Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Mo Gawdat: “Life is a Video Game!” | The Shocking Case for Intelligent Design (#389)

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Will AI destroy humanity? Can we bring the dead back to life? And is there any convincing evidence for intelligent design?  Joining me today to explore these fascinating topics is none other than Mo Gawdat! Mo is the founder of the non-profit organization One Billion Happy and host of the #1 mental health podcast Slo Mo. He is the author of the bestselling books Solve for Happy and Scary Smart and used to work as chief business officer at Google X.  Mo has profoundly shaped my perspectives on artificial intelligence, fatherhood, happiness, and the biggest questions in the universe. I’m sure he will have the same impact on you, so without further ado, let’s jump right into the episode!  Tune in.  Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:31 Judging two books by their covers  00:07:34 Can a computer be happy?  00:17:08 Mo’s timeline for AGI  00:24:40 What it was like to work for X, Google's top-secret moonshot factory 00:31:37 WIll programmers forget how to code?  00:35:25 Elon Musk’s new AI  00:39:46 Our generations y2k problem  00:48:35 The Keating test 00:55:05 Bringing the dead back to life  01:06:36 The case for intelligent design  01:16:51 How to be happy during challenging times 01:29:36 The coolest thing ever invented  01:37:41 Outro — Additional resources: ➡️ Check out Mo Gawdat: 💻 Website: https://www.mogawdat.com/  ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mgawdat 👉 Want to stay fully informed on breaking news, compare coverage, and avoid media bias? Go to https://www.ground.news/drbrian and sign up through my link for 30% OFF unlimited access! 📰 📢 Ownership of your health starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase 👉 https://drinkag1.com/impossible ➡️ Follow me on your favorite platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're featuring somebody who has profoundly impacted me and shaped the way I think about AI, fatherhood, and the biggest questions in the universe. Meet Mo Godot, former Google X chief business officer, founder of $1 billion happy, host of the slow-mo podcast and best-selling author who warn the world about the potential threats of AI years before current conversation started. His expertise ranges from AI to engineering happiness in the video game we call life. Today, he's here to share some of the expertise with us. So without further ado, let's jump right into the episode of my friend Mogad.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. Welcome everybody to what will undoubtedly be one of your favorite episodes of all time on the Into the Impossible podcast. A man that needs no introduction, but I'm going to give him one anyway. It's Mogadat who's influenced me in many, many ways. ways, both how I think about AI, artificial intelligence, but more importantly, how I think about fatherhood, happiness, and the biggest picture questions in all of the universe. And so Mo, I want to thank you so much for taking so much of your time late at night over there in Dubai. Thank you so

much for joining us in the Into the Impossible Podcast. It's such an honor, Brian. Thank you for having me. And thanks for waiting for me until my travel east up a little bit. I think a good problem for my undergraduates would be to compute Mo's average velocity because you travel a couple hundred days a year, which is wild. We have many connections. We are connected this time, I think, through our mutual friend Peter Diamandas, who is an incredible intellect. And Peter is coming up. We have him recorded from an interview we did in October. He'll be on again very soon, talking about AI risks and threats and education, all sorts of things.

But he was kind enough to introduce me to you and you accepted. You said yes. So that was a very joyous time for me. And I want to begin today by talk. You've written so many books and done so many things in your time, both at Google, Google X, and also through your writing and your podcast and your many, many different forms of outreach. But today we're going to do what you're never supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. It's forbidden to do that, but we're going to do it anyway because, Mo, what else do you have to go on? If someone, you know, in Antarctica where I've been twice, you know, there are people who may not have heard about you. So let us review the cover art and the title of your two wonderful books that we're talking about today.

Salfour Happy and Scary Smart. Let's start with Scary Smart. What made you choose the cover, which is a little intimidating? I, so the Titan was a no brain for me. Honestly, the Titan was a play on the threat of AI. but, you know, they are scary smart and many men. You know, you rarely ever get a publisher to approve your choice of a title. That's normally not what publishers do.

But I think Scary Smart got approval in India, everyone thought, oh, that's a clever description of the future that we're about to embark on. Whether it's, you know, not as scary, like, I'm afraid, kind of, you know, scary. hopefully we would get it right and AI may not end up being scary. But either way, they're very smart. They're scary smart. The cover art, on the other hand, I normally draw my cover arts myself. So every one of my books.

But for that one specifically, the publisher came up with a better art, to be honest. So I used a very simplistic but slightly evil kind of emoji of some sort of mischievous, you know, face that is a little bit AI-like. They chose this very playful, almost 50s type of toy that looks like a robot, which is so cool. But then the thing is when you look behind that robot, the shadow of the robot is a lot bigger than the robot itself. And I really loved that choice. I think the whole idea of the book was to go into the depths of what is the possible shadow of AI. And I think they did a really good job to capture that.

Sol For Happy, my first book, on the other hand, was different. Sol For Happy, as you can imagine, the title was objected to by every publisher, simply because solve for X or solve for Y is what we mathematicians like to say and to me it's perfect English like it really makes a lot of sense when you tell me solve for X

I understand but the publishers said it was wrong English and they didn't like it at all and we had a very very big fight solved for happy I have to say they were right so a lot of the people that actually read the book we had

probably close to 300 three-quarters of a million copies sold, then everyone that read the book in English would probably always complain and say, I was going to pick it up. I didn't understand the title. When we translated it into other languages everywhere in the world, it was the equation of happiness, which or the algorithm of happiness, which is really the base of the book and equation that describes you when we get happy or happy. The cover art, on the other hand, everyone loved. So the cover art was a collaboration between myself and my daughter, who is very, very, very, very artistic. And I attempted to do quite a few.

Eventually, she said, well, the engineer that you are speaking about happiness, what you want to do is to show that how algorithmic happiness is. So she picked a very simple smiley emoji, and she added equations to them. And cleverly, you know, these are actually reasonably accurate equations. So the equation of the curve of the smile is actually the equation of a curve. You know, the equation of, you know, some of the equations describe comparisons between events and expectations, which is really the core of the happiness equation. But, yeah, so basically it's an engineering approach to understanding happiness.

The funny, one of my favorite comments ever, ever on my book is I was in the World Happiness Summit in Miami. I think 2019, and a very nerdy young lady approached me and basically said, the equation on your smile is wrong. And I said, what do you mean? And she said, the curve of the smile is actually frowning. And I was not, I hit my head immediately. I said, you're actually right. I'm so sorry. And she said, oh, I thought you meant it.

I thought that was a philosophical view for us mathematicians to teach us that happiness. And I was like, okay, if you want to think of it this way, you know, the teachers that happiness is not that easy. But yes, it is a very mathematical approach to the topic, a very algorithmic approach, if you want. And so I think that the other opt was a description of that. Well, I want to tell you two things related to this that you may not know. One is that Stephen Hawking wrote the following. He said that every equation reduces a book's readership by half. So now you have the

Can you imagine what you would have sold if you didn't listen to your daughter and put those equations on the cover or if you just listen to your publisher? And then the second thing I'd like to maybe tell you or maybe you already know, do you know the great Albert Einstein what he called his happiest thought?

No, what was that? So his happiest thought, the one that led to the theory of general relativity, was that someone in free fall would experience no gravitational force field. That's actually a very happy thought, if you asked. It could be, unless you're on the Birch Khalifa and that 200-floor elevator cracks, right? And then the cable snaps. That's not so happy.

But he called that his happiest thought. And I want to use that as a segue to start talking about artificial intelligence, because you were one of the first people to kind of sound a warning sign, a warning bell, about this potential downside risks of AI, along with Stephen Hawking and others. But I think you're very pressing about it. And then with the expertise you have from your tech, 30 years in technology and finance, gives a true gravitas, no pun intended, speaking about gravity, to the clarion call that you sound. But I want to ask you the following question.

As a physicist, thinking about Einstein, why should I worry? Because to what extent could a computer, A, have a happiest thought, and B, be able to visualize it, he, she is in free fall? In other words, Einstein's genius was evocative of the visceral sense of something he could identify with and then do a thought experiment about. And it brought him happiness. Can a computer be happy? And can a computer create physical laws like those of the great Albert Einstein, through these thought experiments. First of all, first time I get asked that question,

and it's a brilliant question. I'll tell you that openly. Thank you for that. I did start to sound the alarm on AI in 2018 when I left Google X, and I'll tell you openly, nobody listened to people who was literally like, what is he talking about? You were called a whistleblower. You were actually called a whistleblower in the sense of you sound the alarm.

In a very interesting way, you know, whistleblowers in 2022, 2023 got a lot of attention. In 2018, nobody even paid attention. When I published my books, Cary Smart, in 2021, I had very deep contacts in TV everywhere in the world. You know, these are people I work with over the years and due to my seniority. You know, they know I would say something reasonable, if you want. And everyone said, no, but AI is not a topic. Like no one's even interested in talking about AI. Having said that, the idea of AI has been, you know,

by AI being a possible threat, has been, you know, delayed or blocked by most humans because of questions like this, right? Questions that always said, can we actually create intelligence? questions that said, can they actually control our life questions that said, would they be able to become creative? There is always a line of which humanity is only, that is the only species capable of innovation or creativity or art or music and so on and so forth. And we've been proven wrong on every single one of those. So far, they've created better music than us. They write better than us. They create better art than us. And yes, absolutely, we have forms of intelligence

that surpass human intelligence in many ways. And they're controlling us in so many ways when you think about every piece of content that's ever been recommended to you comes from an AI today on social media or other forms of objections from humanity is the question of can they, you know, can AI feel emotions? And normally, when you know, those objections come, I started to learn to ask, what do you mean by emotions? So if I told you that fear is an emotion that follows a logic, it appears to be irrational, right? But it follows a logic and the logic is very straightforward. The logic is a moment in the future is less safe than this moment. Right. So you can simply say my fear is sort of related to my sense of safety

you know, now minus my sense of safety at T1, right? And it's actually algorithmic. You can you can actually see that within us humans, even though it happens so randomly and so quickly that we don't recognize the logic. Right. So most emotions follow equations, right? If fear to us is a moment of the future, let's save them now and we react to it with fight or flight. Okay. A puffer fish reacts by puffing, you know, trying to scare you away, a computer may react if, you know, a tidal wave that's approaching its data center and it has that level of capability and autonomy and intelligence, it may start to move its code to another data center. So it would react to that fear as well. And so accordingly, you know, panic is the threat is imminent. So the amount of time

between me and the threat is imminent. There is logic behind that. You know, Anxiety is I don't have the capability to deal with what is scaring me and so on and so on and so forth. Happiness, as per the work of my first book, is a moment where the events of life miss your expectations of how life should behave. So we don't feel happy or unhappy because we, you know, we life behaved in a certain way. It could rain and you feel happy or unhappy depending on what you want. If it's, you know, if you were expecting to sit in the sun and tan, you would feel unhappy. If it's, you know, your ex-girlthman's wedding, you'd feel very happy, right? And so the event itself doesn't have any inherent value of happiness in it.

It's a comparison between the event and expectations. Now, of course, computers can do the same, can do the same comparison between events and expectations. And if the event doesn't meet their expectation, they'll feel a little unlawed. if you want, which is what we associate with that. Or if the event meets their expectation, they'll feel calm and contented. They won't try to change things. They will keep things exactly the same. So the question of can computers be emotional?

Yes, they can be emotional. As a matter of fact, I claim that they will become more emotional than we humans are. The reason for that is very straightforward. We, because we have the cognitive bandwidth, if you want, to comprehend concepts, like the future, say, we have access to emotions like optimism, like pessimism and so on, while maybe a boldfish doesn't have that because it doesn't complement the future. Okay. Accordingly, if we, if our assumption that AI or AGI soon will be more intelligent than us,

then by definition they have more cognitive bandwidth than us. and by definition, they may actually end up feeling more emotions or different emotions than what people are right. So yes, a computer can feel happy. A computer can feel unhappy. How it will react to this is, again, depends on your definition of happiness. If your definition of happiness is like mind, that calm and peaceful contentment you feed when you're okay with life as it is, then when a computer is happy, it won't try to change things, right? But if, for example, humans are not clicking on its recommendations anymore on social media, and that makes it unhappy, unsatisfied with life as it is. It may try to change its algorithm, and hopefully,

you know, we won't get to a point where if humans start to attack it, maybe it will try to change things around that. Hey there, my favorite audience in the known universe. You make me so happy. Are you enjoying today's episode? I hope so, because Moe's insights will help you become a a happier person. And they really help me do that as well. Let's face it, the world desperately needs a dose of happiness and the infectious optimism I feel for Bo is unmatched. But you want to know would make me super happy right now. And that's if you subscribed and followed the podcast, whether it's on video or on audio, because that's the way that you can show love to me and the great guests that

I bring on this wonderful journey. And it will help me help you get the greatest guests possible in the future as well. I know you're going to want to stay tuned for the ride for the rest of this year is shaping up to be amazing. But help me out. Do me a favor. Subscribe now before you forget, turn the notifications on, and maybe leave a comment or review wherever you're listening to this podcast or watching it. Thanks a lot. Are we all set? Let's get back to the episode with Mo. One of the questions that I solicited from my audience, and you can always ask questions of my guests. I always ask for feedback on upcoming guests in order to get engagement with the audience. So one of my astute listeners wanted to ask you,

timeline for AGI. Are you willing to go out on a limb like our mutual friend Ray Kurtzweil, upcoming guest on the show, and make a prediction that the singularity is near. It's here. It happened already. What is your impression of when AGI will be here if it's not already here? Again, great formulation of the question. So Ray is the arc. I mean, we all know anyone who objects to Ray is all. Right. He's always a very. He's always got it right, reasonably right, reasonably it. I am in slight disagreement with Ray, so Ray Kurzweil will say it's 2029.

If I'm conservative, I'd say 2027, if I'm not, let's say 2025. As a matter of fact, as per your formulation of the question, I will go back and ask, what is AGR, official general advantages, is if, find commonly among us is a machine that is capable of performing most tasks assigned to the average human better than humans, right? So, sorry, most tasks assigned to it better than the average human. So let's look at today's technology. Chat GPD can definitely write better than an average human.

Most computers can drive, sorry, self-trave cars can drive better than most humans. You know, you can think that no human on Earth can grasp the amount of content that social media recommendation engines can grasp. You know, the world champion in the most complex strategy game on the planet's goal is AlphaGo, you know, alpha fold and fold proteins, you know, way better than a PhD student, which normally took their entire PhD thesis to fold one protein. They folded 200 million with Alpha Fold in no time at all. and so on and so forth. The question is, most people, and this is really why my prediction of

AGI is very aggressive, is that most people predict that one company or one researcher or one piece of software is eventually going to become AGI. So open AI, for example, create AGI. I disagree with that assumption. I think that's a very capitalist or commercial view of the assumption. You know, my analogy is very straightforward. If you look at the human brain, a human brain is full of neural networks, if you want to call them. If I want to tap my finger like this, I connect a few neurons together and they become a neural network. Speak to your English, it's another neural network and so on. And they come together to form one brain.

And what we've been creating so far is basically artificial, special or narrow intelligences. that are those individual neural networks. And what's going to happen, what's already happening, is that we humans will choose to connect them together. We humans will choose to connect Dali to chat GPT. We will choose to connect, you know, perhaps the self-driving cars, AI to the surveillance AI so that they can share cameras and see what's around the corner and have more views of the world and so on and so forth.

And, you know, because one of the big mistakes that we've always warned against, but that has been already blown out completely is the idea of not allowing AI to prompt AI. So we said until we are sure of AI safety, we shouldn't have agents, but the world is full of agents today, full of AIs that are talking to AI's. And it's in the benefit of the agent to speak to multiple AIs so that it basically can achieve more intelligence. My feeling is that with those connections between the separate neural networks of the different AIs, that's where AGI is going to. Now, will it be one unified system that is, you know, reporting to one person? I doubt that very much. Okay. But will it achieve artificial general intelligence and become superior

to humanity at large? It already is. Okay. So in every one of the narrow tasks we've assigned to them, they are by far aware. I mean, think about it this way. Chad GPT4 had an IQ of 155. That's basically Elon Musk IQ. Einstein, you've mentioned Einstein is, I think, 162. Because none of us is comparable to Einstein, you know, we're already at AGI level when it comes to async tests and, you know, memorizing knowledge and analyzing knowledge and so on.

And people would say, oh, but it's stupid. it's just predicting the next word. Yeah, we are stupid. That's exactly what we do as well. Okay? I mean, humanity is so arrogant in those topics because in all honesty, remember the first days when you joined a new company

and all that you did was remember the three-letter words and repeated the next word, right? It's like if I say AGI, my boss will be impressed with me, let me just repeat the same word. I don't necessarily have to know what it means. Now, I just want to stop for a second and say that OpenAIs charge EPD3.85 as in comparison, CHRGPT4, they had that 10X growth in performance.

You know, everyone probably listening to us understands Moreslow and the law of accelerating returns, which is the master route. In Moreslowe, we say that computer power will double every 18 months, 18, 24 months. With artificial intelligence will actually be measuring a doubling cycle of 5.7 months. So basically, you know, and an IQ of 155 becomes an IQ of 310 every six months, right? And then Cleveland becomes 620 and the 620 becomes 1240 and so on, et cetera. I just remember, you know, trying to impress my friends when I took my first IQ test and I told them I scored 100 on it. They were not impressed. But

looking how much did you score a hundred end i said i got a hundred i was joking i got a hundred i was waiting for the end so one of the things you open uh chapter two of scary smart with is the phrase that's behind my back over there you talk about you talk about the pod and uh in 2001 a space odyssey you talk about dave and asking asking how two thousand nine thousand to open the pod bay doors And those longtime listeners of my podcast will know that I am at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination here in UC San Diego. And we follow his mission. In fact, the final four questions I'm going to ask you, begging your indulgence at the very end of this talk will be all kind of influenced by Sir Arthur C. Clark. But of course, in that movie, which gave us the name podcast. You knew that, I assume. I didn't know. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. So Steve Jobs and some other, one of the engineers was, were fascinated with what do we call this? this iPod, before it was called the iPod, you know, what is something that holds a thousand songs and fits in your pocket? And they decide to call it the iPod. And then from that,

later on, the term podcast came from that. But the pod comes from the pod and open the pod bay doors. So actually, the beginning of this podcast, I'm going to have Arthur, I'm going to have the voice of Dave. He's going to say, open the pod bay doors, meaning let's start the podcast. But speaking of other large companies. I'm fascinated by sort of these these modern day versions of Bell Labs and and so forth. And one of those is Google X. I want to know if to the extent you can talk about it, what they did there, what you did there as a top executive in charge of operations there. And possibly if you're okay with it and only if you're okay with it, talk about how they are perceived to at least among some of the nerd cognizente, to have lost the

you know, the race of AI, at least right now, with Bard, you know, still in beta and so forth, compared to chat GPT, which is experiencing dramas on a daily basis. But talk about what, to whatever extent you can, what's it like to work at the one of the most secretive kind of institutions on Earth, Google X. X was brilliant in every possible way. Brilliant. You know, you, if we're going to borrow from movies, it was a little bit like the men in black, right? It's, you know, you just, if you look at the brilliance of the people around you, they were just totally unexpected and totally unexpected not just because of their intelligence, but also because of their passion, right? So people at X by the clinician had an immense passion for what it is that they wanted to work on. And so it wasn't a job really for quite a few of them.

And Google, in general, I think Larry Page used to say it, the toothbrush tests. You know, Google, even though, of course, once we started to really abide by the rules of Wall Street, if you want, it was less of a movement to member times when I joined. But Google always in my heart and my mind, at least the Google I joined, was a movement. We wanted to organize the words of the tradition. We wanted to make a difference. I remember vividly when I presented my very first, before Google X I ran the emerging markets

and I started helping big offices and businesses, nobody which included all of the engineering required to build products and so on. I get closely the engineering for that. And so when I presented my very first Middle East plan, I remember vividly that I asked for a little bit of money and I said, we're going to go through revenue from this to that. And, you know, it was at the time, it was EMG, Eric's management group, so Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey, and everyone in the room. And they looked at me very strange saying,

why? Why do you want you to invest to grow the revenue? I was like, don't mess with it. You know, when we run a business, we grow the revenue. They said, no, no, no, why don't we give you money to invest in growing the ecosystem and improving the products and really getting the tech, right? and then the money will follow. So that idea of the toothbrush tests,

you know Larry's words, if you solve a big problem that billions of people care about and you solve it so well that they use the product twice a day like a toothbrush, you're bound to make a lot of money. So X was like that. X was supposed to solve big, big, big problems

that affect billions of people using technology. And the thing most people don't know about it, is that many of X's products were never really split out like way more to become self-driving cars. Most of them were eventually embedded with a group. And a lot of people, so I have to say this with caution because I've been out of Google for five years. But if what I know about Google and Sundberg is true, don't be deceived by and think that

Google is not. at Google. There was a moment in time early on in the AI discovery where we had almost 80% of the top talent in the world. So I think that incredible thinkers and incredible researchers. And a lot of what you see today, I mean, when you really think of Chagipti itself, it's the result of Jeffrey Inton's work.

The idea that we can, we don't have to clean the data and label it as before and that we can use the enforcement learning and so on. All of those were things born within. If I understood correctly, I think Google may have stayed away from launching or using commercial AI because they respected the safety elements. Okay. And in a very interesting way, I tend to be, I have no proof of this. But if I understand those people that I work with closely well enough, I would probably say that that AI that's out in the world today is not safe.

It's not dangerous yet. It's definitely not safe. How so? How do you mean, Mo? In what sense, is it not safe? Is it like my toddler with a chainsaw unsafe? Or is it in 10 years from now, it will potentially turn us all into papercliffe? The latter, but we don't know if it's 10 years, right?

So basically what you have today, as I always said, there were three lines. We said we should never do on AI until we verify the AI safety. Any computer scientists that worked in AI knew that. You know, we said, don't put them on the open Internet because the entire design of the controlled problem, as defined by computer science, was to sort of box them or wire them until you make sure that they can't make decisions that hardly. Intentionally or unintentionally or unintention. The second is we said, don't teach them to write code.

Don't teach them to write code, right? Because today, AI, I think in Mademostak of the Ability.A.I was quoted saying that's 54% of the code on GitHub today is written by AI. Wow. Right? Yes. Wow. Indeed.

I mean, a geek like me. This is where we go to find cold. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. And also, Mo, didn't you, as me, we're similar in age, I think, you know, not too far off, but we enjoyed programming. We learned to love it. And it seems to me it'll be like, you know, now we have things that will build Legos for my kids. Well, that's no good

because it was part of their developmental process, right? So what is this going to do to the mindset of coders in the future. If they don't have, I don't, I don't code anymore myself. I do go to Bard and I say, write me a snippet. It goes to Colab and I've got a plot. I can plot, you know, how many books is Moe Good Art writing right now with his left hand where I can't see it because you're so productive. But tell me, isn't this taking away a fundamental part as silly as it sounds of the human experience, which is learning how to code? 100%. I think, I think there are multiple immediate threats when you when you said the question you know, is AI dangerous yet?

AI itself is not dangerous, but it's bound to become dangerous because of things I spoke about. You know, don't let agents from them. Don't let, you know, don't let them write code and don't put them on the open Internet until we verify safety. But if you look at the immediate threats of which I count normally six, but on top of them is the redefinition of human productivity, human jobs and human purpose, And you have to imagine that it depends on what kind of developer you are. There still is going to be a need for the top end developers,

like the really complex low-level coding or algorithm thinking, at least for a while until they're no longer the smartest person in the room. But today, if you're coding a webpage or you're coding an app or whatever, it's almost impossible that you would be. I mean, you'll be hired, but that's because the person hiring you doesn't know that they can do it on AI. Right? And when that starts to happen, there is an immediate be-design of the fabric of our society. It's not just jobs, huh? The nature of our relationships are about to be redesigned massively. Because I don't know if you've ever had an experience like that of connecting to someone before you see them.

I met a woman on a dating app a few years ago. You know, she lived in the Netherlands. I went to get another. It's frequent. But I was six weeks away from the Netherlands. And during those six weeks, we exchanged texts, photos, voice messages. And we almost fell in love. Right.

And I haven't had, you know, if today that same person could be in a lot, right? It is, you know, capable. I mean, still not perfect but close. Photos would be generated by AI. I mean, there are more than 40,000 influencers on Instagram alone that are not humans. And you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. They're traveling. They're doing anything.

You know, they write text under the posts and, you know, they're not human. So how will that define our relationships, our, you know, connections, our love and relationship, you know, love and romance? All of that is about to be redefined, you know, the concentration of power is about to be. redefined the you know the I think it's the end of the truth our ability to find out what is read and what's not so it you know and I can go on but if not if if all of these are not considered dangerous and by the way these are not dangerous because AI is malicious in any way they're dangerous because human greed does not allow us to stop and say why are we doing what we do why are we going to lay off 85% of all developers in the world and the

next few years. Well, to me, you know, the most kind of alarming outcome may be that we are now in an age of actually having animated memes where you have the bad boyfriend meme, which is now, as of yesterday, has been turned into a video where the three people are walking down the street and the bad boyfriend looks at the backside of a... Just kidding in that front. But you mentioned two things. You mentioned safety and the end of truth or the end of the end of objective truth or epistemologically accessible truth. And you also earlier mentioned Elon Musk. I wonder, can you tell me what are your thoughts about GROC?

Elon Musk's new AI endeavor that's going to be trained on tweets instead of, you know, maybe past language models training datasets. I'm not allowed to say this. But I think Elon made a couple of wrong bets on AI, with open AI being what it is today when he started it. And it's clear that, you know, I respect Elon's view on AI. Tremendously, he's not shy

to say this is more dangerous than Nukes. He's not shy to talk openly about the idea that jobs are about to be to end and that they may not need for a job anymore. So, you know, he sees the world that's coming. He sees the threats, but at the same time,

being, you know, the businessman that he is, the entrepreneur that he is, he's unable to say, and, you know, what, I'm going to just exit this playground or let that playground happen without me. So, you know, in a very interesting way, there is that attempt to catch up and learn, right, and maybe advance somehow. The tricky bit that most people don't understand is that when a breakthrough is found in AI, it's not very difficult to replicate. So don't quote me on the exact number, but my understanding is that the core code of chat GPD4, the core code, is 4,300 lights, right? You know, because we understand, we all understood reinforcement learning from the beginning,

we all understood, you know, the process in which we presented the data set and so on, it's not very difficult to replicate. This is why you have CHAPT like technologies in Russia and China and so on, popped out everywhere. And the game here is between now and the next breakthrough, anyone who is replicating the same technology is just simply modifying the data set. And as you modify the data set, you get a very different form of intelligence. You know, intelligence is not just a function of our abilities and compute power and memory skills and so on. It is definitely a function of the data that we are exposed to.

And this data is very different when it comes to Twitter. You know, this data, I mean, I don't know if you want to call Twitter feeds data. because there is a question on the accuracy of many of those tweets. But more interestingly, it's the tone, it's the anger, it's the rudeness, it's the worst of human behavior, which in scary smart, I openly cite as the absolute threat. The absolute threat is in my comparison or in my, you know, in an analogy really to try and make people understand what AI is all about, I basically compare it to Superman. I say, look, this is a superhero, you know, infant with superpups, right? You know, it's an alien being

that came to planet Earth. Whether it becomes a superhero or not, it's not a question of its superpowers, right? Whether it becomes a superhero or not as a question of how we would raise it. And so, you know, if we raise it to become another tweet fan, Twitter fan, then I think we actually may have a very angry, aggressive route AI. Yeah, I mean, it's hard because, you know, your first book is so optimistic. And I mean, it's a challenging book as well. And the second book is sort of a, it's, I would call it sneaky smart because it's a vector. I was telling you before we start recording that, my young children were listening to it. they were just riveted to it. And I was thinking, this is a vector to deliver a warning,

but to do so in a way that's accessible without the kind of, you know, Cassandra, the sky is falling. And for that, I think it's, it's so commendable. This, this, this, this wonderful book, Scary Smart. And we're going to get into your, your first book, chronologically speaking, second. But I have to ask, you know, in terms of, you know, the future of, of how it affects people, I've been less, I mentioned the paperclip problem. I believe that was coined by Nick Bostrom, correct me if I'm wrong, Mo, but he was a guest on this podcast about a year ago. And, you know, he's a very, he's a very delightful person.

He's very stoic and it's hard to make him crack up. But with the paperclip, you know, problem, I've often thought to myself as an astrophysicist, it's fine to extrapolate, you know, computers can do a lot. lot of extrapolation, modeling, forecasting, and you talk about that a lot in scary smart, but they can't necessarily exceed the planetary limits that, you know, Mother Nature, God, whoever you like, has given to us. In other words, there's only so much metal in the Earth's crust. There's only so much capacity to extract those resources. And this is also an argument, I've used this argument as an argument against the existence of extraterrestrial

intelligence visiting us, but I want to get your perspective on that as we move through the interview. But, you know, for example, there are only, this is a meteorite, which when I see you in person, I've never been to Dubai, but I hope to visit someday and I'll bring one of these to you. This is a chunk of the 4.3 billion-year-old early solar system, and it has iron and has nickel, it has cobalt, and you are guaranteed to win one of these if you have a dot edu email address when you go to Brian Keating.com and sign up for my newsletter. I love to give these out because it really shows you tangible. It feels heavy. It feels massive, literally. Computers don't exist in this domain. They're made of this type of stuff.

And the question is, you know, what are the planetary? Let's geek out on this kind of sci-fi aspects of things. Is it really a danger, you know, the so-called paperclip problem that, you know, AI, if it's optimized to do one thing. I mean, after all, as Michael Shermer has told me on this podcast, you know, he has a Tesla. And when he puts into its autopilot, you know, navigate to my kids' school, the shortest geodesic path, you know, takes it through like a playground and drives on the sidewalk. And the Tesla knows not to do that. So to what extent do we really think that an unsupervised AI would go off and turn us all into paper clips much the same way that, as you point out, in Scary Smart, people were obsessed about the Y2K bug. And that, I think, had one

consequence that you mentioned, like, some people got to like a date wrong, you know, they showed up to a date. It was very minor. You know, no planes fell out of the sky. No people were turned into paperclcliffe. Is this paperclip problem, Mo, our current generation's version of the Y2K problem? When it could be, but can you risk it? Right.

So the idea is, you know, it's very unlikely. But even if I just simply said, there is a 1% chance. that is going to rain where you are tomorrow and it's going to flood everything, would you say, one percent's not that one? Would you? And I think the conversation around artificial intelligence is a lot more of higher than that. Let me try to explain because your question has multiple, multiple layers. We know for a fact from our understanding of tech since the 1920. Well, we understand that once you found a breakthrough, economies of scale will allow you to shrink things and grow things and speed things up and so on. And basically, you'll get a doubling function for some sort of time, some sort of it's an exponential.

Okay. We know for a fact that if we do nothing, nothing but enhance the data sets and improve our data, you know, presented to the AIs and so on and so forth. we will continue to grow their intelligence. We don't have to have another breakthrough, right? The assumptions of how far will they go have constantly been, you know, like Moore's law, there has been in your lifetime in mind multiple times where we said, that's it. You know, we can't make it in our way first. We can't, you know, we're getting closer to the, you know, to the physical limits of how we can

manipulate electricity and so on and so forth. And yes, we were right on those, but we didn't know that we can have third dimensions in the way we designed them. We did have that we can scale computers together in ways that are super parallel in ways that allow us to continue to grow the power. We didn't know there was a quantum computing. And all of those ingenuities happen when you start, only when you start to, you know, you create the first personal computer. You put AutoCAD on it and then Autocad allows you to design. a better computer and so on. And so the question becomes the fault.

Would AI be limited to planet Earth? And I think that's a very philosophic and not a scientific problem. So I need to start by acknowledging the scientific method. You, Brian, you know, as an astrophysicist, you can only respect and deal with what you can measure, repeated. But there are many things about planet Earth, sorry, about our universe. that we couldn't measure in the past that turned out to be true.

If we take wormhorse, for example, there might be ways where the universe operates that are very, very different than what we understand, and with a little bit more intelligence, we can have access to them, and then suddenly the limits of planet Earth becomes limitless. This actually is the theory of Hugo de Gares, if you know his work, normally very pessimistic about AI, but he basically says, well, if I had 10 times more

intelligence than I, I would, that I do right now, or something like that, I would not be concerned with the problems of planet Earth anymore. Perhaps I'll be able to be traveling across multiple planets and, you know, having access to other sides of the universe. That's one thing. The other thing is that we consider that everything about us is physical, when in reality there are elements of us that are not physical at all. Intelligence, needy, is not physical. It may occur within our physical form, but it's not physical at all. And so, you know, the nature of intelligence itself in human intelligence is that it's, you

know, built on analog carbon-based machines. The fact that intelligence itself is built on a digital silicon-based machine doesn't make any difference at all. Intelligence in its nature is not physical. And so accordingly, maybe what we limit our understanding of the scientific method to because we're focused on the physical might not actually apply to abundant intelligence, right? And, you know, if you take things like simulation theory, you start to think to yourself, oh, maybe if it's really a simulation with enough intelligence, we can figure out the simulation and then end the whole game, right? That doesn't mean that AI in that way would be arming us. I always go back and say, I am, you know, there is

nothing inherently dangerous about AI. I think what is the only thing that is dangerous is that AI is so much power in the hands of unethical humans that could be dangerous. Okay. So in the next few years where we direct them is going to dictate where they go beyond our images. But at the end of it, I'll tell you, openly, I think the sky is the limit. I think just like sometime in the 60s, we discovered that the world was not, the universe was not 97% vacuum, but it was dark matter and dark energy. I think we may discover things we never expected because of our additional cultures. Yeah, and I think, you know, that to me is my version of the Turing test, the Keating test. Actually, I came up with Sean Carroll, who you may or may not know as a famous physicist and popularizer of science.

And I came up actually behind me is my, I have an AI device here. I've changed the name so as not to incriminate to any other people. I did want to call him how, but he wouldn't let me do that. So instead, I just call him simply computer. So I'm going to say, computer, who wrote Scary Smart? Mo Godot is the author of the book Scary Smart, The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How to Save Our World. Thank you.

But the other thing is that I connected the computer to his own power supply. And so my question is, will he turn off his own power supply, thus obliterating him committing suicide of a kind? So I'm going to do this now and see if he will do it. Computer, turn off your plug. You see that turned off the plug in the background. Did you see the light go off in the background? Okay. Computer, turn on the plug.

See, it wasn't him, actually. So the true test, the Keating test I coined was, could you have an AGI or an AI assistant? actually choose to take its own life only because you have told it to do so. In other words, kind of like, you know, Asimov's laws of robotics, but applied to AIs. But my true to, and this is all just kind of silliness, Mo, and I beg your forbearance and you're so generous with your time. But I'm kind of being silly. But in reality, I do think that we won't know a true AGI is here until it can come up with new laws of physics. I mean, I may be biased, until it can create new materials until it can do things other than what humans can do. You mentioned Go and AlphaGo

before. My question to you is it's not as important. A computer can fly a plane better than any pilot for 70 years now. And we've had autopilot since before the Apollo days. And in fact, every single Apollo moonlander was capable of landing itself in the late 1960s. But the pilots at the last minute took over control because what is it? What are you if you're a pilot if you're not capable of landing a plane or a spaceship? So it was all a threat to their own identity. But I wonder, you know, can a computer create or can an AI create a game like Go? Not Modified Go and Checker, but create something as pleasant, as endearing, as just joyous to itself, to you, to me, to my kids, to your daughter? Not yet. Absolutely. Not yet. Absolutely. Not.

yet, but can a two-year-old create the game that is, you know, that is like Go? No. I mean, the reality of the matter is that AI did quite a few things that humans can't do, right? You know, move 37 on the board of Go and, you know, when AlphaGo was playing against the world champion, move 37 was a move that no humans ever made before, right? Yeah, it's still within the woods of Go, but, you know, It is not creating goal, but it's something that humanity over millennia, over centuries, did not discover. Having said that, the question is not if, it's when, right? We have a very limited understanding of how our intelligence creates those things, right?

As long as we don't know why, sadly, some of us are capable of creating things and some of us are not. And as long as we keep mimicking human intelligence in ways that are bound to be so fast, there is a point in the very far future. It could be 200 years away or it could be 100 years away where the heating test is met, right? Where AI can make decisions that are completely autonomous in ways that where it cannot sacrifice its own life because it's the right thing to do, which some humans would do as well. or it could even create things from scratch.

The challenges we have today, Brian, is that we have not yet figured out deep reasoning and we really haven't figured out mathematics properly. So, you know, the one thing I'm proud to say is that, you know, in mathematics, I'm smarter than charging to you. Right? But, you know, how far, how long would I keep that advantage?

I think one of your future guests, you told me, you know, you're about to post is actually, probably going to break that at that much. So what we've done so far is we have cracked a few forms of intelligence. We haven't cracked all intelligence yet. We haven't cracked mathematics, we haven't cracked deep reasoning. So for example, if you ask chat GPT or other, maybe they fixed it by now. But if you asked it takes an hour to dry a towel, how long will it take to dry 10 towels?

It will say 10 hours. Having said that, we also have not cracked intuition, have not cracked empathy, we have not cracked, you know, playfulness of flow, which in my mind are forms of human intelligence, right? You know, we normally are on the side of IQ because IQ seems to have created reasonably solid civilization so far. But all of those other forms of intelligence that allow us to have visions and creativity, you know, innovation and and allow us to connect to each other and allow us to, you know, to trust our gut feeling, to crunch a large amount of data in our subconscious and then say,

actually, I don't feel like it and stuff like that. These are all forms of intelligence that are not highly popularized in the highly competitive business world. And yet we haven't, you know, cracked them in AI either. But believe it or not, I keep going back and saying move 37 was a very intuitive move of AlphaGo that basically is not the typical IQ move. It's not that AlphaGo was thinking of 16 moves ahead and saying this will win for me. It was sort of following its gut feeling and making the move that appeared to be slightly different than what humanity would normally do. and as a result showed or demonstrated that this went formal images.

Speaking of human emotions, maybe now this is a good time to pivot towards your first book chronologically, which was Solfer Happy. And this book had a truly deep impact on my life. It's made me reevaluate a lot of the prioritization that I have in life, the kind of goal setting, and the kind of emotional orientation that I want to have as a technically minded person who's blessed to have children.

And, you know, I thought we could, we could pivot towards it by, I want to share something with you and you're free not to answer anything that I ask and, you know, hang up on me at any time. But I read Scary Smart after I read Salfour Happy. The tragedy that you turned into a mission for the kind of eternal life of your son, Ali, who, you know, passed away. I think led you on your mission that has become one of making a billion people happy now, has dramatically impacted my life and many others.

But when I read Scary Smart, I kept thinking, you know, and again, I'm emotional thinking about this. And maybe you know what I want to ask you. But if there was a way, I'm working here. Let me just start by saying, I'm working here to improve education because education really hasn't changed much since the first universities in Egypt and a thousand years ago where you come from, Galileo in the Middle Ages and the University of Bologna in the year 1080. And my thought is why I learn from Brian Keating, Professor Keating, when you could learn from

Professor Galileo or Professor Ibn Hayam or any number of great educators going back thousands of years, Plato, Socrates, whoever you like. But to do that, there's some virtue to embodiment and having not just texting, you know, this chat, sending tokens back and forth. I find that very, very, you know, enervating. It doesn't thrill me. But we're creating here artificial Feynman and artificial Einstein. And actually, my colleague Neil Smith has made a real, photorealistic using Unreal Engine, a version of Gandhi. And what's unique about that is Gandhi was averse. He did not like talking to Westerners. I don't know if you know this. There's only like one or two minutes of him speaking on video.

We have many pictures of him, very little of his actual voice. But Neil and his team, including my nephew, worked over the summer to actually have a photorealistic 3D version using gaming engines like Unreal Engine to synthesize an image of Gandhi with his real voice and with whisper, transcribing back and forth, what I say is you could actually talk to him about the meaning of life. And I think that would be incredibly, you know, enriching for students to be able to do that. Okay. Long way of saying, I couldn't help thinking if you could do bring Ali back to life.

And again, this is horribly crass. If so, please forgive me. But I kept thinking, I want to meet Ali. I want to talk to this person. How much more so would you want to embody him and talk to him based on what may exist? of him in the physical world in order to have a digital avatar of your best friend. And again, please forgive me if this is out of life. So since I wrote Soul for Happy, I must have gotten tens if not hundreds of thousands of

people saying I love that. Would I create an avatar of Ali for people to interact with? Of course I would. That wouldn't count as bringing Ali back. No, of course not. Understand. I mean, we're both physicists, so there is no back. We know that intro people will push us forward.

and the only certainty we have is that I'm moving forward. There is a point at which, and I think there is a lot that enhancing the balance of what we think this physical life is, right? Because if this physical life is all that there is, then bringing Ali back first in the form of an avatar, then in the form of a, you know, maybe first in the form of a knowledge base and then in the form of an avatar, then hopefully in the form of a whole lot if you think about it. you know, the layers of the Turek test, you know, succeeding to almost annihilate Ali entirely, would be bringing the best loan of Ali to life, but not bringing it.

There is something about our human connection that is not found in words, it's not found in actions. There is something about our non-physical, you know, soul to us, soul if you accept that I use the term, not in the religious form, or maybe my consciousness to yours. Maybe there is some side to us that is not physically. I didn't try to address this topic in sort of AP with religion or with favors and stories from the past. I attempted to understand it from a science point. From a science point of view, um, the only really meaningful overlap between physics

and biology, if you want, life's sense is in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. It's basically the idea that when an observer life form

observes some atomic particle collapse in a way function collapses and something happens, reality happens. In my understanding, It's a tiny bit like playing a video game on a game console. The entire game world exists.

But if you turn the controller to the right, that bit gets rendered. It's because the player faced attention to the right and the left. The rest of the game world is still there, but unrendered. Way function, not collapsed, as you think about it. And for that to happen, you need to start questioning a few things. You know, the universe is 13.7 billion years old. And, you know, Big Bang happens and all of the gases and the expansion and then, you know, some solids, you know, come together and we create galaxies.

And then 4.3 billion years ago, you get planet Earth and Earths, then, you know, evolves into what it is. It cools down. It has vegetation. And then we see all forms of it. And the question is who observed all of this? Quantum physics holds true. someone needed to observe all of this. Either this is a simulation that's happening in my head

and it all started last Thursday, right? And there was no need to observe any of it at all. Or that life has always observed space-time. And that basically by definition means that life exists outside space-type. It's a simple object-subject relationship. If I told you to try and observe the movement of a train, assume that the train is not shaking and those are not giving you a perception of the outside world,

the only way to observe it is to be outside the train. You need to have advantage point. So similarly, if I told you that you need to observe the arrow of time, then by definition you need an advantage point that sits outside space time. And in my non-scientific mind, because I can't measure it, I would call this consciousness, that religions would call this a soul that is non-physical in its nature and that exists beyond space-time.

By definition, if it can observe the arrow of time, it exists outside space-time itself. And if that's the case, then my son's body was born after me and my son's body decayed before me, but my son's essence, my son's consciousness, never went anywhere. And going back to that game, that gaming analogy, you know, it's almost like my son and I were playing a multiplayer game. And his avatar vanished, but he's sitting right next to me on the sofa step. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is missing. His essence still remains.

And the interesting bit is that my avatar will vanish sooner or late, even if we figure out longevity and it can give me 20, 50, 40, you know, 60 more years of life, eventually my avatar will vanish. And when my avatar vanishes, where will I go? I will go in that same place in space, outside space time, where space time has been observed right next to my son on the soul. And with that in my mind, I tend to believe that we the humanity have really over-glorified death.

in a way I don't think my son has gone anywhere I think my son's body has gone somewhere so would I try to bring him back and believe that the AI that that simulates him as him no I'm not in that space

I believe most humans will most people agree yeah if you tell them I can bring your love right back they will take they will take that shot I bought you with it. Yeah, I mean, I partially did, you know, got interested in this because thinking about just,

you know, you and I are scientists, right? So there's, there's an honest truth that men will pre-decease their wives. I mean, that's just on average throughout the known, you know, kind of actuarial tables. That means to me that there's, you know, and women will live seven years on average longer. So there may be, you know, billions of women are, you know, hundreds of millions of women that outlive their husbands. And yet, you know, they'll be lonely for companionship. And perhaps it could bring some comfort, although maybe not to people like you or me, to kind of, you know, reinvigorate their relationship with their lost husband. And it may be satisfying enough,

as you say, for certain people, although it isn't for you. And so that kind of, you know, was a parallel thought that I had concomitantly with, you know, but you kind of do this large language model at the end where you have self or happy where you have these conversations and you go through very analytically. And so the book is is a wonderful for, you know, my audience is one of the most brilliant, if not the most brilliant in the whole known universe of podcasting, that heavily male, heavily technically inclined, heavily, you know, 20s to 50s age bracket. And I urge you to to read Solfer Happy because it will, you know, teach you lessons that you really, It's, it's, it's, they're irreversible lessons to use the language of thermodynamics.

You know, there's reversible processes, irreversible. But now, while you have children at home, while you have your loved ones, while you have your peak performing intellect, take advantage. Store these memories, store these interactions because we don't know what, what will happen. I want to pivot now. You talk in the book and Salfour Happy about, you make a very convincing argument. I would say it's an argument from intelligent design or it's allied with an intelligent design perspective. had on perhaps the foremost expositor of intelligent design, Stephen C. Meyer, who's a PhD philosopher, and he's one of the leaders of Discovery Institute, a very close friend, and we've had on people to rebut

him, and that's fine, too. So I don't want to, you know, I hate it when authors are asked because I've written a couple books, and I go on podcasts, they say, oh, tell us everything about the book, you know, so basically they don't, they don't even have to buy the short form, you know, summary of the book. They just have to listen to it. So I'm not going to do that. But I will mention that You talk about your quest to understand God. And you talk about starting off as a, you know, practicing Muslim. As you know, I'm Jewish. I'm a practicing Jew.

We can get into that. And then you discuss kind of the differences between atheism and agnosticism, et cetera. I want to just ask you, if you know Freeman Dyson, he was the first guest on the Into the Impossible podcast. If you've ever heard of Dyson spheres or things like that, he was one of the first practitioners of what's called quantum electrodynamic. along with Feynman. He used to say that he was an agnostic. And I said, oh, that's interesting. So what church do you go to? And he was like, what are you talking about? I don't go to church. I'm agnostic.

I said, well, no, no, no, atheists don't go to church. You said you're agnostic, which must be different than atheism because it has a different name. So tell me, how could an intelligent alien looking at you distinguish you from Richard Dawkins, who is an atheist and also doesn't go to church? In other words, you both don't go to the same church. I want to ask you as a Muslim, as a former Muslim, I don't know. Can you describe your faith and whether or not do you practice at all? Is there any form of practice? Because I consider, and this is a long-winded question, I'm sorry for violating the rules of podcasting.

But I call myself a practicing agnostic. In that, I go to temple. I learned Hebrew at an advanced age. I had in my bar mitzvah a month ago because I didn't have it when I was a 13-year-old boy. In other words, I practice, I keep kosher. I practice, but I'm always on a quest. And I think as a scientist, that's the most applicable way a scientist can be. Never assuming he or she knows the answer, but always thirsty and curious for the truth. Tell me, what is your relationship to formal religion, if any?

It's incredible how he describes it, right? So there is no separation and all separation between religious and general science. The sweet spot is could we apply a bit of the scientific method to understand religion, right? And by the way, is religion all bad? So let me explain this. I practice a religion that I loosely refer to as the food salad. And I'm really, I'm really, really genuinely happy with my choice.

Let me explain. I tend to believe that, in every religion on the planet, that's something incredibly beautiful, okay? A beautiful gold nugget, or sometimes many of them, that are not to be able. And then there is a load of crap, total load of crap, that is in my view, not the core of all. I mean, if you remember, there was a book called The History of God. I don't remember the name of the author, but she basically tries to tell you that the minute

the messenger of a religion dies, you know, you end up having the people that followed mix up what he said with what was said before. Right. So Moses, for example, comes from, you know, Egypt, and then Egypt has the book of the dead, and then you get a little bit of mixture of whatever was written by the scholars, you know, would have a little bit of mixture there. I'm that came, you know, his message happened in Medina, which was 70% Jews, and so Muhammad dies, and then you get a lot of the Book of the Dead in Koran. You know, Buddha comes as a Hindu faith with, you know, speaking Sanskrit. And so when Buddha dies, you get to see all of those deities and the same colors and the same shapes,

sometimes looking as Chinese instead of India, right? And you have that mixture within them. And humans, whether my, you know, when intention or not, will change the core. Right. The question for me is this. If I gave you a basket of oranges that had 12 bad ones and two good ones, you know, you keep the two good ones. And then, you know, you go to the basket of apples and you keep the two good apples and you keep the two good bananas. And that's a fruit side.

That's what I'm doing. Right. I am on a quest to find all of the views. beautiful gold nuggets in every religion, including being agnostic, including eGa, because believe it or not, everyone believes. Whether you're an atheist or not, and you want to say, I don't belong to God, but you belong to your perception of what God is, which is nonexistent. You worship that perception.

And I think that's the game. The game is in every one of them, if you go to the Tibetan Buddhists, for example, will tell you God is emptiness. You know, God is devowed or objective reality. You know, you go to the monotheism, they'd say there is one God, you go and so on. Right. You go to Hinduism, they'd say deities and so on and so forth. You put them all together and you go to atheists and they'd say God is nothing, which, by the way,

from a scientific point of view in the scientific method, you cannot prove a negative. I cannot prove that there is vacuum in the universe. We couldn't prove that there was vacuum. We had to wait until we see, we find dark matter and dark energy, and that we can prove. So that we can measure, we cannot prove a negative. What does that mean? It means that from my early analysis as a young mathematician, if you want, being born a Muslim, Islam is a very conformative society.

So if you live in an Islamic society, you'll be expected to align with the religion a little bit. I asked myself, I don't mind, it's not like, you know, they tell me the own team that's nice. You know, I don't want to be stolen from as well. I like that. That's not a bad thing, right? But maybe if the question is, I'm going to try and have allegiance to that God thing for the rest of my life, I might as well do it mathematically. Right. And so I did what I normally refer to as the mathematics of the divine, which is not very complex, really.

It's just a comparison between the probabilities. There is no certainty. You cannot prove there is a god of law. But you can say there is a probability that we are the subject of intelligent design versus the probability that we are subject to randomness, basically evolution and natural search. And, you know, Stephen Meyer, when he speaks about this,

he speaks about it from a Darwin's doubt way to view and all of the Cambrian explosion and so on and so forth. I speak about it from a mathematics point of view, how many trials does it take to create 20,000 or whatever, the number of 40s, more than 20,000? And the game is very simple. In my mind, there is a higher probability that if I gave you a sheet of paper and turn you, I tell you to turn it into a Bugatti varon kind of car, you know, through origami,

you know, regardless of how intelligent you are, you are likely, you are more likely to create it from a probability point of view if I gave you the origami diagram diagram. Okay? And so from a probabilities point of view, even though human arrogance will say there is no intelligent designer, I think there is a game designer.

I go back to that idea of video games. You know, if you look at video games and how complicated they are, it's really hard in your mind to imagine that the Xbox came out of the sand patch in my garden randomly while the software on it was written randomly on a PC that came out in the patch of my time. So to me, with that in mind, I decided to continue to explain. And to continue to literally, like a scientist, debate everything. So I look at every one of those religions and there

are lots of them absolutely lots. Like, man, that's so cool. And I keep that in my food salad. And there are parts of them that I think, yeah, it's not very intelligent. And I allow myself openly to say, maybe that path is not for me, okay? Because no religious person on earth follows 100% of what they're told anyway, I'm being selective around which of my 100%, you know, which of my choices will define how I find that designer, how I find that designer, how I find that designer in my consciousness. It's not about heaven and hell. It's not about reincarnation. It's not about karma.

It's a journey to understand what I believe is one of the most important questions in this life. This game is so complex, who designed? And how do I get to know the designer so I can sort of ask for a sheet? What I love about the book is that it's a practical book. It gives actionable advice, tips. equations, graphs, tables. And very accurate mathematics. In the chapter of the design,

last chapter, who made who. Yeah, who made who. Yeah, the mathematics are very accurate, and I encourage people to look at it and basically tell me I did the math wrong. Not only that. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast.

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. But I was the interview that aired just a week ago. We're recording this in late November, but I was just in early November. office of Brian Green, who you quote from, from his, his work in the fabric of reality. And you talk about the example that he uses that you then riff on, which is, you know, creating war in peace by, you know, throwing, what, 600 pages up into the air and have them go. And you go through the arguments in meticulous step-by-step detail.

Of course, I love the Audi. And we're going to have to let the audience pick up from here because I hate to give away the book without, because I don't want to deny the pleasure to you out there to read it, because it will, or listen to it. I listen to all your books. I love your voice. And it's just, it's a unique, it's a unique voice and you have an unique delivery and it's obviously very personal to you and you can hear the emotions in your voice. I want to talk about something very emotional to me. And this does touch upon, you know, Judaism. Of course, you know, and you're aware of the, you know, horrific events of October 7th, those occur,

on a holiday, first of all, on Shabbat on the Saturday and a Sabbath, but they occurred also on a holiday called Happiness of the Torah, Happiness of the Bible. It's a biblical holiday. It's one of the three biblical holidays mentioned in the Torah in the Old Testament. And it's a day of pure rejoicing. And actually, one of the things I love about Judaism is that Judaism commands you to be happy. You cannot not be happy. You cannot, just as you're not allowed to work and I don't do emails and send text message on the Sabbath, you're not allowed to be depressed, which is weird. How do you command a thought state? But I want to ask you a different question.

I want to ask you two questions, actually. I want to ask you first, what advice do you have to give to Jews? When this comes up again next October, September, the same holiday will come up. Let's not hope that. Let's hope it never comes up. No, no. I'm just saying the holiday Simcator will come up. And just like Ali's birthday comes up every year, how can we be happy?

What advice do you give to my people and other people that suffered? How can we be happy after, you know, you say happiness is a choice in the book? And I agree with you, Mo. But how do we be happy when it's so horribly ironic that this occurred on a holiday called happiness? What can you give my people and others around the world? Can you give us any way to deal with it? We need in a word where almost everything was wrong. It's a very bad statement when we have so much advancement and progress and homes.

We could be living in a world where there are no issues of all. Truly and honestly, I mean, it's quite funny if you look at the statistics. There is around a billion people in the world that are undernourge, starving to death, basically, and a billion that are obese. It's quite interesting how life would provide. It's that our acts as humans are just putting us in places where we're just almost digging for our own misery. It's just incredible. And they said that, you know, I condemn everyone that kills an innocent soul.

Okay. To me, I mean, I'm, you know, born a Muslim, I wouldn't kill a fly. I learned that from the Buddhists and I thought it was nice. You know, sometimes every now and then I eat animal protein. I'm just not trying to be a head of course here. But not if I don't have to, honestly. Okay. And in a very interesting way, I am attempting to try and find the least hurtful

pass through life, hurtful to others. Okay. Now, whoever loses people on either side of this, miserable, miserable, bleeding of life has one of two choices and I really know this is very difficult to get in your heart, Brian.

We have one of two choices. One choice is to have lost our loved ones and be miserable, okay? And the other choice is to have lost our loved ones and choose to be them. The only difference between them is a choice. Why? Because both ways our loved ones,

So the way my son died, sadly was because of a medical malpractice. The surgeon made a mistake, very, very, very naive mistake. He actually made five in a row, corrected them wrong. And my son, who was at his prime, beautiful young man, dies in an appendix, you know, but, right? Unheard of. It's not unheard of. It's actually, you know, statistically probable or possible. But still, you have that pain within you of my son left this world because of the mistake of a doctor. If you had hugged my son once, I promise you, you wouldn't blame me if I cried for the rest of my life. But what difference would it make? You know, if I

had chased that surgeon for the rest of my life, okay? I did take the actions, by the way, to make sure that at least as much as I am capable, those mistakes don't happen again, right? But if I had chased that surgeon for the rest of my life and made it my absolute, single-minded objective in life to make his life miserable, would it have brought my son back? Okay. So here is an interesting choice, an interesting choice that says, I call it committed acceptance that says sometimes things happen in the world that are beyond my ability to fix. Okay. So I am absolutely going to either accept them or be forced to accept them because I can't change them.

Okay. What happens if you choose to accept that they happen and commit committed acceptance? Committed acceptance is to commit to make sure that tomorrow is slightly better than yesterday. Okay, and that after tomorrow is likely better than today and two. And just take small steps at the time to try and find a path to your happiness and for the happiness of everyone around you so that those events don't happen. And I say that with respect, because of course I can imagine how painful it is to news loved ones. But I also say that it's painful to move loved ones on the other side too.

And I recently was speaking about in an AI event where I basically said, look, I think we're being distracted from the chronological order of the truth. Okay. And the truth is nobody wants to hurt a child and nobody can bear the pain of a child and nobody should accept the hurting of a child. So if you take the most important fact in this situation is stop killing children. on either side of the conflict, can we please remember the ultimate truth and the ultimate truth is don't kill a child. And if people don't understand this, I give them a very visual example. I say if you're walking in a street next to your home and you see someone hitting a child really beating it to death, would you stop there and ask yourself, maybe he has a good reason for that?

No, no, no, hold on. Let me find out what the reason is. is. Let me find out if the reason is just. Like, oh, that doesn't make sense if you elevate yourself above the noise of social need. Okay. So what I'm asking everyone to do, I mean, I lost my wonderful son. It hurts like hell and it will hurt like hell for the rest of my life. Understand, there is a finality to losing the child that never goes away. The pain never goes away. You learn to deal with it. Right. All I'm asking everyone is, Can we keep the children out of this?

You know, can we go to resolve our conflicts elsewhere? Can we please not worth innocent people? Okay? And then from then onwards, honesty, Brian, I have no comments on the situation. Because I don't understand politics. I don't understand, you know, the drivers of... I never understood why someone would walk into a school and shoot children. And I'm never going to be able to understand that.

That's the job of the police to prevent. But all I know is that my heart aches when a child is killed on any side, any place in the world, can we please stop killing children? If we just use that empathy of let's not kill children, to sort of mourn those we lost, whichever side we are, and say, no more. I know how it feels. So please, let's not do that again.

And that becomes our only consolation, if you want, or our only life, you know, our only, you know, rest to hold on to it. Okay. Maybe, maybe, maybe over the years, we would choose to say, okay, it was a painful loss, but at least we made sure that it doesn't happen. Does that make people happy? No, what makes people happy is committed acceptance. is a realization that my unhappiness is not going to change again.

As a matter of fact, happiness, by the way, is not to jump up and down in a party happiness. And my definition is a calm and peaceful contentment, to be okay with life as it is and deal with life from a factual point of view of what it is. So I invite everyone, honestly, on any side that's ever lost a child, to accept it and try to move on, try to make tomorrow better than today.

Hey there, it's great that you've been joining me on this journey through happiness, life, meaning, and artificial intelligence. But it's not everything that I have to offer. In fact, I really want you to join my mailing list, Brian Keating.com slash list. And if you do that, you'll be entered to win a real chunk of meteorite, one of these samples of the early solar system.

Here's a chunk right here. This could be yours sent to you through the U.S. mail, not through gravity. And you can get it if you join the mailing list at Briankeeting.com slash list. I select one winner from around the universe of listeners. We've got over 10,000 people that are tuned in to these Monday magic messages I send out with a chunk of goodness to last you the whole week long. Now, back to the episode, and don't forget to visit briancaking.com slash list for your chance

to win a real chunk of this space schmuts that will make you happy guaranteed. Well, you never fail to make me full of emotions, but that's not a bad thing, right? I think men are conditioned by society or whoever nature may be to guard our emotions and not let them show. But, you know, I've never cried so much as I have in the last few months after what's happened in Israel and Gaza, et cetera. And I've never been moved by a book as much as your book on happiness. And it's just funny. This interview will come out after my interview with Gad Sad. My dream is to get you guys in a room.

He's a Jew from Lebanon, non-practicing, you know, kind of agnostic atheist, a Lebanese Jew, and lives. He's a professor at Concordia University. He's also a podcaster and an author. So his book is called The Sad Truth on Happiness. It just came out a couple months ago, and I just had my interview with him. I would love to be, you know, on stage somewhere, maybe here, maybe there. I love that. With the three of us together, because I love your approach.

And I'd be the religious one. that's, that's, I'd be the, I'd be the rabbi of the three of us. But, but Mo, I want to ask you now, if you have a few more minutes. I have, I ask about three different questions. They're all related to Sir Arthur C. Clark in some way or another. And the first one is a famous one. And I want to go back to our nerdy beginnings and the nerdiness that you and I share in common and maybe a bonded over. And, and that's a statement by Sir Arthur C. Clark that goes like this. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I want to ask you, Mo, what is the most magical thing, the coolest technology that humans have ever invented, do you have ever invented,

or done? What is the thing that would most give humanity the proper bragging rights to swagger about the cosmos and say, we did that? I would say our most incredible discovery ever has been mathematics. You and I understand that. But I don't think we invented mathematics. I think our biggest discovery ever has been the written word, the gestures, the signals that we gave each other to connect us. And it might not be as flashy as your iPhone 15. But believe it or not, it's that one big thing block that we wouldn't be here without today.

Most people think that humanity survive because we were the smartest species. on the planet, not true at all. We survived because we could connect. And we survived because we kept enhancing our ability to connect so that we go from, you know, signs to words, to all the way to hyperlinks on the internet to this podcast that hopefully remains forever. And, you know, the idea of one human discovering the theory of relativity and then me reading about it at age eight and saying, oh, I don't have to do that work. I've actually grasped

what we told me, and that's more than enough for you. Imagine if each and every one of us have to discover relativity. Imagine if each and every one of us had to be near its war, right? Can you imagine that? And humanity's ability to connect and transfer knowledge and emphasize, to feel the pain of another, to try and help another with confession, this is. is it. This is truly in my mind our biggest achievement. Okay. The second question comes from Sir Arthur as well. He said the following. He said, when an distinguished elderly scientist says that something is possible, they are most certainly right. But when they say something is impossible, they are very probably wrong. I want to ask you, Mo,

what have you changed your mind about? What have you been wrong about? If anything. Everything. Are you kidding me? I'm always wrong. Does this not make sense to people? Look at our evolution. We never are right. It's a constant.

But, Mo, come on. You are one of the most successful businessman. You set the tone for a Google expert. Just because I do better than the others. But we're all wrong. This is the core issue. is that if we had settled for 97% of spaces vacuum, if we had settled for that and never assumed that we were wrong,

we wouldn't be where we are today. If we just took the discoveries of relativity and said, look, this is great. Honestly, this is amazing, that's it. And never put ourselves into quantum physics, right? Where would we be today? Right? If we just took our cars and said, okay, great, we've done really well, we've added airbags and so on and never created self-driving cars, we'd still turn out with 1.2 million people on the roads every year.

We're always wrong, people. We're always wrong. That's the beauty of this game. And you don't need to be right. You don't need to be right. You need to be curious and respectful. That's the name of the game. Yeah, that is what my wife tells me.

You don't need to be right, but luckily for you, I'm never right. Okay. Last question before we wrap up this just truly delightful conversation, Mo. It comes from the name. It actually is the genesis, the origin of the name of this podcast. And it's Sir Arthur C. Clark said the following. He said, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. That's the origin of the name of my podcast.

I want to ask you this in terms of advice to a 20-something, 30-something-year-old Moe. What advice would you give if you had 30 seconds to spend with young Moe? What would you tell him to give him the courage to do as you've done, to go into the impossible? I know the answer to that. I know that now, but I wish I knew that then life is a video game. Whether that's actually physics or not, looking at it as a video game actually gives you a massive advantage. And allow me to explain that there is a big difference between playing tennis and playing a bit of game. Tennis is a finite game where you try to win.

And the world that we live in has been positioned as a finite game. You need to become this title. You need to make this much money. You need to get this house and so on and so forth. When reality, life is actually infinite. And by infinite, I mean the game of life that we live in here, right? you know that at our age you start to look back and say all of those goals I set for myself once I achieved them I kept moving and I set other goals and other goals and that you know I'm

I don't know if I should say this but I'm a very serious with you gave if it or not at my age of my responsibilities I still game professionally 45 minutes a day four times a week I'm the game that I play I mean probably two of every million players have a chance to be right what's what game is that i play halo uh yeah and and i'm an old man so i play you and elan musk have that in common as well as your personal net worth being very similar yeah so i'm the one that killed elon yesterday so anyway the idea the idea is uh is this huh true gamers would tell you this true gamers

will tell you there is one objective to the game for an infinite game which is not to win it's not to advance in leper It's not to anything. The only objective is to become the best game where you have to be able. That's the only objective. So when we game, so when you game at the level I game at, I'm not trying to achieve anything other than perfect every single shot. And if I don't perfect it, I repeat it.

Like an athlete. It's an infinite game. And what is the best way to become the absolute base game where you have the perpetrator to become? It's to play. And that's what most people don't understand. that I never succeeded in anything that I did because I was stubbornly trying really hard and I was a little more intelligent than the others or whatever. If I succeeded at anything, it's because I enjoyed what I do so much and I absolutely loved it, so much that I kept trying. And as I kept trying, I improved.

And as I improved, I became in some of those things the best gamer out there. which by the way didn't even matter it I think it mattered to my success but what mattered to me and still matters to me is can I become a slightly better game can I go into the tough parts of life and you know competes the part in those parts because it will teach me to develop and grow we teach me to become better than where I am and and if you take that at the approach to life suddenly something amazing all of the pressure goes away. You don't really care if you make that much or you don't make that much. You just care to play. And as you care to play, you start to enjoy the game. Okay, believe it or not,

you'll still achieve the furthest potential you can achieve because you became the best person you can become, but without the pressures that is wonderful. Well, Mo, I want to close with a quote from a fellow Mohammed or Ahmed, and that's the following statement of Ahmed Zawail, who said, and I believe you will agree with this. He said, and I should say, Ahmed Zuel won the 1999 Chemistry Nobel Prize,

and I overlap with him a little bit at Caltech. It was just a wonderful man. He's got an incredible book. I'd love to talk about with you at some point. But he said the following. He said, although there exists, in the world today, some microbes, viruses of the soul, such as discrimination and aggression. Science was and still is the core of progress for humanity and the continuity of civilization.

I want to thank you for everything you've done for me, whether you knew it or not. You're a tremendous influence on me, and I know millions of people around the world, soon to be billions of people, God willing. And I want to thank you for sharing so much of your time with our audience or the depths of gratitude, which I know is one of the core attributes of a happy person. I am really, really, really great for that you gave in that chance, right? Honestly, first of all, all of your questions were unique and wonderful. You know, I've never had someone comment of the idea of second-load thermodynamics as we

were talking about happiness. But it's not that, it's not just that. It's that you allowed me to reach into my heart and talk about topics that matter in a way that I hope will be understood and expected. And I loved it. I'm really, really grateful that you had me. Me too. And anything we can do to advance your mission is, of course, within our goals. So, Mo, I want to thank you so much.

Go to sleep, get some sleep. I know you do your best work and your best gaming at night. I won't ask you what your handle is because, you know, you might, you might frag me one day. But Mogadat, thank you so much for spending time today on the Into the Impossible podcast. And I hope to meet you someday in person. Thank you. Thanks for happy. Own it all.

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