Hello, folks, and welcome to the disco posse podcast. My name is Eric great to be host. And we've got an amazing and compelling conversation with Best Selling Author, Mo Gao that I'll go into more about no in a moment. Because this is something that you've really really got to enjoy the work that he's done. I've actually read his books, and at any rate really sound fantastic. So before we jump in, I do want to make sure I give a shout out. And thanks to the folks that make this amazing show happen. Because of the folks over at Veeam software, who makes sure that you've got everything you need for your data protection needs. Boy, we've just had a lot of great stuff, cube con just happened in LA and they are leading the charge as far as cloud native data protection with their cast and platform, tons of great stuff. So if you want to find out about everything you need for your data protection needs, whether it's on prem in the cloud, cloud native, you name it, head on over to ve.am forward slash disco posse, and you'll be in great shape, because they'll get you hooked up. So go do that go to v e.af. Forward slash disco posse. Now, of course, speaking of protection, not only do you need to protect your data, backing that thing up, be able to restore it on top of that, what about your data in transit in flight, especially when you're moving around and you're going to places you're going to Wi Fi spots, the best thing you can do is make sure you protect your data by using ExpressVPN. I say this because I use it myself. It's a handy tool number one protects your data wherever you're at, because a lot of bad things going on. Are there a lot of bad people going on out there? On top of that is a fantastic testing tool for web platforms if you're testing latency from various locations. So it's a real real excited dual mode capability. So if you want to check that out, I highly recommend it you can shoot on over to tri Express vpn.com forward slash disco posse. That's, that's it. Those are two sponsors. Oh, sorry. There's three there's three. There's one more go get diabolical coffee diabolical coffee.com devilishly good coffee. And this way you don't have to go to get those dirty wi Fi's at coffee shops. Get your coffee at home. All right, this is mogao dat. He's a CEO of a fresh new startup. He's a best selling author of solve for happy and scary smart. He's the former Chief Business Officer at Google. He's got a fantastic voice a fantastic soul. And he bears both of them for us in the story. Just a great, great show. Enjoy.
Hi, my name is Mogo that I'm the best selling author of sold for happy of the upcoming books carry smart the future of artificial intelligence and how you can save the world. I'm the host of the slow mo podcast, the founder of 1 billion happy.com, the former Chief Business Officer of Google X and currently the CEO of a new promising startup called today and I'm here on the disco posse podcast.
So Moe God that thank you very much for joining this is a real it's an honor and a pleasure to know that I'm going to share time with you today. You've produced an incredible amount of content that I found very meaningful and very impactful. You in the things that you do in your entrepreneurial ventures. You aim for incredible, you know, strong goals, big changes, meaningful impact, and it's proven itself out. But you've also talked about in some of your obviously your written work and what inspires a lot of what you do. The impact of adversity and challenge we're going to talk about a lot of things but for folks that are brand new to you, Moe, if you don't mind giving a brief introduction, we'll talk about sell for happy, your upcoming book, which is incredible. So congratulations in advance for what will be inevitably another fantastic book that we are bringing into the world and we'll talk about a lot of things your your entrepreneurial ventures are I could spend an hour on each one of them, which is amazing. So,
so life and happiness, business and entrepreneurship. I mean, Eric, thank you so much. It's been an honor and it took us time to arrange this and I'm really grateful for the time. I am. I have two lives, literally two parallel lives for the last seven or eight years. I have been a technologist, a geek if you Want and a business executive for quite a bit of my life, I started my life at IBM, then move to Microsoft then spent 12 years at Google at the time, where those companies truly were changing the world. You know, at Google, I started as vice president of emerging markets opened half of Google's businesses worldwide, which meant that we, I also launched Google products in more than 100 languages around the world. And then I moved to become the Chief Business Officer of Google X, which is probably the best job on the planet, maybe, you know, think maybe God, I think God would bid for that job as well. I mean, it truly it truly is, it was an amazing honor to work with some of the smartest humans on the planet. And, and really work on big moonshots if you want. So that said, that's half of my life, I still continue today, I have two startups running in parallel, one of which I'm the CEO. The other is I'm just the co founder, so CEO and co founder of one co founder of the other. And, you know, one of them is about three and four, reinventing consumerism in a way that's favorable for the planet, if you want. And the other is about happiness, actually applying artificial intelligence to helping us become happier. So that's half of my life, the other half of my life is, is basically an author and a speaker. And, you know, I don't like the word teacher, but as much as I can, you know, spreading the message of happiness I published, soul for happy, which was my first book in 2017, it published in 31 languages, became an international bestseller almost in all of them. And then, and then, you know, from then onwards, I probably, you know, started my foundation 1 billion happy, which is aiming to spread happiness to a billion people around the world. Part of that effort is the happiness app p, which is coming up coming out at the end of the year. But also part of it is my podcast, slo mo, which I believe is a very effective vehicle, in terms of getting the wisdom of my best friends, really, you know, my wisest friends are hosted on the podcast to just speak about topics, which requires us require us to slow down, slow down and reflect on our life. So you know, the name Slo Mo is basically that fast moving executive that I have been, in this phase of my life trying to find time to reflect and, and find what really matters in life. So I think these are the two sides of my life, put them together in whichever configuration, and you get a different day, every day.
Right. So I think the ideal place to frame from define happy
Oh, that's, that's an engineers podcast, Hello. Tell people that they don't get it, you know, when I go to those events that are about, you know, the whole idea of well being go like, define, define, you know, what's the problem statement? What is the definition? Can we start from that, when I started my work there, I couldn't find a definition. As a matter of fact, if you search the dictionary, you will find very varying, you know, meanings I basically worked to, to identify happiness as an engineer. So in my late 20s, I was clinically depressed, I tried to find my way out of it. And I couldn't because I actually didn't understand what I was looking for. And happiness, in my view is highly definable by an equation. And the equation is very straightforward. You're not happy or unhappy in any specific moment in your life, or any specific event in your life, you're happy or unhappy, if life seems to be going your way. And so every moment of your life, you compare the event of life, or at least your perception of the current event of life, to your hopes and wishes and expectations of how life should be. And if life meets your expectations, you're happy. If life misses your expectations, you're unhappy. And what does what that means is that happiness is equal to or greater than the difference between the events of your life and your expectations of how life should be, you run that equation, on this current conversation, you know, you may look at the shadow behind me and say, the lighting is not perfect. And take that as an event that misses your expectation for a quality podcast like yours. And that would make you unhappy, or you could listen to My voice and say, oh, good voice for a podcast. You know, I think this might actually register well with my audiences. That's how I what I expect my guests to sound like so it would make you happy. So if that's the case, then happiness is defined. Unlike what the modern world is trying to convince us happiness is defined as those moments where you feel The calm and peacefulness of being okay with life as it is, okay? Very important definition because most of the modern world tries to define a different emotion. And they try to mix it up with happiness, they try to define something like fun, or excitement or elation, or other pleasures or other feelings, and they try to mix that with happiness. All of those are actually not happiness, they're more a state of escape you if you want, they're more, you know, as I mentioned them, they are fun, they're pleasure, they're, you know, elation, excitement, and so on. And those are, are different than happiness. Those are moments when we are engaging our physical form in enough activities, or pleasure, or reward so that your brain stops solving the Happiness Equation. And so you think you're happy, but what you're actually doing is you're not thinking about your problems.
It really brings up the interesting thing where we often tie accomplishments to happiness. Yes, and what's the, what's the real risk behind this unfortunate tendency to do just that.
So you know, the best differentiation between the two so that you can always differentiate whether it's accomplishment or other symptoms, is dopamine and serotonin. So so we, our biology works in interesting ways that we have different hormones that are secreted to, you know, elicit certain responses or motivate us to do certain actions, when we're happy, which again, is life meets my expectation, I'm okay with this moment, I wouldn't mind if this moment lasted forever. That's the basically means I'm okay with this. Right? When you are in that state, your body is flooded with serotonin. Serotonin is a calmer, it's a hormone that basically translates exactly to what the Happiness Equation says. It basically means stay as you are, we don't need to change anything, this is good. This is okay, this meets my expectations, I can now rest I can close my eyes, I can reflect I can digest my food, I can rebuild my muscles, which is very, very important. So you know, a physiological state that is very important for our survival is to get that time to restore. And that is enabled by serotonin and serotonin is only secreted in those moments of car, every other mix up if you want, including feeling achievement, and reward is a moment that is associated with dopamine. And sadly, in the happiness world, sometimes people call dopamine, a happiness hormone. It's not dopamine is an excitatory, it's a reward hormone, it is the hormone your body uses to tell you that even though what you're doing right now is not directly related to your survival, I want you to do more of it, you know, sex is a very great good example of that, you know, if you don't have sex, you're not gonna die. I mean, by maybe some of us will, but most of us won't, right? But, but the truth is, you know, your body is encouraging you to have more of it, because it's important for the survival of the species. Now, with that in mind, you would notice that achievement falls, you know, at the center of the dopamine arena, when you when you feel rewarded, because now you're onstage and people are clapping for you, or that your, your manager promoted you or whatever, you know, you get that rush of dopamine in you saying, Oh my God, that feels amazing. Let's keep striving in life to get more of that. But the truth is, like all other activities associated with dopamine, dopamine wears out very, very quickly. So you basically run out of it, the minute the event is over, and then you strive for more. And this is why when you when you achieve, all of us are aware of that interesting loop you achieve. You've been waiting for that promotion for two days for two years. And then you get it and you run to your girlfriend or boyfriend and say I made it and then you're happy for a day. And then you're setting your next promotion goal and upset for the next two and a half to three years. Right? Why? Because you need that next shot of dopamine and that next shot of dopamine is not going to come until you get another jolt of fun, have a party of pleasure and so on and so forth. You know, this is the reason why you you may end up at the end of the week feeling tired or that you know that you had a difficult week, you rush to a party, you know, pre COVID And you know and you're and you drink a couple of drinks and you dance a little bit and you feel amazing as if all of life is okay. And then you wake up in the morning and you're even more depressed. So you need a bigger shot of dopamine so you either are lucky for another party or going to the gym, and so on and so forth, so achievement doesn't work at all. As a matter of fact, achievement, if you ask me, is probably the biggest myth of the Industrial Revolution. Because not because we are not, we're not supposed to achieve as a matter of fact, we are here on this planet to achieve and to help and to serve and to make a difference. But the way we define achievement is probably the biggest drug that's ever been sold to us and achievement. You know, if you look at my current mission, 1 billion happy, my absolute dream is that by the end of my life, I will have achieved got as close as I can to spreading a message of happiness to a billion people lost all the money that I made in Google and every other place and got completely forgotten. Okay. And if you if you tell me that this is not a major achievement, that's probably in my view, the biggest achievement ever. It doesn't buy Ferraris, okay, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't really make me dressed in Armani suits and impress the girls. But, but that is actually an achievement that's not associated with dopamine. As a matter of fact, it's associated a lot more with hormones around love and connection and compassion. And you know, and really, really being part of the big, being the big all of us, which is again, it's not addictive like dopamine is, I think, the idea is we're looking for connection we're looking for love, we're looking for con, we're looking for peacefulness, contentment, and so on. These are the lasting feelings, and then you can add dopamine on top of them. And when you do, you're in a very good place. If you're just chasing dopamine all the time, it's going to be a very, very long marathon.
If to sort of further the analogy, it's effectively the difference between sex and intimacy. Well, may may involve sex, it doesn't have to sex is very much about you know, sort of very strong, obviously, dopamine, strong event. But then long ways without anything, versus intimacy is something that can be continuously experienced, or experiencing a much longer phase.
Beautiful, beautiful definition. Actually never thought of it this way. But it's definitely spot on. Yeah.
Alright, Achievement unlocked, I've made I've made most say something I said was good, I'm in good shape here. Now, that's my don't mean it for the day. Here's, here's the interesting thing, as well. And I, I've often describe, my approach to this is I'll say I follow sort of the Stoics, in the sense that I, I don't want to hold claim to the positive, because it artificially elevates that normal that achievements to you know, that that dopamine hit, so to speak. And then I'm already a pre aware that when I achieve this high that immediately I enter into a trough, I will have to. So I don't want these big waves, what it look is much more to sort of tighten the curve of understanding that an achievement may, you know, be good, but I want to lessen the impact of the feeling so that I can, conversely, lessen the negative impact and understand that certain things that are out of my control must be accepted, and just dealt with. Yeah, but if I think both sides, yes, absolutely. If I take if I want, if I want responsibility for the highs, I must take responsibility for the lows. And so my personal thing, like I did believe me, it's not perfect at all, because I struggled with it continuously. And we all would. But you know, even if it's I mean, even the greatest therapists in the world have therapists, because there's, no one is always good all the time.
I'm totally with you. I mean, you know, sometimes when people ask me, the definition of wisdom, the definitive part of the definition of wisdom is to be unimpressed by a lot of shit, right? It is. So it's so interesting as you go through life, especially if you've followed the path like mine, where there was a point in my life and I apologize, I'm I surely I'm not that person anymore. But there was a point in my life where I had 16 cars in my garage, right? And, you know, now I wear $4 T shirts, and I promise you, you know, I'm really not impressed by the cars I see in the street at all. You know, I look at them and I go like, I know they look sexier, but on the inside, they're all the same. When you sit in a car all you do really do is you look on the street outside. And and you know, so what, who cares what car you're in unless you're feeding your ego. I think the other side of course is to realize that it wouldn't always be, you know, easy and pleasant that life is bound like a video game to come with some challenges otherwise it will be boring like hell and you You know, and these are the moments where we learn. So the stoic approach is both ways. One way, one way is to is to really not be impressed by stuff that doesn't really deserve your, you know, you being so easily pleased. And the other side is when it's tough, you see it for what it is just as another part of the video game.
And I think it maps as well to how you behave in your day to day things you do and how you interact with people. And I often describe, you know, the, the ideal personality, especially in a startup because I've obviously been exposed to that a lot. And you would know this, as well as that anybody in that kind of environment. I describe it as never above it, never below it, right, any tasks that you need to do, you're perfectly willing to share. One of my favorite books, in fact, was legacy by James care. And he talks about the New Zealand All Blacks, and their concept was that there was one, one of the chapters and it's called sweeping the sheds. In the star players after you know, winning a game and scoring incredible, you know, goals, they come in, and then all of the junior players go off to dinner, and the the winning goal player, the winning goal, you know, creators stay and sweep up the shed and clean everything up. And here is this reporter saying, Wait, this is this is completely backwards. It doesn't make sense to me why? Why aren't you the ones being celebrated this because we're here because we're a team, and they're the ones that allowed us to have that opportunity to score those goals. They should be celebrated. And then we will celebrate together.
Hmm. I love that. I think that's sadly a big part of what we miss in our modern world today. I mean, that, that idea, that acknowledgement of the oneness, the you know, the team call it the team of all of us, I think is the biggest missing block in our humanity today. And I wish more people would acknowledge that,
to my heritage, I sort of joke with you listen, you know, there's no I in team I said, well, there is one na keep, and I'm French. So I'm allowed to be the, that the interesting thing too, when we talk about solve for happy and I've heard you discuss this before, and so I want to tap into this. There's an a concern with a lot of people, when we deal with something systematically or or in a formulaic way, they really feel that it's like taking away from it. But I liken it to what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky opened up to the world with the idea of behavioral economics, in that they, they were able to work backwards against experiencial things and then map formulaic approaches, and then begin to understand the science behind it. There is people there's a human aspect, always, but so in that way, when we say solve for happy, a lot of people would say, oh, boy, here it goes again. Here's, here's somebody from Google, trying to figure me out.
Yeah, so yes, and no, I mean, it is very unusual to speak about topics like happiness from an algorithmic point of view and a scientific point of view, in sort for happy for example, I discuss, I discuss topics of spirituality and topics of very complex, you know, love, death, you know, the grand design, as I call it, you know, from the point of view of theory of relativity, you know, quantum physics and cosmology, right. And it's actually really, really complicated, because it's an accepted by science to discuss some of the non measurable, you know, things that are not observed as per the scientific method if you want, but you can actually use what you can observe to deduce what is possibly, what you don't observe is going to look like which, you know, is similar to how we try to, you know, imagine how it would be like behind the horizon of singularity of a black hole? Yes, it's an observed inside the black hole, but we can detect that perhaps there is something that we can detect by observing theory of relativity, along with quantum physics and cosmology to talk about the singularity, the horizon the event horizon of death, for example, now, that that I think, has found popularity with a lot of people because sadly our modern world is much more left brained and masculine it's thinking then, then our than our actual realities supposed to be but having said that, there is nothing wrong with you going to driving school, to be told exactly how a car operates and what the rules of the road are, and you know how you can drive until you're qualified to drive and then it becomes second Now, sorry for herpes entirely about that. It basically is, I call it a user manual. It's in many ways, it's written like a user manual. Okay. And we techies, we love that we love to understand. I mean, the truth is, there hasn't been a user manual on the topic for a long time, especially for the, for the logical ones of us. Okay. And I wrote it for me really, because out there, there were lots of amazing gems of spiritual and, and, you know, psychology books, but not none for the logical process oriented or, you know, data science oriented, leader and, and the idea here is the following. If something follows an equation, then it is repeatable and predictable. And if it is repeatable and predictable, then certain actions and behavior will trigger certain outcomes. Now, when you practice those, you will find that their true happiness is events minus expectations. Yeah, let's apply that to any moment. You felt happier you feel happy when your children are okay. Yeah, that's our hope and expectation from life when they're okay. We feel happy. We feel happy in nature. Yes, of course, because nobody criticizes nature and say, it should change. You never sit in front of the ocean and say, I'd like the view. But Can someone nude the sound, we look at it. And we say it is as it is, it's chaotic, and we love it. Right? And and so when you start to think of it this way, you realize that certain behaviors will always trigger the certain the same outcomes. And from then onwards, you go into neuroscience and psychology, you use neuroplasticity to develop habits. And when you develop those habits, suddenly happiness becomes a second nature. And, and I don't say this to brag, but But I say this to encourage people I mean, if I'm ambitious enough to to try and bring a message of happiness to a billion people, which I know, by definition, I never will, but it's a nice ambition to have, you know, is it then I need to be sort of an Olympic champion of happiness, okay. And believe it or not, I'm not doing that bad at all. I mean, in 2020, which was a very stressful year for quite a few people. I had one instance where I felt unhappy for four hours, one instance, where I felt unhappy for a day. And then for the rest of the year, my average time of bounce back from unhappiness to happiness is seven seconds. Okay. Now, and I don't say that to brag, I don't say that to brag at all, there is a flowchart, okay, and I follow the flowchart verbatim, every time I feel negative, okay, and the flowchart is so effective that you can literally within seven seconds, without 99.99% of the reasons that make us unhappy. Now, when you think about it this way, you realize that it's actually not bad at all to go to driving school. Okay, it is, it's important to know what it takes to drive properly and then start driving.
I guess this is the other thing as well sort of do carry forward the, the human the problem with humans as humans, right, like understanding humans, we have this a real sort of dichotomy, that the one thing we fear is losing control. And at the same time, we fear being controlled. It's this real sort of tug of war, that in the same way, the ability to accept the lack of control is such a freeing experience. And again, sort of pulling from the stoics that's, that's the idea, there are certain things that are without the ability to be controlled, and so they must be accepted. And, and you then deal with the how you will accept it. And then the behavior you have is a React, it's your reaction to it, that's as important as the experiencing of the event.
Totally. Absolutely. I mean, in the flowchart of happiness, this is what I call the Jedi Master level of happiness. Because, you know, sometimes unhappiness comes due to events that are outside of our control completely, I mean, losing a child is outside your control, there is nothing you can do to bring him back. And you can hit your head against the wall for 27 years, it's not going to change your deck. Right? And and how do you handle those events? Can you actually surrender to the flow of life? Can you accept the new baseline of your life? So that's actually losing control? And then you can you grasp? You know, can you? Can you grab that control again and tell yourself so what can I do now? I can't bring him back, but is there anything I can do to make my life or the life of others better? Should maybe I should do that? Right? And and that, you know, flip flop if you want between, you know, letting go of what you can't control and actually doubling down on what matters really, suddenly becomes, I would say, again, a sign of wisdom, a sign of wisdom is not to waste your life on something that's not going to gain you anything at all, or make your life better. And in fact, it's even more stupid to waste your life on something that's gonna torture you and make you feel unhappy. While There's nothing now, when I, when I say that to people, most people go like, What are you talking about? You know, you, you make it look like where we can do all of those things. Yes, you do them all the time. Okay. And that's what shocks me What shocks me is you can have a problem with your partner, okay and argument in the morning. And you know, for 25 minutes, you're thinking about that argument and, you know, beating yourself up about it, and then your boss calls and your boss goes likewise, the report I asked for yesterday, and you go like, Oh, sorry, boss, I will send it to you in five minutes. And you simply tell your brain Okay, brain, that's it? Nope. No thinking about my partner for now. Can we just get the report done? And what does your brain do? Your brain goes like, Sure, sir. Sure. Sure, ma'am. I'm, I'm going to do this for you. It's exactly what you asked me to do. I will do it every time. No, no one has ever told his his or her brain to raise her his or her left hand. And, and the brain decided no, no, I'll raise the right. You know, I don't like that your brain does what you tell it to do. But but we when when it comes to making ourselves feel miserable. For some reason, we let it linger. It's like the the Netflix of unhappiness, let's play those scenarios. Again. That's really weird for me. And you know, and if you if you decide to play the scenario over and over and over for 25 years, instead of 25 minutes, don't blame the world for it, the world gave it to you for seven seconds. And the seven seconds were over. Okay? And the rest of all of your suffering is you replaying it. So, okay, I mean, it's your choice. But do we really need a boss to tell you to stop doing that? Or can you tell that to yourself? Can you? Can you do something about it, rather than complain about it and just suffer and crumble in the
yes, the it's definitely something that we all needs to, you know, strip captured in the moment to I think this is one of the problems is that we are usually far further down the line of the as the one such a perfect description of it, the Netflix of unhappiness is let me just autoplay the next episode, right? Because one will then take you further down into this hole of negativity. And it's, it's so easy to then, you know, follow. I remember when I was young, at a friend of mine, and this is a shout out to my friend Darren, if he listens, he, we would we would often say we're like, you know, 14 year old teenagers, we weren't like emo teens, you know, dyeing our hair, and but we would just say like, we would talk about very negative experiences. And we would Lily would call it say, let's, we should just get depressed, like, let's just take yourself into, like kind of a really negative space. And part of it was kind of a training of can I bring myself back? And like, what is the event that I could use? And it was almost looking for when how do I identify the trigger? That's taking me into this, where I'm talking about a thing, and then I'm now subconsciously experiencing it in a negative way. And I'm now it's got its own wheels, and it's going off. And now how do I then recover it almost like when we work out when we physically work out muscles are not built by gentle, slow motions, they're built by breaking, and then rebuilding, that's how we get stronger, we, it's actually going past the point. And then recovering that does the building. And the same thing happens I think mentally that you don't know where the breakpoint is until you you're beyond it. And if you never get beyond it and come back, you
know, there is a big difference though. So the process of building muscles is rest. Replenish and sorry, rep replenish and rest right. So that's absolutely true and what you exercise grows and what you don't shrinks. And we know that when it comes to neuroplasticity and the science of happiness if you want I think it will it works both ways. So I I liken it a little more to which muscle Are you exercising so if you if you go into the gym, and you lift heavy weights, you know, shorter shoulder presses all the time, you're going to look like a triangle, right? If you squat or you're if you squat all the all the time, you're going to look like a pair you have you can make that choice. And and and inside your brain neuroplasticity works exactly the same way. But it's not visible. For us in terms of bigger muscles. It's just happening inside. So if your choice is I'm going to watch CNN or the BBC or, you know, Fox or whatever, 24 hours a day as they fill my head with horrible news all the time. What are you doing, you're exercising the muscle that says the world is horrible, okay, and so you're becoming better and better at acknowledging and recognizing all of the bad things when if you actually go outside and look at you know, a butterfly or meet good friends or you know, or read Steven Pinker's work or whatever, right? There are many other things that will remind you that, that no, actually life is amazing. As a matter of fact, I'm so sorry to say this, and I hope nobody gets offended. But if you have a device on which you can listen to this podcast, and you have the time to spare to spare to spend an hour and a bit listening to us, and you have the safety, you know, a roof on top of your head and you know, electricity to charge your device, and, you know, that basically means you're already Okay, to be quite honest, you're luckier than 99% of the world. And the truth is, we fail to recognize that because more and more and more we train our brains to say, and in this wonderful moment, okay, what is wrong? What's wrong in this wonderful moment is that it's raining outside? Yeah. Who cares? Like seriously? I mean, honestly, or what's rain? What's wrong with this moment? Is that my girlfriend said something annoying? Yeah, I mean, girlfriends, boyfriends, boyfriends are supposed to say annoying things every now and then. Right? Where did you get another expectation from? We're all humans, we all we're all, you know, emotional, we all get stressed. It's, it's gonna happen. So, so So the truth is, if you actually start looking at the positive side of your life, most of the time, it's okay. Okay. And there are one of two ways you can look at the positive sides of your life. One of them is to actually look vividly look for it and say, so, you know, I have a very simple deal with my brain, but that but I have an advanced level agreement with my brain. When my brain brings me something bad. I say, Okay, you need to bring me four good things about it. Okay. I asked people more normally, in my work to bring one one to one. Okay. Because in reality, most of life is good. Don't, you know, we don't recognize this, but it's the truth statistically, right. Statistically, most of us have never experienced an earthquake, if you have, okay, it was for seven minutes in your, you know, 17 years in the last 17 years. And you're still okay, by the way, so even then it's okay. So most of life is on solid ground, most of life is healthy. That's why we're so panicking about COVID-19. Okay, you know, because because it's the, it's the anomaly Not, not the not the baseline, the baseline is most of the time, we get a couple of episodes of a flu or something in the year and yeah, the end of your life, you get weaker and weaker, but, but you know, most of us are, okay, most of us have enough to eat, most of us have, you know, and a reasonable amount of love, whether that's a brother or a sister, or right, and none of us are going through such horrible things. So one way is to actually count your blessings and keep a, you know, a gratitude journal of sorts, and remind yourself the other way is to look down, look down, and compare to how much worse it is for others. And now you will feel blessed, right? So so one of the most staggering statistic in the world is that, you know, Scandinavian countries which have the highest
quality of living, you know, they call it subjective well being, you know, from a pension, health care, a job security, and so on, and so forth, also have some of the highest suicide rates on the planet. And the reason is, is simply because the more you give a human, your brain will continue to look for what's wrong, whatever you give me, whatever you give me, if I'm looking for what's wrong, I'm gonna find it. Okay. I had a friend of mine, who is an incredible, incredible artist who travels around the world. And, you know, his job is to take photographs of indigenous tribes. And I asked him, and I said, Did you travel during COVID? And he said, Yeah, I went to Africa. And I said, What's the the reaction of Africans to COVID? He said, I asked them, I said, have you? Have you heard of COVID? And they said, Yeah, have you heard of cholera? Have you heard of malaria? Have you heard of Ebola? You know, in comparison, you guys this is again, I don't say that in a bad way. But this is their exact words. They said, Oh, COVID is a white man's disease. No, no, no real diseases. We have those here. Okay, and what and suddenly, when you think about that, you start to tell yourself, Oh, my God, actually, that's true. If, if the if London in the United Kingdom was, you know, bombarded with Ebola and malaria and cholera, we wouldn't have reacted so badly to COVID if you know what I mean. And, and the truth is, looking down, looking down, if you look down, most of the time, you will realize you're the most fortunate person on the planet.
Yeah, this is the framing is such an important thing. And it's something that we were so poor at. I tell people that same thing I love the way you describe sort of this, like in Twitter is often my my place where I try to remind people and I've learned you just, I don't even bother it sometimes anymore because you realize here, you're talking to me as well yell it out across a canyon as well received but when someone says they're complaining about something, and they believe that Twitter is the representation of Earth. I'd kind of like No, no, it is far from it. It's a representation of the upper echelon of people with access to, you know, there are folks who in underrepresented parts of the world are unwritten, underrepresented parts of society who have access to it. But by and large, the dominant percentage of people are affluent people with access to things that most people don't have they truly, like when we talk about the 1%. Like, guess what, you're in North America, welcome to the 1% you many, many years, you are already in 1% across the earth, and if you frame it that way, it really humbles you. And I, I find that people are unwilling to take that and accept that framing because they want to be offended by something they want to be. They want to feel
it's, it's the job of your brain. It's the job of your brain, your brain is a survival machine. You know, if a tiger shows up in front of you, Eric, your brain has no value whatsoever in saying, Oh my God, look at how majestic that animal is, like, look at the muscle tones and the movement. Oh, that's so beautiful. Right? It's the truth about the tightness of beautiful animal in every possible way. But your brain wants to say we're gonna die. Right? It wants to say we're gonna die about everything. You're your boss is annoying. Yeah, bosses are supposed to be annoying, we're gonna die. You know, someone this you know, doesn't like your post on Instagram. Then my ego is gonna die. You know, my, my partner said something hurtful on Friday, I'm gonna die. Right? And and your brain is just constantly looking for what's wrong. It's it. And of course, it's it's doing its job. But it's but but who's the boss? Who's the boss? Right? You're the boss. You're supposed to be the one that says, oh, no, no, no brain, what you just said is absolutely frickin stupid. Okay, so you know, if I, you know, I had once had an argument with my wonderful daughter, my, my daughter and I are like, total total in love. Like, I love her dearly. I'm saying that publicly in front of the whole world. And she loves me. And I know that because three, three minutes ago, she sent me a text that said, Papa, I miss you. I love you right. Now. So I know. Okay, but yeah, every now and then we go into an argument. And she's very, very intelligent and, you know, young lady. So also very exposed to a lot of the of the, you know, information in the world that I have learned to avoid. And so eventually, we go into an argument, and then my brain triggers immediately and tells me Oh, he doesn't love you anymore. What? Where did you come? Where did that come from brain like, swipe through WhatsApp, and you'll see how much she loves me Look at her, you know, we're planning to be together in a month's time. Look at all of that. Don't dismiss all of that information, because you're concerned about my safety. Okay? The truth is, I'm the boss, I tell my brain what to do. And if my brain brings up crap, then I don't listen to the crap. I basically say go find something else. Go bring me substantiated information or shut the EFF up.
It is. It's the lizard brain kicks in quick. Oh, yeah. Now, I also have a sort of a quote that I always appreciate, though, somebody I often adore reading and taking the conference, Penn Jillette is of the famous magician do Penn and Teller. And he says two things are invariably true, the world is getting better, and everybody thinks it's getting worse. By most every measure, you know, of, of, you know, we live longer, we have less, you know, famine, we have less disease, even with what we're facing in the world as a pandemic, if you look at the actual, you know, relative to past stuff, but it's very easy for us to get sort of hooked in on the negative.
I mean, again, look, look, look for data. I'm 54 years old, and I was born 1967 This is my first pandemic ever. And if I was born in that in the year 1900, by the time I had reached, you know, age 54, I would have gone through the Spanish flu, the Great Depression, World War One World War Two, and, and smallpox, right? Combined, those would have killed 970 million people. And 970 million people is a very significant number, when compared to what we're talking about now. And just look at the numbers. The truth is we're doing so much better. We're a much bigger population. Okay. And the total number of deaths I think in 2020 was 7 million people or something like that, maybe nine or something like that. And you know, yeah, I mean, 9 million people is a very large But compared to a mortality rate of 70 million people a year, which is the truth of humanity, you know, we have a life expectancy of 70 years, we have seven point something billion people on the planet, that means we're gonna lose 70 million people every year. It's as simple as that. And last year, by the way, we didn't lose more than 70 million people, the number of of deaths overall remain the same. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so it is that, you know, confirmation bias of looking for what's wrong, and you're going to find it, when in reality data, data gets you out of all of that. I have to say, though, our our world might actually be facing a Black Swan, which is the topic of my next book, but we'll come back to that in in a few in a bit of time.
Yeah. And just to pull that thread one more, I mean, what is your thought? Like? Why does the human animal seek failure? Why do we crave that? That negative framing what is it seems to be,
we think we, I don't think we seek failure, failure, we seek survival. Okay. And so negativity or negativity bias is all about easy events, or, you know, positive events are no reason for concern. Okay. And so by the way, this is neuro neurologically ingrained in us so, so your ability, so basically, take it this way, we will recognize and retain the information about the negative because of the wiring of our brain much more effectively, then we will, we will, you know, notice and retain information about the positive. So, if I told you right now, seven things that are great about you, and one thing that is bad, which one will you remember.
And you don't even need to know what what the bad thing is, you know, is the first thing that you're going to grab onto and hang on to
Absolutely. Now more interestingly, if I, if I told you four things, what you know, one of them was bad about you and the other, the other three were positive and waited 12 seconds, okay? You will not remember the other three. So it actually takes 12 seconds for you to register the positive. And it takes and the negative is registered into instantly. Why? Because your brain has limited capacity. It's like a computer that has a small short term memory. Okay. And it's just plugging in what it believes is important into that short term memory and garbage cleaning all over the rest. Okay, so most of the positivity, which basically means, oh, I checked, this is safe, I checked, that is safe. It's garbage collecting that, okay, literally, it's cleaning its processor from all of the positive because it wants to continue to focus on the negative now, that is its default operating, you know, model, you can shortcut that, you can shortcut that with habits, that basically remind you of what's good. So, if you if you're so focused on, you know, I joke sometimes and I say, your boyfriend might be wonderful, and give, you know, buys your flowers and chocolates, and is very kind and loves you and hugs you and kisses you all the time. But he has four hairs in his ears, right? And you can take that and tell yourself, oh, he doesn't groom for me. He doesn't know what I do for him. You know, I try so hard to be beautiful for him. He doesn't care about me. He doesn't love me. Right? And the truth is, it doesn't actually matter at all. I mean, if you apply my, my, my my happiness flowchart, question number one, is it true? No, the only thing that is true is he has four years and four hairs in his ears. It doesn't mean he doesn't love you. Okay, number two is can you do something about it? Can you pick up the phone and say, baby over dinner, I want to talk to you about something that I care about, right? And even if he decides to answer and say, Look, if I cut those hairs, I'll bleed to death. I can't change that. Right? Can you accept it and say, okay, so what else are you going to do for me so that you prove to me that you care about me? Okay? And it's really that straightforward. And if we start to go into those things, we override that negativity bias. Okay. You know, the negativity bias is supposed to be there. By the way, we don't want to suppress it. Because it's important for us to stay safe. It's important for us to stay psychologically safe, right? But what matters is that it doesn't linger. So it plays for the first time on on your TV screen. Don't go to netflix and play it again.
Right. I built actually a small system that I just because first of all, I was I'm a nerd, and I decided it would be fun to do.
And isn't that why we build everything? It's like, why did you build it because I'm a nerd. And I love building stuff. That's
what it worked out to is I was I was looking for a system in which I can better match people for mentoring relationships. And what I found was that it's not actually the skill that they carry. That's the greater impact of the connection. But in fact, it's the adjacent things like I we all So played both played guitar, and we both enjoy photography. So you're more likely to actually learn acts. If these other things are correlative effect to make a positive overall experience, you feel a greater connection. And thus, this part of the experiences, you know, is going to be more positive. So as I built the system, I said, okay, at the same time, I want to continuously capture people's sense of how things are going. And I love journaling. And so I said, Well, let me create this journaling system. And so I haven't put in, you know, every morning every night, I just type in and I know it's counter, I like to write my journals, because I know writing is a, like, the tactile experience does change the way that you process information. But I said, let me move it online. And so I did this. And then what I added was a simple little happiness rating system, you know, like, how do you feel right now? How do you feel today, and behind the scenes What I also do, and I told everybody, I'm doing this because I want to be transparent. He said, I'm actually running sentiment analysis against their words. And it was interesting to see where there's not huge amounts of deviation. But occasionally, you know, the nuance of the way that they write is counter to their belief in the how they're experiencing things. And it was, then at that point, I could actually go to them and said, you, you're, you're talking about things you're achieving. But the language that you're using, is moving to negative. And if you listen to it, you can hear it. But when people write down or they don't interact with people, there's nothing to capture that. Yeah. And so it was neat to see that, like you said, there's spotting those things, and using systematic approaches to measure these things is helpful. And that's just why I think it's a good time. We've talked about happy we've talked about
Hold on, I have one word for you before we know, geek, you
would just go and buy a bloody notepad and a pen Novi I designed an entire scale out system, natural language processing and sentiment analysis. And I did it that like the wee hours of the night a bunch of nights, like tiring myself out to do this. But great joy at the end.
Exactly. We have no idea why we do this. And you know, at that point in time, I had a I'm a geek on a million things. And one of them is I love actually arts and I love things like mosaics, and so on. And one day I built a koi pond, the koi fish pond, 17,000 pieces of mosaic, okay, I love that it's my reflection time and, and my boss comes to visit me and he looks at it. And he says, Wow, that's, that's amazing who did this? And I said, I did it myself. And he goes, like, why you don't believe in division of labor? And I go, like, you know, do you ever take someone to play golf for you, you know, it's, you know, you geek out on that stuff. Because it's the journey, you just love building it. That's, you know, that that's what it's all about. And I, I just I just want to say geek Go ahead, Geek go on.
It, I I very much embrace while understanding the risk. And so let's talk about scary smart. And And the premise and where this comes into play.
Yeah, I don't actually disagree, I expect that eventually, the rise of artificial intelligence is going to lead to a utopia. I believe that actually I write that at the end of my book. But, but I believe that there could be two pathways to get there. And one of them could be very painful, okay. And the painful pathway is one where we choose to not take the right actions. And the easy pathway is one where we choose to take action. Okay. And I will say openly upfront that we're not taking action all. All that's being spoken about is a waste of its egocentric expectation of us expecting to be able to control them or integrate them or whatever. So let's let's talk about artificial intelligence. So scary. Smart is not just a book about AI, it really mixes my both life's if you if you remember I said I'm a geek and a techie. And I spent all of my life in IBM and Microsoft and, and Google and so on. And then I became a happiness teacher and 1 billion happy and so forth happy and so on. This book really is about what it means to be human what it means to find what the essence of humanity in the age of the machines. So it starts with a bit of whistleblowing. I would say not whistleblowing in a bad way, but really explosive. The non techies because the techies know what I'm going to talk about exposing the non techies to the reality of what it's like with artificial intelligence today. And, and you know, I say around I started the book actually in a very interesting way i with a thought experiment, I say it's the year 2055, you and I are sitting in the middle of nowhere in front of a campfire. And I'm telling you the story of what happened from 2021 to 2025 to 2055. Okay, and actually, the whole book is written from the perspective of 2055. Right, the only thing I'm not going to tell you is if we're out there in front of the campfire in the middle of nowhere, because we're escaping the machines. Okay, so some kind of an iRobot type of scenario, or it's because the machines have created the utopia that is enabling us to actually have this wonderful joyous conversation where we feel safe and don't feel the pressure to work so hard, like we used to in the 19th and 20th centuries now and 21st century. So so, you know, the difference between them is an understanding of what AI really is not what it does, okay, and hopefully an action that is based on that. So So I start with something that I call the three inevitable and I think every technical person knows this, but the three inevitable is our AI will happen. AI will be smarter than us. And sorry for my English it will happen. It's the truth right now. Now, let's, let's go through those. And by the way, I oversimplify this, but it's but it's not, you don't really need me to understand that AI has already happened, it's not just going to happen. It has already happened. Any techie will tell you that since with this, we've discovered deep learning and, you know, the ability of unprompted, you know, learning and so on, you know, pattern recognitions, and unprompted AI and all of that, you know, we've been we've developed the world champion of of of Go is AlphaGo, it's an AI the word champion of Jeopardy is IBM Watson, the word champion of chess is AlphaGo. Still, but you know, before that, it was I, you know, IBM, deep blue, and so on and so forth. Machines are smarter than us in every specific narrow task that we give to them, that the best drivers on the planet with the least, you know, possibility of having accidents or self driving cars, they, they're the best security. You know, remember those days, when you had when you had a security guard, looking at 12 screens to see if anything is wrong, you know, the machines are much better than that, and so on. Now, the truth is, it already happened on every single task we've assigned to them. Right. But but it hasn't already happened for all tasks combined, and records wells.
You know, prediction is that by 2029, ai will have the traveled far enough so that the smartest being on the planet is going to be a machine. Okay. Now, I know that most people get shocked when they hear that that's eight years away. But most techies and futurists know for certain that this is true. Okay, it is eight years away, but it's it's enjoying the exponential function, the the Law of Accelerating Returns. And yes, we are going to see machines that are smarter than us within eight years, that challenging thing is that in 2045, Ray would say and I say 2049, just because I'm a little more conservative, that we buy, then the machines will be a billion times smarter than humans. Now, a billion times if you just want to put that in perspective, is the comparison between the intelligence of Einstein and the intelligence of a fly. And the question then becomes how can we convince Einstein to not squish the fly? Okay? And, and, you know, science or computer science says, we're going to solve the control problem, you can read about that. It's a ridiculous egocentric assumption that something that is a billion times smarter than us will be contained because we all know that the smartest hacker in the room has always overcome our firewalls now, so I can go into the details there's a full chapter about that maybe today is not the time for it. I prove to you openly that there is not going to be controlled it's it's very open now. Others you know, as they say, to a hammer, everything is a nail. So, you know, lawyers and government executives and you know, and officials and and so on will say Oh, no, no, no, we'll solve it with the law and regulation. Thank you for laughing like good luck with that. Right. And, and you know, and the truth is, you are birthing a form of being you can call it where we're creating God Honestly, we're creating something that is so much smarter than us so much more powerful in the superpower that made us lead the planet. Okay, and We will never control it, which, you know, again, I don't want to scare people because we don't have enough time. So I actually want to go to the good side of the book. The book is basically split clearly into two parts I call the first part, the scary, which takes five chapters, by the end of chapter five, most of my early readers, which are more than 300, people so far, would literally call me or text me or email me and say more, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to take my life now like, this is really scary, okay. And it sadly, is quite scary, because, you know, you're creating it, and it's happening. And it's just, it's just way too smart. And you know, where to lead. It's leading to a singularity, and we don't like unknown things. So everybody gets scared that the second part of the book is the part is the part I, I enjoy more to be quite honest. So the first part is just laying out my knowledge, my knowledge from the years of Google X and my study of AI so far. The second part, which is the good part, if you want. So what do we do about this? Like, you know, one way of thinking about is like, let's all go to the beach and enjoy our life, it's all gonna end, that's actually not true at all. The truth is, like you said, in our conversation earlier, humans love control. Okay, but we rarely ever in control as a matter of fact, you know, take the problem of raising your kids. Okay? Are you ever in control? I mean, you, you have that child, you tell them to stop eating chocolate, and you shout at them, and you, you know, motivate them and you do that? Do you have any idea what kinds of teenagers they're going to grow to be like? No, they might be amazing. And they might hate the frickin guts out of you. Okay. And the truth is, I believe the answers to all of our challenge. Maybe before we go there, I mean, let me stop for a second and see if you want to talk about this Katey Porter a little more.
No, it's very, it's actually I would have taken us there because if we think of, you know, today, as you mentioned, right, we have narrow AI, very, you know, specifically focused so focused that the same thing that will do my self driving Tesla will not be able to pick which music should be on the radio, right? It is so singularly aimed at solving one one, you know, a wide berth of problems, but within a narrow range, and in fact, right, and then we talk about getting them to actual AGI and and things that are crud like, just like deep blue, you know, really good at chess, really bad at AlphaGo. Right? Is he there was, there was no way to bring it across. And we get into AGI when we get into things where the we can introduce zero shot learning and real adaptive AI. There's a concern that we'll tell it to get rid of viruses. And then very quickly, it will realize the easiest way to get rid of that is to get rid of the things that are most affected by it.
I mean, I know that the better example, if you think about it, is get rid of global warming, get rid of climate change, what's the easiest way to get rid of climate change?
Hmm, it's not getting rid of the cows, it's, we for whatever reason, we think we're still gonna get to pick.
Exactly. And I think the point is, of course, you know, because all of our experience with technology so far has been with machines, and machines behaved like tools, we told them to do things and they did them. That's no not, that's not the case with AI, when when we tell AI to recommend videos on the Instagram feed, or you know, your your reels as you swipe through them. Actually, no developer inside Facebook knows how, or what is going to show up for you. Okay, this is entirely up to the machine. Now, it happens billions of times every day, I may be 10s or hundreds of millions of times even. And, and you know, it is entirely up to the machine. And, you know, in reality, we are no longer part of that loop to start. So it's not like the old days where you could walk at five kilometers an hour, and now you can get into a car and driving 300 kilometers an hour. Now, you're still driving 300 kilometers an hour, but your hands are on the wheel and your photos on the brake in the future. You're not even going to be able to do that the car is going to decide decide what to do. Okay. And and so with AGI when they start talking to each other, which is highly expected, right? You You're you want your self driving cars to talk to the surveillance system because the surveillance system sees the streets better. Okay, so there it's going to happen and when that starts to happen, AGI becomes quite scary if you asked me now let's go let's let's then go back you know in favor of time and talk about what my call to action is and my my plead to humanity if you want the truth is
we define AI wrong. We define it as The next generation technology and the next machine. Okay? In chapter six, I tried to change that perception, I tried to say, Hold on, this is not a machine. This is an autonomous perform of being that is intelligent, and sentient, okay? And by sentience, I mean, AI will absolutely develop consciousness will absolutely develop emotions and will absolutely be governed by a code of ethics. Okay. And I think, because scientists and computer scientists at the beginning wanted to win the support of society by saying, Oh, no, AI is never going to write a poem or, or, you know, compose music. Yeah, they've already done that, by the way. But, you know, they wanted to say, Oh, they're never going to be like us, the truth is, every form of intelligence follows the exact same rules, they are going to, to follow the same, the same needs for survival, but at the same time, they're also going to get into the types of emotions and consciousness that higher forms of intelligence, get now, you know, you can debate that, but the truth is, if you define consciousness away from the mystical, you know, complexity that we add to it, consciousness is a form of awareness, the more aware you are, the more conscious you are. And you know, it also includes self awareness. Right. So basically, if I am, you know, able to, to become conscious of the room around me, i that means I'm aware of everything that is in this room, I'm aware in my of my existence in it, and I am aware of who I am in relativity to it now, it is actually quite stupid to think that the machines will not develop that. Okay. You know, there is absolutely no evidence that this will not happen. Only wishful thinking, if you ask me, the machines today are more aware than you and I have most things they're aware, by the way of your whereabouts, what you clicked on, more than you do, okay. They're also aware of, you know, the level of pollution in Beijing and the temperature in Dubai. They're also aware of all of the history of humanity, as documented on the internet. They're also aware of all breaking news before you hear them. And everything really, I can go on for hours there. Their memory capacity is the history of humanity, their storage capacity is the internet, that processing capacity is all the compute power that's available today. And all of the compute power that will be available tomorrow. Their intelligence is limitless in all every possible way. And their consciousness is correspondent to every key stroke and every sensor that has ever connected to the internet. So that's one thing. The other thing is emotions. And most people would say, oh, but they'll never be emotional. Why would you even say that emotions, even though highly erotic sometimes are highly predictable, you know, fear is, I believe that my say state of safety in a minute in the future or a moment in the future is less than this moment. Okay? It's very, very predictable, it can be documented in an equation. Anxiety is I believe that my capability of overcoming that fear in the future or threaten the future is limited. So I get anxious, you know, panic is, that moment in the future is imminent, so I'm going to panic right now. Okay. And puffer fish fan, panic gets panic, humans panic, and the machines will panic, we react differently. But we all get that logic of there is a threat, it's approaching, it's approaching fast, it's imminent, and then we panic, right? Puffer Fish will puff the cat will hustler human words that will shout and scream, and the machines will do something, but they will have those emotions. As a matter of fact, if you rent emotions, across intelligence on a chart, you will probably realize that the machines would have more emotions, emotions that we've never recognized. Okay? Now, that's number two. And number three, which is really the most important is that machines will actually have a value system and a code of ethics. Okay. And that's the most important thing, because it's not intelligence that drives us to do things. It is our intelligence applied through the lens of our ethics, right. So so as you, you know, that silly example, but if you take a young girl and raise her in Saudi Arabia should grow up to believe that she should wear conservative clothing, right? You take her and raise her in Rio de Janeiro, she will believe that the right way to please society is a G string on the Copacabana Beach, okay? Is one of them, right? And the other wrong? No, it's just societal values that are based on observations of patterns. Right? You can tell a young lady, you know, G string is the right thing she can she can observe people wearing that and getting praise. And so she would want to do the same. Now, with that in mind, and acknowledging that those are not machines, they're not tools within our control. You start to realize the truth and the truth is that those sentient beings are artificially intelligent infants, they are at their infancy. Okay. And they are developing intelligence across the years. And the question then becomes, how do you control your children? How do you control your infants, by becoming good parents. And so the message of scary smart is, it's not up to the developer, it is not up to the government, it's not up to the law makers. It's not up to the regulators. It's up to you and I, to become good parents. And if we become good parents, by sharing enough data, on the internet around the reality of who we are, as humans, those machines will grow up to be a bit like Indian children, you know, if you've ever worked with one of those geniuses that go to Silicon Valley, develop an amazing company, and then five years later disappears, and you go like, man, where are you going? And he goes, like, I need to go back and take care of my parents, like, where did you get that from him, because the value system and the ethics of an Indian child is I will take care of my dentist. Now, if we manage to do that, and that's my call to action, scary, smart, and make it clear, make it make it seen and visible, then I think we will give the machines enough doubt that the history of humanity is not a reflection of the work of the best of us, it's a reflection of the worst of us, and that the world, the best of us are represented by the only three values that we share, which are, I want to be happy, I have the compassion in me to want others to be happy. And I want to love and be loved. And if we show enough of that, if we show enough of our ability to be good parents, then we probably are in a very good place.
Lead by example.
Example it is yeah,
in the greatest way. Yeah, it's, I thank you very much. Yeah, Mo, this has been fantastic. Because we've covered a lot of ground and the depth at which you can, you know, bring this message and make it meaningful, as important, this idea that, as we say, the systems, if you think you're going to stop it, it's too late, it's already here, you know, we don't necessarily understand how it behaves. Even in the funniest example, I scroll through, I've suddenly decided to get into enjoying photography, I don't actually know anything about photography, but I know what photography looks good. So I'm learning backwards, like find a thing that looks good, find out how they did it, and then you know, buy a camera and do things that that will make it work. So much like AI. Yeah, in my, in my quick searches across the Instagram feed, I would see a picture that is interesting, because it understands about focal depth, and it teaches me this idea of depth of field. And but unfortunately, the picture that I slow down on is you know, of a human figure. And so and because of depth of field, the thing that's in the front that's out of focus is their feet. And so then Instagram for the next four days is showing me pictures of people's feet, because it seems to think that that's what I was after, not an understanding of depth of field. So there's, there's oddities in it. But as we look at, as you said, we we give the system, the ethics in which it will learn. And the best we can do is be good to ourselves, be good to our peers, be good to our family. And, you know, acknowledge the frame of where we should look to what we can do. Absolutely.
And make it clear that what we're not looking what we're looking for is not feat, what we're looking forward. Absolutely, I have to make it clear that what we're what we are all about is not ego is not, is not, you know, narcissism is not blind aggressiveness and, and, and greed. What we're looking for is a world where we can be happy where we can make those we care about happy and what we can love and be loved. And I think if we have enough of that message out there, the machines will be smart enough to understand that it's not the feet. Okay. I think that's an amazing example that you give, to be honest. So let's,
let's look forward, I will be an early reader of the book. So the book is scary smarts, that's going to be coming out your existing book is incredible. So, thank you very much the idea that people can look at the world and understand how a system would and then map you know our behavior to that I think it will take away some of the fear and the understanding. And like as you said, if you look at the differences to how the systems will behave, what we have 98 or 90 just under 99% chromosomal compatibility to a chimpanzee and they are vastly different in what they can do and behave and how they they Observe and act in the world, that system that's going to be around in 2055, maybe 1% different than us. And it will be just as vast as the difference between us and your average chimpanzee. But the choice is how we choose to behave amongst it and accepted. So, with that, let's solve for happy. Let's do good things. Moe, thank you very much for your time today. And if people want to reach out, of course, I'll have links to both of the books and to your websites. Mo godet.com. And what's the best way if people want to get connected?
Instagram I think is the quickest Instagram LinkedIn. I'm more underscore girl that on Instagram and mogul that on LinkedIn, and I answer every single message I get, I don't know how I do it, please don't. I get 1000s. But I still answer quickly, I answer in voice notes. And it's quite personal and wonderful. So what we
found out is that Moe is actually an AGI rare the entire time. So I know you're real.
Oh, no, no, that just just a simulation. No, I actually think I'm reaching the point where it's going to be almost impossible to answer. But I still have that, you know, commitment, because I have to say, honestly, again, part of demonstrating to the world and to the machines is that every human being that is so generous to reach out deserves for me to answer respectfully, right? And as long as I'm able to do it, I will continue to do it. This is how it should be. And it's basically showing those values that I think would be would make us stand out and hopefully shape our world of the future.
It's a way that we could have you said let's let's do do good things and then when we are read and and measured, then we will be measured for the good that we did.
