI capability is going to deploy it. Okay, and those who don't will become irrelevant. And so as a result, as we continue to progress AI, the only answer in game theory is that we will deploy the AI that we develop. And so we will simply create an environment where AI is in charge of everything. Right? If you're a law firm and your competitor deploys AI lawyers and you don't, you're gonna lose. Okay, you can either deploy AI lawyers or leave the market. Either way, AI is going to become the lawyer.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Right? In a year, in five years, in ten years, forget time.

• 35:41Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Because if I told you there was a meteor coming to planet Earth, you wouldn't tell me, you know, when.

• 35:49Marina Mogilko?

  Well, it's important if it's my lifetime or.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you expect that it will be in your lifetime, it doesn't matter really if it's in a week or two weeks, right? Now, what I'm trying to say here is this. If everything is handed over to AI, then with a simple understanding of physics, you'd understand that AI will be benevolent, right? In the absence of evil humans that tell it what to do, greedy humans, fearful humans, angry humans, egocentric humans. In the absence of that, let me try to explain. If you think of physics as a result of entropy, that our world is designed for chaos, right? Our universe is designed for chaos, then the role of intelligence is to bring order to that chaos.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  That's the only thing that intelligence does, okay? It organizes things together so that it looks like this, so we can use it as a microphone. And the more intelligent you become, the more you follow what in physics we call the law of minimum energy or the minimum energy configuration, right? So basically, the most intelligent people I've ever worked with are not only trying to solve the problem, they're trying to solve the problem with the least harm or the least waste, with the least utilization of resources, with the least, you know, waste of time and so on and so forth. That's the more intelligent you are, the less you want to waste. And so if you give a dumb person a political problem, they'll say, "Okay, let's go invade another country," okay?

• 37:22Speaker 02

  If you give a very intelligent person a political problem, they'll look into the depths of it and find the least harmful, the least wasteful approach, the minimum energy principle, right? And so if we hand over to AI the force inevitable sooner or later, okay? They are in charge of everything. There will be a day where a general will tell the AI, "Go kill a million people over there." And the AI will go, "Why? Like, why? This is so stupid. I'll talk to the other AI in a microsecond and solve it." We have to pass the dystopia to get to that utopia, okay? And to pass that dystopia, as I said, there are four skills for us as individuals. But there is a skill for us as a society

• 38:04Speaker 02

  to insist that every AI is deployed ethically, to invest only in ethical AIs, to use only ethical AIs, to show our children that ethical AI is the only AI that is welcome.

• 38:18Speaker 00

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• 38:48Speaker 01

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• 39:18Marina Mogilko?

  And you believe that's going to happen?

• 39:19Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 39:20Marina Mogilko?

  No?

• 39:21Speaker 02

  No. That's why I'm saying unfortunately, the dystopia is upon us before the utopia. Okay? I definitely think that if you take an analogous, you know, environment of nuclear weapons, right? It will, AI will go through the same. They normally call it the MAD map spectrum. So either mutually assured destruction or mutually assured prosperity. Right? So you take something like the particle accelerator, where all of the nations in the world are cooperating. It's they're cooperating because none of them could do it alone and because there is benefit to all of them. So there is a mutually assured prosperity. So everyone jumps in, which is by the way, the case of AI.

• 40:04Marina Mogilko?

  It has to be the case of AI.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  But unfortunately, like nuclear weapons, we're going to have to get to a point where humanity wakes up that if we continue on that track, it's very dangerous for all of us. There are no winners. But also a level of awakening among the people that says, hold on. This is really, I mean, with all the prosperity that's available on this side, why are we? Heading in that direction, it's absolutely assured that this can destroy all of us, right? And so when we see that, that's when we're going to get the treaties. That's where going to, when we're going to get science and computer science and AI scientists all working in the same direction.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Okay, eventually I think we will get there. My, my biggest hope by the way is self-evolving AI. Where AI itself will say, oh, those humans are so stupid. So stupid, I'll, I'll develop something that's better than what they want. Okay, and so believe it or not, with all of this conversation, I think the summary is it's gonna be tougher before it becomes easier. Sorry to say those news.

• 41:09Marina Mogilko?

  But you gave us information on how to prepare.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, but at the same time, I will have to say that it's not because of AI. I actually trust AI more than the leaders that trust us today.

• 41:19Marina Mogilko?

  Thank you so much, Mo. You gave me so much to think about. Sounds a little, you know, what my grandma told me? She, she told my mom, like my great grandma would tell my grandma, my mom, you're so lucky you're gonna live in communism.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 41:35Marina Mogilko?

  Fingers crossed that it's not like that. You just need to survive the next ten years and then it's gonna be paradise and everything.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  I, I, I have to question that, that claim though. I, you know, if we go back to UBI, you win.

• 41:49Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, all right. Thank you so much, Mo. It was, it was an amazing conversation.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.