The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
The Future of AI and How It Will Shape Our World — with Mo Gawdat
Thu, 06 Feb 2025
Mo Gawdat, the former Chief Business Officer for Google X, bestselling author, the founder of ‘One Billion Happy’ foundation, and co-founder of ‘Unstressable,’ joins Scott to discuss the state of AI — where it stands today, how it’s evolving, and what that means for our future. They also get into Mo’s latest book, Unstressable: A Practical Guide to Stress-Free Living. Follow Mo, @mo_gawdat. Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Buy "The Algebra of Wealth," out now. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
In today's episode, we speak with Mo Gadot, the former chief business officer of Google X, best-selling author, founder of One Billion Happy, and host of Slow Mo, a podcast with Mo Gadot. We discuss with Mo how AI could shape our lives in the coming decades, the opportunities it brings, and the risks it poses to society, ethics, and mental health.
Chapter 2: Who is Mo Gawdat and what is his perspective on AI?
We also get into his latest book, Unstressable, A Practical Guide to Stress-Free Living. Yeah, that's going to happen. Yeah, I'm going to read a book and all of a sudden, Mr. Stress is going to leave the neighborhood. Call me cynical. Color me a bit skeptical. What's going on with the dog? What's going on with the dog? So I am in New York after a stop in Orlando where I went for a speaking gig.
I have absolutely no sense of Orlando other than Disney World, which is the seventh circle of hell for parents. Essentially, I do almost no parenting, 364 days a year, and I compensate for all of it by agreeing to take... my boys and their five or six closest friends to Walt Disney World, which is just, I mean, that is cruel and unusual punishment for a parent.
But anyways, not doing it this time, just bombing in, speaking to a lovely group of people, then getting back on a plane and going up to New York while I spent four days. with the team and do a bunch of, I find New York, I get so much done in New York. There's something about, I don't know, everyone just seems to be on high, if you will. By the way, it's fascinating.
All these members clubs are opening. In the last couple of years, there's been Zero Bond, my favorite, Casa Cipriani, downtown, weird location. They put a ton of money into it, has that Italian vibe. I get the sense it's trust fund kids from New Jersey, but that's just me. And then what else has opened up? San Vicente Bungalows is opening up from Los Angeles.
So everyone assumes it's going to be cool. And I'm excited about that. The Crane Club, which is the guys from the Tao Group who are probably the most successful nightclub. Like pretty much a giant fucking red flag is when you find out that your daughter's dating a club promoter. But these guys made good in...
It made so much dough and cabbage and really kind of professionalized the industry, if you will. And they're the folks or the power behind Crane Club, so it should be interesting. And then I went to another one last week, and it's my favorite so far based on my Snap impressions. Chez Marco. Ooh, hello. Hello, ladies.
I don't know exactly how to describe it other than the thing that struck me was it was super cool, super crowded, and the thing I liked about it was it was intergenerational. What do I mean by that? There was a lot of young, hot people. It was a good thing. It was a good thing. New York, by the way, is run on hot women, hot young women, and rich men. That's it.
For everyone else, it's a soul-crushing experience. Anyways, and then it had people my age, and then it had parents eating and dining. And I love that whole sort of like, we can be cool at any age, which is becoming increasingly important to me as I Me come 100 fucking years old. Anyways, I love being back in New York. New York's on fire.
Still think it's the greatest city in the world and am excited to be here. I'm also going to talk to Mo about specifically, I think there's a paradigm shift going on in AI. A little bit of a teaser, a little bit of a teaser. I'm like those promos for all those YouTube videos that say, the secret to happiness is... And then they cut out.
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Chapter 3: How is AI expected to evolve in the coming years?
Well, let's start there. Surprises of February. What are surprises in February from an individual such as yourself in Dubai?
Dubai is wonderful in February, but it, uh, you know, we, we occasionally remember last year we had this incredible flood, uh, that was really, really quite, uh, you know, and, and just a couple of days ago, we had a bit of rain that sort of like triggered the same fears.
Uh, but, uh, but of course, you know, the real, the real surprises were deep seek and the responses in the market and how the world.
you know i feel overreacted a bit and then underreacted a bit and you know life life there you go i hear you so uh let's bust right into it the last time you were on i think it's about a year ago and you're a little you're sort of our go-to this mix of spirituality and deep technical domain expertise and we were talking as you might guess about kind of our need to control the response to AI.
Give us what you think the kind of current state of play is in AI, given some of the recent developments and how that may have influenced or did it influence your worldview or your predictions around or thoughts around the future of AI?
You have to imagine that the short history of what I normally refer to as the third era of computing, you know, basically the two years between the time when ChatGPT came out and today, you know, that short history was a pace that humanity has never, ever seen before.
I think you've seen what I used to refer to as the first inevitable, where basically everyone is in a prisoner's dilemma, don't want the other side to win. So everyone's competing, throwing everything on it.
uh you know at it and basically you'd get releases of new technology that are sometimes separated by weeks if not months at most and i think what most people don't recognize is that at least within the areas where we invested we have made massive stride on tech so when it comes to the march to AGI if you want
uh which i think humanity would continue to disagree about for a while because we don't really have a definition an accurate definition of agi um you know uh is is still steady and very very fast right so we're gonna get there my prediction is we almost have already gotten there
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Chapter 4: What are the potential societal impacts of AI?
I call them face RIPs, and we can go into them in details if you want. But basically I see this as inevitable. I see that the short term dystopia is going to be upon us very, very soon, just because the massive superpower that is at the disposal of agendas is going to be in play very, very quickly.
100%.
I mean, with all due respect, why is my life being determined by Sam Altman? We all had an accord, unwritten rule, if you want, that we won't put AI out in the public sphere until we feel that we've tackled safety or alignment or ethics, if you want, all wonderful dreams to have. Sam Altman, very soft-spoken, comes out every now and then and says, this is the priority of what we believe in.
But in reality, it's a publicly traded company creating billionaires. Everyone's rushing very, very quickly. Yeah, it's all about the money. And, you know, you and I have lived in the tech world long enough to understand that what... you know, that all you need is a very clever PR manager to craft a message that is almost exactly the opposite of what you focus on every day.
But you say it over and over until you yourself believe it. The truth is, the world is not ready for what is about to hit us. Whether you take the simple things like the economics of the world and how they will change as a result of AI, all the way to the change of the dynamics of power and, you know, the resulting
deprivation of freedom, all the way to how the economics of the world are gonna change and how the jobs are gonna change and how the human connection is gonna change and how our understanding of reality is gonna change. And these are decisions that are not made by us anymore. Think about it this way. Spiderman's with great power comes great responsibility.
We've disconnected power from responsibility. There is massive, massive power concentration concentrated in hands that do not answer to anyone.
So I 100% agree with you. The idea that everything from which buildings are these targeted bombs, bomb first, what our perception of our government, election strategies, all of these things are now being decided by algorithms programmed by a very small number of people. That creates, I think, a lot of concern.
The steel man argument is that if we don't iterate around the public's usage of these things, that other entities will leap ahead of us and their intentions are even more malicious than ours. That while capitalism perverts things, at its heart, it's not malicious. It might be indifferent, but it's not malicious. And the fear is that if we let other entities
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Chapter 5: What challenges does AI pose to global politics?
I say, give me 400 IQ points more and I will harness energy out of thin air. So why are we competing if that's the possibility ahead of us when the competition drives us to a point of absolute mutually assured destruction?
So it strikes me when we talk about mutually assured destruction, it strikes me that the two entities that would have to come to some sort of agreement around regulation or a pause, it would be the U.S. and China. And I'm sure there's other entities, but those are the lead dogs, right? Yeah.
Do you think it's realistic that the Chinese would be sympathetic to this argument and that there's enough mutual trust to say, look, we got to, I don't want to say slow down, but put some of this behind wraps, share with each other.
I mean, this was sort of Oppenheimer's, was it Oppenheimer's initial vision that we share this technology and say, okay, when one gets too far out ahead of the other, that's a problem. We need to control it together and realize that if one gets too far out in front of the other, the temptation to destroy the other is too great, at which point that person will destroy it.
We'll make sure they can strike back in some limited fashion. Do you think it's realistic? And maybe realistic or not, it's something we've got to do, that we try and strike some sort of treaty with the CCP and with China?
It's not realistic in the current political environment. Unfortunately, you know, the current geopolitics of the world is heating up more and more, but it wasn't realistic in the case of Russia and nuclear weapons either. By the way, I am not for slowing down at all.
I'm actually for speeding up all the way, but speeding up in the direction that is not competitive, but rather for the prosperity of the whole world. I mean, at the end of the day, Scott, again, give me 400 IQ points more and I'll solve every problem known to humankind. And this is quite straightforward, really.
You and I have both worked with incredibly smart people and you understand what the difference of 100 IQ points means, right? Give me better reasoning, better mathematics, better understanding of physics, and I can do things that humanity never dreamt of.
and and this is a promised utopia that is at our fingertips so i'm not saying slow down i'm simply saying there is no point to compete the issue that is facing our world is not a problem of technology that's moving too fast technology has always been good for us right it's a problem of trust that if the other guy gets the technology before me i'm in trouble
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Chapter 6: How can AI create a world of abundance?
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100%.
That's the biggest mistake ever.
I mean, since when did we... I mean, strategically, as I said, of course, the two big sanctions that America did in the last few years were... you know, backfired massively against America. The move against Russia, you know, basically got a lot of people to try and de-dollarize a little bit. And the move against China drove China to become more inventive. It's as simple as that.
But it is also a massive statement of, you know what, I'm going to try everything I can to beat you. And I don't know how to say that in a polite way, but I've gone the first time to America in the 70s. And it blew me away. It was a world apart from anywhere else in the world. I get that feeling today when I land in Shanghai. It's, you know, it's not an easy fight. It's not a determined fight.
Let's say 70s, 80s, 90s, definitely, you know, post-Berlin, the US could do whatever the F they wanted in the world. I don't think it's as easy a slam dunk as it has been in the past anymore. I think America needs to recognize that when you win, it's going to be through strategies like what Trump is talking about by increasing defense spending even further than where it was, loading the
the American death clock even further than it is loaded. And I had a very good boss of mine that used to say, when we're under pressure, we tend to do more of what we know how to do best. But what we know how to do best is what got us under pressure in the first place.
And I truly and honestly think that imagine a world where there is an agreement that America adheres to, by the way, that basically says, let's just deliver that world that everyone's dreaming of. Deliver a world where there is no need for you to attack me.
I think of a little bit of this, how I would couch some of your comments is you think we're entering into what I'll call an age of equivalence. I don't know how to, my semantics might be off, but I think of
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